First World War Centennial

XIX

AMERICAN BOYS AND FRENCH

AS we slept, all innocent of harm, last night, German planes sailed over our heads and dropped their deadly freight on each side of us. Accustomed to alarums and excursions, we slept on; but this morning we heard of their visit, and went to see the destruction. A number of civilians were killed and wounded in a certain town hard by. Here I saw the first women's tears I have seen in France. We saw the cars de­railed and smashed in the Germans' attempt to blow up the station; but the "gare" itself was uninjured. Near at hand was a hut, which had been shattered completely, and curious soldiers were walking around it and peering in.

Simultaneously with this expedition the morning papers report, there was another over the English coast at Dover. While these things occur with such frequency we cannot claim to be masters in the air. It is perfectly evident, therefore, where America can put in her best licks in preparation. While sending boats and more boats, let some of them be airboats. This war is going to hinge upon supremacy in that element.

I rather suspected that aircraft activity was going forward last night, for it was a beauti­ful moonlight night. I stood talking with a group of Sammies outside the Y. M. hut, after a meeting a thousand strong, when they sud­denly observed and pointed out to me what looked like a new planet in the sky. I soon saw it change in color from white to blue and then to yellow. The men thought it a signal, from the changes in color; but to me it seemed an aircraft of some description, so long it re­mained afloat and moved about; some thought it a star-shell; but no star-shell hangs so long in the sky. Planes come over so often, how­ever, that we thought comparatively little of the matter.

I was soon absorbed in the story of how our boys had trained their guns on one of our own French planes, a short time since, by mistake. The men who did the firing, both with rifles and machine guns, were the men grouped around me, and each contributed his part of the tale. Everybody had been nervous and on the qui vive at that time, for General Pershing was to come that way in a few minutes on a tour of inspection. Indeed, his car had already been sighted coming down that hill over yonder, and the men pointed to the spot. Suddenly a plane came shooting down out of a cloud and hung quite low above them. They could see no allied markings on her, and they had several minutes of great uneasiness and perplexity. It afterwards de­veloped that the French airman was flying upside down. I have myself seen them per­form that stunt many a time. The purpose is to get their guns in such position as to shoot upward. A French officer was present with our soldiers and after a moment's hesita­tion he advised the major in command of our troops to open fire. The major gave the order and the rifles and machine guns did the rest. Almost instantly the aviator righted his machine and they saw the allied emblem in its proper place. I know that the emblems are painted on top as well as underneath; but, for some reason, the men failed to discern the markings.

It was impossible, however, to avoid the damage to the plane. One wing was broken; and the aviator tried to land close at hand but, finding no suitable place, managed with his crippled craft to effect a landing further on. He himself was uninjured. He after­ward signed a written statement, so the men told me, that it was his own fault for acting in a suspicious manner.

When the story was all done, the corporal who had narrated most of it, took me aside to show me photographs, just received, of his "ex-wife" in Cripple Creek. He said she had divorced him because she did not know where he was. It was his own fault. He had no reason to complain. It seems he had had some qualms of conscience, after reaching La Belle France, or some homesick longings, and had written her. Then he insisted upon my reading her reply, which, it appeared had done much for his amour propre. I rather thought, myself, from the tone of the letter, that the wife would be glad to see him "make a man of himself" and come back to her. Here's hoping that he does; and from the close re­lations he seems to have established with the Y. M. leaders, it would not surprise me, if he becomes a new man, provided he lives at all.

That I am not exaggerating the possibilities of danger to our own men over here was amply borne out by the words of an American ambulance driver, who had been in the recent push at Verdun, Hill 304 and Mort Homme. He said: "The Roche will have it in for the first American they can locate. I wouldn't like to be in the first line that goes up." Nor does this young man believe that the Hun is nearly exhausted, or that he has lost his spirit. I have seen some 1,200 of the prisoners lately taken and they are in very fair physical condition, young, but well fed and therefore quick to recover from fatigue. Our artil­lery is undoubtedly superior to the German, but the supremacy of the air hereabouts is open to question. As for the vanished morale of the Germans, the reports are, like the fam­ous ones concerning Mark Twain's premature death, somewhat exaggerated.

For example, this young driver told me of a Roche prisoner whom he himself had brought into the advanced dressing station wounded; how the fellow had been dressed and then wrig­gled away in a stolen French coat; how he had crawled to the French trenches hard by, scram­bled over them, stole a revolver somewhere and shot at an officer and how they caught him, with their machine guns, going over No Man's Land, and hit him again. This time his back was riddled, and after two or three days out in a shell hole he was brought back again; and they had him in the same dressing station once more. The man had been without food for five days straight and part of the time for five days before that, but he recovered. There was morale left in this one fellow, any­how. Do not for a moment believe that the war is over.

One of the most interesting things about the battle fronts is the fashion in which batteries and aircraft guns, great howitzers and even giant naval guns may be concealed. I have had the guns to open almost under my feet on either side of me, and just behind me, when I was convinced they were within fifty or one hundred yards of where I stood, and have been unable to locate them. This has happened as I walked over a battlefield where not a spear of grass, a tree or a bush or stump was left standing, nothing but miles of yellow mud. How guns and batteries could be so placed that one could not see them at such close proximity almost passes comprehension. It is very clever. On one or two occasions I have located them, later on, by the flashes from the muzzles and confirmed the belief that they were close at hand. Guns are, of course, hid­den in every wood, shrub or bush along the front.

After the first time that one of your own shells goes over your head the sensation is not unpleasant. The first time you jump, duck, feel sheepish and altogether miserable. Of the various kinds of music from these overhead messengers I prefer the tone and timbre of the English five-point-nine. It has a fine voice of its own. The French seventy-five emits more of a soprano note. For those who care only for soprano voices—but this is getting to be more metaphorical than the subject will stand.

There is no joy at all in listening to the approach of a hostile shell or air craft bomb. It is altogether devilish, goose-fleshy, jumpy, and makes one feel as one does when a Klaxon sounds suddenly in your ear when crossing a crowded street. You want to jump and then turn around and glare at and "cuss" somebody. Then comes the thump and you breathe again and are woefully ashamed of yourself.

I think I saw some of the finest men in the French army to-day—the Algerians and the Alpin chasseurs. The Algerians were coming back from Verdun, from a long spell of fight­ing, to the rest camp. I could not feel, in looking at them, that they were vastly in need of help, so all alive did they appear. I was surprised, too, at the whiteness of skin of many of them, but the officer with me promptly explained it by the admixture of French blood. The men were in a clay-colored khaki with red fezzes. They were allowed off the train for a little while in the station; then the bugle sounded and before all of them were on again the train moved slowly away on its road back from the front.

The wild-looking fellows came scrambling from all directions, to run and clamber on the train. Some carried their rifles with bayonets still fixed, and as they ran, their faces eager and anxious, I got some notion of how they would look on charge. I should not care to meet them.

The French chasseur is the flower of the French army. These are the boys who, in Napoleon's day, used to wear the shining breastplates, the tall boots and the horsetail plumes. Now they wear the nattiest black or blue broadcloth, with the most daredevil cut, and the most attractive little visorless caps, with big soft crowns, lolling backward over one ear. One of these lads, with a quarter of an inch of mustache on each side of his nose, a raincoat draped carelessly over one shoulder and high russet boots to his knees, with the Croix de guerre and the medaille militaire upon his breast, strode up and down the platform in a fashion to have stolen every feminine heart, if there had only been some feminine hearts about. As it was, he was bound for Paris, where it was easy to see he would cut a considerably wide swath. I wouldn't blame the women for having their heads turned by him; for you may be very sure he is all the hero he looks.

These people are all heroes here. I don't believe there are any but heroes left in the French army. All the rest have been killed off long ago; and no man can go through what these men have gone through without having been somehow, somewhere heroic. Heroism, as has been so often said, is the normal, the common, the every day thing over here.

I met a man this morning who had come over from America to fight for his beloved France. He had been through nearly three years in the trenches. And who do you think he was? The chef in a famous Michigan resort hotel. And whom do you think he met one night in his own regiment in the trenches? The chef of a well-known Chicago hotel, to whom he had been an assistant years before. Even cooks here must be heroic, for often and often they do their cooking under shell fire; but the two here referred to were shouldering rifles and not ladles.

Nevertheless, France is war weary. The eternal question is on every lip, "Monsieur, how long do you think it will last?" The same expression comes from every heart, "O, it is terrible, terrible, la guerre!" Two or three of us are together in my room. The big, angular femme-de-chambre enters in her black dress and little white cap. One of the men, thinking to be French in his manner, pleasantly says: "Mademoiselle est tres jolie dans noir!" "Ah, monsieur," she replies, and I would not venture to try and put her French into writing, "I wear nothing but black now." "And why?" "For my poor brother—killed in the war four months ago. Yes! monsieur, and a wife and five little children. It is ter­rible—la guerre—terrible! When will it end, monsieur?" So it is, on all sides, and all the time. And they look to America to put an end to it all. We are placed under heavy re­sponsibility.