And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 8

In a measure, the Germans returned this feeling. The arrival of the Americans was really cheering to them. The prisoners disliked the French because they had been taught to do so from childhood. They hated the English because that was the hate with which they went into battle.

It sounds incongruous now but, nevertheless, it was a fact then that the German prisoners confined at that first American sea-base really seemed to like the American soldiers. Maybe it was because any change of masters or guards was a relief in the uneventful existence which had been theirs since the day of their capture. Perhaps the feeling was one of distinct kindred, based on a familiarity with Americans and American customs--a familiarity which had been produced by thousands of letters which Germans in America had written to their friends in Germany before the war. On the other hand, it may simply have been by reason of America's official disavowal of any animosity toward the German people.

One day I watched some of those prisoners unloading supplies at one of the docks in St. Nazaire, more or less under the eyes of an American sentry who stood nearby. One group of four Germans were engaged in carrying what appeared to be a large wooden packing case. Casually, and as if by accident, the case was dropped to the ground and cracked.

Instantly one of the prisoners' hands began to furtively investigate the packages revealed by the break. The other prisoners busied themselves as if preparing to lift the box again. The first German pulled a spoon from his bootleg, plunged it into the crevice in the broken box and withdrew it heaped with granulated sugar. With a quick movement he conveyed the stolen sweet to his mouth and that gapping orifice closed quickly on the sugar, while his stoical face immediately a.s.sumed its characteristic downcast look. He didn't dare move his lips or jaws for fear of detection.

Of course these Germans had been receiving but a scant ration of sugar, but their lot had been no worse than that of the French soldiers guarding them previously, who got no sugar either. American soldiers then guarding those prisoners reported only a few of them for confinement for these human thefts.

Surrept.i.tiously, the American guards would sometimes leave cigarettes where the prisoners could get them, and even though the action did violate the rules of discipline, it helped to develop further the human side of the giver and the recipient and at the same time had the result of making the prisoners do more work for their new guards.

It should be specially stated that lenience could not and was not extended to the point of fraternisation. But the relationship that seemed to exist between the German prisoners and American soldiers at that early date revealed undeniably the absence of any mutual hate.

Around one packing case on the dock I saw, one day, a number of German prisoners who were engaged in unpacking bundles from America, and pa.s.sing them down a line of waiting hands that relayed them to a freight car. One of the Germans leaning over the case straightened up with a rumpled newspaper in his hand. He had removed it from a package. A look of indescribable joy came across his face.

"Deutscher, Deutscher," he cried, pointing to the Gothic type. The paper was a copy of the New York _Staats-Zeitung_.

The lot of those prisoners was not an unhappy one. To me it seemed very doubtful whether even a small percentage of them would have accepted liberty if it carried with it the necessity of returning to German trenches.

Those men knew what war was. They had crossed No Man's Land. Now they were far back from the blazing front in a comparatively peaceful country beyond the sound of the guns. If their lot at that time was to be characterised as "war," then in the opinion of those Germans, war was not what Sherman said it was.

Their att.i.tude more resembled that of the unkissed spinster who was taken captive when the invading army captured the town. She flung herself into the arms of the surprised commander of the invaders and smilingly whispered, "War is war."

The German prison camps at St. Nazaire were inspected by General Pershing on the third day of the American landing when he, with his staff, arrived from Paris. The General and his party arrived early in the morning in a pouring rain. The American commander-in-chief then held the rank of a Major General. In the harbour was the flagship of Rear Admiral Gleaves.

There was no delay over the niceties of etiquette when the question arose as to whether the Rear Admiral should call on the Major General or the Major General should call on the Rear Admiral.

The Major General settled the subject with a sentence. He said, "The point is that I want to see him," and with no further ado about it General Pershing and his staff visited the Admiral on his flagship.

After his inspection of our first contingent, General Pershing said:

"This is the happiest day of the busy days which I have spent in France preparing for the arrival of the first contingent. To-day I have seen our troops safe on French soil, landing from transports that were guarded in their pa.s.sage overseas by the resourceful vigilance of our Navy.

"Now, our task as soldiers lies before us. We hope, with the aid of the French leaders and experts who have placed all the results of their experience at our disposal, to make our forces worthy in skill and in determination, to fight side by side in arms with the armies of France."

CHAPTER IV

THROUGH THE SCHOOL OF WAR

Clip the skyline from the Blue Ridge, arch it over with arboreal vistas from the forests of the Oregon, reflect the two in the placid waters of the Wisconsin--and you will have some conception of the perfect Eden of beauty in which the first contingent of the American Expeditionary Forces trained in France.

Beckoning white roads curl through the rolling hills like ribbons of dental cream squeezed out evenly on rich green velour. Chateaux, pearl white centres in settings of emerald green, push their turrets and bastions above the mossy plush of the mountain side. Lazy little streams silver the valleys with their aimless wanderings.

It was a peaceful looking garden of pastoral delight that United States soldiers had picked out for their martial training ground. It was a section whose physical appearance was untouched by the three years of red riot and roar that still rumbled away just a few miles to the north.

The training area was located in the Vosges, in east central France. By train, it was a nine-hour day trip from Paris. It was located about an hour's motor ride behind the front lines, which at that time were close to the north of the cities of Nancy and Toul.

The troops were billeted in a string of small villages that comprised one side of the letter V. French troops and instructing officers occupied the other converging line of the letter. Between the two lines was the area in which our men trained. Where the two lines converged was the town of Gondercourt, the headquarters of Major General Seibert, the Commander of the first American division in France.

The area had long since been stripped of male civilian population that could be utilised for the French ranks. The war had taken the men and the boys, but had left the old people and children to till the fields, tend the cattle, prune the hedges and trim the roads.

With the advent of our troops, the restful scene began to change.

Treeless ridges carpeted with just enough green to veil the rocky formation of the ground began to break out with a superficial rash of the colour of fresh earth. In rows and circles, by angles and zigzags, the training trenches began to take form daily under the pick and shovel exercises of French and Americans working side by side.

Along the white roads, clay-coloured rectangles that moved evenly, like brown caravans, represented the marching units of United States troops.

The columns of bluish-grey that pa.s.sed them with shorter, quicker steps, were companies of those tireless Frenchmen, who after almost three years of the front line real thing, now played at a mimic war of make-believe, with taller and heavier novitiates.

Those French troops were Alpine Cha.s.seurs--the famous Blue Devils. They wore dark blue caps, which resemble tam o'shanters, but are not. They were proud of the distinction which their uniform gave them. They were proud of their great fighting records. One single battalion of them boasted that of the twenty-six officers who led it into the first fight at the opening of the war, only four of them existed.

It was a great advantage for our men to train under such instructors.

Correspondents who had been along the fronts before America's entry into the war, had a great respect for the soldierly capacity of these same fighting Frenchmen; not only these st.u.r.dy young sons of France who wore the uniform, but the older French soldiers--ranging in age from forty to fifty-five years--who had been away to the fronts since the very beginning of the war.

We had seen them many, many times. Miles upon miles of them, in the motor trucks along the roads. Twenty of them rode in each truck. They sat on two side benches facing the centre of the trucks. They were men actually bent forward from the weight of the martial equipment strapped to their bodies. They seemed to carry inordinate loads--knapsacks, blanket roll, spare shoes, haversacks, gas masks, water bottles, ammunition belts, grenade ap.r.o.ns, rifle, bayonet and helmet.

Many of them were very old men. They had thick black eyebrows and wore long black beards. They were tired, weary men. We had seen them in the camions, each man resting his head on the shoulder of the man seated beside him. The dust of the journey turned their black beards grey. On the front seat of the camion a sleepless one handled the wheel, while beside him the relief driver slept on the seat.

Thus they had been seen, mile upon mile of them, thousand upon thousand of them, moving ever up and down those roads that paralleled the six hundred and fifty miles of front from Flanders to the Alps--moving always. Thus they had been seen night and day, winter and summer, for more than three long years, always trying to be at the place where the enemy struck. The world knows and the world is thankful that they always were there.

It was under such veteran instructors as these that our first Americans in France trained, there, in the Vosges, in a garden spot of beauty, in the province that boasts the birthplace of Jeanne d'Arc. On the few leave days, many of our men, with permission, would absent themselves from camp, and make short pilgrimages over the hills to the little town of Domremy to visit the house in which the Maid of Orleans was born.

Our men were eager to learn. I observed them daily at their training tasks. One day when they had progressed as far as the use of the New French automatic rifles, I visited one of the ranges to witness the firing.

Just under the crest of the hill was a row of rifle pits, four feet deep in the slaty white rock. On the opposite hill, across the marshy hollow, at a distance of two hundred yards, was a line of wooden targets, painted white with black circles. Poised at intervals on the forward edge of the pits were a number of automatic rifles of the type used by the French army. An American soldier and a French soldier attended each one, the former in the firing position and the latter instructing.

The rear bank of the pits was lined with French and American officers.

The order, "Commence firing," was given, and white spurts of rock dust began dancing on the opposite hill, while splinters began to fly from some of the wooden targets.

At one end of the firing trench a raw American recruit, who admitted that he had never handled an automatic rifle before, flushed to his hat-brim and gritted his teeth viciously as his shots, registering ten feet above the targets, brought forth laughter and exclamations from the French soldiers nearby. He rested on his gun long enough to ask an interpreter what the Frenchmen were talking about.

"They say," the interpreter replied, "that you belong to the anti-aircraft service."

The recruit tightened his grip on his rifle and lowered his aim with better results. At the end of his first fifty shots he was placing one in three on the target and the others were registering close in.

"Bravo!" came from a group of French officers at the other end of the trench, where another American, older in the service, had signalised his first experiences with the new firearm by landing thirty targets out of thirty-four shots, and four of the targets were bull's-eyes. The French instructors complimented him on the excellence of his marksmanship, considering his acknowledged unfamiliarity with the weapon.

Further along the depression, in another set of opposing trenches and targets, a row of French machine guns manned by young Americans, sprayed lead with ear-splitting abandon, sometimes reaching the rate of five hundred shots a minute. Even with such rapidity, the Americans encountered no difficulties with the new pieces.

French veterans, who for three years had been using those same guns against German targets, hovered over each piece, explaining in half French and half English, and answering in the same mixture questions on ways and means of getting the best results from the weapons.

Here a cha.s.seur of the ranks would stop the firing of one American squad, with a peremptory, "Regardez." He would proceed with pantomime and more or less connected words, carrying the warning that firing in such a manner would result in jamming the guns, a condition which would be fatal in case the targets in the other trenches were charging upon the guns.

Then he showed the correct procedure, and the Yanks, watchfully alert to his every move, changed their method and signified their pleasure with the expression of "Trays beans," and "Mercy's."

"Do you think it would have resulted in a quicker and possibly more understanding training if these Americans were instructed by British veterans instead of French?" I asked an American Staff Officer, who was observing the demonstration.

"I may have thought so at first," the officer replied, "but not now. The explanations which our men in the ranks are receiving from the French soldiers in the ranks are more than word instructions. They are object lessons in which gesticulation and pantomime are used to act out the movement or subject under discussion.