Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Glory of the Coming

In the Army itself there are exceedingly few members of the Bejones of Tuxedo family, and this, I take it, is a striking evidence of the average high intelligence of the men who have been chosen to officer our forces, considering that we started at scratch to mould millions of civilians into soldiers and considering also how necessary it was at the outset to issue a great number of commissions overnight, as it were. Howsomever, now and again a curious ornithological specimen does bob up, wearing shoulder straps.

A party of civilians, observers, were sent to France by a friendly power to have a look at our troops. When they reached General Headquarters they were being escorted by a beardless youth with the bars of a second lieutenant on his coat. He also wore two bracelets, one of gold and one of silver, on his right wrist. He also spoke with a fascinating lisp. He went straight to the office of the officer commanding the Intelligence Section.

“Colonel,” he says, “I regard it as a great mistake to send me out here with this party. My work is really in Paris.”

“Well,” said the colonel, “you let Paris worry along without you as best it can while you toddle along and accompany these visiting gentlemen over such-and-such a sector. Oh, yes, there is one other thing: Kindly close the door behind you on your way out.”

The braceleted one hid his petulance behind a salute, his jewelry meanwhile jingling pleasantly, and withdrew from the presence. For two days in an automobile he toured with his charge, at a safe distance behind the front lines. On the evening of the second day, when they reached the railroad station to await the train which would carry them back to Paris, he was heard to remark with a heartfelt but lispy sigh of relief: “Well, thank heaven for one thing anyhow – I have done my bit!”

Without being in possession of the exact facts I nevertheless hazard the guess that this young person either has been sent or shortly will be going back to his native land. Weeding-out is one of the best things this Army of our does. It would be well, in my humble judgment, if folks at home followed the Army’s example in this regard, but conducted the weed-ing-out process over there.

For men and women who can be of real service, who can endure hardships without collapsing and without complaining, who can fend for themselves when emergencies arise, who are self-reliant, competent, well skilled in their vocations, there is need here in France in the Red Cross, in the Y. M. C. A., in the Y. M. H. A., in the K. of C., in the hospitals, in the telephone exchanges, the motor service, the ambulance service and in scores of other fields of departmental and allied activity. If these persons can speak a little French, so much the better.

But for the camouflaged malingerer, for the potential slacker, for the patriotic but unqualified zealot, for the incompetent one who mistakes enthusiasm for ability, and for the futile commission member there is no room whatsoever. This job of knocking the mania out of Germania is a big job, and the closer one gets to it the bigger it appears. We can’t make it absolutely a fool-proof war, but by a proper discrimination exercised at home we can reduce the number of Americans in Europe for whose presence here there appears to be no valid excuse whatsoever.

P. S. I hope they read these few lines in Washington.

CHAPTER XVII. YOUNG BLACK JOE

YOU rode along a highroad that was built wide and ran straight, miles on, and through a birch forest that was very dense and yet somehow very orderly, as is the way with French highroads, and with French forests, too, and after a while you came to where the woods frazzled away from close-ranked white trunks into a fringing of lacy undergrowth, all giddy and all gaudy with wild flowers of many a colour.

Here, in a narrow clearing that traversed the thickets at right angles to the course you had been following, there disclosed himself a high-garbed North American mule, a little bit under weight, so that his backbone stood out sharply like the ridgepole of a roof pitched steep, with hollows by his hip joints to catch the rain water in. Viewing him astern or on the quarter you discerned that his prevalent architecture, though mixed, inclined to the mansard type. Viewing him bow-on you observed that he wore a gas mask upon his high and narrow temples and that from beneath this adornment, which would be startling elsewhere but which at the Front is both commonplace and customary, he contemplated the immediate foreground with half-closed, indolent eyes and altogether was as much at home as though his chin rested upon the hickory top rider of a snake fence in his native Ozarks instead of resting, as it did, athwart the crosspiece of a low signpost reading: “Danger Beyond – All Cars Halt Here! Proceed Afoot!”

You might be sure that never did any mule born in Missouri take his languid ease amid surroundings more unique for a mule to be in, inside or outside of that sovereign commonwealth. There was, to begin with, his gas mask, draped upon the spindled brow and ready, on warning, to be yanked down over the muzzle and latched fast beneath the throat; probably as a veteran mule he was used to that. But there were other things: High-velocity shells from a battery of six-inches somewhere in the woods to the west were going over his head at regular half-minute intervals, each in its passage making a sound as though everybody on earth in chorus had said “Whew-w-w-! “ – like that. Merely by cocking an eyelid aloft he could have beheld, sundry thousands of feet up, three French combat planes hunting a German raider back to his own lines, the French motors humming steadily like honeybees but the German droning to a deeper note with sullen heavy rift tones breaking into its cadences, for all the world like one of those big noisy beetles that invade your bedchamber on a hot night. Merely by squinting straight ahead he could have seen at the farther edge of the little glade a triple row of white crosses, each set off by the wooden rosette device in red, white and blue with which the French, when given time, mark the graves of their fallen fighters. Merely by sniffing he could have caught from a mile distant the faint but unmistakable reek that hangs over battlefields when they are getting to be old battlefields but are not yet very old, and that nearly always distresses green work animals at the first time of taking it into their nostrils. None of these things he did though, but remained content and motionless save for his wagging ears and his switching tail and his uneasy lower lip. He was just standing there, letting the hot sunshine seep into him through all his pores.

Otherwise, however, his more adjacent settings were in a manner of speaking conventional and according to mules. For he was attached by virtue of an improvised gear of wire ropes and worn leather breeching to a small fiat car that bestraddled a rusty railroad track; and at his head stood a ginger-coloured youth of twenty years or thereabouts. In our own land you somehow expect, when you find a mule engaged in industry, to find an American of African antecedents managing him. So the combination was in keeping with the popular conception. Only in this instance the attendant youth wore part of a uniform and had a steel shrapnel helmet clamped down upon his skull.

Said youth caught a nod from a corporal of his own race who lounged against a broken wall, the wall being practically all that remained of what once had been the home of a crossings guard alongside a railroad that was a real railroad no longer; and at that he climbed nimbly on muleback.

He gathered up the guiding strings, and this then was the starting signal he gave as he showed all his teeth – he seemed to have fifty teeth at least – in a gorgeous and friendly grin: “All abo’d fur the Fifty-nint’ Street crosstown line!”

By that you would have known, if you knew your New York at all, that this particular muleteer must hail from that nook of Li’l Ole Manhattan which since the days of the Yanko-Spanko war, when a certain group of black troopers did a certain valiant thing, has been called San Juan Hill, and that away off here where now he was, in the back edges of France, he had in his own mind at the moment a picture of West Fifty-ninth Street as it might look – and probably would – on this bright warm afternoon, stretching as a narrow band, biaswise, of the town from the Black Belt on the West Side with its abutting chop-suey parlours and its fragrant barber shops and its clubrooms for head and side waiters, on past Columbus Circle into the lighter coloured districts to the eastward; and likewise that since he did have the image in his mind he perhaps grinned his toothful grin to hide a pang of homesickness for the place where he belonged.

I figured that I knew these things, who had journeyed by motor with two more for a hundred and eighty miles across country to pay a visit to the first sector in our front lines that had been taken over by a regiment of negro volunteers – ? – now by reason of departmental classifyings known as the Three Hundred and Somethingth of the American Expeditionary Forces. Because New York was where I also belonged, and this genial postilion was of a breed made familiar to me long time ago in surroundings vastly dissimilar to these present ones.

To the three of us word had come, no matter how, that negro troops of ours were in the line. No authoritative announcement to that effect having been forthcoming, we were at the first hearing of the news skeptical. To be sure the big movement overseas was at last definitely and audaciously under way; the current month’s programme called for the landing on French soil of two hundred thousand Americans of fighting age and fighting dispositions, which contract, I might add, was carried out so thoroughly that not only the promised two hundred thousand but a good and heaping measure of nearly sixty thousand more on top of that arrived before the thirtieth. It is The Glory of the Coming all right, this great thing that has happened this summer over here, and I am glad that mine eyes have seen it. It is almost the finest thing that the eye of an American of this generation has yet seen or is likely to see before Germany herself is invaded.

But even though the sea lanes were streaky with the wakes of our convoys and the disembarkation ports cluttered with our transports, we doubted that coloured troops were as yet facing the enemy across the barbed-wire boundaries that separate him from us. Possibly this was because we had grown accustomed to thinking of our negroes as members of labour battalions working along the lines of communication – unloading ships and putting up warehouses and building depots and felling trees in the forests of France, which seem doomed to fall either through shelling or by the axes of the timbering crews of the Allies.

“You must be wrong,” we said to him who brought us the report. “You must have seen an unusually big lot of negroes going up to work in the lumber camps in the woods at the north.”

“No such thing,” he said. “I tell you that we’ve got black soldiers on the job – at least two regiments of them. There’s a draft regiment from somewhere down South, and another regiment from one of the Eastern States – one of the old National Guard outfits I think it is – about fifteen miles to the east of the first lot. Here, I can show you about where they are – if anybody’s got a map handy.”

Everybody had a map handy. A correspondent no more thinks of moving about without a map than he thinks of moving about without a gas mask and a white paper, which is a pass. He wouldn’t dare move without the mask; he couldn’t move far without the pass, and the next to these two the map is the most needful part of his travelling equipment.

So that was how the quest started. As we came nearer to the somewhat indefinitely located spot for which we sought, the signs that we were on a true trail multiplied, in bits of evidence offered by supply-train drivers who told us they lately had met negro troopers on the march in considerable number. As a matter of fact there were then four black regiments instead of two taking up sector positions in our plan of defence. However, that fact was to develop later through a statement put forth with the approval of the censor at General Headquarters.

After some seven hours of reasonably swift travel in a high-powered car we had left behind the more peaceful districts back of the debatable areas and were entering into the edges of a village that had been shot to bits in the great offensive of 1914, which afterward had been partially rebuilt and which lately had been abandoned again, after the great offensive of 1918 started.

Right here from somewhere in the impending clutter of nondescript ruination we heard many voices singing all together. The song was a strange enough song for these surroundings. Once before in my life and only once I have heard it, and that was five years ago on an island off the coast of Georgia. I don’t think it ever had a name and the author of it had somehow got the Crucifixion and the Discovery of America confused in his mind.

We halted the car behind the damaged wall of an abandoned garden, not wishing to come upon the unseen choristers until they had finished. Their voices rose with the true camp-meeting quaver, giving reverence to the lines:

In Fo’teen Hunnerd an’ Ninety-one

‘Tuna den my Saviour’s work begun.

And next the chorus, long-drawn-out and mournful:

Oh, dey nailed my Saviour ‘pen de cross,

But he never spoke a mumblin’ word.

I was explaining to my companions, both of them Northern-born, that mumbling in the language of the tidewater darky means complaining and not what it means with us, but they bade me hush while we hearkened to the next two verses, each of two lines, with the chorus repeated after the second line:

In Fo’teen Hunnerd an’ Ninety-two

My Lawd begin his work to do!

In F o’teen Hunnerd an’ Ninety-three

Dey nailed my Saviour on de gallows tree.

And back to the first verse – there were only three verses, it seemed – and through to the third, over and over again.

An invisible choir leader broke in with a different song and the others caught it up. But this one we all knew – My Soul Bears Witness to de Lawd – so we started the machine and rode round from back of the wall. The singers, twenty or more of them, were lying at ease on the earth alongside a house in the bright, baking sunshine of a still young but very ardent summer. On beyond them everywhere the place swarmed with their fellows in khaki, some doing nothing at all and some doing the things that an American soldier, be he black or white, is apt to do when off duty in billets. Almost without exception they were big men, with broad shoulders and necks like bullocks, and their muscles bulged their sleeves almost to bursting. From the fact that nine out of ten were coal-black and from a certain intonation in their voices never found among up-country negroes, a man familiar with the dialects and the types of the Far South might know them for natives of the rice fields and the palmetto barrens of the coast. Lower Georgia and South Carolina – there was where they had come from plainly enough, with perhaps a sprinkling among them of Florida negroes. Our course, steered as it was by chance reckoning, had nevertheless been a true one.

We had found the draft outfit first. By the same token, if our original informant had been right, another negro regiment – of volunteers this time – would be found some fifteen miles to the eastward and northward of where we were; and this latter unit was the one whose whereabouts we mainly desired to discover, since, if it turned out to be the regiment we thought it must be, its colonel would be a personal friend of all three of us and his adjutant would be a former copy reader who had served on the staff of the same evening newspaper years before, with two of us.

We halted a while to pay our respects to the commander of these strapping big black men – a West Pointer, still in his thirties and inordinately proud of the outfit that was under him. He had cause to be. I used to think that sitting down was the natural gait of the tidewater darky; but here, as any one who looked might see, were soldiers who bore themselves as smartly, who were as snappy at the salute and as sharp set at the drill as any of their lighter-skinned fellow Americans in service anywhere. Most of the officers were Southern-born men, they having been purposely picked because of a belief that they would understand the negro temperament. That the choosing of Southern officers had been a sane choosing was proved already, I think, by what we saw as well as by things we heard that day. For example, one of the majors – a young Tennesseean – told us this tale, laughing while he told us:

“We’ve abolished two of our sentry posts in this town. Right over yonder, beyond what’s left of the village church, is what’s left of the village cemetery. I’ll take you to see it if you care to go, though it’s not a very pleasant sight. For a year or more back in 1914 and 1915 shells used to fall in it pretty regularly and rip open the graves and scatter the bones of those poor folks who were buried there – you know the sort of thing you’re likely to find in any of these little places that have been under heavy bombardment. Well, when we moved here a week and a half ago and got settled a delegation from the ranks waited on the C. O. They told him that they had come over here to fight the Germans and that they were willing to fight the Germans and anxious to start the job right away, but that, discipline or no discipline, war or no war, orders or no orders, they just naturally couldn’t be made to hang round a cemetery after dark.

“‘Kernul, suh,’ the spokesman said, ‘ef you posts any of us cullud boys ‘longside dat air buryin’ ground, w’y long about midnight somethin’ll happen an’ you’s sartain shore to be shy a couple of niggers when de mawnin’ comes. Kernul, suh, we don’t none of us wanter be shot fur runnin’ ‘way, but dat’s perzactly whut’s gwine happen ef ary one of us has to march back an’ fo’th by dat place w’en de darkness of de night sets in.’ And the colonel understood, and he took mercy on ‘em, so that’s why if the Germans should happen to arrive at night by way of the graveyard they could march right among us, probably without having a shot fired at them.

“But don’t think our boys are afraid,” the young major added with pride in his voice. “I’d take a chance on going anywhere with these black soldiers at my back. So would any of the rest of the officers. We haven’t had any actual fighting experience yet – that’ll come in a week or two when we relieve a French regiment that’s just here in front of us holding the front lines – but we are not worrying about what’ll happen when we get our baptism of fire. Only I’m afraid we’re going to have a mighty disappointed regiment on our hands in about two months from now, when these black boys of ours find out that even in the middle of August watermelons don’t grow in Northern France.”

As we left the regimental headquarters, which was a half-shattered wine shop with breaches in the wall and less than half a roof to its top floor, the young major went along with us to our car to give our chauffeur better directions touching on a maze of cross roads along the last lap of the run.

En route he enriched my notebook with a lovely story, having the merit moreover – a merit that not all lovely stories have – of being true.

“Day before yesterday,” so his narrative ran, “we began drilling the squads in grenade throwing – with live grenades. Up until then we’d exercised them only on dummy grenades, but now they were going to try out the real thing. We had batches of the new grenades – the kind that are exploded by striking the cap at the lower end upon something hard. You probably know how the drill is carried on: At the call of ‘One’ from the squad commander the men strike the cap ends against a stone or something; at ‘Two’ they draw back the thing full arm length, and at ‘Three’ they toss it with a stiff overhand swing. There’s plenty of time of course for all this if nobody fumbles, because the way the fuses are timed five seconds elapse between the striking of the cap and the explosion. If you fling your grenade too soon a Heinie is liable to pick it up and throw it back at you before it goes off. If you hold it too long you’re apt to lose an arm or your life. That’s why we are so particular about timing the movements.

“Well, one squad lined up out here in a field with their eyes bulging out like china door knobs. They were game enough but they weren’t very happy. The moment the word ‘One’ was given a little stumpy darky in my battalion that we call Sugar Foot flung his grenade as far as he could.

“When the rest of the grenades had been thrown the platoon commander jumped all over Sugar Foot. He said to him: ‘Look here, what did you mean by throwing that grenade before these other boys threw theirs? Don’t you know enough to wait for “Three” before you turn loose?’

“‘Yas, suh, lieutenant,’ says Sugar Foot; ‘but I jes’ natchelly had to th’ow it. W’y, lieutenant, I could feel dat thing a-swellin’ in my hand.’”

It may have been the same Sugar Foot – assuredly it was the likes of him – who gave us the salute so briskly as we sped out of the village on the far side from the side on which we entered it. Followed then a swift coursing through a French-held sector wherein at each unfolding furlong of chalky-white highway we beheld sights which, being totted up, would have made enough to write a book about, say three years back. But three years back is ancient history in this war, and what once would have run into chapters is now worth no more than a paragraph, if that much.

At the end of this leg of the journey we were well out of the static zone and well into the active one. And so, after going near where sundry French batteries ding-donged away with six-inch shells – shrapnel, high explosives and gas in equal doses – at a German position five miles away, we emerged from the protecting screenage of forest after the fashion stated in the opening sentences of this chapter, and learned that we had landed where we had counted on landing when we started out.

It was the regiment we were looking for, sure enough. Its colonel, our friend, having been apprised by telephone from two miles rearward at one of his battalion headquarters that we were approaching, had sent word per runner that he waited to welcome us down at his present station just behind the forward observation posts.

So we climbed aboard the one piece of rolling stock that was left astride the metals of a road over which, until August of 1914, transcontinental trains had whizzed, and the ginger-colored humourist slapped the sloping withers of his steed and that patient brute flinched a protesting flinch that ran through his frame from neck to flanks, and we were off for the front trenches by way of the Fifty-ninth Street cross-town line on as unusual a journey as I, for one, have taken since coming over here to this war-worn country, where the unusual thing is the common thing these days. Off with an ex-apartment-house doorman from San Juan Hill, New York City, for our steersman; a creaking small flat car for a chariot; a homegrown mule for motive power; a Yankee second lieutenant and a French liaison officer for added passengers; and for special scenic touches alongside the bramble-grown cut through which we jogged, machine guns so mounted as to command aisles chopped through the thickets, and three-inch guns plying busily at an unseen objective. To this add the whewful remarks let fall in passing by the big ones from farther back as they conversed among themselves on their way over to annoy the Him, and at intervals aërial skirmishes occurring away up overhead – ‘twas a braw and a bonny day for aërial fighting, as a stage Scotchman might say – and you will have a fairly complete picture of the ensemble in your own mind, I trust. But don’t forget to stir in the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects.

The negro troopers we encountered now, here in the copses, sometimes singly or oftener still in squads and details, were dissimilar physically as well as in certain temperamental respects to their fellows of the draft regiment we had seen a little while before. They were apt to be mulattoes or to have light-brown complexions instead of clear black; they were sophisticated and town wise in their bearing; their idioms differed from those others, and their accents too; for almost without exception they were city dwellers and many of them had been born North, whereas the negroes from Dixie were rural products drawn out of the heart of the Farther South. But for all of them might be said these things: They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed, as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere and heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible delay. I am of the opinion personally – and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all of the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question – that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness – but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart – is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.

However, that is getting in the moral of my tale before I am anywhere near its proper conclusion. The reader consenting, we’ll go back to the place where we were just now, when we rode over the one-mule traffic line to the greeting that had been organised for us two miles away. By chance we had chosen a most auspicious moment for our arrival. For word had just been received touching on the honours which the French Government had been pleased to confer upon two members of the regiment, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, to wit, as follows: For each the War Cross and for each a special citation before the whole French Army, and in addition a golden palm, signifying extraordinary valour, across the red-and-green ribbon of Johnson’s decoration. So it was shortly coming to pass that a negro, almost surely, would be the first private of the American Expeditionary Forces to get a golden palm along with his Croix de Guerre. It might be added, though the statement is quite superfluous in view of the attendant circumstances, that he earned it.

Through the cable dispatches which my companions straightway sent, they being correspondents for daily papers, America learned how Johnson and Roberts, two comparatively green recruits, were attacked at night in a front-line strong point by a raiding party estimated to number between twenty and twenty-five; and how after both had been badly wounded and after Roberts had gone down with a shattered leg he, lying on his back, flung hand grenades with such effect that he blew at least one of the raiders to bits of scrap meat; and how Johnson first with bullets, then with his clubbed rifle after he had emptied it, and finally with his bolo gave so valiant an account of himself that the attacking party fled back to their own lines, abandoning most of their equipment and carrying with them at least five of their number, who had been either killed outright or most despitefully misused by the valiant pair. If ever proof were needed, which it is not, that the colour of a man’s skin has nothing to do with the colour of his soul these twain then and there offered it in abundance.

The word of what the French military authorities meant to do having been received, it had spread, and its lesson was bearing fruit.

So we found out when the colonel took us on a journey through the forward trenches. Every other private and every other noncom. we ran across had his rifle apart and was carefully oiling it. If they were including the coloured boys now when it came to passing round those crosses he meant to get one too, and along with it a mess of Germans – Bush-Germans, by his way of expression. The negro soldier in France insists on pronouncing boche as Bush, and on coupling the transmogrified word to the noun German, possibly because the African mind loves mouth-filling phrases or perhaps just to make all the clearer that, according to his concepts, every boche is a German and every German is a boche.

As we passed along we heard one short and stumpy private, with a complexion like the bottom of a coal mine and a smile like the sudden lifting of a piano lid, call out to a mate as he fitted his greased rifle together:

“Henry Johnson, he done right well, didn’t he? But say, boy, effen they’ll jes gimme a razor an’ a armload of bricks an’ one half pint of bust-haid licker I kin go plum to Berlin.”