Part 29

How different this front from the days of stationary warfare, with the deep trenches with parapets of sand-bags! Individualism here returned to its own. Patrols must be sent out to keep watch of the enemy; machine-guns and riflemen must be ready for a counter-attack,--which were variations from that deadly monotony of lying in a wet hole in the ground, whether on a bare crest or among the roots of trees in a wood. Blood-stains, torn bits of uniform, meat tins, and hard bread boxes formed the litter around the fox-holes, which marked the stages of progress where we had dug in. The young officers had to creep from fox-hole to fox-hole, keeping touch with their platoons, and bearing in mind all the instructions, regardless of exposure to cold and fire. The men must not forget anything they were told. Their gas masks must always be ready; they must "stick to the death" when that served the purpose of their superiors. Nothing except war's demands could have won them to such willing submission to such a hideous existence.

If there were to be an attack the next morning, then stealthily the men of the first wave came up to the line of the fox-holes and hugged the clammy moist earth, while they were to keep their spirits hot for their charge. Their officers had to study the ground over which they were to advance; consider the speed of the barrage which they were to follow; carry out amazingly intricate maneuvers,--not knowing what volume of shell and machine-gun fire would meet them as they rose to the charge in the chilliest hour of the day, at dawn, when the ground reeked in slipperiness from the mist. The night before an attack always had the same oppressive suspense, the same urgency on the part of all hands in trying to be definite under the camouflage of darkness--hazard omnipotent in its grip on every man's thought.

After the attack came the hurry call for artillery fire on points which had checked our advance; the summoning of reserves to add more pressure; the eagerness for exact reports from out of the woods and ravines where our men were struggling; the hurried flight of messengers running the gamut of machine-gun bullets; the glad news of gallant charges going home; the sad news of companies "shot to pieces"; the filtering back of the walking wounded, and the stretcher-bearers carrying those who could not walk; prostrate forms waiting on ambulances, and busy doctors at the _triages_; all so habitual that its wonder had ceased even for our young army.

If you were wary, studying your ground, eyes and ears alert, you might travel far in that region beyond the dead line of transport; or you might invite a burst of machine-gun fire at the outset of your journey. When it came, or the scream of a shell announced that it would burst in close proximity, as you sought the nearest protection with an alacrity that increased with experience, you indulged in that second of prayer, blasphemy, or fatalistic philosophy which suited your mood. Some men laughed and smiled; I do not think, however, that they were really amused. The farther you went, the more deadly the monotony. When you had seen the front once, you had seen it all, in one sense; in another, little. After that, going under fire was in answer to duty or the desire to be nearer the realities. Every man was subjective at intervals. The less time he had to think of anything but his work, the more objective he was. One man might be killed when he left the parapet the first time he was under fire; another might go through showers of missiles again and again, and never receive a scratch. I have marveled, considering the number of men whom I have seen fall, how chance had favored me. The high-explosive shell I always found the most hateful with its suggestion of maiming for life. Bullets were merciful. They meant death, or a wound from which, except in rare cases, you would recover. Fighting in the open as our men did in the Meuse-Argonne, all their bodies exposed to machine-gun nests, the percentage of dead was often only one in six or seven, and in some cases only one in ten, to the wounded. In the Ypres salient, conspicuously, and elsewhere in the old days of trench warfare, when only heads were exposed above the parapet, and shells mashed in dugouts and struck in groups of men, the percentage was one in three, and even one in two.

Those who saw our returned veterans parading in clean uniforms have little idea of their appearance in battle, their clothes matted with mud, their faces grey as the shell-gashed earth from exhaustion, when they had given the last ounce of their strength against the enemy. This picture of them makes a march over pavements, between banks of people rewarding them with cheers for what they had endured, seem exotic pageantry. No one can know except by feeling it the physical and mental fatigue of this siege battle. There was always the contrast of effort at high nervous pitch and the utter relaxation of moments of inaction. Memories of weary men prone on the earth, or lying on caissons or gun limbers, go hand in hand with memories of our bursts of "speed" when orders summoned weariness to another impulse of effort. Nature compelled sleep at times, even in the cold; and men awoke to find that they had pneumonia or "flu." It was not only the wounded, but the sick, who were dripping, painfully hobbling shadows along the muddy roads. The medical corps accomplished a wonder I do not understand in the low percentage of mortality.

The battle was a treadmill. If there were men of faint hearts or dazed by fatigue, they had to keep on going. The number with an inclination to straggle was infinitely fewer than in the Civil War. Not only battle police but something stronger held them in their places in the machine: public opinion. We were all in it; we must all do our share. The spirit of the draft was applied by the common feeling. A soldier who might sham illness or shell-shock--which was rare indeed--if his malingering were not understood at a glance, must pass the test of a searching diagnosis. I have in mind such a case, of a soldier who came into a _triage_.

"Well, what's the matter with you?" asked the medico, looking at him in gimlet intensity as their eyes met.

"Nothing, except tired, I guess. I'm feeling better. I'm going back to the front," was the reply.

The wonder is that there were not more men who succumbed, not to fear or fire but to the strain. There were instances of insanity, of temporary illusion, of mind losing control over body--shell-shock, or whatever you choose to call it--which sent a soldier back through sifting processes for specific treatment; but no soldier well enough to fight might escape his duty. Never, I repeat, were there so few who had any such thought; and this under conditions worse than Valley Forge. Where heroes of that day only knew want and cold in camp, they did not have to fight at the same time. The lack of warm food was alone enough to weaken initiative in men used to comforts and to being well fed. We tried to force the rolling kitchens up to the front, but it was impossible on many occasions. Division staffs might say they were up--and they were, in some parts of the line, but not in all. The men growled, of course. They had a right to growl. They growled about many things. The lack of artillery fire, the failure of our planes to stop enemy planes from flying low with bursts of machine-guns, orders that made them march and counter-march without apparent reason. They growled, but they kept on the job.

I always think of three words to characterize the battle. Will, endurance, and drive: the will to win, the endurance which could bear the misery necessary to win, and the drive which by repeated attacks would break the enemy's will. It was the old accepted system; but its application is the test of the soldier in every cell of brain and body. The high command could supply the orders, but the men must supply the qualities which could carry out the orders.

"It's drive, drive, drive!" as one of the soldiers said. "All the way down from Washington, through Pershing, to the lieutenants, to us--and there's nobody for us to drive except the Boche"--an enemy who was a mighty soldier. We tried our steel against no inferior metal. To say otherwise is not to allow just tribute to ourselves.

All our national energy, our pride, came to a head in the fields of the Argonne. We can be ruthless with ourselves and with one another. We consumed man-power like wood in a furnace. Some men and divisions gave their all in the first period of the battle; others in a later period; others in the final period. The thing was to give your all. For officers there was always the fear of Blois; of being sent to the rear. I know of an officer who staggered at the door of division headquarters; and then stiffened and drew in his chin as he entered.

"How are you?" asked his division chief of staff.

"All right. Never felt better."

Then his hand went out to the wall to keep him from falling. This was the right spirit. Yet he must have rest. He could no longer command three thousand men.

One day an officer might seem fully master of himself and his task; the next day he "cracked." Superiors, breaking under the strain, were unjust to subordinates who could not carry out orders to take a series of machine-gun nests. Personal fortunes were subject to the "break in luck."

Favoring circumstances honored officers who perhaps had not done as well as those who were considered to have failed. Success was success; failure was failure. Time was precious.

"Finding that X-- was not close enough up to his battalion, I immediately relieved him," was the matter-of-fact report of a colonel on a major, which meant tragedy to the major; the next day the colonel himself might "crack." The young lieutenants of platoons and companies, burdened with their instructions and maps, were the object of the accumulated pressure from senior officers. They could always charge. There was one sufficing answer to criticism--death. It came to many against impossible positions: yet not in vain. Every man who dared machine-gun fire added to the enemy's conviction of our determination to keep on driving until we had "gone through."

XXIX

THEY ALSO SERVED

From tambourine to doughnut--The "Y" and the canteen--Too much on its hands--Other ministrants--Manifold activity of the Red Cross--But not at the front--Honor to the army nurses--The chaplain's label immaterial.

Of the auxiliary organizations serving with the army the Salvation Army was nearest to the soldier's heart, and the Y. M. C. A., or the "Y," as the soldiers knew it, the most in evidence. When the pioneer Salvationists appeared in our training camps early in the winter of 1917-1918, some wits asked if they were to beat the tambourine and hold experience meetings in the trenches. Soon they were winning their way by their smiling humility. They were not bothered by relative rank, which gave some of the personnel of the other auxiliaries much concern.

"If there's anything that anybody else is too busy to do, won't you let us try to do it?" seemed to express their attitude.

After the fighting began, it was evident that on campaign their emblem was not the tambourine but the doughnut. When our soldiers came out of the battle, whom should they see standing in the mud of the shelled zone but the khaki-clad Salvation lassies, smilingly passing out doughnuts and hot coffee--free. The tired fighter did not have to search his pockets for money. All he had to do was to eat the doughnuts, and drink the coffee. That made a "hit" with him.

The men workers of other auxiliaries went up under fire, and distributed chocolate and cigarettes. Yet nothing in their gallantry or devotion could have the appeal of the smiling lassies offering free doughnuts and hot coffee to a man just out of the shambles, when his emotions were gelatine to the impressions that would endure. The Salvationists were ready night and day to bear hardships and do cheerfully any kind of drudgery. There were relatively few of them; they filled in gaps, depending upon the personal human touch, which they exerted with admirable "tactics," as the map experts of the staff would say.

Possibly the soldier was a little unfair to the "Y"; possibly, too, the "Y" was the object of critical propaganda, while it neglected propaganda on its own account among our soldiers, though not at home. Where nothing was expected of the Salvation Army, everything was expected of the "Y." It must have motion pictures, singers, and vaudeville artists, and huts wherever American soldiers congregated from end to end of France; this was a part of the ambitious plan, although it could not get the tonnage allowance from home, or the supplies in France, to carry it out. Another part was that of really taking the place of a company exchange. Here the "Y" put its head in a noose; but not unwittingly. When the proposition came from the army to the "Y," its answer was in the negative.

"Aren't you here to serve?" was the army's question. To this the "Y" could only say, "Yes, sir." At that time the army authorities--not foreseeing conditions which later developed--were applying the theory that gifts to the soldiers meant charity: as a self-respecting man he would want to pay for his tobacco, candy, or other luxuries.

The "Y" had no such generous fund as the Red Cross; it could not build huts and theaters, sell cigarettes, chocolate, sandwiches, pie, or furnish meals below cost. In the early days when our soldiers were hungry for chocolate, and none was arriving from home, the "Y" bought it at exorbitant prices in the local market, charging what it had paid. Later it had supplies from the quartermaster. As soon as a soldier appeared in a town, he asked, "Where is that blankety-blank 'Y'?" If there were no "Y" hut, canteen, or motion picture show, his conclusions were inevitable, and his remarks sometimes unprintable, especially if he could not buy his home brand of cigarettes. It was the "Y's" business to be on hand, no less than that of the quartermaster department to see that he was given his daily rations.

He did not receive his pay more regularly than his mail. If he had no money, though he might go to the "Y" motion picture show, he could not get cigarettes, chewing gum, or pie. On one occasion when a "Y" truck loaded with cigarettes came to the rescue of the tobacco-famished at the front, the besieging purchasers, when they opened the packages, found a slip inside, saying that they were from a newspaper's free tobacco fund. The fat was in the fire. The "Y" might give away all that truck load of cigarettes as it did, return the money of the deceived purchasers, and it might give away a dozen trucks of sales cigarettes; but the explanation that the quartermaster department had mixed the free cigarettes with sales cigarettes, the "Y" being officially credited for payment for all, could never overtake the circumstantial report of the "Y's" profiteering, which grew as it was helped on its travels, perhaps, by the "Y's" enemies.

If a division commander wanted an errand done in Paris, a check cashed, or any comfort or entertainment for his men, he called on the "Y," which was not "volunteer," but "drafted." No one ever stopped to think what the army would have done without the "Y" huts, motion pictures, theatricals, and canteens.

After the armistice, when a large number of returned British and American prisoners arrived at Nancy, I recollect how the local head of another auxiliary organization called up the "Y" on the telephone, saying: "We're helpless. Can you do anything?"

"Send them on!" was the answer.

"There are eight hundred, all hungry. Have you food for them?"

"No, but we'll find it--" which was the spirit of the S. O. S. that kept us supplied in the Meuse-Argonne battle. Another type of "Y" man might, however, have thrown up his hands in despair.

The "Y" was an enormous and mixed force, criticized, reasonably I think, for lack of organization to keep pace with its ambitions. Its home administration seemed disinclined to take the advice of men experienced at the front in the choice of personnel. A novelist, a college professor, a lawyer, or even a regular "Y" secretary is not as good at running a lunch counter or a hut as a man who regularly runs a lunch counter or a hotel. A young woman who stood high at college might not be as useful in the kind of work the "Y" had to do as a practical housewife who might not have heard of Euclid, but who did know how to bake, sew, and cook. The soldier judged personnel by the way they came down to earth, as he had a very earthly job in his fox-holes and charges. I have gone into this detail because it became the fashion to give the "Y" a bad name, which was hardly deserved considering the large contract it had undertaken to fill.

The Knights of Columbus also had huts and theaters, but did not attempt to cover the whole field. When K. of C. workers opened a counter or appeared with a truck at the front, the supplies while they lasted were free to all comers. The soldier who had no change was always looking for the K. of C. When he passed the "Y," which required money for the sweets or the tobacco he craved, the contrast in his mind was that between generosity and commercialism. He was allotting a large portion of his pay to his family in a time of war, when according to all he read everybody at home was subscribing liberally in order that the men who faced hardship and death might not go without comforts. As the K. of C. appeared in force with the army later than the "Y" and could profit by example, its workers were seemingly a little more practical than those of the "Y."

"Boys, we'll give you all we have. Never mind the money!" was their attitude. The Jewish Welfare Board seems to have been admirably forehanded and generous in its special attention to the soldiers of the Jewish race.

We must not overlook the American Library Association, which had a free library in Paris. It circulated books throughout the army zone by a system which enabled the reader, if he were traveling, to return a book to any "Y" hut. If a book were lost, no matter. The thing was that our fighters should be served.

The Red Cross, having elaborate headquarters in Paris, was an enormous organization, managed with able statecraft, which covered a broad field of various activity. Its duties with the army never seemed as specific as those of the other auxiliaries. The old established Samaritan of our modern world, with immense funds and resources ready to meet any emergency when the call came, it opened free dispensaries and succored refugees; assisted civil populations as well as soldiers; ran some auxiliary hospitals, convalescent hotels, and hotels for officers; never selling, always giving, supplied hot coffee and lunches to soldiers en route across France; and "filled in" on a huge scale in the same way as the Salvation Army on a smaller scale. More of its workers were well-to-do and unpaid than in the K. of C. and the Y. M. C. A. Some of these--for the A. R. C., too, had its difficulties with personnel--were far more expensive, the practical comrades said, than if they had received large salaries. The Red Cross doctors and nurses were ready to supplement the regular army forces when occasion demanded.

The popular idea that the Red Cross had anything to do with bringing in the wounded from the field, or with the dressing stations or ambulances, was quite erroneous. All the doctors and medical men in the front line, and all the stretcher-bearers who endured their share of gas, shells, and machine-gun blasts, of rains and mud, with heavy casualties; all the drivers of the ambulances along shell-infested roads; all the hospital corps men, on their feet twenty-four hours at a stretch at the _triages_; all the teams of surgeons and their helpers, whose skill and tireless endurance saved lives--these were of the army.

There is no heroism finer than that of the stretcher-bearer; or of the surgeon and medical corps man in the front line. Their blood is not hot in pursuit or combat. They see the red bandages and gaping wounds, and hear the gasps for breath of the dying. Your medical corps man "took on for the war"; he was of the army machine. The work of our doctors is attested by the record of how successfully they patched up the wounded to return to the battle; of how they kept the stream of wounded flowing back to the hospitals in amazing smoothness, considering the unexpected demands of the battle.

There were not enough medical officers, hospital corps men, or nurses; but they made up for their lack of numbers under the most appealing of calls by giving the limit of their strength, no less than the soldiers. The honors to the womanhood which served in France go to our trained nurses in the army service. They did not report to a Paris headquarters when they arrived from home, but were hurried to their destinations on army travel orders; they knew none of the diversions of working in canteens or of automobile rides about the front. For weeks on end they were restricted to hospital areas; they were soldiers under army discipline, in every sense of the word. They had not only kindness in their hearts, but they knew how to be kind; they not only wanted to do, but knew how to do.

How their competency shone beside the frittering superficiality of volunteers who had not even been taught by their mothers to sew, or cook, or look misery in any form in the face, but who felt that they must reach France in some way in order to help, or rather to be helped! It was the difference between the sturdy workhorse drawing a load upgrade, and a rosette of ribbons on the bridle; between the cloth that keeps out the cold, and the flounce on the skirt; between knowing how to bathe a sick man, put a fresh bandage on his wound, move him gently, and what to say to cheer him; and knowing how to take a chocolate out of a box daintily. There was no time for ribbons or flounces during our greatest battle. We rarely had candy from the commissary, which fact however did require self-abnegation on the part of a few of the least serviceable of auxiliary workers, which might lead them to think that they were doing their bit.

Hollow-eyed nurses, driving into bodies aching with fatigue no less energy of will than the exhausted battalions in their charges, kept the faith with smiles, which were their camouflage for cheeks pale from want of sleep. They often worked double the time that they would in hospitals at home, where they had their home comforts and diversions. When a soldier, with drawn, ashen face from loss of blood, reeking still with the grime of the battlefield, came into a ward, an American woman, who knew his ways and his tongue, was waiting to attend upon such cases as his. When he was bathed and shaved and his wound dressed, and he lay back glowing in cleanliness on his cot, his gratitude gave the nurse renewed strength.