The A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces Part 14

CHAPTER XIX

THE AMERICAN ARMY MARCHES TO THE TRENCHES

THE chief press officer told us that we could spend the first night in the trenches with the American army. There were eight correspondents and we went jingling up to the front with gas masks and steel helmets hung about our necks and canned provisions in our pockets. It was dusk when we left ----. Bye-and-bye we could hear the guns plainly and the villages through which we traveled all showed their share of sh.e.l.ling. The front was still a few miles ahead of us, but we left the cars in the square of a large village and started to walk the rest of the way. We got no further than just beyond the town. An American officer stood at the foot of an old sign post which gave the distance to Metz, but not the difficulties. He asked us our destination and when we told him that we were going to spend the first night in the trenches with the American army he wouldn't hear of it.

"There'll be trouble enough up there," he said, "without newspapermen."

He was a nervous man, this major. Every now and then he would look at his watch. When he looked for the fourth time within two minutes he felt that we deserved an explanation.

"I'm a little nervous," he said, "because the Boches are so quiet tonight. I've been up here looking around for almost a week and every night the Germans have done some sh.e.l.ling." He looked at his watch again. "The first company of my battalion must be going in now." He stood and listened for six or seven seconds but there wasn't a sound. "I wonder what those Germans are up to?" he continued. "I don't like it. I wish they'd shoot a little. This business now doesn't seem natural."

We turned back toward the town and left the major at his post still listening for some sound from up there. Soon we heard a noise, but it came from the opposite direction. Soldiers were coming. There was a bend in the road where it straightened out in the last two miles to the trenches. It was so dark that we could not see the men until they were almost up to us. The Americans were marching to the front. The French had instructed them and the British and now they were ready to learn just what the Germans could teach them.

The night was as thick as the mud. The darkness seemed to close behind each line of men as they went by. Even the usual marching rhythm was missing. The mud took care of that. The doughboys would have sung if they could. Sh.e.l.ls wouldn't have been much worse than the silence. One soldier did begin in a low voice, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching." An officer called, "Cut out that noise." There was no tramp, tramp, tramp on that road. Feet came down squish, squish, squish. There was also the sound of the wind. That wasn't very cheerful, either, for it was rising and beginning to moan a little. It seemed to get hold of the darkness and pile it up in drifts against the camouflage screens which lined the road.

At the spot where the road turned there was a cafe and across the road a military moving picture theater. The door of the cafe was open and a big patch of light fell across the road. The doughboys had to go through the patch of light and it was almost impossible not to turn a bit and look through the door. There was red wine and white to be had for the asking there, and persuasion would bring an omelette. The waitress was named Marie, but they called her Madelon. She was eighteen and had black hair with red ribbons. She could talk a little English, too, but n.o.body came to the door of the cafe to see the soldiers go by. There had been a good many who pa.s.sed the door of that cafe in three years.

The pictures could not be seen from the road, but we could hear the hum of the machine which made them move. Presently, we went to the door and looked. The theater was packed with French soldiers who were back from the front to rest. American troops were going into the trenches for the first time. Our little group of civilians had come thousands of miles to see this thing, but the poilus did not stop to watch marching men. They paid their 10 centimes and went into the picture show. They had an American Western film that night, and French soldiers who only the day before had been face to face with Germans, sh.e.l.led and ga.s.sed and hara.s.sed from aeroplanes, thrilled as Indians chased cowboys across a canvas screen. It grew more exciting presently, for the United States cavalry came riding up across the screen and at the head of the cavalcade rode Lieutenant Wallace Kirke. The villain had spread the story that he wasn't game, but there was nothing to that. The poilus realized that before the film was done and so did the Indians.

Meanwhile the doughboys were marching by as silently as the soldiers on the screen, for this wasn't a movie-house where they synchronized bugle calls and rifle fire to the progress of the film. At one point in the story there was some gun thunder, but it came at a time when the orchestra should have been playing "Hearts and Flowers" for the love scene in the garden. Of course, these were German guns, and they were fired with the usual German disregard for art.

Probably the men who were marching to the trenches would have enjoyed the scene of the home-coming of the cavalry, when Lieutenant Wallace Kirke confounded the villain, who actually held a commission as major in the United States army. However, the doughboys might have spotted him for a villain from the beginning, on account of his wretched saluting.

The director should have spoken to him about that.

The marching men looked at the theater as they pa.s.sed by, but only one soldier spoke. He said: "I certainly would like to know for sure whether I'll ever get to go to the movies again."

They went a couple of hundred yards more without a word, and then a soldier who couldn't stand the silence any longer shouted, "Whoopee!

Whoopee!" It was too dark to conduct an investigation and too close to the line to administer any rebuke loud enough to be effective, and so the nearest officer just glared in the general direction of the offender. A little bit further on the soldiers found that the road was pock-marked here and there with sh.e.l.l holes. They began to realize the importance of silence then, for they knew that where a sh.e.l.l had gone once it could go again. It was necessary to walk carefully, for the road was covered with casual water in every hollow, and there was no seeing a hole until you stepped in it. They managed, however, to avoid the deeper holes and to jump most of the pools.

That is, the infantry did. Late that night a teamster reported that he had driven his four mules into a sh.e.l.l hole and broken the rear axle of his wagon.

"Why didn't you send a man out ahead to look out for sh.e.l.l holes?" asked the officer.

"I did," said the soldier. "He fell in first."

Presently the marching men came to the beginning of the trench system, and they were glad to get a wall on either side of them. There was no scramble, however, to be the first man in, and even the major of the battalion has forgotten the name of the first soldier to set foot in the French trenches. Some twenty or thirty men claim the honor, but it will be difficult to settle the matter with historical accuracy. A Middle Western farm boy, an Irishman with red hair or a German-American would seem to fit the circ.u.mstances best, but it's all a matter of choice. As the Americans came in the French marched out.

A trench during a relief is no good place for a demonstration, but some of the poilus paused to shake hands with the Americans. There were rumors that one or two doughboys had been kissed, but I was unable to substantiate these reports. Probably they are not true, for it would not be the sort of thing a company would forget.

Although the trenches for the most part were far from the German lines, there was noise enough to attract attention over the way. The Germans did not seem to know what was going on, but they wanted to know, and they sent up a number of star sh.e.l.ls. These are the sh.e.l.ls which explode to release a bright light suspended from a little silk parachute. These parachutes hung in the air for several minutes and brightly illumined No Man's Land. It was impossible to keep the Americans entirely quiet then.

Some said "Oh!" and others exclaimed "Ah!" after the manner of crowds at a fire-works show.

Persiflage of this kind helped to make the men feel at home. Indeed, the trenches did not seem altogether unfamiliar, after all their days and nights in the practice trenches back in camp. The men were a little nervous, though, and took it out in smoking one cigarette after another.

They shielded the light under their trench helmets. After an hour or so a green rocket went up and all the soldiers in the American trenches put on their gas masks. They had been drilled for weeks in getting them on fast and a green rocket was the signal agreed upon as the warning for an attack. Presently the word came from the trenches that the masks were not necessary. There had been no attack. The rocket came from the German trenches. It was quiet then all along the short trench line with the exception of an occasional rifle shot. The wind was making a good deal of noise out in the mess of weeds just beyond the wire and it sounded like Germans to some of the boys. It was clearer now and a sharp eyed man could see the stakes of the wire. They were a bit ominous, too.

"I was looking at one of those stakes," a doughboy told me, "and I kept alooking and alooking and all of a sudden it grew a pair of shoulders and a helmet and I let go at it."

There were others who suffered from the same optical illusion that night, but let it be said to their credit that when a working party examined the wire several days later they found some stakes which had been riddled through and through with bullets.

CHAPTER XX

TRENCH LIFE

They dragged the gun up by hand to fire the first shot in the war for the American army. The lieutenant in charge of the battery told us about it. He was standing on top of the gun emplacement and the historic seventy-five and a few others were being used every little while to fire other shots at the German lines. He had to pause, therefore, now and then in telling us history to make a little more.

"I put it up to my men," said the lieutenant, "that we would have to wait a little for the horses and if we wanted to be sure of firing the first shot it would be a good stunt to drag the gun into place ourselves. We had a little talk and everybody was anxious for our battery to get in the first shot, so we decided to go through with it and not wait for the horses. We dragged the gun up at night and I can tell you that the last mile and a half took some pulling. Excuse me a second----" He leaned down to the pit and began to shout figures. He made them quick and snappy like a football signal and he looked exactly like a quarterback with the tin hat on his head which might have been a leather head guard. There was a sort of eagerness about him, too, as if the ball was on the five-yard line with one minute more to play. It was all in his manner. Everything he said was professional enough. After the string of figures he shouted "watch your bubble" and then he went on with the story.

"We fired the first shot at exactly six twenty-seven in the morning," he said. "It was a shrapnel sh.e.l.l." He turned to the gunners again. "Ready to fire," he shouted down to the men in the pit. "You needn't put your fingers in your ears just yet," he told us.

"It was pretty foggy when we got up to the front and we thought first we'd just have to blaze away in the general direction of the Germans without any particular observation. But all of a sudden the fog lifted and right from here we could see a bunch of Germans out fixing their wire. I gave 'em shrapnel and they scattered back to their dugouts like prairie dogs. It was great!"

The lieutenant smiled at the recollection of the adventure. It meant as much to him as a sixty-yard run in the Princeton game or a touchdown against Yale. He was fortunate enough to be still getting a tingle out of the war that had nothing to do with the cold wind that was coming over No Man's Land. A moment later he grinned again and he suddenly called, "Fire," and the roar of the gun under our feet came quicker than we could get our fingers in our ears.

The gun had earned a rest now and we went down and looked at it. The gunners had chalked a name on the carriage and we found that this seventy-five which fired the first shot against the Germans was called Heinie. We wanted to know the name of the man who fired the first shot.

Our consciences were troubling us about that. This was our first day up with the guns in the American sector and the men had been in two days.

There were drawbacks in writing the war correspondence from a distance as we had been compelled to do up to this time. We'd heard, of course, that the first gun had been fired and that made it imperative that the story should be "reconstructed," as the modern newspaperman says when he's writing about something which he didn't see. Of course, everybody back home would want to know who fired the first shot. Censorship prevented the use of the name, but we couldn't blame the censors for that, because when we wrote the stories we didn't know his name or anything about him. With just one dissenting vote the correspondents decided that the man who fired the first shot must have been a red-headed Irishman. And so it was cabled. Now we wanted to know whether he was.

The lieutenant told us the name, but that didn't settle the question. It was a more or less non-committal name and the officer volunteered to find out for us. He led the party over to the mouth of another dugout and called down: "Sergeant ----, there's some newspapermen here and they want to know whether you're Irish."

Immediately there was a scrambling noise down in the dugout and up came the gunner on the run. "I am not," he said.

"Haven't you got an Irish father or mother or aren't any of your people Irish?" asked one of the correspondents hopefully. He was committed to the red-headed story and he was not prepared to give up yet. "Not one of 'em," said the sergeant, "I haven't got a drop of Irish blood in me. I come from South Bend, Indiana."

The party left the gunner rather disconsolately. That is, all but the hopeful correspondent. "He's Irish, all right," he said. We turned on the optimist.

"Didn't you hear him say he wasn't Irish?" we shouted.

"Oh, that's all right," answered the optimist, "you didn't expect he was going to admit it. They never do."

"Say," inquired another reporter, "did anybody notice what was the color of the sergeant's hair?"

I had, but I said nothing. There had been disillusion enough for one day. It was black with a little gray around the temples.

The lieutenant took us to his dugout and we tried to get some copy out of him. A man from an evening newspaper spoiled our chances right away.

"I suppose," he said, "that you made a little speech to the men before they fired that first shot?"

The little lieutenant was professional in an instant. He felt a sudden fear that his manner or his youth had led us to picture him as a romantic figure.

"What would I make a speech for?" he inquired coldly.

"Well," said the reporter, "I should think you'd want to say something.

You were going to fire the first shot of the war, and more than that, you were going to fire the first shot in anger which the American army has ever fired in Europe. Of course, I didn't mean a speech exactly, but you must have said something."