Part 28

He was billeted in villages where the people had been billeting soldiers for four years. They wanted the privacy of their homes again as surely as he wanted to be back in his own home. The roads over which he marched he had to help repair, in winter rains, when old cathedral spires lacked the impressiveness which they had to the tourists because they looked as cold as everything else, and when picturesque, winding canals merely looked wet when everything was wet.

He knew other roads which were swept by the blasts of hell; he saw the beautiful landscapes through the mud of trenches and from the filthy fox-holes where he waited in hourly expectation of an attack; he knew the beautiful woods which fleck the rolling landscape with their patches of green as the best possible places for being gassed.

The hand of authority was on him even in his holidays--he, the free American. He might not go beyond certain limits when he went for a walk, for otherwise all our soldiers within walking distance of the largest town would spend the day there, to the discomfiture of discipline and French regulations. If he secured leave, it was not to the Paris of which he dreamed, but to the area which the army had prescribed. For months and months our men fought and marched, going and coming past Paris, without a glimpse of the city of their desire. That Paris was not good for them all the high authorities agreed; besides, their services were too valuable to be spared for sight-seeing.

From the day of their arrival they were under the whip of a great necessity: first, of keeping the Germans from winning the war, and then of winning the war before Christmas came. In the last stages of the war, they bore more than American soldiers have ever borne--more than the British, in their own limited sector with its settled appointments a day's travel from England; more than the French, fighting in their own country with leave to go to their homes--their own homes--once in four months. Our men had a real rest only when they were wounded or ill and were sent back to the hospitals and rest camps.

When a soldier was not fighting, somebody was lecturing to him. His education was never complete. There was some new gas which he must avoid, some new wrinkle in fighting machine-guns which he must learn. As he had so much lecturing on the drill-ground and on the march and in billets about making sure that he did not destroy any property or take a piece of wood or use a tool that did not belong to him, the orators who came from the United States to tell him how to be "good" though a soldier, and how all the country admired him and depended upon him, were not so popular as they might have been, because he knew the character of his job by very bitter experience. How little such visitors knew of him--in his own world!

As distinguished from the officers of commissioned rank, we spoke of the privates as the men; also as the "doughboys," a name which long ago the cavalry, looking down haughtily from their saddles, applied to the infantry, as kneaders of mud. There was a gulf between officers and privates, settled in old military customs, which at least at the front grew narrower as the old influences were dissolved in the crucible of fire. Many of the privates were superior to their officers. Many won their commissions in the training-camp of battle. I preferred always to think of the whole of generals, colonels, "kid" lieutenants, and privates as men. It was the whole that was majestic; manhood as manhood, which was supreme.

Officers, whether with one bar or two stars on their shoulders, were only the nails holding the structure of manhood together. They might be promoted and demoted; prune themselves on their rank; but the mighty current of soldiery was elemental as the flow of a river. Never had the part of any high commander been relatively less important than in this war; in no army was this so true probably as in ours. By running through a list of names in this age of universal ability, you might find a score of leaders for corps or army who might be better than those in the field; but fresh divisions of infantry were not in such easy call. The names of officers who commanded more men than Napoleon or Wellington had at Waterloo, Meade or Lee at Gettysburg, were unknown to the public. Never had a single human being, no matter how many orders on his breast, appeared more dispensable than in this machine war with its enormous masses of troops. We had two million men in France. Every officer and man counted as one unit in the machine, according, not to rank, but to the giving of all that he had in him. Manhood and not soldiering was glorified.

It was the great heart of our men, beating as the one heart of a great country--simple, vigorous, young, trying out its strength--on the background of old Europe, which appealed to me. It was the spontaneous incidents of emotion breaking out of routine which revealed character. One day on a path across the fields near headquarters town, I met a soldier with a wound stripe who had been invalided back from the front. He was thick-set, bow-legged, with a square, honest face, and eyes slightly walled, and he was leading a bow-legged sturdy child of four years, whose one visible eye showed a cast resembling the soldier's own. The other eye was hidden by a drooping wool Tam-o'-Shanter about four sizes too large for the child's head, while his wool sweater and wool leggings were not more than two sizes too large. It was evident that a man and not a woman had bought his wardrobe, having in mind that the child was to be kept warm at any cost. The pair aroused my interest.

"I heard all about adopting French war orphans through the societies," the soldier said, "and I concluded, when they sent me here, to pick out my own orphan. So I adopted Jake. Yes, I calls him Jake. You see, his father was killed by the boche and his mother croaked. He hadn't anybody to look after him, so I took over the job. Didn't I, Jake?"

Jacob looked up with an eye that seemed to consider this a wonderful world created by the soldier, and removed his finger from his mouth long enough to say "Yep," which he had learned in the place of "Oui."

"I'm going to take Jake home with me, and make him an American, ain't I, Jake? You're learning English too, ain't you, Jake?"--with Jake taking up his cue to prove that he was by responding "Yep!" again.

When they started on, I paused to look after them, with something catching in my throat, and as the soldier paused I overheard him saying:

"I'm going to take you home. Don't you worry--I'm sticking to that, Jake. The French regulations will say that they ain't going to let you leave France when they're so short of kids over here, and the American regulations will say there ain't no room for kids on transports, and probably the censor will lip in too--but I'll bring you after the war if I can't now. You and me's fixed up a life pardnership, ain't we? You'll make a hit with my mother, all right. All you've got to do is look up at her just the way you're looking up at me and say 'Yep.' Oh, it'll be all right over there--no more of this war and regulation stuff!"

"Speaking a few words of French" could only open a chink in the barrier of language between our men and the French people. Wherever two Americans met they could begin talking without waiting on an interpreter. The common bond of language promoted the family feeling of the A. E. F. In all their relations our men saw with fresh eyes, in the light of foreign surroundings, how like they were, not only in uniform and equipment and ways of thought, but how distinctly American even the European born and the sons of European parents had become. Old differences disappeared in this new sense of a fundamental similarity. Men from the different parts of the United States came together not only in the combat divisions but around the docks and railway yards and wherever they labored in the Services of Supply. Kansas, Oregon, and Maine had adjoining beds at a hospital, while a doctor from Pittsburgh or Oskaloosa, or a nurse from New York or Cheyenne, looked after them. Reserve officers who had been lawyers, merchants, engineers, gang foremen, bakers, bankers, manufacturers, lived and worked together in keeping the army fed with shells and food.

"The gang's all here," was as expressive of the soldier's feeling in the Great War as "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" in the little war with Spain. To all in whom there was the germ from which it could develop, the stern fighting and effort brought a sense of personal power, quiet, observant, undemonstrative; and their sense of the presence there in France of two millions of Americans--scattered far and wide, omnipresent in their energy, welded into one mighty organization, pulsing with the heart of the home country three thousand miles away, as California looked Maine in the eye in that common family--brought a new sense of national power. It occurred to me that the A. E. F. symbolized how a great overgrown boy of a nation, with a puzzled feeling about its expanding physique, had suddenly become a dignified, poised, self-respecting adult.

The men knew why they were in France, even if they did not express it in the phrases of oratory or propaganda. Their logic was as cold as their steel, as vivid as gun flashes. They were in France to beat the Germans. The period for argument had passed for them. They had the business in hand. Their bitterness toward the foe was not as great as that at home. Why waste words on him when you had bullets and shells to fire at him? He was taken for granted no less than burglary and murder: a positive material force to be overcome.

Whether college graduates or street-sweepers, the privates were a guild as exclusive in its way--as it always has been--as a regular mess. They had voted themselves into their task. It was the will of the majority of their country that we go to France. The majority rules; general and other officers may act as legatees for the majority. The thing was to "play the game." Those who rebelled found that there was nothing else to do. They were in the machine's grip. "Play the game!" No phrase better expressed their attitude than this. It was a wicked, filthy, dangerous game. They had signed on for it; they would see it through.

Given this conviction, and no soldier will endure more hardship than the American. It was the bedrock of adherence to that rigid discipline which in our western democracy surprised Europeans. We saluted on all occasions--what a punctiliously saluting army we were!--and followed all the rules of etiquette that the experts said were necessary, and learned to take "bawlings out" with soldierly philosophy. As children know their parents, the men knew their officers' characters; a fresh replacement lieutenant was promptly "sized up," but final judgment was reserved until he had led them under fire, where he must stand the real test. It was a relief to them that they did not have to add an extra salute for every grade of an officer's rank. One salute would do for a general as well as a second lieutenant. Generals passed them on the road in cars; generals inspected them. They did not take much interest in generals, who were also a part of the game to them. Company and battalion commanders alone could make their personal leadership felt. They were the "heroes" when they were good, and rightly so.

Officers made strange guesses sometimes as to what their men were thinking. The men were wiser than many officers knew; for they were the mass intelligence of America. They understood that the Stars and Stripes was propaganda; but it was interesting. They read it with avidity. Propaganda was one of the parts of the mysterious, ugly game. I have heard it compared to the coaching from the bleachers at a league game. The men smiled over the communiqué's records of actions in which they participated. Communiqués were a part of the game, helping propaganda to coach from the side lines. It would not do to say that a company had been sent by mistake into interlocking machine-gun fire to take a town which the survivors had to yield. When the men read the home papers, there was no mention of their losses or their suffering. One might think from the accounts that they were enjoying themselves immensely, and were quite comfortable in the fox-holes. This, too, was a part of the game.

They were there to see the game through. The sooner it was through, the sooner they would go home. Veterans who had spent one winter in France did not want to spend another; those who had not did not care to try the experience. They had no more reason for liking France than a man who sleeps on the ground in Central Park in December, eating cold rations, under machine-gun fire, has for liking New York City. "I want to get back to the cactus!" as an Arizona man said. All were fighting to reach home and be free men again; freedom having a practical application for them. The longer they were in France, the more they felt that they were fighting for America. As Americans they were on their mettle. Such was the spirit that carried them as Americans through the Meuse-Argonne, which was the American army's battle.

XXVIII

THE MILL OF BATTLE

Wet misery--"Penetratin'er and penetratin'er"--The men behind the lines--Back to "rest"--Replacements as bundles of man-power--Reliefs in the fox-holes--Before and during an attack--Dodging shells--A struggle to keep awake--And "on the job"--Will, endurance, and drive--The wedge of pressure.

As the processes of the Argonne battle became more systematic, they became more horrible. They would have been unendurable if emotion had not exhausted itself, death become familiar, and suffering a commonplace. The shambles were at the worst during the driving of our wedges in the second and third weeks of October. The capacity to retain vitality and will-power in the face of cold and fatigue, and not to become sodden flesh indifferent to what happened, was even more important than courage, which was never wanting. The thought of ever again knowing home comforts became a mirage; a quiet trench sector, with its capacious dugouts and occasional shell-bursts, became a reminiscence of good old days. Paradise for the moment would be warmth--just warmth--and a dry board whereon to lay one's head until nature, sleep finished, urged you to rise.

We were learning what our Allies, and the enemy too, suffered in the winter fighting of Verdun and the Ypres salient. The Europeans, we must not forget, were fighting in their own climate. They were used to having their oxygen served in the humidity of a clammy sponge pressed close to their nostrils; we to having our oxygen served in dry air. We suffered less at home when ice covered lakes and streams than in mists and rains in France at forty and fifty degrees. There is sunshine on snow-drifts and frosty window-panes in our northern States in midwinter, as well as on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; but we never saw sunshine, as we know sunshine, in the Meuse-Argonne, though there were days which the natives called fair, when the sun was visible as through a moist roof of cheese-cloth.

"I'd charge a machine-gun nest single handed, if I could first sit on a steam radiator for half an hour," one of our soldiers said.

It was summer during the Château-Thierry fighting; a kindly summer, resembling our June in the northern, or our April in the southern States. The enthusiasm of our first important action gave hardships a certain glamour. Men could sleep on the ground without blankets; the wounded did not suffer greatly from cold, if they remained out over night. Cold rations were tolerable. Clothes and earth dried soon after a rain. Fox-holes did not become wells on the levels, and cisterns on the slopes. Guns and trucks did not cut deep ruts beside the roads or in crossing the fields. Summer was ever the time for war in temperate climates; winter the time of rest. It was so in our Civil War.

The battlefield was a sombre brown, splashed by liquid grays. No bright colors varied the monotony of the landscape except the hot flashes from gun-mouths; there were none overhead against the leaden and weeping sky except the red and blue of the bull's-eye of an aeroplane, and the gossamer sheen of its wings. Khaki uniforms and equipment, and the tint of trucks, automobiles, caissons, and ambulances were all in the protective coloration of the surrounding mud. A horse with a dappled coat, or with dark bay or black coat, shining in the mist, was a relief. The sounds were the grating of marching hobnailed shoes, the rumble of motor-trucks and other transport, the roar of the guns, the strident gas alarm, the bursts of shells, the staccato of machine-guns: all in an orchestrated efficiency which wasted not even noise in conserving all energy to the end of destruction--if we except the song of marching companies at the rear, and the badinage with which men diverted one another and themselves from their real thoughts.

There were the one-way roads where all the traffic was going in one direction, either to or from the front, all day and all night in orderly procession. Along the roads our negro laborers, who all seemed to be giants, kept filling in stones and shoveling in earth to mend broken places. They were in a marvelous world, whose diversions tempted a holiday spirit. They rested on their spades as they watched a general's car, or a big gun, or a tank, or one of a dozen other wonders on wheels pass by; or, the whites of their eyes showing, looked around at the sound of the burst of a shell or an aviator's bomb; or aloft at the balloons and passing aeroplanes and duels in the air.

"How do you like this weather?" I asked one.

"It's ve'y penetratin' and ve'y cold, seh," he replied. "They say it keeps on getting colder and colder, and penetratin'er and penetratin'er, and spring nevah comes."

"It will not, if you don't work hard and win the war."

"I'm goin' to work ve'y hard. We've gotta win this war, seh; or we'll all freeze to death--only it's pow'ful hard keeping yo' mind on work, seh, when so much is goin' on."

Thus at the front the colored man kept open the passageway for the supplies which the colored man had unloaded at the ports. He was truly the Hercules of physical labor for us.

In the zone of battle, back of the infantry and artillery lines, many men had many parts, all under shell-fire and hardships; the rolling kitchen men, the ammunition train and ambulance drivers; the salvage men gathering up the overcoats, blankets, rifles, gas masks, and other equipment discarded in the course of an attack; and the much-abused military policemen, who made drivers keep their lights turned off, and insisted, in the latter days of their high authority, upon colonels' automobiles obeying orders, with the same impartiality that policemen at street crossings show in "stop" and "go" to the "flivver" delivery wagon and the limousine of the man who groans over the size of his income tax.

Out of the shelled zone in the early morning the shattered companies of expended divisions came marching back from the front. Sometimes they broke into song. Usually they were too tired to sing; the recollection of what they had seen was too near for rollicking gayety, at least. They were going into "rest" in some ruined village or series of dugouts, or possibly into a village that had not been shelled; to be "Y. M. C. A.'d" and deloused, to receive fresh clean clothing and warm meals. There were no beds or cots for them, with rare exceptions, but floors and lofts, as we know. Of course, they were not rested in one day, or two or three, or even ten. They had given an amount of their store of reserve energy which it would take them a long time to renew. Drill began as soon as they had had their first long round of sleep. New officers took the place of the fallen: officers who often did not know their men or the battle. Replacements came to fill the gaps in the ranks, and share all the drills and the lectures which applied the latest battle lessons. Tired brains reeled with instruction.

There was a plan to return convalescent wounded to their original divisions, but in the pressure to hurry all available man-power forward to fill the greedy maw of the front it could be carried out only in a limited way. Thus, whether convalescent or newcomers, the replacements might come from a part of the country widely separated from that of the division which they were joining, and upon the division's welcome home to the locality of its origin by relatives and friends find themselves still far from their own homes. Maine was fighting in the ranks of a battalion from Chicago; New York in the ranks of a battalion from Kansas. The longer a division had fought, the less regional its character. The fortune of war never fell more unkindly than upon the National Army divisions which arrived late in France and were broken up for replacements, or, even in those final days when victory beckoned us to our utmost endeavor, turned into labor troops in the S. O. S. In that vital juncture, they went where they were most needed, which is a soldier's duty. I have seen groups of replacements, who had had so little training that they hardly knew how to use their rifles, moving up through the shelled area to find the battalion in reserve to which they were assigned. Only two or three weeks from American training camps, shot across France, strangers indeed on that grim field, they were man-power which could take the place of the fallen.

In the late afternoon on the roads near the front one might see the troops of rested divisions marching forward to relieve expended troops. At Château-Thierry, our men, I know, went singing toward the line of shell-bursts. I am told that many put flowers in their rifle barrels and their button-holes. No doubt they did. So did the French and British in the early days of the war. There were no flowers on the Meuse-Argonne field, only withering grass and foliage. To sing was to attract the enemy's attention. The first enthusiasm had passed; our spring of war was over; our winter of war had come. Most of the men whom I watched going forward looked as if they appreciated that there was wicked, nasty business ahead, and they meant to see it through.

It was dark when they came into the zone where the transport had its dead line. The length of their march was often in darkness if we were making concentrations for an attack. Some went to their appointed places as reserves in the warrens dug on reverse slopes; others in cautious files, led by guides from the troops in position who knew the ground, went on until they came to the little pits where the outposts were lying, or to machine-gun posts which faced the enemy under the whipping of bullets and the bursts of shell-fire and gas. They were the very point of the wedge which all the strength of our nation was driving. Wet to the skin, filthy, hollow-eyed, the occupants gave up their places to the newcomers, whose officers located their positions on the map, and received local information from their predecessors about the character and direction of fire and many details. It was like a change of shift in a factory--all as businesslike as possible.