Over the Seas for Uncle Sam Part 10

On the fourth day the signal was pa.s.sed along the trench for a charge.

One hundred and fifty men were picked--every third man. I was lucky and was one of the number. Every man was keen to be first over the top.

About nine of the Indians came along. None of my cousins made it, but the little j.a.p who had taught me bayoneting was beside me, grinning and fondling his rifle as a mother does her baby.

Our leaders sprang up on the sand bags and hurled us the order. How few of them came back from that charge on which they set out so fearlessly!

We climbed up. We heard our officers shouting to us and our comrades wishing us the best of luck, to give the Huns h.e.l.l! We sprang forward and the Germans opened a rain of bullets from their machine guns full upon us and the men who followed. They swept our lines. Men reeled and fell to the left and right of me--just crumpled up like those little toys whose springs have snapped. Still we went on. We made the trench and I speared my first Boche. Got him, too! Brought back his iron cross as a trophy. The Germans were scampering to the next trench like rats caught in a trap. They sure do hate hand-to-hand fighting!

We held that trench six days. It was jumpy work. The Germans were driven back, but there was no telling when they would start with the hand-grenades. They didn't do that, but they did something worse--gas.

It was pretty new to us then. We were fitted out with a sort of rubber mask that wasn't much good. We saw a fellow drop a way down the line.

Then one of the brownish trench rats, a friendly little chap, who ate the sc.r.a.ps I sh.e.l.led out to him, turned up his toes. We clapped on our masks, but the wind was with Fritz and the gas swept through our trench on the breeze.

It lasted about an hour and a half. I'd hate the job of being the first man ordered to take off his mask and test the air for the rest, but some one has to, and it often means lights out for him.

I had been slightly wounded--a sabre cut on my leg, but I managed to dress it myself. It was ten times better to be up, however rocky you felt, than lying around those damp trenches. I wondered where my cousins were. I worried about them. Somehow I wasn't afraid for myself, but I just wished it would soon be over and I could get home. You think about home an awful lot out there.

We were sent to some swamps next. There were cement trenches--German make--and they were considerably drier. We were pretty comfortable there except for an occasional sh.e.l.l blowing things to bits. I used to wonder how there was enough lead in the world to make all the sh.e.l.ls the armies used. We always had plenty of ammunition. The Russians were the ones who got the raw deal. We pa.s.sed a lot of them on our way out front.

A regiment of them was holding a square. They were dull-eyed boys--hopeless looking. Do you blame them? One day they would be sent out with ammunition to burn. The next they wouldn't even be given a rifle. How did they protect themselves? Oh, rocks and stones, I suppose.

But they were wiped out when they tried to charge empty-handed, that's sure.

The Germans raided us with hand grenades one night. We heard them coming and we fought like fiends, but they outnumbered us five to one. I went down with a shot in my side. The next thing I remembered was being aboard a transport bound for home. Nothing ever sounded so good to me as that word! I found my three cousins were aboard. One of them had lost his two legs, another his leg and his arm, and the youngest had his right arm blown off.

It didn't take me long to find out how lucky I was. All I needed to do was to look around at the other eighteen hundred wounded. They landed us at Halifax, on our way to Toronto. I was laid up for quite a while, and the funny thing was now that I was home again I kept planning ways to get back as soon as I could just to show those Huns who's who.

I used to lie in my clean white bed, looking out a long window onto the garden. It was calm and quiet. But I didn't seem to see it--what I saw were those blood-soaked trenches, with your pals gasping out their lives alongside of you and your leaders, falling even as they urged you to charge! It took me a while to get well and when I did I went back to the States. I had an idea. I would join the Navy. It would be a new way of meeting Fritz. I liked the thought of killing him wholesale on the sea.

I enlisted as an apprenticed seaman,--that was last March. I am in fine trim, except for a scar on my leg and a bullet hole in my side. I've finished training now and I'm ready to be shipped across. Gee, but I hope we'll get a fat submarine full of German officers--and that we'll drown them like the rats they are!

SECOND-CLa.s.s GUNNER'S MATE FOWLER SPEAKS:

[Ill.u.s.tration: A marine can do anything--even ride a horse!]

THE WANDERl.u.s.t AND THE WAR

I'VE been torpedoed three times--three ships gone down under me, and I'm still here. Didn't mind it much--I can swim; besides, I'm pretty used to the sea--first shipped when I was thirteen. My father and mother had sent me to a manual training school. I didn't like it. I was always playing hookey and finally ran away.

I didn't care where I went just so long as it was on a ship. I knew it was the sea I wanted. Before I decided, I used to hang around the docks.

I liked the smell of the water and the big talk of the old salts who had been around the world a dozen times. They didn't stay cooped up in any four walls studying geography--they went out and lived it.

I knew enough about sailing to ship as boatswain. I was big for my age, so they took me on. It was a sand sucker going down to the mouth of the Mississippi.

The skipper took a kind of a shine to me. He saw I wanted to study navigation so he lent me books and let me go into the chart house and work. Arithmetic was hard for me, and spelling, too, but I'd copy out words I didn't know and take them to him. I guess he saw I was in earnest.

As a result I got my rate as able-bodied seaman when I was fifteen. I was in New Orleans then, and I saw a chance to ship on one of the Standard Oil boats bound for Tampico.

I was crazy to go to Mexico. There was a "Mex" on the old ship and he was always talking about the sunshine and free fruit in his country.

When I told him where I was bound for he wanted to come, too, but my new skipper couldn't see him. "Mex" drank too much fire water for the good of one man.

We didn't stay long in Mexico. I got a chance to go through Vera Cruz, and that was about all, before starting for home. I'd saved quite a lot of money and all the way back to New York I kept asking myself would I or wouldn't I drop in on my father and mother to let them know I was alive. I couldn't decide. When I got to New York the first thing I did was to buy myself a great outfit; then I started to the street where I knew the family lived. On the way I met a pal who was shipping on a small boat leaving for Canada. He wanted me to go along. There didn't seem to be any good reason to refuse, seeing as I had all my papers. I'd never been to Canada.

I told him about wanting to call on my parents, but he said there'd be time enough when I got back to port. I went along with him and up to Nova Scotia.

All the time I told myself it was going to be my last trip up the coast.

I wanted to see Europe next. When we came back to New York I went up to Union Hall and told them I'd like to ship across. I got my wish. They sent me on a Standard Oil steamer bound for Rouen. At last I was going to France!

I liked that country from the start. The first sight I had of it was white houses and green fields and church steeples. I was so busy looking at the scenery I couldn't do a stroke of work. I got liberty to go up to Paris, and I saw all of it for two francs. I just hopped into one of those little cabs and said to the driver "Giddap," and he rode me around. I didn't miss a thing.

We went back to Norfolk, where we were quarantined for seven days because a yellow cook we had broke out with the same color fever. That gave me time to think, and I made up my mind that I'd pay off and go up and see my folks. I was sixteen then, hard as nails and pretty prosperous.

Once ash.o.r.e I bought myself everything from patent leather shoes to a derby hat. I wanted them to see I'd made good.

I walked in on them at dinner time. My father didn't know me, but my mother did. "It's George!" she hollered, then stared at me. But father didn't. He wanted to lick me for staying away all those years. Mother wouldn't let him, though. She wanted to hear all about where I'd been. I was glad I could put some money in the bank for her. I stayed home about two weeks and then got so restless I knew I'd better leave before they threw me out.

Well, I let myself in for an adventure that time for I went to Halifax, and from there shipped on an oil collier bound for Mexico. We struck a hurricane and were washed ash.o.r.e. That was my first shipwreck. We had to eat stores out of the ship's supplies, which were pretty low at the time. I didn't like the looks of things and I decided to foot it into Tampico, which we figured wasn't more than forty-two miles south of us.

Eight of my mates and I figured that by traveling toward the sun, we'd make it in a couple of days. We packed our grub and put on the good heavy Dutch sea boots we wore in heavy weather, and set out through the woods.

Hot! Say, your head blistered under your cap. We struck a swamp, but we were afraid to go back--it was just as bad as going forward--so we started through, but we miscalculated, for we spent a whole day and night in there before we got our bearings.

We climbed the branches of the trees at nights and slept as best we could in them. But two of the fellows caught the jungle fever, and one of them died before we could get him out. We buried him there and marked the place.

Another man was pretty sick, and I remember reading somewhere that sa.s.safras root was good for fever. We found some growing there, and we managed to build a fire--but we didn't have matches to light it, so we struck flints until we got a blaze. We cooked the root and gave him the juice. It saved him.

On the outskirts of the swamp we saw a little Mexican house. It was the greatest sight I ever want to see. The woman was cooking some kind of meat over her fire. We didn't stop to inquire what it was so long as it was _f_-_o_-_o_-_d_. That was enough for us. She was glad to give us all she had, because American money goes big down there. Several of the men stayed to look after our sick mate, but I hot-footed it into Tampico to find the consul and try to get back to the States. I found him but he couldn't do anything for us.

I didn't care much. It was a pleasant country, so I decided to stay. I was there six months. At last I grew tired of everlasting hot weather so I asked a skipper on an English ship if he'd take me back to the States.

I told him I didn't care about the pay, just so long as I got home. That impressed him and he signed me up for a quarter a month. He couldn't have paid me less, but what difference did it make to me? Wasn't I getting out of that all-fired hot country?

We docked at Baltimore. I was pretty seedy, so I took the first job I could get, which was night watchman on the docks. Then I wired my mother that I was stranded without clothes or money. She sent it double quick.

I knew she would.

Once I was outfitted I applied for a third mate's job. I had already made my license, although I was only seventeen. The hard thing was getting any skipper to believe I knew all I claimed I did. I found one at last. I told him to fire any questions at me he could think of. He sure did. He asked me things a chief has to know and I came through. He took me on as third and I paid off at New York.

When I reached there I went to the seamen's Bethal, where I got clothes and the chance to ship on an English vessel bound for the other side.

That was in 1915. The German subs had started their little game of hide-and-seek, but we didn't expect any trouble. However Fritz was waiting for us. It was about six o'clock in the evening, dark, with a full moon. I was on deck watching the moonlight on the water. It's a sight I never get tired of. All was quiet except the throbbing of our own engines, when suddenly we felt the blow that ripped her side open. A torpedo had registered a hit.

We couldn't see the sub; she had gotten in the moon's rays, and it was impossible to make her out. We didn't try. The order, "abandon ship,"

had sounded, but I didn't make a lifeboat; instead I dived off the side of the ship and swam around in the water for a few minutes before somebody heard me yelling and yanked me in.

Next morning an English schooner picked us up and we went ash.o.r.e. Say, but I was mad through to think of a blinking submarine sinking a neutral. I never was neutral from that minute, and when we got into the war I went in the navy. I knew that would be the one place I'd have a chance to take a shot at the Kaiser's pets.

We carried a big cargo over; our cargo line was 'way down. We had a lot of green hands aboard, "hay-shakers," I call them. Some of the boys were pretty seasick. I bet they wished they had never started across.