this war. On parade when it played the Memphis Blues the men did not
march; the music poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels,
and instead of marching they literally danced their way along. As for
the dwellers of the French towns in which this regiment has from time to
time been quartered, they, I am told, fairly go mad when some alluring,
compelling, ragtime tune is played with that richness of syncopated
melody in it which only the black man can achieve; and as the regiment
has moved on, more than once it has been hard to keep the unattached
inhabitants of the village that the band was quitting from moving on
with it.

If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night,
which was a night of a splendid, flawless full moon. We stood with
the regimental staff on the terraced lawn of the chief house in a
half-deserted town five miles back from the trenches, and down below us
in the main street the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro
soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned
dark faces was a ring of white ones where the remaining natives of the
place clustered, with their heads wagging in time to the tunes.

And when the band got to Way Down Upon the Swanee River I wanted to cry,
and when the drum major, who likewise had a splendid barytone voice,
sang, as an interpolated number, Joan of Arc, first in English and then
in excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant,
heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm
running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from
throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him. When this type of
Frenchman feels emotion he expresses it moistly.

Those two days we heard stories without number, all of them true, I
take it, and most of them good ones. We heard of the yellow youth who
beseeched his officer to send him with a “dang'ous message” meaning by
that that he craved to go on a perilous mission for the greater glory
of the A. E. F. and incidentally of himself; and about the jaunty
individual who pulled the firing wire of a French grenade and catching
the hissing sound of the fulminator working its way toward the charge
exclaimed: “That's it--fry, gosh dem you, fry!” before he threw it. And
about how a sergeant on an emergency trench-digging job stuck to the
task, standing hip-deep in icy water and icy mud, until from chill and
exhaustion he dropped unconscious and was like to drown in the muck
into which he had collapsed head downward, only his squad discovered him
up-ended there and dragged him out; and about many other things small
or great, bespeaking fortitude and courage and fidelity and naïve Afric
waggery.

Likewise into my possession came copies of two documents, both of which
I should say are typical just as each is distinctive of a different
phase of the negro temperament. One of them, the first one, was
humorous. Indeed to my way of thinking it was as fine an example
of unconscious humour as this war is likely to produce. The other
was--well, judge for yourself.

Before the regiment moved forward for its dedication to actual warfare
it was impressed upon the personnel in the ranks that from now on, more
even than before, a soldier in his communications with his superior
officer must use the formal and precise language of military propriety.
The lesson must have sunk in, because on the thrillsome occasion when a
certain private found himself for the first time in a forward rifle pit
and for the first time heard German rifle bullets whistling past his
ears he called to him a runner and dispatched to the secondary lines
this message, now quoted exactly as written except that the proper names
have been changed:

     “Lieutenant Sidney J. McClelland,

     “Commanding Company B,--, A. E. F.,

     U. S. A.

     “Dear Sir: I am being fired on heavily from the left.
     I await your instructions.

     “Trusting these few lines will find you the same,

     I remain, Yours truly,

     “Jefferson Jones.”

The other thing was an extract from a letter written by an
eighteen-year-old private to his old mother in New York, with no idea
in his head when he wrote it that any eyes other than those of his own
people would read it after it had been censored and posted. The officer
to whom it came for censoring copied from it one paragraph, and this
paragraph ran like this:

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

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

CHAPTER XIX. WAR AS IT ISN'T

THREE of us, correspondents, had gone up with a division of ours that
was taking over one of the Picardy sectors. The French, moved out by
degrees as we by degrees moved in. On the night when we actually came
into the front lines two of us slept--or tried to--in a house of a
village perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward trenches. The third
man went on perhaps a half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion
of an infantry regiment that on the morrow would relieve some sorely
battered poilus in the trenches. It is with an experience of this third
man I now mean to deal.

He found lodgment in a château on the outskirts of a village the name of
which does not matter--and probably never will matter again, seeing that
it fairly was blasted out of the earth by its foundations the next time
the Germans attempted to resume their advance toward the Channel. As for
the château, which likewise must be quite gone by now, it was more of a
château than some of the buildings that go by this high-sounding title
in the edges of Normandy.

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

French officers and a few American officers were occupying the château.
Every room and every hallway was crowded already, but space for the
correspondent to spread down his bedding roll was provided in an inner
chamber on the second floor. At two o'clock in the morning, by consent
of the divisional commander, he was going out into the debatable land
between the trenches with a wire-mending party. There is always a chance
that a wire party will bump into a squad of enemies on the prowl or
surprise a raiding outfit from Fritzie's trenches, and then there are
doings to ensue.

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

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

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

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

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

Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping up in one's wartime
experiences. Indeed, war may be said to be made up of countless
paradoxes, overlapping and piled one upon another. To me the most
striking of the outstanding manifestations of war on its paradoxical
side is the fact that in this war nothing, or almost nothing, actually
turns out in accordance with what one's idea of it had been beforehand.
Looking backward on what I myself have viewed of its physical and
metaphysical aspects I can think of scarcely an element or a phase which
accorded with my preconceived brain image of the thing. I do not mean
by this that as a spectacle it has been disappointing, but that almost
invariably it has been different from what I was expecting it would be.
I found this to be true in 1914, back at the very beginning.

Take for example the fashion after which men bear themselves as they
go into battle; and, for a more striking illustration than that, their
customary deportment after they actually are in the battle. I figure
that beforehand my own notion of what these two demonstrations would be
like was based probably in part upon conceptions derived from old-time
pictures of Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly imaginative
representations such as used to hang upon the parlour walls of every
orthodox rural home in our country; and in part upon fiction stories
with war for a background which I had read; and finally perhaps in some
lesser part upon the moving-picture man's ideas as worked out with
more or less artistic license in the pre-war films. I rather think the
average stay-at-home's notions in these regards must be pretty much what
mine were, because he probably derived them from the same sources. The
utter dissimilarity of the actual thing as I have repeatedly viewed it
in three countries of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessening
degree continued to astonish me until the real picture of it had
supplanted the conjured one in my mind.

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

Men on the casual march, say, from one billeting place to another, are
apt to push ahead stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is hard
work, marching under heavy equipment is, and after a few hours of it the
strongest individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weariness in his
scissoring legs and along his burdened back. So he bends forward from
the hips and he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty little of his
breath in idle persiflage. Only toward the end of the journey, when rest
and food are in impending prospect, do his spirits revive to a point
where he feels like singing and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud of
the feet upon the highroad, the grunted commands of the officers, and
the occasional clatter of metal striking against metal as a man shifts
his piece are likely to be the only accompaniments of the hike for miles
on end; and there isn't much music really in such sounds as these.

But suppose the same men are moving into action and know whither they
are bound. The preliminary nervousness that possesses every normally
constituted man at the prospect of facing the deadliest forms of danger
now moves these men to hide their true emotions under a masking of
gaiety. This gaiety, which largely is assumed at the outset, presently
becomes their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass are indulging in
quips and catches. Nine in ten are ready to laugh at trivialities
that ordinarily would go unnoticed. One standing by to watch them
must diagnose the average expression on the average face as betokening
exultation rather than exaltation. The tenth man is quiet and of a
thoughtful port. He is forcing himself to appraise the situation before
him in its right proportions, and so the infection that fills his
comrades passes him by. Yet it is safe to bet on it that the sober
one-tenth, in the high hour of the grapple, will contend with just as
much gallantry as the nine-tenths can hope to show.

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

Paradoxically the reaction upon men who have come whole out of the
inferno of battling at close quarters affects these two compared classes
of soldier-men differently--at least that has been my observation. The
unseasoned men, to whom the hell from which they have just emerged has
been for them a new kind of hell, are as likely as not almost downcast
in their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish in their language.
For one thing, they are dog-tired; for another, I would say, a true
appreciation of the ordeal through which they have passed is now coming
home to them; for still another, the shock of having seen their mates
wiped out all about them surely affects the general consciousness of
the survivors; and finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm
following the tumult and the struggle leaves them well-nigh numbed.
Certainly it frequently leaves them inarticulate almost to dumbness.
Give them twenty-four hours for rest and mental adjustment, and the
coltishness of youth returns to them in ample measure, especially if
there is a victory to their credit.

On the contrasting hand, if you want to witness an exhibition of good
cheer at the end of a day of fighting seek for it among the veterans. On
a certain day in May when the second of the great German drives was in
progress I chanced to be at a spot where a brigade of French infantry--a
brigade with a magnificent record made earlier in the war--was thrown
into action to reenforce a hard-pressed and decimated British command.
Almost without exception the little dusty, rusty poilus went to the
fighting in a sort of matter-of-fact methodical silence more impressive
to me than loud outbursts could possibly have been. Quietly, swiftly,
without lost motion or vain exclamations, but moving all like men intent
upon the performance of a difficult and an unpleasant but a highly
necessary task, they took up their guns, adjusted their packs of
ammunition, set their helmets over their foreheads, and walked with no
undue haste but only with an assured and briskened serenity into the
awfulness that was beyond the clouds of smoke and dust, just yonder.

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

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

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

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

It may be that the Frenchman has grown wearied of the sound of
his national air, or it may be--and this, I think, is the proper
explanation--that in this time of stress and suffering for his land the
Marseillaise hymn has for him become a thing so high and so holy that
he holds it for sacred moments, to be rendered then as the accompaniment
for a sacrificial rite of the spirit and of the soul. At any rate it is
true that except on the one occasion I have just mentioned I have yet to
hear the French soldier in the field sing the Marseillaise hymn. He much
prefers his cheerful chansons, and when an American band plays for him
it is a jazz tune that most surely may be counted upon to make him cry
“_Encore! _”

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

Almost any hour, day or night, one might see troops of those about to
be mobilised--schoolboys of eighteen, apprentice lads, peasant youths,
cadets of military academies--parading the avenues. They wore all manner
of fantastic garbings, with enormous red neckties and red sashes, and
battered high hats banded with red, and with poppies stuck in their
buttonholes or festooned in garlands about their necks. And always
they were singing and skylarking, marching with fantastic jig steps in
grotesque queue formations, and playing pranks upon the pedestrians
who got in their way. The sight made an American think of college
fraternities conducting outdoor initiations. The scene gave colour and
the sparkle of youthful exuberance to a city where the sad sights are
commoner than the happy ones.

It was inevitable that in every few rods of their progress the
youngsters would encounter soldiers on leave, and then the boys,
dropping for a moment their joyousness, would gravely salute the
veterans, and the veterans as gravely would return the salute. Then the
roisterers would whirl off down the sidewalk waving their exaggerated
walking sticks and kicking up their heels as is the way with youth the
world over, and the soldiers in their stained patched tunics, and their
worn leather housings, and with their worn resolute faces--how often I
have seen this little byplay repeated!--would exchange swift expressive
glances with one another and smile meaning, sad little smiles, and shake
their heads in a sort of passive resignation to the inevitable, before
they went trudging on in their heavy, run-down, shabby boots. They
knew--these war-worn elders did--what the chosen man children of the
generation just emerging from the first stages of its adolescence would
very shortly be called upon to face; and so they shook their heads in
silent but regretful affirmation of the certain prospect of an added
burden of woefulness and suffering for the flowered youth of their
stricken land. For these men who had trod the paths of glory that are so
flinty and so hard could understand what must lie ahead so much better
than those stripling lads to whom the road to war was as yet a shining
and a golden highway!

Have you ever seen at the movies a film purporting to show an actual
scene in the trenches under hostile fire, wherein the men on guard there
all faced, with squinted eyes and scowling brows, across the parapets,
fingering their weapons nervously, and rarely or never glanced toward
the camera, but seemingly were so absorbed in their ambitions to pot the
foeman across the way they had no thought for anything except the tragic
undertaking in hand? Then again, have you ever seen another so-called
war reel with a similar setting, which brought before you the figures
of soldiers who from behind the shelter of the piled-up sandbags grinned
self-consciously in the direction of the machine that was recording
their forms and their movements for back-home consumption, and who
between intervals of loading and firing deported themselves pretty much
as any group of sheepishly pleased young men might while under the eye
of a photographing machine and who for the moment appeared to be more
inspired by a perfectly normal human impulse to show off than by any
other thought?

Now I have seen both these varieties of pictures and assuming that the
reader has, too, I put to him or her this question: Granting that one
of these films was the genuine article, namely, a view of a section of
a front-line trench taken at risk of the operator's life; and that the
other was a manufactured thing, with carefully rehearsed supers made up
as soldiers posing in obedience to a hired director's orders, which one,
in the reader's opinion, was the authentic thing and which the bogus?

If I have figured the probable answer aright the probable answer is
wrong. The picture in which the soldiers behaved in conformity with
the average civilian's notion of the way a soldier does behave under
fire--to wit, by being all intent upon the job of shooting, with no
regard for any lesser diversions--was the imitation; and the film in
which you saw the soldiers crowding forward in the narrow trench way in
order to be sure of getting into the focus area--the one where you saw
the soldiers grinning toward you and winking and nudging their fellows
and generally behaving like curious and embarrassed children--well, that
was the genuine article.

For the fact of the matter is that once the novelty of his new
environment has worn off--and it does wear off with marvellous
speed--the soldier in the front-line trench carries on after identically
the same patterns that would govern him under ordinary circumstances.
The detail that he is in a place of imminent danger becomes to him of
secondary importance. Except for the chance that any moment he may
stop a bullet his mode of habit resolves itself back to its familiar
elements. He is bored or he is interested by exactly the same things
that would bore him or excite him anywhere else. To him the shooting
back and forth across the top very soon becomes a more or less tedious
part of the daily routine of the trench life, but the intrusion into his
corner of a moving-picture man with a camera is a novelty, an event very
much' out of the ordinary; therefore he pays much more attention to
the taking of the picture than to what goes on pretty steadily during
practically all of his waking hours.

For added qualities of seeming indifference to externals in the midst
of great and stirring exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with the
heavies. Generally things are fairly lively among those dainty, darling,
death-dealing pets that are called the 75's. Under their camouflaging
they look like speckled pups when they do not look like spotted circus
ponies. It is a brisksome and a heartening thing to see how fast a crew
of Frenchmen can serve a battery of these little pintos, feeding the
three-inch shells into the pieces with such celerity that at a distance
the reports merge together so one might almost imagine he heard the
voice of an overgrown machine gun speaking, instead of the intermingled
voices of five separate trouble makers. Near Compiègne one day I watched
a battery of 75's at work on the Germans advancing in mass formation, I
keeping count of the reports; and the average number of shots per minute
per gun was twelve.

But the heavies work more slowly, and their crews have a sluggish look
about them as befitting men who do their fighting all at long range and
never see the foe; though I suspect the underlying reason to be that
they have learned to combine the maximum of efficiency and of accuracy
with the minimum of apparent effort and the minimum of apparent
enthusiasm. Particularly is this to be said in cases where the gunners
have become expert through long practice.

On the Montdidier Front on a gloriously beautiful afternoon of early
summer I kept company for two hours with three French batteries of
155's. The guns were ranged in dirt emplacements under a bank alongside
a sunken road that meandered out from the main street of a village that
was empty except for American and French soldiers. The Germans were four
miles away, beyond a ridge of low hills. By climbing to the crest of the
nearermost rise and lying there in the rank grass and looking through
glasses one could make out the German lines. Without glasses one could
mark fairly well where the shells from our side fell. But during the
time I stayed there no single man among the artillerymen manifested any
desire whatsoever to ascertain the visible effects of his handiwork.

Over the ground telephone an order would come from somewhere or other,
miles away. The officer in command of one of the batteries would sing
out the order to fire so many rounds at such and such intervals.
The angles--the deflections for charge temperature, air temperature,
barometer pressure and wind--had all been worked out earlier in the day,
and a few corrections for range were required. So all the men had to do
was to fire the guns. And that literally was all that they did do.

Not all the explosions in that immediate vicinity were caused by
“departs,” either. Occasionally there were to be heard the unmistakable
whistle and roar and the ultimate crack of an “arrive,” for the Germans'
counterbatteries did not remain silent under the punishment the French
were dealing out. But when an arrive fell anywhere within eye range the
men barely turned their heads to see the column of earth and dust and
pulverised chalk-rock go geysering up into the air. It was only by
chance I found out an enemy shell had fallen that morning among a gun
crew stationed near the westerly end of the line of guns, perhaps a
quarter of a mile away, and had blown seven men to bits and wounded as
many more.

Still, this apathy with regard to the potential consequences of being
where an arrive bursts is not confined to the gunners. When one has
had opportunity to see how many shells fall without doing any damage to
human beings, and to figure out for oneself how many tons of metal
it takes to kill a man, one likewise acquires a measure of this same
apparent nonchalance.

For sheer sang-froid it would be hard to match those whose work I
watched that day. In intervals of activity they lounged under the gun
wheels, smoking and playing card games; and when one battery was playing
and another temporarily was silent the members of the idle battery paid
absolutely no heed to the work of their fellows.

In two hours just one thing and only one thing occurred to jostle them
out of their calm. Something mysterious and very grievous befell a
half-grown dog, which, having been abandoned or forgotten by his owners,
still lived on in the ruins of the town and foraged for scraps among the
mess kitchens. Down the road past the guns came the pup, ki-yiing his
troubles as he ran; and at the sound of his poignant yelps some of the
gunners quit their posts and ran out into the road, and one of them
gathered up the poor beastie in his arms and a dozen more clustered
about offering the consolation of pats and soothing words to the
afflicted thing. Presently under this treatment he forgot what ailed
him, and then the men went back to their places, discussing the affair
with many gestures and copious speech. Ten German shells plumping down
near by would not have created half so much excitement as the woes of
one ownerless doggie had created. I said to myself that if the incident
was typically French, likewise it was typical of what might be called
the war temperament as exemplified among veteran fighters.

I should add, merely to fill out the settings of the scene, that
scarcely was there a ten-minute interlude this day in which German
observation planes did not scout over our lines or French observation
planes did not scout over theirs. Sometimes only a single plane would
be visible, but more often the airmen moved in squadron formations. Each
time of course that a plane ventured aloft its coursing flight across
the heavens would be marked by bursting pompons of downy white or black
smoke--white for shrapnel and black for explosive bursts--where the
antiaircraft guns of one side or the other took wing shots at the pesky
intruder. One time six sky voyagers were up simultaneously. Another time
ten, and still another no less than sixteen might be counted at once.
But to focus the attention of any of the persons then upon the earth
below, an aërial combat between the two groups would have been required,
and even this spectacle--which at the first time of witnessing it is
almost the most stirring isolated event that military operations have to
offer--very soon, with daily repetitions, becomes almost commonplace,
as I myself can testify. War itself is too big a thing for one detached
detail of it to count in the estimates that one tries to form of the
whole thing. It takes a charge in force over the top or something
equally vivid and spectacular to whet up the jaded mentality of the
onlooker.

CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

SEEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless
probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I
went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of
command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a
fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting
here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly
good perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through
periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked château held
by the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing
industriously. We could see where the shells struck--now in the garden,
now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the
front walls or a segment of the roof of the château itself; and we could
see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small gray
figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.

A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and
purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood,
and with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken
them days or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and
ours, and it would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For
you see both forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its
front lines with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into
their defences was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men
thinking different thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions
and moved by impulses all running counter to those of our breed.

Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensation of crouching in that
hole in the ground, spying upon the movements of those dwellers of that
other small world, while high above us the shells passed over, shrieking
their war-whoops as they travelled from or toward our back lines, very
soon lost for me the savour of interest, just as it had lost it a month
before when I did the same thing in front of Noyon, or two weeks before
near Verdun, or as afterward it was to do when I repeated the experience
near Rheims.

So after a bit my companion and I fell to enjoying the beauties of the
day. In front of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not badly marred
by shell craters, and all green except where lovely wide slashes of a
bright yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen sunshine. The
lower reaches of air were filled with the humming of bees, and every
minute the skylarks went singing up into the soft skies as though
filled with a curiosity to find out what those wailing demons that sped
crisscrossing through the heavens might be. Presently from a thicket
behind us sounded a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious cluck
in it. I had never heard that note before except when uttered by wooden
clocks of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recognised it for what it
was.

“Listen,” said my companion: “that's the second time within a week I've
heard it. A French liaison officer was with me then, and he said that
for three years now the cuckoo had been silent, and he said that the
French country people believed that since the cuckoo had begun calling
again it was a sign the war would soon be over--that the cuckoo was
calling for peace on earth.”

“I wonder if he was right,” I said.

“Well, he was right so far as he personally was concerned. This war for
him was nearly over. Night before last he was riding back to division
headquarters in a side car, and a shell dropped on him at a crossroads
and he and the driver were killed.”

We sat a minute or two longer and nothing was said.

“Well,” he said at length, “if you've had enough of this we'll be
getting back. It isn't very much of a show, once a fellow gets used to
it, and I guess the major will have supper ready for us pretty soon.
Ready to go?”

We got up cautiously and put our helmets on the proper ends of us and
started back through the shallow communication trench leading to the
village.

“Being where you can look right across and down into the German lines
makes a fellow wonder,” I suggested. “It makes a fellow wonder what
those men over yonder are thinking about and what their feelings toward
us are, and whether they hate us as deeply as they hate the British'.”

“I guess I can figure out what one of them thinks anyhow,” he said with
a quizzical side-wise glance at me. He flirted over his shoulder with
his thumb. “I've got a brother somewhere over yonder ways--if he's
alive.” He smiled at the look that must have come across my face. “Oh,
you needn't suspect me,” he went on. “I judge I'm as good an American
as you are or any man alive is, even if I do wear a German name. You
see I'm a youngest son. I was born in the good old U. S. A. all right
enough, but two of my brothers, older than I am, were born in Germany,
and they didn't come to America when the rest of the family migrated.
And one of them, last time I heard from him before we got into the mess,
was a lieutenant in a Bavarian field battery. Being a German subject
I suppose he figures he's only doing his duty, but how he can go on
fighting for that swine of a Kaiser beats me. But then, I don't suppose
I can understand; I'm an American citizen. Funny world, isn't it?

“Say, listen! That cuckoo is calling again. I wonder if there is
anything in the superstition of the French peasants that peace will come
this year. Well, so far as I am concerned I don't want it to come until
Uncle Sam has finished up this job in the right way. I only hope
the next time I hear the cuckoo sing it'll be in the outskirts of
Berlin--that is, providing a cuckoo can stand for the outskirts of
Berlin.”

I reminded him that the cuckoo was a bird that stole other bird's
nests--or tried to.

“That being so, I guess Berlin must be full of 'em,” said he.

The major's headquarters--he was a major of artillery--was in the chief
house of the little town. Curiously enough this was almost the only
house in the town that had not been hit, and two days later it was hit,
and in the ruins of it a friend of mine, another major, was crushed; but
that is a different story, not to be detailed here. It stood--the house,
I mean--in a little square courtyard of its own, as most village houses
in this part of France do, being flanked on one side by its stable and
on the other side by its cow barn and by its chicken houses. There was a
high wall to inclose it along the side nearest the street, with rabbit
hutches and pigeon cots tucked up under the wall. In the centre of the
court was a midden for manure. It had been a cosy little place once.
The dwelling was of red brick with a gay tiled roof, and the lesser
buildings and the wall were built of stones, as is the French way. Even
the rabbit hutches were stone, and the dovecot and the cuddy for the
fowls. Now, except for American artillerymen, it was all empty of
life. The paved yard was littered with wreckage; the doors of the empty
cubicles stood open.

I sat with the major and his adjutant on the doorstep of the cottage
waiting for the orderlies to call us in to eat our suppers. Through the
lolled gate in the wall an old man, a civilian, entered. He was tall
and lean like one of the lombard trees growing in the spoiled vegetable
garden at the back of the house, and he was dressed in a long frock coat
that was all powdered with a white dust of the roads. He had a grave
long face, and we saw that he limped a little as he came across the
close toward us. Nearing us he took off his hat and bowed.

“Pardon, 'sieurs,” he said in Norman French, “but could I look through
this house?”

“No civilians are permitted here now,” said the major. “How did you get
here?”

“I was given a pass to return,” he explained. “Your pardon again,
m'sieurs, but I am--I was--the mayor of this town, and this is my house.
I mean, it was my house. The Germans came upon us so rapidly we had to
leave on but two hours' notice, taking with us very little. Not until
to-day could I secure leave to come back. I wished to see what was left
of my home--I always had lived here before, you know--and to gather up
some of my belongings, if I might.”

“Where did you come from?” asked the major.

“From --------.” He named a town twenty-two miles away.

“And how did you get here?”

“I walked.” He lifted his shoulders in an expressive gesture. “There was
no other way. And I must walk back to-night. There is no shelter nearer
except for soldiers.”

He looked past us into the main room of the house. Its floor of tiles
was littered with dried mud. A table and three broken chairs that had
given way beneath the weight of heavy and careless men were its only
furniture now. The window panes had been shattered. It was hard to
picture that this once had been a cozy, comfortable room, clean and
tidy, smartened with pictures and ornaments upon the walls and with
curtains at the casement openings, which now gaped so emptily.

“Not much is left, eh?” said the old man, his face twitching. “Well
_c'est la guerre!_”

“I'm afraid your home is rather badly wrecked,” said the major. “Since
I came here my men have tried to do no more damage to it than they could
help, but Algerians were here before us; and the Algerians, as you know,
are rough in their habits and sometimes they loot houses. Do you wish
to enter? If so, go ahead. And if you are hungry I would be glad to have
you stay and eat with us.”

The stranger hesitated a moment.

“No, no,” he said; “of what use to go in? I have seen enough. And thank
you, m'sieur but I do not wish any food.”

He bowed once more and turned away from us; but he did not go away
directly. He went across the court to his barn and tugged at a door that
was half ajar. From within came the grumbled protest of a Yankee gunner
lying just inside on a pile of straw, and indignant at being roused from
a nap.

The man who owned the barn backed away, making his apologies. He picked
up a hay fork that lay upon the dungpile, and near the gate, under the
shadow of the wall, he stooped again and picked up a broken clock that
some one had tossed out of the house. Then, after one more glance all
about the place as though he strove to fix in his mind a picture of it,
not as now it was but as once it had been, he stepped through the gate,
and with his pitiable salvage tucked under his bony arms he vanished up
the road.

When that night I summed up my experiences the memories of the day that
stood out clearest in my mind were not of the guns nor the aëroplanes
nor the bursting shells nor yet the sight in the German lines, but of
the mistreated dog that howled and of the cuckoo that fluted in the
thicket and of the old man who had trudged so far, over perilous
roads, to look with his eyes for the last time, surely, upon the sorry
ruination of his home. And I felt that I, a man whose business it is
to see interesting things and afterward to put them down in black and
white, was acquiring in some degree the perspective of the soldier,
whose mental viewpoint is so foreshortened by the imminent presence
of the greater phases of war that he comes after a while to regard the
inconsequential, and so looks on the incidental phases of it as of
more account than the complexities of its vast, hurrying, overdriven
mechanism.

For the point I have been trying, perhaps clumsily, to make clear all
along is just this: As a general thing it may be set down that except
for those infrequent occasions when there is a charge to be made or
a charge to be repelled, or except when some freak of war, new to the
trooper's experience, is occurring or has just occurred, he in all
essential outer regards is exactly the same person that he was before he
went a-soldiering, with nothing about him to distinguish him from what
he was then, barring the fact that now he wears a uniform.

Spiritually he may have been transformed; indeed he must have been, but
it is a shading of spirituality that but rarely betrays itself in his
fashion of speech or in his physical expression or in his behaviour.
Doing the most heroic things he nevertheless does them without indulging
in any of the heroics with which the fiction of books and the fiction
of stagecraft love to invest the display of the finer and the higher
emotions of mankind.

Living where death in various guises is ever upon the stalk for him he
learns to regard it no more than in civil life he regards the commoner
manifestations of a code of civilised procedure that ethically is based
upon a plan to safeguard his life and his limb from mischance and ill
health. The habit of death becomes to him as commonplace as the habit of
life once was. He gets used to the incredible and it turns commonplace.
He gets used to the extraordinary, which after it has happened a few
times becomes most ordinary. He gets used to being bombed and is bored
thereby; gets used to gas alarms and bombardments; to high explosives,
spewing shrapnel, and purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals
standing up and taking his rest in broken bits. He gets used to all
of war's programme--its impossibilities and its contradictions, its
splendours, its horrors and its miseries. In short he gets used to
living in a world that is turned entirely upside down, with every
normal aspect in it capsised and every regular and ordained phase of it
standing upon its head.

For a fact it seems to me that in its final analysis the essence of
war is merely the knack of getting used to war. And the instantaneous
response of the average human being to its monstrous and preposterous
aspects is a lesson to prove the elasticity and the infinite
adaptability of the human mind. Because people can and do get used to
it is the reason why they do not all go mad in the midst of it. Getting
used to it--that's the answer. After a while one even gets used to the
phenomenon that war rarely or never looks as you would think war should
look--and that brings me by a roundabout way back again to the main text
of my article.

Troops travelling in numbers across country do not present the majestic
panoramic effect that one might expect. This in part, though, is due to
the common topography of France. Generally speaking, a given district
is so cut up with roads threading the fields that the forces, for
convenience in handling, are divided into short columns that move by
routes that are practically parallel, toward a common destination.
The sight of troops going into camp at night also is disappointing.
In France, thickly settled as it is, with villages tucked into every
convenient dip between the hills, the men are so rapidly swallowed up in
the billeting spaces under house and bam roots that an hour or even half
an hour after the march has ended you might traverse a district where,
let us say, twenty thousand soldiers are quartered, and unless you know
the correct figures the evidence offered to your eyes might deceive you
into assuming that not one-tenth of that number were anywhere in the
vicinity.

It is this failure of war, when considered as a physical thing, to
measure up to its traditional Impressiveness, that fills with despair
the soul of the writing man, who craves to put down on paper an adequate
conception of it in its entirety. Finally he comes to this: That either
he must throw away the delusions he himself nourished and content
himself by building together little mosaics with scraps gleaned from the
big, untellable, untranslatable enigma that it is, or for the reader's
sake must try to conjure up a counterfeit conception, which will
correspond with what he knows the average reader's mental vision of the
thing to be. In one event he is honest--but disappointing. In the other
he is guilty of a willful deceit, but probably turns out copy that is
satisfying to his audience. In either event, in his heart he is bound to
realise the utter impossibility of depicting war as it is.

It is one of the cumulating paradoxes of the entire paradoxical
procedure that the best place to get a reasonably clear and intelligible
idea of the swing and scope of a battle is not upon the site of the
battle itself, but in a place anywhere from ten to twenty miles behind
the battle. Directly at the front the onlooker observes only those small
segments of the prevalent hostilities that lie directly under his eyes.
He is hedged in and hampered by obstacles; his vision is circumscribed
and confined to what may be presented in his immediate vicinity.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. I am speaking not of every
case but of the average case.

A fairish distance back, though, he may to an extent grasp the immensity
of the operation. He sees the hammered troops coming out and the fresh
troops going in; beholds the movements of munitions and supplies and
reserves; observes the handling of the wounded; notes the provisions
that are made for a possible advance and the preparations that have been
made for a possible retreat. Even so, to the uninitiated eye the scheme
appears jumbled, haphazard and altogether confused. It requires a mind
acquainted with more than the rudiments of military science to discern
purpose in what primarily appears to be so absolutely purposeless. There
is nothing of the checkerboard about it; the orderliness of a chess game
is lacking. The suggestion is more that of a whirlpool. So it follows
that the novice watches only the maelstrom on the surface and rarely can
he fathom out the guiding influences that ordain that each twistiwise
current moves in its proper channel without impairment or impediment lor
any one of the myriad of related activities.

Being a novice he is astonished to note that only infrequently do
wounded men act as his fictional reading has led him to believe they
would act. To me the most astounding thing about this has been not that
wounded men shriek and moan, but that nearly always they are so terribly
silent. At the moment of receiving his hurt a man may cry out; often he
does. But oftener than not he comes, mute and composed, to the dressing
station. The example of certain men who lock their lips and refuse
to murmur, no matter how great is their pain, inspires the rest to
do likewise. A man who in civil life would make a great pother over a
trivial mishap, in service will endure an infinitely worse one without
complaint. If war brings out all the vices in some nations it most
surely brings out the virtues in others. I hate to think back on the
number of freshly wounded men I have seen, but when I do think back on
it I am struck by the fact that barring a few who were delirious
and some few more who were just emerging into agonised consciousness
following the coma shock of a bad injury, I can count upon the fingers
of my two hands the total of those who screamed or loudly groaned.
Men well along the road to recovery frequently make more troublesome
patients than those who have just been brought to the field hospitals;
and a man who perhaps has lain for hours with a great hole in his flesh,
stoically awaiting his turn under the surgeon's hands, will sometimes,
as a convalescent, worry and fret over the prospect of having his hurts
redressed.

Among certain races the newly stricken trooper is more apt to be
concerned by the fear that he may be incapacitated from getting
back into the game than he is about the extent of his wound or the
possibility that he may die of it. As an American I am proud to be able
to say, speaking as a first-hand witness, that our own race should be
notably included in this category. The Irishman who had been shot five
times but was morally certain he would recover and return to the war
because he thought he knew the fellow who had plugged him has his
counterpart without number among the valorous lads from this side of the
ocean whose names have appeared on the casualty lists.

CHAPTER XXI. PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

WHILE I am on the subject of unusual phases of modern warfare I should
like to include just one more thing in the list--and that thing is the
suddenness with which in France, and likewise in Belgium, one in
going forward passes out of an area of peacefulness into an area
of devastation and destruction. Almost invariably the transition is
accomplished with a startling abruptness. It is as though a mighty
finger had scored a line across the face of the land and said; “On this
side of the line life shall go on as it always has gone on. Here men
shall plough, and women shall weave, and children shall play, and the
ordinary affairs of mankind shall progress with the seasons. On that
side there shall be only death and the proofs of death and the promises
of yet more deaths. There the fields shall be given over to the raven
and the rat; the homes shall be blasted flat, the towns shall be razed
and the earth shall be made a charnelhouse and a lazar pit of all that is
foul and loathsome and abominable in the sight of God and man.”

For emphasis of this sharp contrast you have only to take a motor run up
out of a district as yet untouched by war into the scathed zone of past
or present combat. By preference I should elect for you that the trip
be made through a British sector, because the British have a way
of stamping their racial individuality upon an area that they
take over--they Anglicise it, so to speak. Besides, a tour through
British-held territory partakes of the nature of a flying visit to an
ethnological congress, seeing that nearly all the peoples who make up
the empire are likely to have representatives here present, engaged
in one capacity or another--and that adds interest and colour to the
picture.

Let us start, say, from a French market town on a market day. From far
away in the north, as we climb into our car with our soldier driver and
our officer escort, comes the faint hollow rumble of the great guns; but
that has been going on nearly four years now, and in the monotony of
it the people who live here have forgotten the threat that is in that
distant thundering. Pippin-cheeked women are driving in, perched upon
the high seats of two-wheeled hooded carts and bringing with them fowls
and garden truck. In the square before the church booths are being set
up for the sale of goods. Plump round-eyed children stand to watch us
go down the narrow street, which runs between close rows of wattled,
gable-ended stone or plaster cottages. Most of the little girls are
minding babies; practically all of the little boys wear black pinafores
belted in at their chubby waistlines, with soldier cap--always soldier
caps--on their heads, and they love to stiffen to attention and salute
the occupants of a military automobile.

There are but few men in sight, and these are old men or else they wear
uniforms. The houses are tidied and neat; the soil, every tillable inch
of it, is in a state of intensive and painstaking cultivation. On all
hands vineyards, orchards, pastures and grain fields are spread in
squares and parallelograms. The road is bordered on either side by tall
fine trees. Chickens, geese and turkeys scuttle away to safety from
before the onrushing car, and at the roadside goats and cattle and sheep
and sometimes swine are feeding. Each animal or each group of animals
has its attendant herder. Horses are tethered outside the hedges where
they may crop the free herbage. The landscape is fecund with life and
productivity.

It is a splendid road along which we course, wide and smooth and
well-kept, and for this the reason is presently made plain. Steam
rollers of British manufacture, with soldiers to steer them, constantly
roll back and forth over stretches where broken stone has been spread
by the repair gangs. These mending crews may be made up of
soldiers--French, British, Portuguese or Italians; and then again they
may be drafts of German prisoners or members of labour squads drawn from
far corners of the world where the British or the French flag flies.
Within an hour you will pass turbaned East Indians, Chinamen, Arabs,
Nubians, Ceylonese, Senegalese, Maoris, Afri-dis, Moroccans, Algerians.
Their head-dresses are likely to be their own; for the rest they wear
the uniforms of the nation that has enlisted or hired them.

Despite this polyglot commingling of types the British influence is upon
everything. Military guideposts bearing explicit directions in English
stand thick along the wayside, and in the windows of the shops are
cruder signs to show that the French proprietors make a specialty of
catering to the wants of Britishers. Here is one reading “Eggs and
Potato Chips”; there one advertising to whom it may concern, “Washing
Done Here.” “Post-cards and Souvenirs” is a common legend, and on the
fronts of old wine-shops a still commoner one is “Ale and Stout.” Rows
of beer bottles stand upon the window ledges, with platters of buns and
sandwiches flanking them. A “Wet and Dry Canteen” flies a diminutive
British flag from its peaky roof.

Evidences of British military activity multiply and re-multiply
themselves. Long trains of motor-trucks lumber by like great, grey
elephants each with a dusty Tommy for its mahout. A convoy of small, new
tanks go wallowing and bumping along bound frontward, and they suggest
a herd of behemoths on the move. Their drivers as likely as not
are Chinamen who presently will turn their unwieldy charges over to
soldier-crews. Officers clatter past on horse-back looking, all of them,
as though they had just escaped from the military outfitters; staff-cars
whiz through the slower traffic; troops bound for the baths or for the
trenches or for rest billets march stolidly up the road or down it as
the case may be. Omnibuses from London town, now converted to military
usage, are thick in the press. Military policemen are more numerous and
more set upon scrutinising your pass than they were a few miles back.
And civilians are fewer.

Alongside the highway, settlements of wooden or iron huts increase in
number and in proportions. Hospitals, headquarters of various units,
bath-houses, punishment compounds, motor stations, supply depots,
airdromes, ordnance repair plants, munition warehouses, Y. M. C. A.
huts, gas test stations, rest barracks, gasoline depots and all the rest
of it show themselves for what they are both by their shapes and by
the notice boards which mark them. Here is cluttered all the infinitely
complicated machinery of the war-making industry, with its accessories
and its adjuncts, its essentials and its incidentals, but so far there
is no actual evidence that the rude and disturbing hand of war has
actually been laid upon the land. Rather is it a spectacle to make you
think of a thousand circus days rolled into one, and mixed in with
all this, travelling caravans, gypsy encampments, Wild West shows,
horse-fairs, street carnivals and what not.

Of a sudden the picture changes. There are no civilians visible now,
no prisoners and no labour-battalions but only soldiers and not so many
soldiers either as you encountered just behind you in the intermediate
zone because as a general thing, the nearer you come to the actual
theatre of hostilities, the fewer soldiers in mass are you apt to see.
The soldiers may be near by but they are not to be found until you
search for them. They have taken cover in dug-outs and in trenches and
in remote billets hidden in handy, sheltered spots in the conformation
of the rolling landscape.

Now the vista stretching before you wears a bleak and untenanted look.
You notice that the shade trees have disappeared. Instead of living
trees there are only jagged stumps of trees or bare, shattered trunks
from which the limbs have been sheared away by shell-fire, and to which
the bark clings in scrofulous patches. Across the fields go winding,
brown bramble-patches of rusted barbed wire. The earth is depressed into
hollows and craters, or upthrown into ugly mounds and hillocks. In the
wasted and disfigured meadows rank weeds sprout upon the edges of the
ragged shellholes. The very earth seems to give off a sour and rancid
stink. There is a village ahead of you; it is a village without
roofs to its houses, or dwellers within its breached and tottering
walls. It is a jumbled nightmare of a ruin. It is as though a tornado
had blown a cluster of brick-kilns flat, and then an earthquake had
come along and jumbled the fragments into still greater and more utter
confusion.

Protruding from the flattened rubble about it, there uprears a crooked,
spindle-like pinnacle of tottering masonry. It may have been a corner
of the church wall or the town hall. Now it is like a beckoning finger
calling to heaven for vengeance. Upon it is set a notice-board to
advise you that you are now in the “Alert Zone,” which means your
gas-respirator must be snuggled up under your chin ready for use and
that your steel helmet must be worn upon your head and that you must
take such other precautions as may be required.

You ride on then at reduced speed along a camouflaged byway for
perhaps fifteen minutes. You come to where once upon a time, before
the jack-booted, spike-headed apostles of Kul-tur descended upon this
country, was another village standing. This village has been more
completely obliterated out of its former image--if such a thing is
possible--than its neighbour. It is little else than a red smear in the
greyish yellow desolation, where constant bombardment has reduced the
bricks of its houses to a powder and then has churned and pestled the
powder into the harried earth. There remains for proof of one-time
occupancy only the jagged lines of certain foundations and ugly mounds
of mingled soil and debris. Up from beneath one of these mess-heaps,
emerging like a troglodyte, from a hole which burrows downward to a
hidden cellar, there crawls forth a grimed soldier who warns you that
neither you nor your car may progress farther except at your dire risk,
since this is an outpost position and once you pass from your present
dubious shelter you will be in full view and easy target range of
Brother Boche. You have advanced to the very forward verge of the
battle-line and you didn't know it.

One rather dark night, travelling in an unlighted car, three of us were
trying to reach an American brigade headquarters where we expected to
sleep. Our particular destination was a hamlet in a forest just behind
and slightly east of the main defences of Verdun.

We must have taken the wrong turn at a crossroads, for after going some
distance along a rutted cart track through the woods we came to where
a deep ditch--at least it seemed to be a deep ditch--had been dug
right across the trail from side to side. By throwing on the brakes the
chauffeur succeeded in halting the car before its front wheels went
over and into the cut. We climbed out to investigate, and then we
became aware of an American sentry standing twenty feet beyond us in the
aforesaid ditch.

“We are correspondents,” said a spokesman among us, “and we are trying
to get to General So-and-So's headquarters. Can't we go any farther
along this road?”

Being an American this soldier had a sense of humour.

“Not unless you speak German, you can't,” he drawled. “The Heinies are
dead ahead of you, not two hundred yards from this here trench.”

Without once suspecting it we had ridden clear through a sector held by
us to the frontline defences alongside the beleaguered city of Verdun.

It's just one paradox after another, is the thing we call war.

CHAPTER XXII. THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

THE deadlier end of a snake is the head end, where the snake carries its
stingers. Since something happened in the Garden of Eden this fact has
been a matter of common knowledge, giving to all mankind for all time
respect for the snake and fear of him. But what not everybody knows
is that before a constrictor can exert his squeezing powers to the
uttermost degree he must have a dependable grip for his tail, else those
mighty muscles of his are impotent; because a snake, being a physical
thing, is subject to the immutable laws of physics. There must be a
fulcrum for the lever, always; the coiled spring that is loose at both
ends becomes merely a piece of twisted metal; and a constrictor in
action is part a living lever and part a living spring. And another
thing that not everybody knows is that before a snake with fangs can
fling itself forward and bite it must have a purchase for the greater
part of its length against some reasonably solid object, such as the
earth or a slab of rock.

Now an army might very well be likened to a snake, which sometimes
squeezes its enemy by an enveloping movement but more often strikes at
him with sudden blows. In the case of our own Army I particularly like
the simile of a great snake--a rattlesnake, by preference, since in the
first place the rattlesnake is essentially an American institution, and
since once before our ancestors fought for their own freedom, much as
we now are fighting for the freedom of the world, under a banner that
carried the device of a rattler coiled. Moreover, the rattlesnake, which
craves only to be let alone and which does not attack save on intrusion
or provocation, never quits fighting, once it has started, until it is
absolutely no more. You may scotch it and you may bruise and crush and
break it, but until you have killed it exceedingly dead and cut it to
bits and buried the bits you can never be sure that the job from your
standpoint is finished. So for the purpose of introducing the subject in
hand a rattlesnake it is and a rattlesnake it shall be to the end of
the narrative, the reader kindly consenting--a rattlesnake whose bite is
very, very fatal and whose vibrating tail bears a rattle for every star
in the flag.

For some months past it has been my very good fortune to watch the
rattler's head, snouting its nose forth into the barbed wires
and licking out with the fiery tongue of its artillery across the
intervening shell holes at Heinie the Hun. Now I have just finished a
trip along the body of the snake, stretching and winding through and
across France for 800 miles, more or less, to where its tail is wetted
by salt water at the coast ports in the south and the east and the
southeast. This is giving no information to the enemy, since he knows
already that the snake which is the army must have a head at the
battleground and a neck in the trenches, and behind the head and the
neck a body and a tail, the body being the lines of communication and
the tail the primary supply bases.

His own army is in the likeness of a somewhat similar snake; otherwise
it could not function. Moreover, things are happening to him, even
as these lines are written, that must impress upon his Teutonic
consciousness that our snake is functioning from tip to tip. Unless he
is blind as well as mad he must realise that he made a serious mistake
when he disregarded the injunction of the old Colonials: “Don't Tread On
Me.”

In common with nearly every other man to whom has been given similar
opportunity I have seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front where
our people hold for defence or move for attack--heroism, devotion,
sacrifice, an unquenchable cheerfulness, and a universal determination
that permeates through the ranks from the highest general to the
greenest private to put through the job that destiny has committed into
our keeping, after the only fashion in which this job properly may be
put through.

In the trenches and immediately behind them I thought I had exhausted
the average human capacity for thrills of pride, but it has turned out
that I hadn't. For back of the Front, back of the line troops and the
reserves, back all the way to the tail of the snake, there are things
to be seen that in a less spectacular aspect--though some of them are
spectacular enough, at that--are as finely typical of American resource
and American courage and American capability as any of the sights that
daily and hourly duplicate themselves among the guns.

I am sure there still must be quite a number of persons at home who
somehow think that once a soldier is armed and trained and set afoot
on fighting ground he thereafter becomes a self-sustaining and
self-maintaining organism; that either he is providentially provisioned,
as the ravens of old fed the prophet, or that he forages for himself,
living on the spoils of the country as the train bands and hired
mercenaries used to live by loot in the same lands where our troops are
now engaged. Or possibly they hazily conceive that the provender and the
rest of it, being provided, manage to transport themselves forward to
their user. If already we had not had too many unnecessary delegates
loose-footing it over France this year I could wish that I might have
had along with me on this recent trip a delegation of these unreflecting
folk, for they would have beheld, as I did, a greater miracle than the
one vouchsafed Elijah, yet a miracle of man's èncompassment, and in some
measure would have come to understand how a vast American army, three
thousand miles from home on foreign shores, is fed and furnished and
furbished and refurbished, not at the expense of the dwellers of the
soil but to their abundant personal benefit. Finally they would see in
its operation the vastest composite job of creation, organisation and
construction that has ever been put through, in the space of one year
and three months about, by any men that ever toiled anywhere on this
footstool of Jehovah.

To me statistics are odious things, and whenever possible I avoid them.
Besides, some of the figures I have accumulated in this journey are
so incredibly stupendous that knowing them to be true figures I
nevertheless hesitate to set them down. By my thinking way adjectives
are needed and not numerals to set forth in any small measure a
conception of the undertaking that has been accomplished overseas by our
people and is still being accomplished with every hour that passes.

Before this war came along Europeans were given to saying that we
Americans rarely bragged of producing a beautiful thing or an
artistic thing or a thing painstakingly done, but rather were given to
advertising that here we had erected the longest bridge and there the
tallest building and over yonder the largest railway terminal and
down this way the most expensive mansion--that ever was. Perhaps the
criticism was justified in peacetimes. Today in the light of what we
have done in France these past few months back of the lines it not only
is justified but it is multiplied, magnified and glorified. It no longer
is a criticism; it is a tribute. When you think of the performance that
stands to our credit you must think of it in superlatives, and when you
speak of it you must speak in superlatives too. The words all end in
“est.”

On French soil within twelve months, and in several instances within six
months, we have among other things constructed and set going the biggest
cold-storage plant, with two exceptions, in the world; the biggest
automobile storage depot, excluding one privately owned American
concern, in the world; the biggest system of military-equipment
warehouses in the world; probably the biggest field bakery in the world;
the biggest strictly military seaport base in the world; what will
shortly be the biggest military base hospital in the world; the biggest
single warehouse for stock provender in the world; the biggest junkshop
in the world; the biggest staff training school in the world--three
months ago it had more scholars than any university in America ever
has had; the biggest locomotive roundhouse under one roof; the biggest
gasoline-storage plant; the next to the biggest training camp for
aviators, the same being a sort of 'finishing school for men who have
already had a degree of instruction elsewhere; the biggest acetylene-gas
plant; and half a dozen other biggest things in the world--and we're not
good and started yet!

Every week sees the plants we have already constructed being enlarged and
amplified; every week sees some new contract getting under way. Every
month's end sees any similar period in the building of the Panama Canal
made to seem almost a puny and inconsequential achievement by contrast
and by comparison with what superbly and triumphantly has gone forward
during that month. In military parlance it is called the Service of
Supplies. It should be called the Service of the Supremely Impossible
Supremely Accomplished. When this war is ended and tourists are
permitted to visit foreign parts Americans coming abroad and seeing what
has here been done will be prouder of their country and their fellow
countrymen than ever they have been.

The Service of Supplies, broadly speaking and in its bearing on
operations upon the Continent, begins at tide mark and ends in the
front-line trenches, with ramifications and side issues and annexes
past counting, but all of them more or less interrelated with the main
issues. For example the staff school can hardly be called a part of it,
though lying, so to speak, in a whorl of the snake. It is divided into
a Base Section, which is that part situate nearest to the coasts; an
Intermediate Section, which is what its name implies; and an Advance
Section, which extends as close up to the zone of hostilities as is
consistent with reasonable safety, the term “reasonable safety” being a
relative term in these days of hostile raiding planes. The Base Section
is subdivided again into several lesser segments, each centring about a
main port.

Broadly described it might be said that any military equipment in its
natural course is first unloaded and stored temporarily at the bases.
Then it is moved into the Intermediate Section, where it is housed and
kept until called for. Thereupon it goes on a third rail journey to the
Advance Section, out of the depots of which it is requisitioned and sent
ahead again by trucks or wagons, or more commonly by rail, to meet the
day-to-day and the week-to-week requirements of the units in the field.

While this is going on all the sundry hundreds of thousands of men
engaged on duty along the Service of Supplies must be cared for without
impairment to the principal underlying purpose--that of provisioning and
arming the fighting man, and providing supplies and equipment for the
hospitals and the depots and all the rest of it, world without end.
When you sit down to figure how many times the average consignment, of
whatsoever nature, is loaded and unloaded and reloaded again even after
it has been brought overseas, and how many times it is handled and
rehandled, checked in and checked out, accounted for and entered up, and
eventually fed out in dribs as fodder for the huge coiling serpent we
call an army--you begin to understand why it is that for every 100 men
brought across the ocean upward of 50 must be assigned to work in some
capacity or another along the communication ways.

For the reader to visit the various departments and sub-departments and
subber subdepartments that properly fall within the scope of the Service
of Supplies would take of his time at least two weeks. It took that much
of my time and I had a fast touring car at my disposal and between stops
moved at a cup-racing clip. For the writer to attempt to set down in any
comprehensive form the extent of the thing would fill a fat book of many
pages. By reason of the limitations of space this article can touch only
briefly on the general scheme and only sketchily upon those details that
seemed to the present observer most interesting.

For example at one port--and this not yet the busiest one of the ports
turned over to us by our allies--we are operating an extensive system of
French docks that already were there and with them an even larger system
of docks constructed by our Army and now practically completed. Likewise
we have here a great camp, as big a camp as many a community at home
that calls itself a city, where negro labour battalions are living;
two extensive rest camps for troops newly debarked from the transports;
enormous freight yards and storage warehouses with still another
camp handily near by for the accommodation of the yard gangs and the
warehouse gangs; a base hospital that when completed will be the largest
military base hospital on earth; a sizable artillery camp where gun
crews and ordnance officers take what might be called a post-graduate
course to supplement the training they had in the States; a remount
station; an ordnance and aviation-storage warehouse; and a motor
reception park.

This, remember, is but one of several ports that we practically have
taken over for the period of the war. On the land side of a second port
are grouped a rest camp, a motor-assembling park, a system of docks
inside a basin that is provided with locks, a locomotive-assembling
plant, freight yards, warehouses without end, and two base hospitals.

Taking either of these ports for a starting point and moving inland one
would probably visit first the headquarters of the Service of Supplies,
where also is to be found our main salvage depot for reclaiming all
sorts of equipment except motor and air equipment--these go to salvage
stations specially provided elsewhere--and not far away an aviation
training centre. A little farther along as one travelled up-country
he would come to an artillery instruction centre located in a famous
French military school; to our engineer training centre and our
engineer replacement depots; and thence onward to our air-service
production centre with its mammoth plant for assembling, repairing and
testing planes and with its camp for its personnel. This would bring one
well into the Intermediate Section with its depots, freight yards and
warehouses, and with its refrigerating plant, which is the third largest
in existence and which shortly will have a twin sister a few miles
away. There would be side excursions to the motor supply and spare parts
depot, to the main motor repair station, to the locomotive repair shops,
to the car shops, to the principal one of our aviation training centres,
to the main field bakery, to the gasoline depots, the camouflaging plant
and to various lesser activities.

Finally one would land at the Advance Section depots with their complex
regulating stations for the proper distribution of the material that has
advanced hither by broken stages. And yet when one had journeyed thus
far one would merely be at the point of the beginning of the real work
of getting the stuff through to the forces without congestion, without
unnecessary wastage, without sending up too much or too little but just
exactly the proper amounts as needed.

Now then, on top of this please remember that each important camp, each
station, each centre has its own water system, its own electric light
system, its own police force, its own fire department, its own sanitary
squad, its own sewers, its own walks and drives and flower beds, its own
emergency hospitals and dispensaries and surgeries, its own Y. M. C. A.,
its own Red Cross unit, generally its own K. of C. workers and its own
Salvation Army squad; as likely as not its own newspaper and its own
theatre. Always it has its own separate communal life.

Figure that in a score of places veritable cities have sprung up where
last January the wind whistled over stubbled fields and snow-laden pine
thickets. Figure that altogether 40,000,000 square feet of covered
housing space are required and that more will be required as our
expeditionary force continues to expand. Figure that in and out and
through all these ramified activities our locomotives draw our cars over
several hundred miles of sidings and yard trackage, which Uncle Sam has
put down by the sweat of the brow of his excellent sons, supplemented
by a copious amount of sweat wrung from the brows of thousands of German
prisoners and thousands more of Indo-Chinese labourers imported by
the French and loaned to us, and yet thousands more of native French
labourers past or under the military age.

Figure that while the work of construction has been going on upon a
scope unprecedented in the scheme of human endeavour the men charged
with the responsibility for it have had to divide their energies and
their man power to the end that the growing Army should not suffer
for any lack of essential sustenance while the other jobs went forward
toward completion. Figure at the beginning of last winter, nine months
ago, scarcely a spadeful of earth had been turned for the foundations
anywhere. Figure in with all of this mental pictures of the Children of
Israel building the pyramids for old Mister Pharaoh, of Goethals at
the Isthmus, of Cæsar's legions networking Europe with those justly
celebrated Romanesque roads of his, of the coral insects making an
archipelago in nine months instead of stretching the proceeding through
millions of years, as is the habit of these friendly little insects;
figure in all these things--and if your headache isn't by this time too
acute for additional effort without poignant throbbings at the temples
you may begin to have a shadowy conception of what has happened along
our Service of Supplies over here in France since we really got busy.

So much for the glittering generalities--and Lawsie, how they do
glitter with the crusted diamond dust of endeavour and stupendous
accomplishment! Now for a few particularly brilliant outcroppings: There
is a certain port at present in our hands. For our purposes it is a
most important port--one of the most important of all the ports that the
French turned over to us. When our engineers set up shop there the port
facilities were very much as they had been when the Phoenicians
first laid them out, barring some comparatively modern improvements
subsequently tacked on by the Roman Emperors and still later by that
famous but somewhat disagreeable old lady, Anne of Brittany. There were
no steam cranes or electric hoists on the docks, and if there had been
they would have been of little value except for ornamental purposes,
seeing that by reason of harbourwise limitations ships of draft or of
size could not range alongside but must be lightered of their cargoes
at their mooring chains out in midchannel anywhere from half a mile to
a mile and a half off shore. Moreover, there was but one railroad track
running down to the water's edge. Even yet there are no steam cranes in
operation; both freight and men must be brought to land in lighters. But
mark you what man power plus brains plus necessity has accomplished in
the face of those structural obstacles and those mechanical drawbacks.

At the outset it was estimated by experts among our allies that possibly
we could land 20,000 troops and 6,000 tons of freight a month at this
port--if we kept nonunion hours and hustled. In one day in the early
part of the present summer 42,000 American soldiers were debarked and
ferried ashore with their portable equipment, and on another day of the
same week through one of the original French-built docks--not through
the whole row of them, but through one of the row--our stevedores
cleared 5,000 tons of freight. Five thousand tons in one day, when those
Continental wiseacres had calculated that by straining ourselves and by
employing to their utmost all the facilities provided by all the docks
in sight we might move 6,000 tons in a month! For this performance and
for so frequent duplication of it that now it has become commonplace and
matter-of-fact and quite in accordance with expectations, a great share
of the credit is due to thousands of brawny black American stevedores
drawn from the wharves of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Galveston,
Savannah, New Orleans and Newport News. The victory that we are going to
win will not be an all-white victory by any manner of means.

Besides the physical limitations there were certain others, seeming
at first well-nigh insurmountable, which our military and civilian
executives had to meet and contend with and overcome. I mean the
Continental fashion of doing things--a system ponderously slow
and infinitely cumbersome. When a job is done according to native
requirements over here it is thoroughly done, as you may be quite
sure, and it will last for an age; but frequently the preceding age is
required to get it done. Europeans almost without exception are thrifty
and saving beyond any conceivable standards of ours, but they are
prodigals and they are spendthrifts when it comes down to expending what
in America we regard as the most precious commodity of all, and that
commodity is time. Some of our masters of frenzied finance could wreck a
bank in less time than it takes to cash a check in a French one.

Not even the exigencies and the sharp emergencies of wartime conditions
can cure a people, however adaptable and sprightly they may be in most
regards, of a system of thought and a system of habit that go back
as far as they themselves go as a civilised race. Here is a concrete
instance serving to show how at this same port that I have been talking
about the Continental system came into abrupt collision with the
American system and how the American system won out:

The admiral in command of the American naval forces centring at this
place received word that on a given day--to wit: three days from the
time the news was wirelessed to him--a convoy would bring to harbour
transports bearing about 50,000 Yank troopers. It would be the admiral's
task to see that the ships promptly were emptied of their passengers and
that the passengers were expeditiously and safely put upon solid land.
After this had been done it devolved upon the brigadier in command of
the land forces to quarter them in a rest camp until such time as they
would be dispatched up the line toward the Front.

The great movement of our soldiers overseas, which started in April and
which proceeds without noticeable abatement as I write this, was then in
midswing; and the rest camps in the neighbourhood were already crowded
to their most stretchable limits. Nevertheless the general must provide
livable accommodations for approximately 50,000 men somewhere in an
already overcrowded area--and he had less than seventy-two hours in
which to do it. He got busy; the members of his staff likewise got busy.

That same night he called into conference a functionary of the French
Government, in liaison service and detailed to cooperate with the
Americans or with the British in just such situations as the one that
had now risen. The official in question was zealous in the common
cause--as zealous as any man could be--but he could not cure himself of
thinking in the terms of the pattern his nation had followed in times of
peace.

“I must have a big rest camp ready by this time day after to-morrow,”
 said, in effect, the American. “So I went out this afternoon with my
adjutant and some of my other officers and I found it.”

Briefly he described a suitable tract four or five miles from the town.
Then he went on: “How long do you think it would take for your engineers
to furnish me with a fairly complete working survey of that stretch,
including boundaries and the general topography with particular regards
to drainage and elevations?”

The Frenchman thought a minute, making mental calculations.

“From four to six weeks I should say,” he hazarded. “Not sooner than
four weeks surely.”

“I think I can beat that,” said the American.

He turned to his desk phone and called up another office in the same
building in which this conference was taking place--the office of his
chief engineer officer.

“Blank,” he said when he had secured connection, “how long will it take
you to give me the survey of that property we went over this afternoon?
You were to let me know by this evening.”

Back came the answer:

“By working all night, sir, I can hand it to you at noon to-morrow.”

“Are you sure I'll get it then?”

“Absolutely sure, sir.”

“Good,” said the general, and rang off. He faced the Frenchman.

“The survey will be ready at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Now, then, I want
arrangements made so that construction gangs can take possession of that
land in the morning early. They've got a good many thousand tents to set
up and some temporary shacks to build, and I'm going to sick 'em on the
job at daylight.”

“But what you ask is impossible, _mon général,_” expostulated the
Frenchman. “Days will be required--perhaps weeks. We must follow a
regular custom, else there will be legal complications. We must search
out the owners of the various parcels of land included in the area and
make separate terms with each of them for the use of his land by your
people.”

“And meanwhile what will those 50,000 soldiers that are due here inside
of seventy-two hours be doing?”

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. “Very well then,” said the
American. “Now here's what we must do: I want you please to get in
touch, right away, with your Minister of War at Paris and tell him
with my compliments that at daylight in the morning I am going to take
possession of that tract, and I want the sanction of his department for
my authority in taking the step. Afterward we'll settle with the owners
of the land for the ground rent and for the proper damages and for all
the rest of it. But now--with my compliments--tell the minister we've
got to have a little action.”

“But to write a letter and send it to Paris even by special courier, and
to have it read and to get a reply back, would take three days at the
very quickest,” the Frenchman replied.

“I'm not asking you to write any letters. I'm asking you to call up the
minister on the telephone--now, this minute, from this office, and over
this telephone.”

“But, my dear general, it is not customary to call a minister of the
government on the telephone to discuss anything. There is a procedure
for this sort of thing--a tradition, a precedent if you will.”

“We'll have to make a new precedent of our own then. Here's the
telephone. Suppose you get the minister on the wire and leave the
rest to me. I'll do the talking from this end--and I'll take the
responsibility.”

“But--but, general,” faltered the dum-founded Frenchman, “have you
thought of the question of water supply? There are no running streams
near your proposed site; there are no reservoirs. Of what use for me to
do as you wish and run the risk of annoying our Minister of War when you
have no water? And of course without water of what use is your camp?”

“Don't let that worry you,” said the American. “The water supply has all
been arranged for. In fact”--he glanced at his watch--“in fact you might
say that already it is being installed.”

“But--if you will pardon me--what you say is impossible!”

“Not at all; it's very simple. This town is full of vintners' places and
every vintner has--or rather he did have--a lot of those big empty wine
casks on hand. Well, I sent two of my officers out this afternoon and
bought every empty wine cask in this town. They rounded up 600 of them,
and there'll be more coming in from the surrounding country to-morrow
morning. I know there will be, because I've got men out scouting for
them, and at the price I'm willing to pay I'll have every spare wine
cask in this part of France delivered here to me by this time to-morrow.
But 600 was enough to start on. I've had 800 of them set up at handy
places over my camp site--had it done this evening--and at this moment
the other 300 are being loaded upon army trucks--six casks to a truck.
To-morrow morning the trucks will begin hauling water to fill the casks
now on the ground.”

It was as he had said. The minister was called up at night on the
telephone, and from him a very willing approval of the unprecedented
step in contemplation was secured. The water hauling started at dawn,
and so did the tent raising start. The survey was delivered at noon;
half an hour later American labour battalions were digging ditches for
kitchen drains and latrines, and in accordance with the contour of
the chosen spot a makeshift but serviceable sewerage system was being
installed. When the troops marched out to their camp in the late
afternoon of the second day following, their camp was there waiting for
them and their supper was ready.

CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

TAKE any separate project along our line of communication. Pick it out
at random. It makes no difference which particular spot you choose; you
nevertheless are morally sure to find stationed there a man or a group
of men who have learned to laugh at the problem of making bricks without
straw. If put to it they could make monuments out of mud pies. Brought
face to face with conditions and environments that were entirely new to
their own experience, and confronted as they were at the outset by the
task of providing essentials right out of the air--essentials that were
vitally and immediately needed and that could not be forthcoming from
the States for weeks or even months--an executive or an underlying
invariably would find a way out of the difficulty.

There was pressing need once for a receptacle in which rubber cement
could be mixed in small quantities. Neither the local community nor the
government stores yielded such a thing and there was no time to send
clear back New York or Philadelphia for it. The man who was charged
with the responsibility of getting that rubber cement mixed wait on
a scouting tour. Somewhere he unearthed probably the only ice-cream
freezer in rural Fiance outside of the immediate vicinity of Paris, and
he acquired it at the proprietor's valuation and loaded it into his car
and hurried back with it to his shop, and ten minutes after he arrived
the required cement was being stirred to the proper consistency in the
ice-cream freezer.

At the main depot of automobile supplies they needed, right away,
springs with which to repair broken-down light cars. As yet an adequate
supply of spare parts had not been received from the base, nor was there
any likelihood that a supply would be forthcoming at once. The colonel
in charge of the depot sent men ranging through the countryside with
instructions to buy up stuff that would make springs. They brought
him in tons of purchases, and most unlikely looking material it was
too--rusted chunks and strips and spirals of metal taken from the
underpinnings of French market carts and agricultural implements; but
the forces in the machine shops sailed in and converted the lot into
automobile springs in no time at all.

This same colonel already had a plant which, exclusive of the value of
buildings specially built, represents at this time a national investment
of $35,000,000, and the outlay was growing every hour. He used to be the
head of a big metal-working establishment at home. As a specialist
in his line he joined the Army to help out. Now every month he does a
volume of buying that would have made his average year's turnover in
times of peace look trifling in comparison. Just before he sailed to
take over his present job he ordered $6,000,000 worth of motor parts at
one fell swoop, as it were.

Because of the rapidity with which our forces on foreign service
multiplied themselves there was a rush order from General Headquarters
for more buildings and yet more buildings, at one of our warehouse
depots, to provide for storage of perishable foodstuffs in transit from
the rear to the Front. Between seven-thirty o'clock in the morning
and five o'clock in the evening of a given day a gang of steel riggers
accomplished the impossible by rearing and bolting together the steel
frame--posts, girders, plates, rafters and crossbeams--for a building
measuring 96 feet in width, 24 feet in height and 230 feet in length,
the same being merely one of the units of a structure that very soon
thereafter was up in the air and that measured 650 feet crosswise and
650 feet lengthwise, with railroad tracks stretching alongside and in
between its various segments.

“When we laid out our original plans for this project the French said it
would be entirely too large for our uses, no matter how big an army
we brought over,” remarked to me a young ex-civilian, now wearing
a captain's markings on his flannel shirt, who had put through this
undertaking. “Our people thought differently and we went ahead, trying
to figure as we went along on all future contingencies. The result is
that already we are enlarging upon the old specifications as rapidly as
possible. Even so the supplies are piling up on us faster than we can
store them. Look yonder.”

He pointed to a veritable mountain of baled hay--a regular Himalaya of
hay--which covered a corner of the field whereon we stood. It towered
high above the tops of the trees behind it; it stretched dear to the
edge of the woodlands beyond, and it was crowned, as a mountain peak
should be, with white; only in this instance the blanket was of canvas
instead of snow.

“There are 80,000 tons of American baled hay in that pile,” he said,
“and in a month from now if the present rate of growth keeps up it will
be bigger by a third than it is now. It's quite some job--taking care of
this man's army.”

In the midriff of the Intermediate Section is a project on which at this
writing 10,000 men are at work, and on an air-service field adjoining it
3,000 more men are engaged. Exclusive of material for local construction
purposes 500 carloads of strictly military supplies arrive here daily,
and approximately 75 carloads a day move out. Later the ratio of
outgoing equipment will increase, but the incoming amount is not liable
to fall off very much. To house the accumulating mass here and elsewhere
in the same zone, including as it does engineers' stores, ordnance
stores, fresh meats, salt meats, medical stores, harness, guns and
quartermasters' stores, there has been provided or will be provided
4,500,000 square feet of roof-covered space and 10,000,000 square feet
of open storage space.

When I came that way the other day miles of the plain had been filled
pretty thoroughly with buildings and with side tracks and wagon roads;
and, scattered over a tract measuring roughly six miles one way and four
miles the other, between 18,000 and 14,000 men were engaged. In January
of this year, when a man who now accompanied me had visited the same
spot, he said there was one building standing on the area, and that two
side tracks were in use; all the rest was a barren stretch of snowdrifts
and half-frozen mud and desolation. They were just beginning then to dig
the foundations of our main cold-storage plant. It is finished and in
operation to-day. Besides being a model plant it is the third largest
cold-storage plant in the world, and yet it is to be distinguished from
the sixty-odd buildings that surround it only by the fact that it is
taller and longer and has more smokestacks on it than any of the rest.

At the principal depot of the Advance Section, where the chief
regulating officer is stationed, one of the biggest jobs is to sort out
the man provender as it flows in by rail and to fill up each of fifty
or sixty track-side warehouses with balanced rations--so much flour,
so much salt meat, so much of salt, sugar, lard, canned goods, pepper,
vinegar, pickles, and so on, to each building; or else to load
a building with balanced man equipment--comprising shoes, socks,
underwear, shirts, uniforms and the rest of it down to shoe laces and
buttons, the purpose of this arrangement being that when a warehouse is
emptied the man who is in charge, even before checking up on the loading
gangs, already knows almost to a pound or a stitch just how many rations
or how many articles of apparel have gone forward.

In each warehouse the canned tomatoes, the vinegar and the stuff that
contains mild acids are stored at the two ends of the building in
crosswise barricades that extend to the roof. This disposal was an idea
of the officer in control of the arrangement. He explained to us that in
case of fire canned stuff bearing a heavy proportion of fluid would burn
more slowly than the other foodstuffs, so there would be a better chance
of confining the blaze to the building in which it originated and of
preventing its spread to adjoining or adjacent buildings, which might be
of brick or concrete or stone or sheet metal, but which are more apt to
be of frame.

A British colonel on a visit of inspection to, our Service of Supplies
visited this project on the same day that I came. Radiating admiration
and astonishment at every step and at every stop, he accompanied the
young first lieutenant who was in personal charge of the warehousing
scheme on a tour of his domain, which covered miles. When the round had
been completed and the lieutenant had saluted and taken himself away the
Britisher said to the chief regulating officer:

“I have never seen anything so perfectly devised as your plan of
operation and distribution here. I take it that the young man who
escorted me through is one of your great American managing experts.
I imagine he must have been borrowed from one of those marvellous
mail-order houses of yours, of which I have heard so much. One thing
puzzles me though--he must have come here fresh from business pursuits,
and yet he bears himself like a trained soldier.”

The chief regulating officer smiled a little smile.

“That man,” he said, “is an old enlisted man of our little antebellum
Regular Army. He didn't win his commission until he came over here.
Before that he was a noncom on clerical duty in the quartermaster's
department, and before that he was a plain private, and as far as I know
he never worked a day for any concern except our own Government since he
reached the enlisting age.”

In addition to doing what I should say at an offhand guess was the work
of ten reasonably active men, the colonel who supervises our Advance
Section has found time since he took over his present employment to
organise a brass band and a glee dub among his personnel, to map out and
stage-manage special entertainments for the men, to entertain visitors
who come officially and unofficially, to keep several thousand
individuals busy in their working hours and happy in their leisure
hours, and at frequent intervals to write for the benefit of his command
special bulletins touching on the finer sides of the soldier's duties
and the soldier's discipline. He gave me a copy of one of his more
recent pronouncements. He called it a memorandum; I called it a classic.
It ran as follows:

“1. The salute, in addition to being a soldier's method of greeting,
is the gauge by which he shows to the world his proficiency in the
profession, his morale and the condition of his discipline.

“2. For me the dial of a soldier's salute has three marks, and I read
his salute more accurately than he himself could tell me.

“3. The three gradations are:

(a) I am a soldier; I know my trade or will know it very soon, and I
will be a success as a soldier or a civilian, wherever I may be put.

(b) I do not know what I am and do not care, I only do what I am forced
to do, and will never be much of a success at anything.

(c) I am a failure and am down and out, sick, homesick and disgruntled.
I cannot stand the gaff.

“4. As Americans try to conceal your feelings from our Allies.

“Remember you are just as much fighters here as you would be carrying a
pail of food to the fighting line or actually firing a gun.

“Every extra exertion is an addition to the firing line direct.

“Every bit of shirking is robbing the firing line.”

“Buck Up!”

For qualities of human interest no joints in the snake's spine, no
twists in his manifold convolutions measure up, I think, to the salvage
depots. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, an army in the field
threw away what it did not use or what through breakage or stress became
unserviceable. That day is gone. In this war the wastage is practically
negligible. Our people have learned this lesson from the nations that
went into the war before we entered it, but in all modesty I believe,
from what I have seen, that we have added some first-rate improvements
to the plan in the few months that have been vouchsafed us for
experiments and demonstrations. Moreover, to the success of our plans
in this regard there have been difficulties that did not confront our
Allies to the same extent. For instance our biggest motor-repair depot
is housed in what formerly had been a French infantry barracks--a series
of buildings that had never been devised for the purposes to which they
are now put, and that at first offered many serious problems, mechanical
and physical.

In tall brick buildings, under sheds and under tents and out in the open
upon the old parade ground a great chain of machine shops, carpenter
shops, paint shops, upholstery shops and leather-working shops has
been coordinated and is cooperating to attain the maximum of possible
production with the minimum of lost energy and lost effort. The
scientist who reconstructs a prehistoric monster from a fossilised femur
finds here his industrial prototype in the smart American mechanics
who build up an ambulance or a motor truck from a fire-blackened,
shell-riddled car frame, minus top, minus wheels, minus engine parts.
What comes out of one total wreck goes into another that is not quite so
totally so. And when a tool is lacking for some intricate job the Yank
turns in and makes it himself out of a bit of scrap; and neither he nor
his fellows think he has done anything wonderful either. It's just part
of the day's work.

The salvage depot for human equipment and for lighter field equipment
is established at this writing in what was, not so very long ago, a shop
where one of the French railroad lines painted its cars. It began active
operations last January with six civilian employees under an officer
who four weeks before he landed in France was a business man in
Philadelphia. In June it had on its pay rolls nearly 4,000 workers,
mainly women and many of them refugees.

When all the floor space available--about 200,000 square feet of it--has
been taken over the plant will have a personnel of about 5,000 hands,
and it will be possible to do the reclamation work in clothing, shoes,
rubber boots and slickers, harness and leather, canvas and webbing,
field ranges, mess equipments, stoves, helmets, trenching tools, side
arms, rifle slings, picks, shovels and metal gear generally for about
400,000 fighting men, with an estimated saving to Uncle Sam--exclusive
of the vast sum saved in tonnage and shipping charges--of about
$1,000,000 a month.

At this time 10,000 garments and articles of personal attire are passing
through this plant every twenty-four hours, and coming out cleaned,
mended, remade or converted to other purposes. A man could spend a week
here, I feel certain, and not count his sight-seeing time as wasted.
Among the men workers he would find invalided and crippled soldiers
of at least six nations--America, Belgium, France, Greece, Serbia
and Italy. Among the women workers, who average in pay seven francs a
day--big wages for rural France--he would find many women of refinement
and education hailing from evacuated districts in northern France and
Belgium, whose faces bespeak the terrors and torments through which
they have passed in the attempted implanting of the seeds of Kultur
upon their homelands. Now they sit all day, driving sewing machines or
managing knitting looms alongside their chattering, gossiping sisters of
the peasant class.

And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close
would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy
of war's flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German
bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into
the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it
would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great
brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. A talking machine in fair
order, the half of a tombstone and the full-dress equipment of a captain
of Prussian Hussars were among the relics that turned up at the salvage
depot in one week.

There is no dump heap behind the converted paint bam, for the very good
reason that practically there is nothing to dump. Everything is saved.
The salvaged junk comes in by the carload lot from the Front--filthy,
crumpled, broken, blood-crusted, verminous, tattered, smelly and
smashed. Sorters seize upon it and separate it and classify it according
to kind and state of disrepair. Men and women bear it in armloads to
sterilisers, where live steam kills the lice and the lice eggs; thence
it goes to the cleaning vats, after which it is sorted again and the
real job of making something out of what seemed to be worse than nothing
at all is undertaken, with experts, mainly Americans, to supervise
each forward step in the big contract of renovation, restoration and
utilisation.

After the body clothing has been made clean and odourless it is assigned
to one of three classes, to wit: (a) Garments needing minor repairs
and still sightly and serviceable, which are put in perfect order and
reissued to front-line troops; (b) garments not so sightly but still
serviceable, which are issued to S O S workers, including stevedores,
labourers, railroad engineers, firemen and forestry workers; (c)
garments that are not sightly but that will repay repairing. These are
dyed green and given to German prisoners of war. Practically no new
material is used for repair. Garments that are past salvation in their
present shape are cut up to furnish patches. Three garments out of four
are reclaimed in one form or another; the fourth one becomes scrap for
patchings. Shoes are washed in an acid disinfectant that cleanses the
leather without injuring its fabric, and then they are dried and greased
before going in to the workers. Shoes that are worth saving are saved to
the last one; those past saving are ripped apart and the uppers are
cut into shoe strings, while the soles furnish ground-up leather for
compositions. Thanks to processes of washing, cleansing and repairing,
a salvage average of approximately ninety per cent, is attained in
slickers and rubber boots.

Last spring the high military authorities decided to shorten the heavy
overcoats worn by our soldiers, so it befalls that the lengths of cloth
cut from the skirts of the overcoats are now being fashioned at the
salvage plants into uppers for hospital slippers, while old campaign
hats furnish the material for the soles. The completed article, very
neat in appearance and very comfortable to wear, is turned out here in
great numbers. Old tires are cooked down to furnish new heels for rubber
boots. Old socks are unravelled for the sake of the wool in them. Tin
receptacles that have held gasoline or oil are melted apart, and from
their sides and tops disks are fashioned which, being coated with
aluminum, become markers for the graves where our dead soldier boys have
been buried. Smaller tins are smelted down into lumps and used for a
dozen purposes. The solder from the cans is not wasted either. Even the
hobnails of worn-down boot soles are saved for future use.

Master of theatrical trick and device that he is, none the less David
Belasco could learn lessons at our camouflaging plant. He probably
would feel quite at home there, too, seeing that the place has a most
distinctive behind-the-scenes atmosphere of its own; it is a sort of
overgrown combination of scenery loft, property room, paint shop and
fancy-dress costumer's establishment, where men who gave up sizable
incomes to serve their country in this new calling work long
hours seeking to improve upon the artifices already developed--and
succeeding--and to create brand-new ones of their own.

As a branch of military modernism camouflaging is even newer than the
trade of scientific salvaging is and offers far larger opportunities for
future exploitation. After all there are just so many things and no more
that may be done with and to a pair of worn-out rubber boots, but in the
other field the only limits are the limits of the designer's individual
ingenuity and his individual skill.

We came, under guidance, to a big open-fronted barracks where hundreds
of French women and French girls made screenage for road protection and
gun emplacements. The materials they worked with were simple enough:
rolls of ordinary chicken wire, strips of burlap sacking dyed in four
colours--bright green, yellowish green, tawny and brown--and wisps of
raffia with which to bind the cloth scraps into the meshes of the wire.
For summer use the bright green is used, for early spring and fall the
lighter green and the tawny; and for winter the brown and the tawny
mingled. For, you see, camouflage has its seasons, too, marching in step
with the swing of the year. Viewed close up the completed article looks
to be exactly what it is--chicken wire festooned thickly with gaudy
rags. But stretch a breadth of it across a dip in the earth and then
fling against it a few boughs cut from trees, and at a distance of
seventy-five yards no man, however keen-eyed, can say just where the
authentic foliage leaves off and the artificial joins on.

For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety
of camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags
alternating, and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is
very apt indeed to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what
he beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of
earth; and he must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that
the seeming pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops.
This deceit has been described often enough, but the sheer art of it
takes on added interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how
marvellously its effects are brought about.

In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile
dotted thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the
outer slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been--loose clods of
earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken
mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was
crowned with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench
behind it, and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless
and ragged, that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling
has been brisk.

Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed
ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads
appeared above the parapet--heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and
beneath the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this
way and that as the heads turned from side to side.

“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us.
“And as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of
men. The three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated
from below. Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the
dummy--the enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by
tracing the direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are
able to locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to
pick out the real heads from the fake ones.”

There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in
our guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood
very much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The
lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.

“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage
expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and
orthodox, doesn't it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench
work, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. Two of those stakes are what they
appear to be--ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal
tubes, inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk
is faked, too. It is all hollow within--a shell of light tough steel
with a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are
broken off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through
a manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is
the bark on it--we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.

“The dump heap isn't on the level either, as you possibly know, since
you may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation
pits up at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the
side facing us it is full of peepholes--seventeen peepholes in all, I
think there are. Let's go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of
them you can detect.”

At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of
the seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin
can, each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each
swirl of the tree stump--masked a craftily hidden opening shielded
with fine netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath
the surface of the earth might study the land in front of him. That
innocent-appearing, made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider;
but even so, the uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it
without once suspecting the truth.

For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all.
Five men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas
which covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated
with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them
look very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow
Man in “The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise
camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a
half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.

This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men
were snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their
background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless
figures melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united
in the opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong
again. We really had picked out only one of the five. The two other
suspected clumps were not men but what they seemed to be--small
protrusions in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco
could have spent a fruitful half hour or so there with us.

Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage
outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by
raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds
approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a
mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come
from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe
feint, but just at present there are military reasons why he should not
know any of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise,
even though he is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the
trick has been pulled.

These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon
here are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the
recent recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the
most compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring
and constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.

There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that
are going always to stick in my brain--the smell of the crisp brown
crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery
where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day,
seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big
proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for
in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles
upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes
towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as
big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept
on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months
old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths
between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of
Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may
always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the
gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except
for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there
would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the
pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive
English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep
lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake
of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war
broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row
of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been
laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a
burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a
maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front,
cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a
headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an
American negro's homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a
former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman,
an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in
America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with
their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old
Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice
plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the
funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who
had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth
now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the
coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses
from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.

And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found
myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great
snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the
thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns,
deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit--the high
salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and
comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of
the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little
old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon
the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a
proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since
this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the
individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the
skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates' wages for
the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly,
enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his
heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns
boom.

CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

BLOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens
the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I
suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in
small, incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect
it is too vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds;
but by piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a
dim groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.

When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and
hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that
especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too
terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the
risk of losing one's belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme
of things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now,
with its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining
spindle of ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless
beauty which forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon
for sheer, degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns
until they had broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to
sprawl upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the
sight of dead soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier
accepts the chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he