"When it happens in our French artillery the cannoneers lose confidence in their pieces. They build small individual dugouts a safe ways back from the gun and extend the lanyard a safe distance. Then, with all the gun crew under cover, they fire the piece. This naturally removes them from their regular firing positions beside the pieces, reduces the accuracy and slows up the entire action of the battery. The men's suspicions of the shells combined with the fear of death by their own weapons, which is greater than any fear of death at the hands of the enemy, all reduce the morale of the gun crews."
Now, for an incident. A new shipment of ammunition had reached the post. The caissons were filled with it. Early the following morning when the guns rumbled out of camp to the practice grounds, Battery X was firing in the open. At the third shot the shell from piece number two exploded prematurely thirty yards from the muzzle. Pieces three and four fired ten and twenty seconds later with every man standing on his toes in his prescribed position.
Ten rounds later, a shell from number three gun exploded thirty feet after leaving the bore. Shell particles buried themselves in the ground near the battery. Piece number four, right next to it, was due to fire in ten seconds. It discharged its projectiles on the dot. The gun crews knew what they were up against. They were firing faulty ammunition. They passed whispered remarks but reloaded with more of the same ammunition and with military precision on the immediate command. Every man stuck to his position. As each gun was fired the immediate possibilities were not difficult to imagine.
Then it happened.
"Commence firing," megaphoned the firing executive. The section chief of number one piece dropped his right hand as the signal for the discharge. The corporal gunner was sitting on the metal seat in front of his instruments and not ten inches to the left of the breech. Cannoneer number one of the gun crew occupied his prescribed position in the same location to the immediate right of the breech. Gunner number two was standing six feet behind the breech and slightly to the left ready to receive the ejected cartridge case. Gunner number three was kneeling over the fuse setter behind the caisson which stood wheel to wheel with the gun carriage. Gunners four and five were rigid statues three feet back of him. Every man in the crew had seen the previous bursts of dangerous ammunition.
Number one's eye caught the descending hand of the section chief. He pulled the lanyard.
There was an eruption of orange coloured flame, a deafening roar, a crash of rendered steel, a cloud of smoke blue green, and yellow.
A black chunk of the gun cradle hurtled backward through the air with a vicious swish. A piece of the bore splintered the wheels and buried itself in the ammunition caisson. Thick hunks of gun metal crumbling like dry cake filled the air. The ground shook.
The corporal gunner pitched backward from his seat and collapsed on the ground. His mate with fists buried in his steel seared eyes staggered out of the choking fumes. The rest of the crew picked themselves up in a dazed condition. Fifty yards away a horse was struggling to regain his feet.
Every man in the three other gun crews knew what had happened. None of them moved from their posts. They knew their guns were loaded with shells from the same lot and possibly with the same faults. No man knew what would happen when the next firing pin went home. The evidence was before them. Their eyes were on the exploded gun but not for long.
"Crash," the ten second firing interval had expired. The section chief of piece number two had dropped his hand. The second gun in the battery had fired.
"Number two on the way," sang out the signalman over the telephone wire to the hidden observation station.
Ten seconds more for another gun crew to cogitate on whether disaster hung on the dart of a firing pin.
"Crash."
"Number three on the way."
Another ten seconds for the last section to wonder whether death would come with the lanyard jerk.
"Crash."
"Number four on the way." Round complete. The signalman finished his telephone report.
Four horses drawing an army ambulance galloped up from the ravine that sheltered them. The corporal gunner, unconscious and with one leg pulverised was lifted in. Two other dazed members of the crew were helped into the vehicle. One was bleeding from the shoulder. The lead horses swung about; the ambulance rattled away.
"Battery ready to fire. Piece number one out of action." It was the signalman reporting over the wire to the observer.
Battery X fired the rest of the morning and they used ammunition from the same lot and every man knew what might happen any minute and every man was in his exact position for every shot and nobody happened to think about hiding in a dugout and putting a long string on the firing lanyard.
It had been an unstaged, unconscious demonstration of nerve and grit and it proved beyond all question the capacity of American artillerymen to stand by the guns.
The gunner corporal told the nurse at his bedside how it all happened, but he was still under the effects of the anesthetic. He did not refer to the morale of his battery mates because it had not occurred to him that there was anything unusual in what they did. But he did think that he could wiggle the toes on his right leg. The doctor told me that this was a common delusion before the patient had been informed of the amputation.
Incidents such as the one related had no effect whatever upon the progress of the work. From early dawn to late at night the men followed their strenuous duties six days a week and then obtained the necessary relief on the seventh day by trips down to the ancient town of Besançon.
In this picturesque country where countless thousands fought and died, down through the bloody centuries since and before the Christian era, where Julius Cæsar paused in his far flung raids to dictate new inserts to his commentaries, where kings and queens and dukes and pretenders left undying traces of ambition's stormy urgings, there it was that American soldiers, in training for the war of wars, spent week-end holidays and mixed the breath of romance with the drag of their cigarettes.
The extender of Roman borders divided that region into three parts, according to the testimony of the first Latin class, but he neglected to mention that of these three parts the one decreed for American occupation was the most romantic of them all.
It is late on a Saturday afternoon and I accept the major's offer of a seat in his mud-bespattered "Hunka Tin." The field guns have ceased their roar for the day and their bores will be allowed to cool over Sunday. Five per cent. of the men at the post have received the coveted town leave.
They form a khaki fresco on the cab and sides of the giant commissary trucks that raise the dust along the winding white road over the hills. Snorting motorcycles with two men over the motor and an officer in the side car skim over the ground, passing all others. A lukewarm sun disappears in a slot in the mountains and a blue grey mist forms in the valleys. A chill comes over the air and a cold new moon looks down and laughs.
It is a long ride to the ancient town, but speed laws and motor traps are unknown and the hood of the Detroit Dilemma shakes like a wet dog as her sizzling hot cylinders suck juice from a full throttle. We cross one divide through a winding road bordered by bushy trees and as orderly as a national park. We coast through a hillside hamlet of barking dogs and saluting children who stand at smiling attention and greet our passage with a shrill "Veev La Mereek" (Vive l'Amérique).
We scud across a broad, level road built well above the lowland, and climb through zig-zagging avenues of stately poplars to the tunnel that pierces the backbone of the next ridge.
While the solid rock walls of the black bore reverberate with the echoes from our exhaust, we emerge on a road that turns sharply to the left and hugs a cliff. Below winds a broad river that looks like mother of pearl in the moonlight. The mountain walls on either side rise at angles approximating 45 degrees, and in the light their orderly vineyards look like the squares on a sloping checkerboard. In front of us and to the right the flanking ridges converge to a narrow gorge through which the river Doub runs to loop the town.
Commanding this gorge from the crests of the two rocky heights are sinister sentinels whose smooth, grey walls and towers rise sheer from the brink of the cliffs. The moonlight now catching the ramparts of the em-battlements splashes them with strokes of white that seem ever brighter in contrast with the darker shadows made by projecting portions of the walls. Spaniard and Moor knew well those walls, and all the kingly glory that hurried France to the reign of terror has slept within their shadows.
Our way down the cliff side is hewn out of the beetling rock. To our left, a jagged wall of rock rises to the sky. To our right, a step, rock-tumbled declivity drops to the river's edge.
The moonlight brings funny fancies, and our yellow headlights, wavering in concentric arcs with each turn of the course, almost seem to glint on the helmets and shields of the spear-bearing legionaries that marched that very way to force a southern culture on the Gauls. We slow down to pass through the rock-hewn gate that once was the Roman aqueduct bringing water down from mountain springs to the town.
Through the gate, a turn to the left and we reach the black bottom of the gorge untouched by the rising moon. We face a blast of wind that slows our speed and brings with it the first big drops of rain. We stop at the "Octroi" and assure the customs collector that we are military, and that we carry no dutiable wine, or beans or wood into the town.
Yet another gate, built across the narrow road between the cliff and the river, and we enter the town. It has been raining and the cobblestones are slippery. They shine in the gleams of pale light that come from the top-heavy street lamps. Gargoyle water spouts drip drainage from the gables of moss-speckled tiles.
We pass a fountain that the Romans left, and rounded arches further on show where the hooded Moor wrote his name in masonry. Barred windows and stone balconies projecting over the street take one's mind off the rattling motor and cause it to wander back to times when serenading lovers twanged guitars beneath their ladies' windows and were satisfied with the flower that dropped from the balcony.
The streets are wet and dark now and through their narrow windings our headlights reveal tall figures in slickers or khaki overcoats topped by peaked felt hats with the red cords of American artillerymen. Their identification is a surprise to the dreamer, because one rather expects these figures to sulk in the deeper shadows and screen their dark, bearded faces with the broad brims of black felt hats or muffle themselves to the chin in long, flowing black cloaks that hide rapiers and stilettos and other properties of mediæval charm.
We dine in a room three hundred years old. The presence of our automobile within the inner quadrangle of the ancient building jars on the sense of fitness. It is an old convent, now occupied by irreligious tenants on the upper three floors, restaurants and estaminets on the lower floor. These shops open on a broad gallery, level with the courtyard, and separated from it only by the rows of pillars that support the arches. It extends around the four sides of the court.
Centuries ago shrouded nuns, clasping beads or books of office, walked in uncommunicative pairs and mumbled their daily prayers beneath these time-worn arches, and to-night it affords a promenade for officers waiting for their meals to be served at madame's well laid tables within.
Madame's tables are not too many. There is not the space economy of an American café, where elbows interlock and waiters are forced to navigate fearsome cargoes above the diners' heads. Neither is there the unwholesome, dust-filled carpet of London's roast beef palaces.
Madame's floor is bare, but the wood has stood the scrubbings of years, and is as spotless as grass-dried linen. The high ceiling and the walls are of white stucco. In bas-relief are clusters of heraldic signs, of bishops' crooks and cathedral keys, of mounted chargers and dying dragoons, of miter and crown, and trumpet and shield, and cross.
Large mirrors, circled with wreaths of gilded leaves, adorn both end walls, and beneath one of them remains an ornate fireplace and mantelpiece of bologna coloured marble, surmounted with a gilt cock of wondrous design. Beneath the other mirror madame has placed her buffet, on which the boy who explores the dusty caves below places the cobwebbed bottles of red wine for the last cork pulling. Large gold chandeliers, dangling with glass prisms, are suspended from high ceiling and flood the room with light, against which the inner shutters of the tall windows must be shut because of danger from the sky.
There is colour in that room. The Roman conquerors would have found it interesting. If former armed occupants of the old town could have paraded in their ancient habiliments through the room like a procession from the martial past, they would have found much for their attention in this scene of the martial present. American khaki seems to predominate, although at several tables are Canadian officers in uniforms of the same colour but of different tailoring.
The tables are flecked with all varieties of French uniforms, from scarlet pants with solitary black stripes down the leg, to tunics of horizon blue. In one corner there are two turbaned Algerians with heads bent close over their black coffee, and one horn of the hall rack shows a red fez with a gold crescent on the crown.
Consider the company. That freckle-faced youth with the fluffed reddish hair of a bandmaster is a French aviator, and among the row of decorations on his dark blue coat is one that he received by reason of a well known adventure over the German lines, which cannot be mentioned here. That American colonel whose short grey hair blends into the white wall behind him is a former member of the United States war college and one of the most important factors in the legislation that shaped the present military status of his country. That other Frenchman with the unusual gold shoulder straps is not a member of the French army. He is a naval officer, and the daring with which he carried his mapping chart along exposed portions of the line at Verdun and evolved the mathematical data on which the French fired their guns against the German waves has been the pride of both the navy and the army.
Over there is a young captain who this time last year was a "shavetail" second in command at a small post along the line of communications in Chihuahua. Next to him sits a tall dark youngster wearing with pride his first Sam Browne belt and "U. S. R." on his collar. He carted human wreckage to the hospitals on the French front for two years before Uncle Sam decided to end the war. There's another one not long from the "Point," booted and spurred and moulded to his uniform. He speaks with a twang of old Virginia on every syllable and they say his family – but that has nothing to do with the fact that he is aid to a major general and is in these parts on a mission.
There are three American women in the room. One who is interested in Y. M. C. A. work and a number of newspapers, wears a feminine adaptation of the uniform and holds court at the head of a table of five officers. Another, Mrs. Robert R. McCormick, who is engaged in the extension of the canteen work of a Paris organisation, is sitting at our table and she is willing to wager her husband anything from half a dozen gloves to a big donation check that Germany will be ready for any kind of peace before an American offensive in the spring.
The interests of the other American woman are negative. She professes no concern in the fact that war correspondents' life insurances are cancelled, but she repeats to me that a dead correspondent is of no use to his paper, and I reply that if madame puts yet another one of her courses on the board, one correspondent will die with a fork in his hand instead of a pencil.
The diners are leaving. Each opening of the salon door brings in a gust of dampness that makes the tablecloths flap. Rain coats swish and rustle in the entry. Rain is falling in sheets in the black courtyard. The moon is gone.
A merry party trails down the stone gallery skirting the quadrangle. Their hobnailed soles and steel plated heels ring on the stone flags. The arches echo back their song:
"In days of old
A warrior bold
Sang merrily his lay, etc. etc. etc.
My love is young and fair.
My love has golden hair,
So what care I
Though death be nigh, etc. etc. etc."
With frequent passages where a dearth of words reduce the selection to musical but meaningless ta-de-ta-tas, the voices melt into the blackness and the rain.
"Great times to be alive," I say to the wife. "This place is saturated with romance. I don't have to be back to the post until to-morrow night. Where will we go? They are singing 'Carmen' in the old opera house on the square. What do you say?"
"There's a Charlie Chaplin on the programme next to the hotel," the wife replies.
Romance was slapped with a custard pie.
CHAPTER VI
"FRONTWARD HO!"
When the artillery training had proceeded to such a point that the French instructors were congratulating our officers upon their proficiency, the rumours spread through the post that the brigade had been ordered to go to the front – that we were to be the first American soldiers to actually go into the line and face the Germans.
The news was received with joy. The men were keen to try out their newly acquired abilities upon the enemy. Harness was polished until it shone. Brass equipment gleamed until you could almost see your face in it. The men groomed the horses until the animals got pains from it. Enlisted men sojourning in the Guard House for petty offences, despatched their guards with scrawled pleadings that the sentences be changed to fines so that they could accompany the outfits to the front.
With one special purpose in view, I made application to General March for an assignment to Battery A of the Sixth Field Artillery. I received the appointment. The Sixth was the first regiment of the brigade and A was the first battery of the regiment. I knew that we would march out in that order, that Battery A would entrain first, detrain first, go in the line first, and I hoped to be present at the firing of the first American shot in the war.
We pulled out of the post on schedule time early in the morning, two days later. Officers and men had been up and dressed since midnight. Ten minutes after their arising, blankets had been rolled and all personal equipment packed ready for departure with the exception of mess kits.
While the stable police details fed the horses, the rest of us "leaned up against" steak, hot biscuits, syrup and hot coffee. The cook had been on the job all night and his efforts touched the right spot. It seemed as if it was the coldest hour of the night and the hot "chow" acted as a primer on the sleepy human machines.
In the darkness, the animals were packed into the gun carriages and caissons down in the gun park, and it was 4 A. M. on the dot when the captain's whistle sounded and we moved off the reserve. As we rattled over the railroad crossing and took the road, the men made facetious good-byes to the scene of their six weeks' training.
Soldiers like movement – we were on the move. Every one's spirits were up and the animals were frisky and high-stepping in the brisk air. Chains rattled as some of the lead pairs mussed up the traces and were brought back into alignment by the drivers. The cannoneers, muffled in great coats, hung on the caisson seats and chided the drivers.
We were off. Where we were going, seemed to make no difference. Rumours could never be depended upon, so none of us knew our destination, but all of us hoped that we were going into action. Every man in the battery felt that the schooling was over and that the battery, if given a chance, could prove that it needed no further training.
At the same time, some of the men expressed the fear that we were on our way to some other training camp for some post-graduate course in firing or maybe for the purpose of instructing other less advanced batteries. The final consensus of opinion was, however, that "beefing" about our prospects wouldn't change them, and that anything was better than staying in the same place forever.
Two miles from the post the road crossed the railroad tracks. The crossing bore a name as everything else did in that land of poetical nomenclature. There was only one house there. It was an old grey stone cottage, its walls covered with vines, and its garden full of shrubbery. It was occupied by three persons, the old crossing-tender, his wife – and one other. That other was Jeanne. Jeanne was their daughter.
We had seen her many times as she opened the crossing gates for traffic on the road. She was about sixteen years old. Her ankles were encased in thick grey woollen hose of her own knitting and, where they emerged from her heavy wooden shoes, it looked as if every move in her clumsy footgear might break them off.
As we approached the crossing, Gallagher, who rode one of the lead pair on piece No. 2, began to give vent to his fine Irish tenor. Gallagher was singing:
"We were sailing along
On Moonlight bay,
You could hear the voices ringing,
They seemed to say,
'You have stolen my heart
Now, don't go away,'
As we kissed and said good-bye
On Moonlight bay."
It would almost have seemed that there was need of some explanation for Gallagher's musical demonstration on this cold, dark morning, but none was demanded. Gallagher apparently knew what he was doing.
His pair of lead horses were walking in much too orderly a fashion for the occasion. Apparently the occasion demanded a little greater show of dash and spirit. Gallagher sunk his spurs into the flanks of his mount and punched its mate in the ribs with the heavy handle of his riding crop.
The leads lunged forward against their collars. The sudden plunge was accompanied by a jangle of chains as the traces tightened. The gun carriage jolted and the cannoneers swore at the unnecessary bouncing.
"Easy, Zigg-Zigg, whoa, Fini." Gallagher pulled on the lines as he shouted in a calculated pitch the French names of his horses. And then the reason for Gallagher's conduct developed.
A pair of wooden shutters on a first floor window of the gate-tender's cottage opened outward. In the window was a lamp. The yellow rays from it shone upward and revealed a tumbled mass of long black hair, black eyes that gleamed, red cheeks and red lips. Then a sweet voice said:
"Gude-bye, Meeky."
"Orry wore, Jeen," replied Gallagher.
"Après la guerre, Meeky," said Jeanne.
"Orry wore, Jeen," repeated Gallagher.
"Oh, Jeanie, dear, please call me 'Meeky,'" sang out one of the men, astride one of the wheel pair of the same gun.
The window had closed, but before the light disappeared, black eyes flashed hate at the jester, and Gallagher, himself, two horses ahead, turned in the saddle and told the taunter to shut his mouth, observing at the same time that "some guys didn't know a decent girl when they saw one."
We rode on. Soon, on the left, the sun came up cold out of Switzerland's white topped ridges miles away, and smiling frigidly across the snow-clad neutral Alps, dispelled the night mist in our part of the world.
The battery warmed under its glow. Village after village we passed through, returning the polite salutes of early rising grand-sires who uncovered their grey heads, or wrinkled, pink-faced grandmothers, who waved kerchiefs from gabled windows beneath the thatch and smiled the straight and dry-lipped smile of toothless age as they wished us good fortune in the war.
We messed at midday by the roadside, green fields and hills of France, our table decorations, cold beef and dry bread, our fare, with canteens full to wash it down. When the horses had tossed their nose-bags futilely for the last grains of oats, and the captain's watch had timed the rest at three-quarters of the hour, we mounted and resumed the march.
The equipment rode easy on man and beast. Packs had been shifted to positions of maximum comfort. The horses were still fresh enough to need tight rein. The men had made final adjustments to the chin straps on their new steel helmets and these sat well on heads that never before had been topped with armoured covering. In addition to all other equipment, each man carried two gas masks. Our top sergeant had an explanation for me as to this double gas mask equipment.
"I'll tell you about it," he said, as he ruthlessly accepted the next-to-the-last twenty-five centime Egyptian cigarette from my proffered case. I winced as he deliberately tore the paper from that precious fine smoke and inserted the filler in his mouth for a chew.
"You see, England and France and us is all Allies," he said. "Both of them loves us and we love both of them. We don't know nothing about gas masks and they knows all there is to know about them. The French say their gas mask is the best. The British say their gas mask is the best.
"Well, you see, they both offer us gas masks. Now Uncle Sam don't want to hurt nobody's feelings, so he says, 'Gentlemen, we won't fight about this here matter. We'll just use both gas masks, and give each of them a try-out.'
"So here we are carrying two of these human nose-bags. The first time we get into a mess of this here gas, somebody will send the order around to change masks in the middle of it – just to find out which is the best one."
The sergeant, with seeming malice, spat some of that fine cigarette on a roadside kilometer stone and closed the international prospects of the subject.
Our battery jangled through a tunnelled ridge and emerged on the other side just as a storm of rain and hail burst with mountain fury. The hailstones rattled on our metal helmets and the men laughed at the sound as they donned slickers. The brakes grated on the caisson wheels as we took the steep down-grade. The road hugged the valley wall which was a rugged, granite cliff.
I rode on ahead through the stinging hailstones and watched our battery as it passed through the historic rock-hewn gateway that is the entrance to the mediæval town of Besançon. The portal is located at a sharp turn of the river. The gateway is carved through a mountain spur. Ancient doors of iron-studded oak still guard the entrance, but they have long since stood open. Battlements that once knew the hand of Vaubon frown down in ancient menace to any invader.
No Roman conqueror at the head of his invading legions ever rode through that triumphal arch with greater pride than rode our little captain at the head of his battery. Our little captain was in stature the smallest man in our battery, but he compensated for that by riding the tallest horse in the battery.
He carried his head at a jaunty angle. He wore his helmet at a nifty tilt, with the chin strap riding between his underlip and his dimpled, upheld chin. He carried his shoulders back, and his chest out. The reins hung gracefully in his left hand, and he had assumed a rather moving-picture pose of the right fist on his right hip. Behind him flew the red guidon, its stirruped staff held stiffly at the right arm's length by the battery standard bearer.
Both of them smiled – expansive smiles of pride – into the clicking lens of my camera. I forgave our little captain for his smile of pride. I knew that six weeks before that very day our little captain had fitted into the scheme of civilian life as a machinery salesman from Indiana. And there that day, he rode at the head of his two hundred and fifty fighting men and horses, at the head of his guns, rolling down that road in France on the way to the front.
In back of him and towering upward, was that historic rock that had known the tread and passage of countless martial footsteps down through the centuries. Behind him, the gun carriages rattled through the frowning portal. Oh, if the folks back on the Wabash could have seen him then!
We wound through the crooked narrow streets of Besançon, our steel-tired wheels bounding and banging over the cobblestones. Townsfolk waved to us from windows and doorways. Old women in the market square abandoned their baskets of beet roots and beans to flutter green stained aprons in our direction. Our column was flanked by clattering phalanxes of wooden-shoed street gamins, who must have known more about our movements than we did, because they all shouted, "Gude-bye."
Six weeks' familiarity between these same artillerymen on town leave and these same urchins had temporised the blind admiration that caused them first to greet our men solely with shouts of "Vive les Américains." Now that they knew us better, they alternated the old greeting with shouts of that all-meaning and also meaningless French expression, "Oo la la."
Our way led over the stone, spanned bridge that crossed the sluggish river through the town, and on to the hilly outskirts where mounted French guides met and directed us to the railroad loading platform.
The platform was a busy place. The regimental supply company which was preceding us over the road was engaged in forcibly persuading the last of its mules to enter the toy freight cars which bore on the side the printed legend, "Hommes 40, Chevaux 8."
Several arclights and one or two acetylene flares illuminated the scene. It was raining fitfully, but not enough to dampen the spirits of the Y. M. C. A. workers who wrestled with canvas tarpaulins and foraged materials to construct a make-shift shelter for a free coffee and sandwich counter.