We gained a wooded hillside that bristled with busy French seventy-fives, which the German tried in vain to locate with his howitzer fire. We mounted a forest plateau, in the centre of which a beautiful white château still held out against the enemy's best efforts to locate it with his guns. One shell addressed in this special direction fortunately announced its coming with such unmistakable vehemence that our party all landed in the same shell hole at once.
Every head was down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly bumble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, no difficulty had been found.
Passing from the woods forward, one by one, over a bald field, we skirted a village that was being heavily shelled, and reached a trench on the side of the hill in direct view of the German positions. The enemy partially occupied the ruined village of Cantigny not eight hundred yards away, but our glasses were unable to pick up the trace of a single person in the débris. French shells, arriving endlessly in the village, shot geysers of dust and wreckage skyward. It was from this village, several days later, that our infantry patrols brought in several prisoners, all of whom were suffering from shell shock. But our men in the village opposite underwent the same treatment at the hands of the German artillery.
It was true of this sector that what corresponded to the infantry front line was a much safer place to be in than in the reserve positions, or about the gun pits in villages or along roads in our back area. Front line activity was something of minor consideration, as both sides seemed to have greater interests at other points and, in addition to that, the men of both sides were busy digging trenches and shelters. There were numerous machine gun posts which swept with lead the indeterminate region between the lines, and at night, patrols from both sides explored as far as possible the holdings of the other side.
Returning to the battalion headquarters that night by a route apparently as popular to German artillery as was the one we used in the forenoon, we found a telephone switchboard in full operation in the sub-cellar, and mess headquarters established in a clean kitchen above the ground. Food was served in the kitchen and we noticed that one door had suffered some damage which had caused it to be boarded up and that the plaster ceiling of the room was full of fresh holes and rents in a dozen places. At every shock to the earth, a little stream of oats would come through the holes from the attic above. These falling down on the officer's neck in the midst of a meal, would have no effect other than causing him to call for his helmet to ward off the cereal rain.
We learned more about the sinister meaning of that broken door and the ceiling holes when it became necessary later in the evening to move mess to a safer location. The kitchen was located just thirty yards back of the town cross roads and an unhealthy percentage of German shells that missed the intersection caused too much interruption in our cook's work.
We found that the mess room was vacant by reason of the fact that it had become too unpleasant for French officers, who had relinquished it the day before. We followed their suite and were not surprised when an infantry battalion mess followed us into the kitchen and just one day later, to the hour, followed us out of it.
Lying on the floor in that chalk cellar that night and listening to the pound of arriving shells on nearby cross roads and battery positions, we estimated how long it would be before this little village would be completely levelled to the ground. Already gables were disappearing from houses, sturdy chimneys were toppling and stone walls were showing jagged gaps. One whole wall of the village school had crumbled before one blast, so that now the wooden desks and benches of the pupils and their books and papers were exposed to view from the street. On the blackboard was a penmanship model which read:
"Let no day pass without having saved something."
An officer came down the dark stone steps into the cellar, kicked off his boots and lay down on some blankets in one corner.
"I just heard some shells come in that didn't explode," I remarked. "Do you know whether they were gas or duds?"
"I don't know whether they were gas or not," he said, "but I do know that that horse out in the yard is certainly getting ripe."
The defunct animal referred to occupied an uncovered grave adjoining our ventilator. Sleeping in a gas mask was not the most unpleasant form of slumber.
CHAPTER XII
BEFORE CANTIGNY
It is strange how sleep can come at the front in surroundings not unlike the interior of a boiler factory, but it does. I heard of no man who slept in the cellars beneath the ruins of Serevilliers that night being disturbed by the pounding of the shells and the jar of the ground, both of which were ever present through our dormant senses. Stranger still was the fact that at midnight when the shelling almost ceased, for small intervals, almost every sleeper there present was aroused by the sudden silence. When the shelling was resumed, sleep returned.
"When I get back on the farm outside of Chicago," said one officer, "I don't believe I will be able to sleep unless I get somebody to stand under my window and shake a thunder sheet all night."
It is also remarkable how the tired human, under such conditions, can turn off the switch on an energetic imagination and resign himself completely to fate. In those cellars that night, every man knew that one direct hit of a "two ten" German shell on his particular cellar wall, would mean taps for everybody in the cave. Such a possibility demands consideration in the slowest moving minds.
Mentalities and morale of varying calibre cogitate upon this matter at varying lengths, but I doubt in the end if there is much difference in the conclusion arrived at. Such reflections produce the inevitable decision that if one particular shell is coming into your particular abode, there is nothing you can do to keep it out, so "What the hell!" You might just as well go to sleep and forget it because if it gets you, you most probably will never know anything about it anyway. I believe such is the philosophy of the shelled.
It must have been three o'clock in the morning when a sputtering motor cycle came to a stop in the shelter of our cellar door and a gas guard standing there exchanged words with some one. It ended in the sound of hobnails on the stone steps as the despatch rider descended, lighting his way with the yellow shaft from an electric pocket lamp.
"What is it?" inquired the Major, awakening and rolling over on his side.
"Just come from regimental headquarters," said the messenger. "I'm carrying orders on to the next town. Adjutant gave me this letter to deliver to you, sir. The Adjutant's compliments, sir, and apologies for waking you, but he said the mail just arrived and the envelope looked important and he thought you might like to get it right away."
"Hmm," said the Major, weighing the official looking envelope in one hand and observing both the American stamps in one corner and numerous addresses to which the missive had been forwarded. He tore off one end and extracted a sheet which he unfolded and read while the messenger waited at his request. I was prepared to hear of a promotion order from Washington and made ready to offer congratulations. The Major smiled and tossed the paper over to me, at the same time reaching for a notebook and fountain pen.
"Hold a light for me," he said to the messenger as he sat on the edge of the bed and began writing. "This is urgent and I will make answer now. You will mail it at regimental headquarters." As his pen scratched across the writing pad, I read the letter he had just received. The stationery bore the heading of an alumni association of a well-known eastern university. The contents ran as follows:
"Dear Sir: What are you doing for your country? What are you doing to help win the war? While our brave boys are in France facing the Kaiser's shell and gas, the alumni association has directed me as secretary to call upon all the old boys of the university and invite them to do their bit for Uncle Sam's fighting men. We ask your subscription to a fund which we are raising to send cigarettes to young students of the university who are now serving with the colours and who are so nobly maintaining the traditions of our Alma Mater. Please fill out the enclosed blank, stating your profession and present occupation. Fraternally yours, – Secretary."
The Major was watching me with a smile as I concluded reading.
"Here's my answer," he said, reading from a notebook leaf:
"Your letter reached me to-night in a warm little village in France. With regard to my present profession, will inform you that I am an expert in ammunition trafficking and am at present occupied in exporting large quantities of shells to Germany over the air route. Please find enclosed check for fifty francs for cigarettes for youngsters who, as you say, are so nobly upholding the sacred traditions of our school. After all, we old boys should do something to help along the cause. Yours to best the Kaiser. – , Major. – Field Artillery, U. S. A. On front in France."
"I guess that ought to hold them," said the Major as he folded the letter and addressed an envelope. It rather seemed to me that it would but before I could finish the remark, the Major was back asleep in his blankets.
By daylight, I explored the town, noting the havoc wrought by the shells that had arrived in the night. I had thought in seeing refugees moving southward along the roads, that there was little variety of articles related to human existence that they failed to carry away with them. But one inspection of the abandoned abodes of the unfortunate peasants of Serevilliers was enough to convince me of the greater variety of things that had to be left behind. Old people have saving habits and the French peasants pride themselves upon never throwing anything away.
The cottage rooms were littered with the discarded clothing of all ages, discarded but saved. Old shoes and dresses, ceremonial high hats and frock coats, brought forth only for weddings or funerals, were mixed on the floor with children's toys, prayer books and broken china. Shutters and doors hung aslant by single hinges. In the village estaminet much mud had been tracked in by exploring feet and the red tiled floor was littered with straw and pewter measuring mugs, dear to the heart of the antiquary.
The ivory balls were gone from the dust covered billiard table, but the six American soldiers billeted in the cellar beneath had overcome this discrepancy. They enjoyed after dinner billiards just the same with three large wooden balls from a croquet court in the garden. A croquet ball is a romping substitute when it hits the green cushions.
That afternoon we laid more wire across fields to the next town to the north. Men who do this job are, in my opinion, the most daring in any organisation that depends for efficiency upon uninterrupted telephone communication. For them, there is no shelter when a deluge of shells pours upon a field across which their wire is laid. Without protection of any kind from the flying steel splinters, they must go to that spot to repair the cut wires and restore communication. During one of these shelling spells, I reached cover of the road side abri and prepared to await clearer weather.
In the distance, down the road, appeared a scudding cloud of dust. An occasional shell dropping close on either side of the road seemed to add speed to the apparition. As it drew closer, I could see that it was a motor cycle of the three wheeled bathtub variety. The rider on the cycle was bending close over his handle bars and apparently giving her all there was in her, but the bulky figure that filled to overflowing the side car, rode with his head well back.
At every irregularity in the road, the bathtub contraption bounced on its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders, thus draped, were surmounted by a huge head, which by reason of its rigid, backward, star-gazing position appeared mostly as chin and double chin. The whole was topped by a huge fat cigar which sprouted upward from the elevated chin and at times gave forth clouds like the forward smoke-stack on the Robert E. Lee.
I was trying to decide in my mind whether the elevated chin posture of the passenger was the result of pride, bravado or a boil on the Adam's apple, when the scudding comet reached the shelter of the protecting bank in which was located the chiselled dog kennel that I occupied. As the machine came to halt, the superior chin depressed itself ninety degrees, and brought into view the smiling features of that smile-making gentleman from Paducah – Mr. Irvin S. Cobb. Machine, rider and passenger stopped for breath and I made bold to ask the intrepid humourist if he suffered from a too keen sense of smell or a saw edge collar.
"I haven't a sensitive nose, a saw edge collar or an inordinate admiration for clouds," the creator of Judge Priest explained with reference to his former stiff-necked pose, "but George here," waving to the driver, "took a sudden inspiration for fast movement. The jolt almost took my head off and the wind kept me from getting it back into position. George stuck his spurs into this here flying bootblack stand just about the time something landed near us that sounded like a kitchen stove half loaded with window weights and window panes. I think George made a record for this road. I've named it Buh-Looey Boulevard."
When the strafing subsided we parted and I reached the next deserted town without incident. It was almost the vesper hour or what had been the allotted time for that rite in those parts when I entered the yard of the village church, located in an exposed position at a cross roads on the edge of the town. A sudden unmistakable whirr sounded above and I threw myself on the ground just as the high velocity, small calibre German shell registered a direct hit on the side of the nave where roof and wall met.
While steel splinters whistled through the air, an avalanche of slate tiles slid down the slanting surface of the roof, and fell in a clattering cascade on the graves in the yard below. I sought speedy shelter in the lee of a tombstone. Several other shells had struck the churchyard and one of them had landed on the final resting place of the family of Roger La Porte. The massive marble slab which had sealed the top of the sunken vault had been heaved aside and one wall was shattered, leaving open to the gaze a cross section view of eight heavy caskets lying in an orderly row.
Nearby were fresh mounds of yellow earth, surmounted by now unpainted wooden crosses on which were inscribed in pencil the names of French soldiers with dates, indicating that their last sacrifice for the tri-colour of la Patria had been made ten days prior. In the soil at the head of each grave, an ordinary beer bottle had been planted neck downward, and through the glass one could see the paper scroll on which the name, rank and record of the dead man was preserved. While I wondered at this prosaic method of identification, an American soldier came around the corner of the church, lighted a cigarette and sat down on an old tombstone.
"Stick around if you want to hear something good," he said, "That is if that last shell didn't bust the organ. There's a French poilu who has come up here every afternoon at five o'clock for the last three days and he plays the sweetest music on the organ. It certainly is great. Reminds me of when I was an altar boy, back in St. Paul."
We waited and soon there came from the rickety old organ loft the soothing tones of an organ. The ancient pipes, sweetened by the benedictions of ages, poured forth melody to the touch of one whose playing was simple, but of the soul. We sat silently among the graves as the rays of the dying sun brought to life new colouring in the leaded windows of stained glass behind which a soldier of France swayed at the ivory keyboard and with heavenly harmony ignored those things of death and destruction that might arrive through the air any minute.
My companion informed me that the poilu at the organ wore a uniform of horizon blue which marked him as casual to this village, whose French garrisons were Moroccans with the distinctive khaki worn by all French colonials in service. The sign of the golden crescent on their collar tabs identified them as children of Mahomet and one would have known as much anyway upon seeing the use to which the large crucifix standing in what was the market place had been put.
So as not to impede traffic through the place, it had become necessary to elevate the field telephone wires from the ground and send them across the road overhead. The crucifix in the centre of the place had presented itself as excellent support for this wire and the sons of the prophet had utilised it with no intention of disrespect. The uplifted right knee of the figure on the cross was insulated and wired. War, the moderniser and mocker of Christ, seemed to have devised new pain for the Teacher of Peace. The crucifixion had become the electrocution.
At the foot of the cross had been nailed a rudely made sign conveying to all who passed the French warning that this was an exposed crossing and should be negotiated rapidly. Fifty yards away another board bore the red letters R. A. S. and by following the direction indicated by arrows, one arrived at the cellar in which the American doctor had established a Relief Aid Station. The Medico had furnished his subterranean apartments with furniture removed from the house above.
"Might as well bring it down here and make the boys comfortable," he said, "as to leave it up there and let shells make kindling out of it. Funny thing about these cellars. Ones with western exposure – that is, with doors and ventilators opening on the side away from the enemy seem scarcest. That seems to have been enough to have revived all that talk about German architects having had something to do with the erection of those buildings before the war. You remember at one time it was said that a number of houses on the front had been found to have plaster walls on the side nearest the enemy and stone walls on the other side. There might be something to it, but I doubt it."
Across the street an American battalion headquarters had been established on the first floor and in the basement of the house, which appeared the most pretentious in the village. Telephone wires now entered the building through broken window panes, and within maps had been tacked to plaster walls and the furniture submitted to the hard usage demanded by war. An old man conspicuous by his civilian clothes wandered about the yard here and there, picking up some stray implement or nick-nack, hanging it up on a wall or placing it carefully aside.
"There's a tragedy," the battalion commander told me. "That man is mayor of this town. He was forced to flee with the rest of the civilians. He returned to-day to look over the ruins. This is his house we occupy. I explained that much of it is as we found it, but that we undoubtedly have broken some things. I could see that every broken chair and window and plate meant a heart throb to him, but he only looked up at me with his wrinkled old face and smiled as he said, 'It is all right, Monsieur. I understand. C'est la guerre.'"
The old man opened one of his barn doors, revealing a floor littered with straw and a fringe of hobnailed American boots. A night-working detail was asleep in blankets. A sleepy voice growled out something about closing the door again and the old man with a polite, "Pardonnez-moi, messieurs," swung the wooden portal softly shut. His home – his house – his barn – his straw —c'est la guerre.
An evening meal of "corn willy" served on some of the Mayor's remaining chinaware, was concluded by a final course of fresh spring onions. These came from the Mayor's own garden just outside the door. As the cook affirmed, it was no difficulty to gather them.
"Every night Germans drop shells in the garden," he said. "I don't even have to pull 'em. Just go out in the morning and pick 'em up off the ground."
I spent part of the night in gun pits along the road side, bordering the town. This particular battery of heavies was engaged on a night long programme of interdiction fire laid down with irregular intensity on cross roads and communication points in the enemy's back areas. Under screens of camouflage netting, these howitzers with mottled bores squatting frog-like on their carriages, intermittently vomited flame, red, green and orange. The detonations were ear-splitting and cannoneers relieved the recurring shocks by clapping their hands to the sides of their head and balancing on the toes each time the lanyard was pulled.
Infantry reserves were swinging along in the road directly in back of the guns. They were moving up to forward positions and they sang in an undertone as they moved in open order.
"Glor – ree – us, Glor – ree – us!
One keg of beer for the four of us.
Glory be to Mike there are no more of us,
For four of us can drink it all alone."
Some of these marchers would come during an interval of silence to a position on the road not ten feet from a darkened, camouflaged howitzer just as it would shatter the air with a deafening crash. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the detonation would make the marchers start and jump involuntarily. Upon such occasions, the gun crews would laugh heartily and indulge in good natured raillery with the infantrymen.
"Whoa, Johnny Doughboy, don't you get frightened. We were just shipping a load of sauerkraut to the Kaiser," said one ear-hardened gunner. "Haven't you heard the orders against running your horses? Come down to a gallop and take it easy."
"Gwan, you leatherneck," returns an infantryman, "You smell like a livery stable. Better trade that pitchfork for a bayonet and come on up where there's some fighting."
"Don't worry about the fighting, little doughboy," came another voice from the dark gun pit. "This is a tray forte sector. If you don't get killed the first eight days, the orders is to shoot you for loafing. You're marching over what's called 'the road you don't come back on.'"
A train of ammunition trucks, timed to arrive at the moment when the road was unoccupied, put in appearance as the end of the infantry column passed, and the captain in charge urged the men on to speedy unloading and fumed over delays by reason of darkness. The men received big shells in their arms and carried them to the roadside dumps where they were piled in readiness for the guns. The road was in an exposed position and this active battery was liable to draw enemy fire at any time, so the ammunition train captain was anxious to get his charges away in a hurry.
His fears were not without foundation, because in the midst of the unloading, one German missile arrived in a nearby field and sprayed the roadway with steel just as every one flattened out on the ground. Five ammunition hustlers arose with minor cuts and one driver was swearing at the shell fragment which had gone through the radiator of his truck and liberated the water contents. The unloading was completed with all speed, and the ammunition train moved off, towing a disabled truck. With some of the gunners who had helped in unloading, I crawled into the chalk dugout to share sleeping quarters in the straw.
"What paper do you represent?" one man asked me as he sat in the straw, unwrapping his puttees. I told him.
"Do you want to know the most popular publication around this place?" he asked, and I replied affirmatively.
"It's called the Daily Woollen Undershirt," he said. "Haven't you seen everybody sitting along the roadside reading theirs and trying to keep up with things? Believe me, it's some reading-matter, too."
"Don't let him kid you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed around those flea charms. Have you seen them?"
For our joint inspection there was passed the string necklace with two linen tabs soaked in aromatic oil of cedar, while the section chief gave an impromptu lecture on personal sanitation. It was concluded by a peremptory order from without for extinction of all lights. The candle stuck on the helmet top was snuffed and we lay down in darkness with the guns booming away on either side.
Our positions were located in a country almost as new to war as were the fields of Flanders in the fall of '14. A little over a month before it had all been peaceful farming land, far behind the belligerent lines. Upon our arrival, its sprouting fields of late wheat and oats were untended and bearing their first harvest of shell craters.
The abandoned villages now occupied by troops told once more the mute tales of the homeless. The villagers, old men, old women and children, had fled, driving before them their cows and farm animals even as they themselves had been driven back by the train of German shells. In their deserted cottages remained the fresh traces of their departure and the ruthless rupturing of home ties, generations old.
On every hand were evidences of the reborn war of semi-movement. One day I would see a battery of light guns swing into position by a roadside, see an observing officer mount by ladder to a tree top and direct the firing of numberless rounds into the rumbling east. By the next morning, they would have changed position, rumbled off to other parts, leaving beside the road only the marks of their cannon wheels and mounds of empty shell cases.
Between our infantry lines and those of the German, there was yet to grow the complete web of woven wire entanglements that marred the landscapes on the long established fronts. Still standing, silent sentinels over some of our front line positions were trees, church steeples, dwellings and barns that as yet had not been levelled to the ground. Dugouts had begun to show their entrances in the surface of the ground and cross roads had started to sprout with rudely constructed shelters. Fat sandbags were just taking the places of potted geraniums on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily, but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held much of its erstwhile beauty.
Those days before Cantigny were marked by particularly heavy artillery fire. The ordnance duel was unrelenting and the daily exchange of shells reached an aggregate far in excess of anything that the First Division had ever experienced before.
Nightly the back areas of the front were shattered with shells. The German was much interested in preventing us from bringing up supplies and munition. We manifested the same interest toward him. American batteries firing at long range, harassed the road intersections behind the enemy's line and wooded places where relief troops might have been assembled under cover of darkness. The expenditure of shells was enormous but it continued practically twenty-four hours a day. German prisoners, shaking from the nervous effects of the pounding, certified to the untiring efforts of our gunners.
The small nameless village that we occupied almost opposite the German position in Cantigny seemed to receive particular attention from the enemy artillery. In retaliation, our guns almost levelled Cantigny and a nearby village which the enemy occupied. Every hour, under the rain of death, the work of digging was continued and the men doing it needed no urging from their officers. There was something sinister and emphatic about the whine of a "two ten German H. E." that inspired one with a desire to start for the antipodes by the shortest and most direct route.
The number of arrivals by way of the air in that particular village every day numbered high in the thousands. Under such conditions, no life-loving human could have failed to produce the last degree of utility out of a spade. The continual dropping of shells in the ruins and the unending fountains of chalk dust and dirt left little for the imagination, but one officer told me that it reminded him of living in a room where some one was eternally beating the carpet.
This taste of the war of semi-movement was appreciated by the American soldier. It had in it a dash of novelty, lacking in the position warfare to which he had become accustomed in the mud and marsh of the Moselle and the Meuse. For one thing, there were better and cleaner billets than had ever been encountered before by our men. Fresh, unthrashed oats and fragrant hay had been found in the hurriedly abandoned lofts back of the line and in the caves and cellars nearer the front.
In many places the men were sleeping on feather mattresses in old-fashioned wooden bedsteads that had been removed from jeopardy above ground to comparative safety below. Whole caves were furnished, and not badly furnished, by this salvage of furniture, much of which would have brought fancy prices in any collection of antiques.
Forced to a recognition solely of intrinsic values, our men made prompt utilisation of much of the material abandoned by the civilian population. Home in the field is where a soldier sleeps and after all, why not have it as comfortable as his surroundings will afford? Those caves and vegetable cellars, many with walls and vaulted ceilings of clean red brick or white blocks of chalk, constituted excellent shelters from shell splinters and even protected the men from direct hits by missiles of small calibre.