The A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces Part 1

The A.E.F.

by Heywood Broun.

CHAPTER I

THE BIG POND

"Voila un sousmarin," said a sailor, as he stuck his head through the doorway of the smoking room. The man with aces and eights dropped, but the player across the table had three sevens, and he waited for a translation. It came from the little gun on the afterdeck. The gun said "Bang!" and in a few seconds it repeated "Bang!" I heard the second shot from my stateroom, but before I had adjusted my lifebelt the gun fired at the submarine once more.

A cheer followed this shot. No Yale eleven, or even Harvard for that matter, ever heard such a cheer. It was as if the shout for the first touchdown and for the last one and for all the field goals and long gains had been thrown into one. There was something in the cheer, too, of a long drawn "ho-old 'em."

I looked out the porthole and asked an ambulance man: "Did we get her then?"

"No, but we almost did," he answered. "There she is," he added. "That's the periscope."

Following the direction of his finger I found a stray beanpole thrust somewhat carelessly into the ocean. It came out of a wave top with a rakish tilt. Probably ours was the angle, for the steamer was cutting the ocean into jigsaw sections as we careened away for dear life, now with a zig and then with a zag, seeking safety in drunken flight. When I reached the deck, steamer and pa.s.sengers seemed to be doing as well as could be expected, and even better.

The periscope was falling astern, and the three hundred pa.s.sengers, mostly ambulance drivers and Red Cross nurses, were lined along the rail, rooting. Some of the girls stood on top of the rail and others climbed up to the lifeboats, which were as good as a row of boxes. It was distinctly a home team crowd. n.o.body cheered for the submarine. The only pa.s.senger who showed fright was a chap who rushed up and down the deck loudly shouting: "Don't get excited."

"Give 'em h.e.l.l," said a home town fan and shook his fist in the direction of the submarine. The gunner fired his fourth shot and this time he was far short in his calculation.

"It's a question of whether we get her first or she gets us, isn't it?"

asked an old lady in about the tone she would have used in asking a popular lecturer whether or not he thought Hamlet was really mad. Such neutrality was beyond me. I couldn't help expressing a fervent hope that the contest would be won by our steamer. It was the bulliest sort of a game, and a pleasant afternoon, too, but one pa.s.senger was no more than mildly interested. W. K. Vanderbilt did not put on a life preserver nor did he leave his deck chair. He sat up just a bit and watched the whole affair tolerantly. After all the submarine captain was a stranger to him.

Our fifth and final shot was the best. It hit the periscope or thereabouts. The sh.e.l.l did not rebound and there was a patch of oil on the surface of the water. The beanpole disappeared. The captain left the bridge and went to the smoking room. He called for cognac.

"Il est mort," said he, with a sweep of his right hand.

"He says we sunk her," explained the man who spoke French.

The captain said the submarine had fired one torpedo and had missed the steamer by about ninety feet. The U-boat captain must have taken his eye off the boat, or sliced or committed some technical blunder or other, for he missed an easy shot. Even German efficiency cannot eradicate the blessed amateur. May his thumbs never grow less!

We looked at the chart and found that our ship was more than seven hundred miles from the nearest land. It seemed a lonely ocean.

One man came through the crisis with complete triumph. As soon as the submarine was sighted, the smoking room steward locked the cigar chest and the wine closet. Not until then did he go below for his lifebelt.

Reviewing my own emotions, I found that I had not been frightened quite as badly as I expected. The submarine didn't begin to scare me as much as the first act of "The Thirteenth Chair," but still I could hardly lay claim to calm, for I had not spoken one of the appropriate speeches which came to my mind after the attack. The only thing to which I could point with pride was the fact that before putting on my lifebelt I paused to open a box of candy, and went on deck to face destruction, or what not, with a caramel between my teeth. But before the hour was up I was sunk indeed.

It was submarine this and sousmarin that in the smoking room. The U-boats lurked in every corner. One man had seen two and at the next table was a chap who had seen three. There was the fellow who had sighted the periscope first of all, the man who had seen the wake of the torpedo, and the littlest ambulance driver who had sighted the submarine through the bathroom window while immersed in the tub. He was the man who had started for the deck with nothing more about him than a lifebelt and had been turned back.

"I wonder," said a pa.s.senger, "whether those submarines have wireless?

Do you suppose now that boat could send messages on ahead and ask other U-boats to look after us?" And just then the gun on the forward deck went "Bang."

It was the meanest and most inappropriate sound I ever heard. It was an anti-climax of the most vicious sort. It was bad form, bad art, bad everything. I felt a little sick, and one of the contributing emotions was a sort of fearfully poignant boredom. I tried to remember just what the law of averages was and to compute as rapidly as possible the chances of the vessel to complete two more days of travel if attacked by a submarine every hour.

"The ocean is full of the d.a.m.n things," said the man at the next table petulantly.

This time the thing was a black object not more than fifty yards away.

The captain signaled the gunner not to fire again and he let it be known that this was nothing but a barrel. Later it was rumored that it was a mine, but then there were all sorts of rumors during those last two days when we ran along with lifeboats swung out. There was much talk of a convoy, but none appeared.

Many pa.s.sengers slept on deck and some went to meals with their lifebelts on. Everybody jumped when a plate was dropped and there was always the possibility of starting a panic by slamming a door. And so we cheered when the steamer came to the mouth of the river which leads to Bordeaux. We cheered for France from friendship. We cheered from surprise and joy when the American flag went up to the top of a high mast and we cheered a little from sheer relief because we had left the sea and the U-boats behind us.

They had been with us not a little from the beginning. Even on the first day out from New York the ship ran with all lights out and portholes shielded. Later pa.s.sengers were forbidden to smoke on deck at night and once there was a lifeboat drill of a sort, but the boats were not swung out in the davits until after we met the submarine.

Early in the voyage an old lady complained to the purser because a young man in the music room insisted on playing the Dead March from "Saul."

There was more cheerful music. The ambulance drivers saw to that. We had an Amherst unit and one from Leland Stanford and the boys were nineteen or thereabouts. It is well enough to say that all the romance has gone out of modern war, but you can't convince a nineteen-year-older of that when he has his first khaki on his back and his first anti-typhoid inoculation in his arm. They boasted of these billion germs and they swaggered and played banjos and sang songs. Mostly they sang at night on the pitch black upper deck. The littlest ambulance driver had a nice tenor voice and on still nights he did not care what submarine commander knew that he "learned about women from her." He and his companions rocked the stars with "She knifed me one night." Daytimes they studied French from the ground up. It was the second day out that I heard a voice from just outside my porthole inquire "E-S-T--what's that and how do you say it?" Later on the littlest ambulance driver had made marked progress and was explaining "Mon oncle a une bonne fille, mais mon pere est riche."

Romance was not hard to find on the vessel. The slow waiter who limped had been wounded at the Marne, and the little fat stewardess had spent twenty-two days aboard the German raider _Eitel Friedrich_. There were French soldiers in the steerage and one of them had the Croix de Guerre with four palms. He had been wounded three times.

But when the ship came up the river the littlest ambulance driver--the one who knew "est" and women--summed things up and decided that he was glad to be an American. He looked around the deck at the Red Cross nurses and others who had stood along the rail and cheered in the submarine fight, and he said:

"I never would have thought it of 'em. It's kinda nice to know American women have got so much nerve."

The littlest ambulance driver drew himself up to his full five feet four and brushed his new uniform once again.

"Yes, sir," he said, "we men have certainly got to hand it to the girls on this boat." And as he went down the gangplank he was humming: "And I learned about women from her."

CHAPTER II

THE A. E. F.

The dawn was gray and so was the ship, but the eye picked her out of the mist because of two broad yellow stripes which ran the whole length of the upper decks. As the ship warped into the pier the stripes of yellow became so many layers of men in khaki, each motionless and each gazing toward the land.

"Say," cried a voice across the diminishing strip of water, "what place is this anyhow?" The reply came back from newspapermen whose only companions on the pier were two French soldiers and a little group of German prisoners.

"Well," said the voice from the ship, "this ought to be better than the Texas border."

The American regulars had come to France.

The two French soldiers looked at the men on the transport and cheered, flinging their caps in the air. The Germans just looked. They were engaged in moving rails and after lifting one they would pause and gaze into s.p.a.ce for many minutes until the guards told them to get to work again. But now the guards were so interested that the Germans prolonged the rest interval and stared at the ship. News that ships were in was carried through the town and people came running to the pier. There were women and children and old men and a few soldiers.

n.o.body had known the Americans were coming. Even the mayor was surprised and had to run home to get his red sash and his high hat. Children on the way to school did not go further than the quay, for back of the ship, creeping into the slip, were other ships with troops and torpedo boat destroyers and a cruiser.

Just before the gangplank was lowered the band on the first transport played "The Star Spangled Banner." The men on the ship stood at attention. The crowds on sh.o.r.e only watched. They did not know our national anthem yet. Next the band played "The Ma.r.s.eillaise," and the hats of the crowd came off. As the last note died away one of the Americans relaxed from attention and leaned over the rail toward a small group of newspapermen from America.

"Do they allow enlisted men to drink in the saloons in this town?" he asked.

Somebody else wanted to know, "Is there any place in town where a fellow can get a piece of pie?" A sailor was anxious to rent a bicycle or a horse and "ride somewhere." Later the universal question became, "Don't any of these people speak American?"

The men were hustled off the ship and marched into the long street which runs parallel with the docks. They pa.s.sed within a few feet of the Germans. There was less than the length of a bayonet between them but the doughboys did credit to their brief training. They kept their eyes straight ahead.

"How do they look?" one of the newspapermen asked a German sergeant in the group of prisoners.