Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Glory of the Coming

For roadsides in special cases there is still another variety of camouflage, done in zebra-like strips of light and dark rags alternating, and this stuff being erected alongside the open highway is very apt indeed to deceive your hostile observer into thinking that what he beholds is merely a play of sunlight and shade upon a sloped flank of earth; and he must venture very perilously near indeed to discern that the seeming pattern of shadows really masks the movements of troops. This deceit has been described often enough, but the sheer art of it takes on added interest when one witnesses its processes and sees how marvellously its effects are brought about.

In an open field used for experimenting and testing was a dump pile dotted thickly with all the nondescript débris that accumulates upon the outer slope of a dug-in defence where soldiers have been – loose clods of earth, bits of chalky stone, shattered stumps, empty beef tins, broken mess gear, discarded boots, smashed helmets, and such like. It was crowned with a frieze of stakes projecting above the top of the trench behind it, and on its crest stood one of those shattered trees, limbless and ragged, that often are to be found upon terrains where the shelling has been brisk.

Here for our benefit a sort of game was staged. First we stationed ourselves sixty feet away from the mound. Immediately five heads appeared above the parapet – heads with shrapnel helmets upon them, and beneath the helmet rims sunburnt faces peering out. The eyes looked this way and that as the heads turned from side to side.

“Please watch closely,” said the camouflage officer accompanying us. “And as you watch, remember this: Two of those heads are the heads of men. The three others are dummies mounted on sticks and manipulated from below. Since you have been at the Front you know the use of the dummy – the enemy sniper shoots a hole in it and the men in the pit, by tracing the direction of the bullet through the pierced composition, are able to locate the spot where Mister Sniper is hidden. Now then, try to pick out the real heads from the fake ones.”

There were three of us, and we all three of us tried. No two agreed in our guesses and not one of us scored a perfect record; and yet we stood very much nearer than any enemy marksman could ever hope to get. The lifelikeness of the thing was uncanny.

“Next take in the general layout of that spot,” said the camouflage expert, with a wave of his hand toward the dump pile. “Looks natural and orthodox, doesn’t it? Seems to be just the outer side of a bit of trench work, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Two of those stakes are what they appear to be – ordinary common stakes. The other two are hollow metal tubes, inside of which trench periscopes are placed. And the tree trunk is faked, too. It is all hollow within – a shell of light tough steel with a ladder inside, and behind that twisted crotch where the limbs are broken off the observer is stationed at this moment watching us through a manufactured knothole. The only genuine thing about that tree trunk is the bark on it – we stripped that off of a beech over in the woods.

“The dump heap isn’t on the level either, as you possibly know, since you may have seen such dump piles concealing the sites of observation pits up at the Front. Inside it is all dug out into galleries and on the side facing us it is full of peepholes – seventeen peepholes in all, I think there are. Let’s go within fifteen feet of it and see how many of them you can detect.”

At a fifteen-foot range it was hard enough for us to make out five of the seventeen peep places. Yet beforehand we understood that each tin can, each curled-up boot, each sizable tuft of withered grass, each swirl of the tree stump – masked a craftily hidden opening shielded with fine netting, through which a man crouching in safety beneath the surface of the earth might study the land in front of him. That innocent-appearing, made-to-order dump pile had the eyes of a spider; but even so, the uniformed invader might have climbed up and across it without once suspecting the truth.

For a final touch the camouflage crew put on their best stunt of all. Five men encased themselves in camouflage suits of greenish-brown canvas which covered them head, feet, body and limbs, and which being decorated with quantities of dried, grasslike stuff sewed on in patches, made them look very much as Fred Stone used to look when he played the Scarecrow Man in “The Wizard of Oz” years ago. Each man carried a rifle, likewise camouflaged. Then we turned our backs while they took position upon a half-bare, half-greened hillock less than a hundred feet from us.

This being done we faced about, and each knowing that five armed men were snuggled there against the bank tried to pick them out from their background. It was hard sledding, so completely had the motionless figures melted into the herbage and the chalky soil. Finally we united in the opinion that we had located three of the five. But we were wrong again. We really had picked out only one of the five. The two other suspected clumps were not men but what they seemed to be – small protrusions in the ragged and irregular turf. Yes, I am sure Mr. Belasco could have spent a fruitful half hour or so there with us.

Thanks to yet another crafty and deceitful artifice of the camouflage outfit it is possible to make the enemy think he is being attacked by raiders advancing in force when as a matter of fact what he beholds approaching him are not files of men but harmless dummies operated by a mechanism that is as simple as simplicity itself. The attack will come from elsewhere while his attention is focused upon the make-believe feint, but just at present there are military reasons why he should not know any of the particulars. It would take the edge of his surprise, even though he is not likely to live to appreciate the surprise once the trick has been pulled.

These details of the whole vast undertaking that I have touched upon here are merely bits that stand out with especial vividness from the recent recollections of a trip every rod of which was freighted with the most compelling interest for any one, and for an American with enduring and constant pride in the achievements of his own countrymen.

There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that are going always to stick in my brain – the smell of the crisp brown crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day, seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an American negro’s homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.

And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns, deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit – the high salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates’ wages for the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns boom.

CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK

BLOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in small, incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect it is too vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds; but by piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a dim groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.

When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the risk of losing one’s belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme of things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now, with its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining spindle of ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless beauty which forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon for sheer, degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns until they had broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to sprawl upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the sight of dead soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier accepts the chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he is killed. The dread spectacle he presented is part and parcel of the picture of war. But these men and women and babes that the shells dispossessed from their narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully in their beds away back yonder – and how long ago it seems now! – when the world itself was at peace. They had been shrouded in their funeral vestments; they had been laid away with cross and candle, with Book and prayer; over them slabs of the everlasting granite had been set, and flowers had been planted above them and memorials set up; and they had been left there beneath the kindly loam, cradled for all eternity till Gabriel’s Trump should blow.

But when I came there and saw what Kul-tur had wrought amongst them – how with exquisite irony the blasts had shattered grave after grave whose stones bore the carved words Held in Perpetuity and how grandmothers and grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little children had been flung forth out of the gaping holes and left to moulder in the rags of their cerements where all who passed that way might see them – why, it was a blasphemy and an indecency and a sacrilege which no man, beholding it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to forget.

And yet, as I just said, it was not the defilement of the cemetery of Ypres which impressed me most when I went up to Ypres. It was the lamp-posts.

Ypres had been studded thick with lampposts; ornamental and decorative standards of wrought iron they were, spaced at intervals of forty yards or so for the length of every street and on both sides of every street. And every single lamp-post in Ypres, as I took the pains to see for myself, had been struck by shells or by flying fragments of shells. Some had been hit once or twice, some had been quite hewn down, some had been twisted into shapeless sworls of tortured metal; not one but was scathed after one mutilating fashion or another.

In other words, during these four years of bombardment so many German shells had descended upon Ypres that no object in it of the thickness of six inches at its base and say, two inches at its top, had escaped being struck. Or putting it another way, had all these shells been fired through a space of hours instead of through a space of years, they would have rained down on the empty town with the thickness and the frequency of drops in a heavy thunder-shower.

Never was the Hun quite so thorough as when he was punishing some helpless thing that could not fight back.

Riding along through France on a Sunday, these times, one is reasonably certain to meet many little girls wearing their white communion frocks, and many Chinamen under umbrellas.

The latter mostly hail from Indo-China. The French imported them in thousands for service in the labour battalions behind the lines. During the week, dressed in nondescript mixtures of native garb and cast-off uniforms, they work at road-mending or at ditch-digging or on truck-loading jobs. On Sundays they dress themselves up in their best clothes and stroll about the country-side. And rain or shine, each one brings along with him his treasured umbrella and carries it unfurled above his proud head. It never is a Chinese umbrella, either, but invariably a cheap black affair of local manufacture. Go into one of the barracks where these yellow men are housed and at the head of each bunk there hangs a black umbrella, which the owner guards as his most darling possession. If he dies I suppose it is buried with him.

Nobody knows here why every Sunday, Chinaman sports an umbrella, unless it be that in his Oriental mind he has decided that possession of such a thing stamps him as a person of travel and culture who, like any true cosmopolitan, is desirous of conforming to the customs of the country to which he has been transported. But a Frenchman, if careless, sometimes leaves his umbrella behind when he goes forth for a promenade; a Chinaman in France, never.

When a ship-load of these chaps lands they are first taken to a blacksmith shop and upon the left wrist of each is securely and permanently fastened a slender steel circlet bearing a token on which is stamped the wearer’s name and his number. So long as he is in the employ of the State this little band must stay on his arm. It is the one sure means of identifying him and of preventing payroll duplications.

With the marker dangling at his sleeve-end he makes straightway for a shop and buys himself a black cotton umbrella and from that time forward, wherever he goes, his steel bangle and his umbrella go with him. He cannot part from one and not for worlds would he part from the other.

One Sunday afternoon in a village in the south of France I saw that rarest of sights – a drunken Chinaman. He wiggled and waggled as he walked, and once he sat down very hard, smiling foolishly the while, but he never lost his hold on the handle of his umbrella and when he had picked himself up, the black bulge of it was bobbing tipsily above his tipsy head as he went weaving down the road behind a mile-long procession of his fellows, all marching double file beneath their raised umbrellas.

Whisper – there is current a scandalous rumour touching on these little moon-faced allies of ours. It is said that among them every fourth man, about, isn’t a man at all. He’s a woman wearing a man’s garb and drawing a man’s pay; or rather she is, if we are going to keep the genders on straight. But since the women work just as hard as the men do nobody seems to bother about the deceit. They may not have equal suffrage over in Indo-China but the two sexes there seem to have a way of adjusting the industrial problems of the day on a mutually satisfactory basis of understanding.

“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar’s.”

The sign-board was the top of a jam box. The upright to which it was nailed was the shell-riddled trunk of a plane tree with one sprig of dried mistletoe clinging in a crotch where limbs had been, like a tuft of dead beard on a mummy’s chin. Piccadilly Circus was a roughly-rounded spot at a cross-road where the grey and sticky mud – greyer than any mud you stay-at-homes ever saw; stickier than any mud you ever saw – made a little sea which quaked and shimmered greasily like a quicksand. The way to Swan and Edgar’s was down a communication trench with shored sides to it, so that the semi-liquid walls could not cave in, and with duck boards set in it upon spiles for footing, so that men passing through would not be engulfed and drowned in the quagmire beneath.

So much for the immediate setting. The adjacent surroundings were of a pattern to match the chosen sample. All about on every side for miles on end, was a hell of grey mud, here up-reared into ridges and there depressed into holes; and the ridges heaved up to meet a skyline of the same sad colour as themselves, and the holes were like the stale dead craters of a stale dead moon.

Elsewhere in the land, spring had come weeks before, but here the only green was the green of the skum on the grey water in the bottoms of the shell-fissures; the only living things were the ravens that cawed over the wasted landscape, and the great, fat, torpid rats with mud glued in their whiskers and their scaled tails caked with mud, that scuttled in and out of the long-abandoned German pill-boxes or through holes in the rusted iron sides of three dismantled British tanks. For lines of trees there were up-ended wrecks of motor trucks and ambulances; for the hum of bees, was the hum of an occasional sniper’s bullet; for the tap of the wood-pecker, was the rat-tat of machine guns marking time for a skirmish miles away; for growing crops, in these once fecund and prolific stretches of the Flanders flat-lands, there were eighty-thousand unburied dead, all encysted in the mud except where the gouging shells had uprooted them out of the loblolly. And from far up on the rise toward Passchen-daele came the dull regurgitations of the big guns, as though the war had sickened of its own horrors and was retching in its nausea.

What now was here must, in a measure, always be here. For surely no husbandman would dare ever to drive his ploughshare through a field which had become a stinking corruption; where in every furrow he would inevitably turn up mortal awfulness, and where any moment his steel might strike against one of the countless unexploded shells which fill the earth like horrid plums in a yet more horrid pudding.

You couldn’t give this desolation a name; our language yields no word to fit it, no adjective to cap it. Yet right here in the stark and rotten middle of it a British Tommy had stopped to have his little joke. Was he downhearted? No! And so to prove he wasn’t, – that his spirits were high and that his racial gift of humour was unimpaired, he stuck up a sign of sprawled lettering and it said:

“Piccadilly Circus. This way to Swan and Edgar’s.”

Mister Kaiser, you might have known, if your mental processes hadn’t been stuck on skew-wise, forty ways for Sunday, that you could never break through an army of good sports who make jokes at death and coin gibes at what might well drive less hardy souls to madness.

Mighty few men outwardly conform to the rôles they actually fill in life. I am not speaking of drum-majors in bands or tattooed men in side-shows or floor-walkers in department stores. Such parties are picked for their jobs because, physically, they live up to the popular conception; perhaps I should say the popular demand. I am speaking of the run of the species. A successful poet is very apt to look like an unsuccessful paper-hanger and I have known a paper-hanger who was the spittin’ image of a free versifier.

I think, though, of two men I have met over here who were designed by nature and by environment to typify exactly what they are. One is Haig and the other is Pershing. Either would make the perfect model for a statue to portray the common notion of a field-marshal. General Sir Douglas Haig is a picture, drawn to scale, of the kind of British general that the novelists love to describe; in mannerism, in figure, in size, in bearing, in colouring and expression, he is all of that. And by the same tokens Pershing in every imaginable particular is the typical American fighting-man. Incidentally I might add that these two men are two of the handsomest and most splendid martial figures I have ever met. They say Haig is the best-dressed officer in the British army and that is saying a good deal, considering that the officers of the British army are the best dressed officers of any army.

Pershing has the poise and port of a West Point cadet; has a cadet’s waist-line and shoulder-lines, too. A man may keep a youthful face but in the curves of his back is where nearly always he betrays his age. Look at Pershing’s back without knowing who he was and you would put him down as an athlete in his early twenties.

I have taken lunch with General Sir Douglas Haig, and his staff, including his Presbyterian chaplain who is an inevitable member of the commander’s official family, and I have dined with General Pershing and his staff, as Pershing’s guest. When you break bread with a man at his table you get a better chance to appraise him than you would be likely to get did you casually meet him elsewhere. From each headquarters I brought away the settled conviction that I had been in the company of one of the staunchest, most dependable, most capable personalities to whom authority and power were ever entrusted. Different as they were in speech and in gesture, from each there radiated a certain thing which the other likewise possessed and expressed without knowing that he expressed it – a sense of a stupendous, unremitting responsibility, gladly accepted and well discharged; an appreciation of having in his hands a job to do, the tools for the doing of which are human beings, and in the doing of which, should he make a mistake, the error will be charged up against him in figures of human life.

Always I shall remember one outstanding sentence which Haig uttered and one which Pershing uttered. Curiously enough, each was addressing himself to the same subject, to wit: the American soldier. Haig said:

“The spirit of the American soldier as I have seen him over here since your country entered the war, is splendid. When he first came I was struck by his good humour, his unfailing cheerfulness, his modesty, and most of all by his eager, earnest desire to learn the business of war as speedily and as thoroughly as possible. Now as a British commander, I am very, very glad of the opportunity to fight alongside of him – so glad, that I do not find the words offhand, to express the depth of my confidence in the steadfastness and the intelligence and the courage he is every day displaying.”

Pershing said:

“When I think, as I do constantly think, of the behaviour of our men fighting here in a foreign land; of the disciplined cheerfulness with which they have faced discomforts, of the constant determination with which they have confronted difficulties, and of the splendid dash with which they have met the enemy in battle, I cannot speak what is in my mind because my emotions of gratitude are so great they keep me from speaking of these things.”

At a French railway station any day one sees weeping women but they do not weep until after the trains which carry their men-folk back to the trenches have gone. To this rule I have never seen an exception.

A soldier who has finished his leave – a permissionaire the French call him – comes to the station, returning to his duties at the Front. It may be he is a staff officer gorgeous in gold lace. It may be he is a recruit of this year’s class with the fleece of adolescence still upon his cheeks but with the grave assurance of a veteran in his gait. Or it may be that he is a grizzled territorial bent forward by one of those enormous packs which his sort always tote about with them; and to me this last one of the three presents the most heart-moving spectacle of any. Nearly always he looks so tired and his uniform is so stained and so worn and so wrinkled! I mean to make no cheap gibe at the expense of a nation which has fine-tooth-combed her land for man, power to stand the drain of four years of war when I say that according to my observations the back-line reserves of France in 1918 are a million middle-aged men whose feet hurt them.

Be he staff officer though, or beardless youth or fifty-year-old rear-guard it is certain that his women-folk will accompany him to the station to tell him farewell. He has had his week at home. By to-night he will be back again at the Front, in the mud and the filth and the cold and the wet. By to-morrow he may be dead. But there is never a tear shed at parting. He kisses his wife or his mother or his sister or all of them; he hugs to his breast his babies, if he has babies. Then he climbs aboard a car which already is crowded with others like him, and as the train draws away the women run down the platform alongside the train, smiling and blowing kisses at him and waving their hands and shouting good-byes and bidding him to do this or that or the other thing.

And then, when the train has disappeared they drop down where they are and cry their hearts out. I have witnessed this spectacle a thousand times, I am sure, and always the sight of it renews my admiration for the women of what I veritably believe to be the most patient and the most steadfast race of beings on the face of the globe.

In early June, I went up to where the first division of ours to be sent into the British lines for its seasoning under fire was bedded down in billets hard by the Flanders border; and there I saw a curious thing. There were Canadians near at hand, and Australians and New Zealanders and one might naturally suppose the Yankee lads would by preference fraternise with these soldiers from the Dominions and the Colonies who in speech, in mode of life and in habit of thought were really their brothers under the skin.

Not at all. In many cases, if not in a majority of cases, that came under my notice I found Americans chumming with London Cockneys, trading tobacco for cheese; prunes for jam, cigarettes for captured souvenirs; guying the Londoners because they drank tea in the afternoons and being guyed because they themselves wanted coffee in the mornings.

The phenomenon I figured out to my own satisfaction according to this process of deduction: First, that the American and the Cockney had discovered that jointly they shared the same gorgeous sense of humour, albeit expressed in dissimilar ways; second, that each had found out the other was full of sporting instincts, which made another tie between them; and third and perhaps most cogent reason of all, that whatever the Yankee might say, using his own slang to say it, sounded unutterably funny in the Cockney’s ear, and what the Cockney said on any subject, in his dialect, was as good as a vaudeville show to the Yankee.

Personally I do not believe it was the Anglo-Saxon strain calling to the Anglo-Saxon strain, because the American was as likely to be of Italian or Irish or Jewish or Teutonic or Slavic antecedents as he was to be of pure English ancestry. I am sure it was not the common use by both of the same language – with variations on the part of either. But I am sure that it was the joyous prospect of getting free and unlimited entertainment out of the conversations of a new pal.

Anyway our soldiers are cementing us together with a cement that will bind the English-speaking races in a union which can never be sundered, I am sure of that much.

The madness which descended upon our enemies when they started this war would appear to have taken a turn where it commonly manifests itself in acts of stark degeneracy. Every day I am hearing tales which prove the truth of this. If there was only one such story coming to light now and then we might figure the terrible thing as proof of the nastiness of an individual pervert manifesting itself; but where the evidence piles up in a constantly accumulating mass it makes out a case so complete one is bound to conclude that a demoniacal rottenness is running through their ranks, affecting officer and men alike. For the sake of the good name of mankind in general one strives not to accept all these tales but the bulk of them must be true.