Part 29

How now, Paul, my _poilu_ comrade, _bon ami_, why don’t you add the house itself to the pack on your back? Sure, you’ll scramble along somehow to the rest of the camp in the rear, and on your way you will pass bright remarks that we _non compree_ but enjoy just the same, for we know you are wishing the doughboy good luck. How droll your antics when hard luck surprises. We swear and you grimace or paw wildly the air. And we share a common dislike for the asperity shown by the untactful, inefficient, bulldozing old Jack.

Here is a good story that “Buck” Carlson used to tell in his inimitable way. Scene is laid in the headquarters of the British Colonel who is having a little difficulty with his mixed command that contains soldiers of America, France, Poland, China, where not, but very few from England at that time. A French sergeant with an interpreter enters the room and salutes are exchanged. The sergeant then orders his comrade to convey his request to the colonel.

“Ker-nell, par-don,” says the little interpreter after a snappy French salute which is recognized by a slight motion of the colonel’s thumb in the general direction of his ear. “Ze sarzhont, she say, zat ze French man will please to have ze tobak, ze masheen gun am-mu-nish-own and ze soap.”

“But, my man,” says the colonel reddening, “I told you to tell the sergeant he should go on as ordered and these things will come later, I have none of these things now to give him, but they will soon arrive and he shall be supplied. But now he must hurry out with his detachment of machine gunners to help the Americans. Go, my man.” More salutes and another conversation between the two French soldiers with arms and spit flying furiously.

“Ker-nell, sir, par-don, again, but ze sar-zhont, she say, zat wiz-out ze to-bak, ze am-mu-nish-own and ze soap, he weel not go, par-don, ker-nell!”

This time the colonel was angered to popping point and he smote the table with a thump that woke every bedbug and cockroach in the building and the poor French interpreter looked wildly from the angry British colonel to his tough old French sergeant who now leaped quickly to his side and barked Celtic rejoinder to the colonel’s fist thumping language. No type could tell the story of the critical next moment. Suffice it to say that after the storm had cleared the colonel was heard reporting the disobedience to a French officer miles in the rear. The officer had evidently heard quickly from his sergeant and was inclined to back him up, for in substance he said to the offended British officer: “Wee, pardon, mon ker-nell, it eez bad,” meaning I am sorry, “but will ze gallant ker-nell please to remember zat consequently zare eez no French offitzair wiz ze French de-tach-mont, ze sar-zhont will be treated wiz ze courtesy due to ze offitzair.”

And it was true that the sergeant, backed up by his French officer, refused to go as ordered till his men had been supplied with the necessary ammunition and “ze to-bak and ze soap.” The incident illustrates the fact that the French officer’s relation to his enlisted men is one of cordial sympathy. He sees no great gulf between officer and enlisted man which the British service persists to set up between officers and enlisted men.

Hop to it, now Frenchie, you surely can sling ’em. We need a whole lot from your 75’s. We are guarding your guns, do not fear for the flanks. Just send that barrage to the Yanks at the front. And how they do send it. And we remember that the French artillery officers taught the Russians how to handle the guns well and imbued them with the same spirit of service to the infantry. And many a Red raid in force and well-planned attack was discouraged by the prompt and well-put shrapnel from our French artillery.

And there was Boyer. First we saw him mud-spattered and grimy crawling from a dugout at Obozerskaya, day after his men had won the “po-zee-shown.” His animation he seems to communicate to his leg-wearied men who crowd round him to hear that the Yanks are come to relieve them. With great show of fun but serious intent, too, he “marries the squads” of Americans and Frenchies as they amalgamate for the joint attack. “Kat-tsank-awn-tsank” comes to mean 455 as he talks first in French to his poilus and then through our Detroit doughboy French interpreter to the doughboys. Captain he is of a Colonial regiment, veteran of Africa and every front in Europe, with palm-leafed war cross, highest his country can give him, Boyer. He relies on his soldiers and they on him. “Fires on your outposts, captain?” _“Oui, oui, nitchevo_, not ever mind, _oui_, comrade,” he said laughingly. His soldiers built the fires so as to show the Reds where they dare not come. Truth was he knew his men must dry their socks and have a warm spot to sit by and clean their rifles. He trusted to their good sense in concealing the fire and to know when to run it very low with only the glowing coals, to which the resting soldier might present the soles of his snoozing shoes. Captain Boyer, to you, and to your men.

It is not easy to pass over the names of Dupayet and Reval and Alebernarde. For dynamic energy the first one stands. For linguistic aid the second. How friendly and clear his interpretation of the orders of the French command, given written or oral. Soldier of many climes he. With songs of nations on his lips and the sparkle of mirth in his eye. “God Save the King,” he uttered to the guard as password when he supposed the outguard to be a post of Tommies, and laughingly repeated to the American officer the quick response of the Yank sentry man who said: “To hell with any king, but pass on French lieutenant, we know you are a friend.”

And Alabernarde, sad-faced old _Major du Battalion_, often we see you passing among the French and American soldiers along with Major Nichols. Your eyes are crow-tracked with experiences on a hundred fields and your bronzed cheek hollowed from consuming service in the World War. We see the affectionate glances of poilus that leap out at sight of you. You hastened the equipment of American soldiers with the automatics they so much needed and helped them to French ordnance stores generously. Fate treated you cruelly that winter and left you in a wretched dilemma with your men in March on the railroad. We would forget that episode in which your men figured, and remember rather the comradery of the fall days with them and the inspiration of your soldierly excellence. To you, Major Alabernarde.

On the various fronts in the fall the doughboy’s acquaintance with the British allies was limited quite largely, and quite unfortunately we might say, to the shoulder strappers. And all too many of those out-ranked and seemed to lord it over the doughboy’s own officers, much to his disgust and indignation. What few units of Scots and English Marines and Liverpools got into action with the Americans soon won the respect and regard of the doughboys in spite of their natural antipathy, which was edged by their prejudice against the whole show which was commonly thought to be one of British conception. Tommie and Scot were often found at Kodish and Toulgas and on the Onega sharing privations and meagre luxuries of tobacco and food with their recently made friends among the Yanks.

And in the winter the Yorks at several places stood shoulder to shoulder with doughboys on hard-fought lines. Friendships were started between Yanks and Yorks as in the fall they had grown between Frenchies and Americans, Scots and Yanks, and Liverpools and Detroiters. Bitter fighting on a back-to-the-wall defense had brought the English and American officers together also. Arrogance and antipathy had both dissolved largely in the months of joint military operations and better judgment and kinder feelings prevailed. Grievances there are many to be recalled. And they were not all on one side. But except as they form part of the military narrative with its exposure of causes and effects in the fall and winter and spring campaigns, those grievances may mostly be buried. Rather may we remember the not infrequent incidents of comradeship on the field or in lonely garrison that brightened the relationships between Scots and Yorks and Marines and Liverpools in Khaki on the one hand and the O. D. cousins from over the sea who were after all not so bad a lot, and were willing to acknowledge merit in the British cousin.

It must be said that Canadians, Scots, Yorks and Tommies stood in about this order in the affections of the Yankee soldiers. The boys who fought with support of the Canadian artillery up the rivers know them for hard fighters and true comrades. And on the railroad detachment American doughboys one day in November were glad to give the Canadian officer complimentary present-arms when he received his ribbon on his chest, evidence of his election to the D. S. O., for gallantry in action. Loyally on many a field the Canadians stood to their guns till they were exhausted, but kept working them because they knew their Yankee comrades needed their support.

One of the pictures in this volume shows a Yank and a Scot together standing guard over a bunch of Bolshevik prisoners at a point up the Dvina River. American doughboys risked their lives in rescuing wounded Scots and the writer has a vivid remembrance of seeing a fine expression of comradeship between Yanks and Scots and American sailors starting off on a long, dangerous march.

Mention has been made in another connection of the friendship and admiration of the American soldiers for the men of the battalion of Yorks. In the three day’s battle at Verst 18 a York sergeant over and over assured the American officer that he would at all times have a responsible York standing beside the Russki machine gunner and prevent the green soldiers from firing wildly without order in case the Bolshevik should gain some slight advantage and a necessary shift of American soldiers might be interpreted by the green Russian machine gunners as a movement of the enemy. And those machine guns which were stationed at a second line, in rear of the Americans, never went off. The Yorks were on the job. And after the crisis was past an American corporal asked his company commander to report favorably upon the gallant conduct of a York corporal who had stood by him with six men all through the fight.

Of the King’s Liverpools and other Tommies mention has been made in these pages. Sometimes we have to fight ourselves into favor with one another. Really there is more in common between Yank and Tommie than there is of divergence. Hardship and danger, tolerance and observation, these brought the somewhat hostile and easily irritated Yank and Tommie together. Down underneath the rough slams and cutting sarcasm there exists after all a real feeling of respect for the other.

This volume would not be complete without some mention of that man who acted as commanding general of the Allied expedition, William Edmund Ironside. He was every inch a soldier and a man. American soldiers will remember their first sight of him. They had heard that a big man up at Archangel who had taken Gen. Poole’s job was cleaning house among the incompetents and the “John Walkerites” that had surrounded G. H. Q. in Poole’s time. He was putting pep into G. H. Q. and reorganizing the various departments.

When he came, he more than came up to promises. Six foot-four and built accordingly, with a bluff, open countenance and a blue eye that spoke honesty and demanded truth. Hearty of voice and breathing cheer and optimism, General Ironside inspired confidence in the American troops who had become very much disgruntled. He was seen on every front at some time and often seen at certain points. By boat or sledge or plane he made his way through. He was the soldier’s type of commanding officer. Never dependent on an interpreter whether with Russian, Pole, or French, or Serbian, or Italian, he travelled light and never was seen with a pistol, even for protection. Master of fourteen languages it was said of him, holder of an Iron Cross bestowed on him by the Kaiser in an African war when he acted as an ox driver but in fact was observing for the British artillery, on whose staff he had been a captain though he was only a youth, he was a giant intellectually as well as physically.

When British fighting troops could not be spared from the Western Front in the fall of 1918 and the British War Office gambled on sending category B men to Archangel—men not considered fit to undergo active warfare, a good healthy general had to be found. Ironside, lover of forlorn hopes, master of the Russian language, a good mixer, and experienced in dealing with amalgamated forces, was the obvious man. Of course, there were some British officers who bemoaned the fact, in range of American ears too, that some titled high ranking officers were passed over to reach out to this Major of Artillery to act as Major-General. And he was on the youthful side of forty, too.

Edmund Ironside ought to have been born in the days of Drake, Raleigh, and Cromwell. He would have a bust in Westminster and his picture in the history books. But in his twenty years of army life he has done some big things and it can be imagined with what gusto he received his orders to relieve Poole and undertook to redeem the expedition, to make something of the perilous, forlorn hope under the Arctic winter skies.

In _The American Sentinel_ issue of December 10th, which was the first issue of our soldier paper, we read:

“It is a great honor for me to be able to address the first words in the first Archangel paper for American soldiers. I have now served in close contact with the U. S. Army for eighteen months and I am proud to have a regiment of the U. S. Army under my command in Russia.

“I wish all the American soldiers the best wishes for the coming Christmas and New Year and I want them to understand that the Allied High Command takes the very greatest interest in their welfare at all times.”

EDMUND IRONSIDE, Major-General.

Without doubt the General was sincere in his efforts to bring about harmony and put punch and strength into the high command sections as well as into the line troops. But what a bag Poole left him to hold. Vexed to death must that big man’s heart have been to spend so much time setting Allies to rights who had come to cross purposes with one another and were blinded to their own best interests. British thought he was too lenient with the willful Americans. Americans thought he was pampering the French. British, French and Americans thought he was letting the Russkis slip something over on the whole Allied expedition. Green-eyed jealousy, provincial jealousy, just plain foolish jealousy tormented the man who was soon disillusioned as to the glories to be won in that forlorn expedition but who never exhibited anything but an undaunted optimistic spirit. He was human. When he was among the soldiers and talking to them it was not hard for them to believe the tale that after all he was an American himself, a Western Canadian who had started his career as a military man with the Northwest Mounted Police.

An American corporal for several weeks had been in the field hospital near the famous Kodish Front. One day General Ironside leaned over his bunk and said: “What’s the trouble, corporal?” The reply was, “Rheumatism, sir.” At which the British hospital surgeon asserted that he thought the rheumatism was a matter of the American soldier’s imagination. But he regretted the remark, for the general, looking sternly at the officer, said: “Don’t talk to me that way about a soldier. I know, if you do not, that many a young man, with less exposure than these men have had in these swamps, contracts rheumatism. Do not confuse the aged man’s gout with the young man’s muscular rheumatism.” Then he turned his back on the surgeon and said heartily to the corporal: “You look like a man with lots of grit. Cheer up, maybe the worst is over and you will be up and around soon. I hope so.”

And there was many a British officer who went out there to Russia who won the warm friendship of Americans. Of course, those were short friendships. But men live a lot in a small space in war. One day a young second lieutenant—and those were rare in the British uniforms, for the British War Office had given the commanding general generous leeway in adding local rank to the under officers—had come out to a distant sector to estimate the actual needs in signal equipment. He rode a Russian horse to visit the outpost line of the city. He rode in a reindeer sled to the lines which the Russian partisan forces were holding. He sat down in the evening to that old Russian merchant trader’s piano, in our headquarters, and rambled from chords and airs to humoresque and rhapsodies. And the American and Russian officers and the orderlies and batmen each in his own place in the spacious rooms melted into a tender hearing that feared to move lest the spell be broken and the artist leave the instrument. Men who did not know how lonesome they had been and who had missed the refinements of home more than they knew, blessed the player with their pensive listening, thanked fortune they were still alive and had chances of fighting through to get home again. And after playing ceased the British officer talked quietly of his home and the home folks and Americans thought and talked of theirs. And it was good. It was an event.

In sharp contrast is the vivid memory of that picturesque Lt. Bob Graham of the Australian Light Horse. He could have had anything the doughboy had in camp and they would have risked their lives for him, too, after the day he ran his Russian lone engine across the bridge at Verst 458 into No Man’s Land and leaped from the engine into a marsh covered by the Bolo machine guns and brought out in his own arms an American doughboy. Starting merely a daredevil ride into No Man’s Land, his roving eye had spied the doughboy delirious and nearly dead flopping feebly in the swamp.

Hero of Gallipoli’s ill-fated attempt, scarred with more than a score of wounds; with a dead man’s shin bone in the place of his left upper arm bone that a Hun shell carried off; with a silver plate in his head-shell; victim of as tragic an occurrence as might befall any man, when as a sergeant in the Flying Squadron in France he saw a young officer’s head blown off in a trench, and it was his own son, Bob Graham, “Australian Force” on the Railroad Detachment, was missed by the doughboys when he was ordered to report to Archangel.

There the heroic Bob went to the bad. He participated in the shooting out of all the lights in the Paris cafe of the city in regular wild western style; he was sent up the river for his health; he fell in with an American corporal whose acquaintance he had made in a sunnier clime, when the American doughboy had been one of the Marines in Panama and Bob Graham was an agent of the United Fruit Company. They stole the British officer’s bottled goods and trafficked unlawfully with the natives for fowls and vegetables to take to the American hospital, rounded up a dangerous band of seven spies operating behind our lines, but made such nuisances of themselves, especially the wild Australian “second looie,” that he was ordered back to Archangel. There the old general, who knew of his wonderful fighting record, at last brought him on to the big carpet. And the conversation was something like this:

“Graham, what is the matter? You have gone mad. I had the order to strip you of your rank as an officer to see if that would sober you. But an order from the King today by cable raises you one rank and now no one but the King himself can change your rank. You deserved the promotion but as you are going now it is no good to you. All I can do is to send you back to England. But I do not mean it as a disgrace to you. I could wish that you would give me your word that you would stop this madness of yours.” And the general looked kindly at Bob.

“Sir, you have been white with me. You have a right to know why I have been misbehaving these last weeks. Here, sir, is a letter that came to me the day I helped shoot up the cafe. In Belgium I married an American Red Cross nurse. This is a picture of her and the new-born son come to take the place of the grown-up son who fell mortally wounded in my arms in France. To her and the baby I was bound to go if I had to drink Russia dry of all the shipped-in Scotch and get myself reduced to the ranks for insubordination and deviltry. Sir, I’m fed up on war. I thank you for sending me back to England.”

And Corporal Aldrich tells us that his old friend Bob Graham’s present address is First National Bank, Mobile, Alabama. His father, an immigrant via Canada from old Dundee in Scotland, was elected governor of Alabama on the dry issue. And officers and doughboys who knew the wild Australian in North Russia know that his father might have had some help if Bob were at home. With a genial word for every man, with a tender heart that winced to see a child cry, with a nimble wit and a brilliant daring, Lt. Bob Graham won a place in the hearts of Americans that memory keeps warm.

And other British officers might be mentioned. There was, for example, the grizzled naval officer, Commander Young, whose left sleeve had been emptied at Zeebrugge, running our first armored train. We missed his cheery countenance and courteous way of meeting American soldiers and officers when he left us to return to England to take a seat in Parliament which the Socialists had elected him to. We can see him again in memory with his Polish gunners, his Russian Lewis gun men, standing in his car surrounded by sand bags and barbed wire, knocking hot wood cinders from his neck, which the Russki locomotive floated back to him. And many a time we were moved to bless him when his guns far in our rear spoke cheeringly to our ears as they sent whining shells curving over us to fall upon the enemy. It is no discredit to say that many a time the doughboy’s eye was filled with a glistening drop of emotion when his own artillery had sprung to action and sent that first booming retort. And some of those moments are bound in memory with the blue-coated figure of the gallant Commander Young.

The Russian Army of the North was non-existent when the Allies landed. All the soldiery previously in evidence had moved southward with the last of the lootings of Archangel and joined the armies of the soviet at Vologda, or were forming up the rear guard to dispute the entrance of the Allies to North Russia. The Allied Supreme Command in North Russia, true to its dream of raising over night a million men opened recruiting offices in Archangel and various outlying points, thinking that the population would rally to the banners (and the ration carts) in droves. But the large number of British officers waited in vain for months and months for the pupils to arrive to learn all over the arts of war. At last after six months two thousand five hundred recruits had been assembled by dint of advertising and coaxing and pressure. They were called the Slavo-British Allied Legion, S. B. A. L. for short.