Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Glory of the Coming
At that congenial employment the youngster has been distinguishing himself ever since. Into the rifle pits young Fulton took something besides his ability to hit whatever he shot at, and his marvellous eyesight – he took a most enormous distaste for the institution of royalty; and this, too, in spite of the fact that when he joined up he swore allegiance to His Gracious Majesty George the Fifth. His ideas of royalty seemingly were based upon things he read in school histories. His conception of the present occupant of the English throne was a person mentally gaited very much like Henry the Eighth or Richard the Third, except with a worse disposition than either of those historic characters had. Apparently he conceived of the incumbent as rising in the morning and putting on a gold crown and sending a batch of nobles to the Tower, after which he enacted a number of unjust laws and, unless he felt better toward evening, possibly had a few heads off.
Acquaintance with his comrades at arms served to rid Sergeant Fulton of some of these beliefs, but despite broadening influences he has never ceased to wonder – generally doing his wondering in a loud clear voice – how any man who loved the breath of freedom in his nostrils found it endurable to live under a king when he might if he chose live under a President named Woodrow Wilson.
One morning just at daybreak a Canadian captain – who, by the way, told me this tale – crawled into a shell hole near the German lines where Sergeant Fulton and two other expert riflemen had been lying all night, like big-game hunters at a water hole, waiting for dawn to bring them their chance. One of Fulton’s mates was a Vancouver lad, the other a London Tommy – a typical East-ender, but a very smart sniper.
“Cap,” whispered Fulton, from where he lay stretched on his belly in the herbage at the edge of the crater, “you’ve got here just in time. Ever since it began to get light a Fritzie has been digging over there in their front trench. I’ve had him spotted for half an hour. He has to squat down to dig; and that’s telling on his back. Before long I figure he’s going to straighten up to get the crick out of himself. When he does he’ll show his head above the parapet, and that’s when I’m going to part his hair in the middle with a bullet. Take a squint, Cap, through the periscope and you’ll be able to locate him, dead easy. Then stay right there and you’ll see the surprise party come off.”
So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and see the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy’s parapet. He kept watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant had guessed right, and the sergeant’s gun spoke once. Once was enough – a greenhorn at this game would have known that much.
For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched hands were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at nothing; and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the hole he had been digging.
Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach he turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a gratified grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said: “There goes another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”
The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge will be pleased w’en ‘e ‘ears wot you done fur ‘im!”
Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these writings. The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One of the main compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because he used to be an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave his occupation in his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the expression on the other’s face when a Minenwerfer from a German mortar fell near by on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made a hole in the earth deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide the average smokehouse in – it was, I repeat, to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel put this question:
“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and goes off, are you going to stay by me?”
“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain’t goin’ tell you no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I’ll jest natch-elly be obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don’t you set me down as no deserter. Jest put it in de books as ‘absent without leave,’ ‘cause I’ll be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”
“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest of the boys will do then?”
“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we’ll shore render one service anyway: We’ll spread de word all over France ‘at de Germans is comin’!”
Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.
It was a member of the Fifteenth who in all apparent seriousness suggested to his captain that it might be a good idea to cross the carrier pigeon with the poll parrot so that when a bird came back from the Front it would be able to talk its own message instead of bringing it along hitched to its shank.
Speaking of carrier pigeons reminds me of a yam that may or may not be true – it sounds almost too good to be true – that is being related at the Front. The version most frequently told has it that a half company of a regiment in the Rainbow Division going forward early one morning in a heavy fog for a raid across No Man’s Land carried along with the rest of the customary equipment a homing pigeon. The pigeon in its wicker cage swung on the arm of a private, who likewise was burdened with his rifle, his extra rounds of ammunition, his trenching tool, his pair of wire cutters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emergency ration and quite a number of other more or less cumbersome items.
It was to be a surprise attack behind the cloak of the fog, so there was no artillery preparation beforehand nor barrage fire as the squads climbed over the top and advanced into the mist-hidden beyond. Behind, in the posts of observation and in the post of command – “P.O.” and “P.C.” these are called in the algebraic terminology of modern war – the colonel and his aids and his intelligence officers waited for the sound of firing, and when after some minutes the distant rattle of rifle fire came to their ears they began calculating how long reasonably it might be before word reached them by one or another medium of communication touching on the results of the foray. But the ground telephone remained mute, and no runner returned through the fog with tidings. The suspense tautened as time passed.
Suddenly a pigeon sped into view flying close to the earth. With scores of pairs of eager eyes following it in its course the winged messenger circled until it located its portable cote just behind the colonel’s position, and fluttering down it entered its familiar shelter.
An athletic member of the staff hustled up the ladder. In half a minute he was tumbling down again, clutching in one hand the little scroll of paper that he had found fastened about the pigeon’s leg. With fingers that trembled in anxiety the colonel unrolled the paper and read aloud what was written upon it.
What he read, in the hurried chirography of a kid private, was the following succinct statement: “I’m tired of carrying this derned bird.” In London one night Don Martin, of the New York Herald, and I were crossing the Strand just above Trafalgar Square. In the murk of the unlighted street we bumped into a group of four uniformed figures. Looking close we made out that one was an American soldier, that one was a lanky Scot in kilts, slightly under the influence of something even more exhilarating than the music of the pipes, and that the remaining two were English privates. We gathered right away that an international discussion of some sort was under way. At the moment of our approach the American, a little dark fellow who spoke with an accent that betrayed his Italian nativity, had the floor, or rather he had the sidewalk. We halted in the half-darkness to listen.
“It’s lika thees,” expounded the Yanko-Italian, “w’en I say ‘I should worry’ it mean – it mean – why, it mean I shoulda not worry. You getta me, huh?”
He glanced about him, plainly pleased with the very clear and comprehensive explanation of this expressive bit of Americanism, which had come to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.
The others stared at him blankly. It was one of the Englishmen who broke the silence.
“You ‘ave nothin’ to worry habout hat all, and so you say that you hare worryin’ – his that hit?” he inquired. The American nodded. “Well, then, hall Hi can say his hit sounds like barmy Yankee nonsense to me.”
“Lusten here, laddie, to me,” put in the Scotchman. “If you’ve naught to worry about, why speak of it at all? That’s whut I would be pleased to know.”
“Hoh, never mind,” spoke up the second Englishman; “let’s go get hanother drink at the pub.”
“You’re too late,” stated his countryman in lachrymose tones. “While we’ve been chin-chinnin’ ‘ere the bloomin’ pub ‘as closed – it’s arfter hours for a drink.”
But the canny Scot already was feeling about with a huge paw in the back folds of his kilt. From some mysterious recess he slowly drew forth a flat flask.
“Lads,” he stated happily, “in the language of our American friend here, we should worry, because as it happens, thanks to me own forethought, we ha’ na need to concern ourselves wi’ worryin’ at all, d’ye ken? Ha’ the furst nip, Yank!”
This recital would not be complete did I fail to include in it a paragraph or so touching on the humorous proclivities of – guess who! – the commander of a German submarine, no less; a person who operated last winter mainly off the southernmost tip of Ireland with occasional incursions into the British Channel. This facetious Teuton was known to the crews of the British and American destroyers that did their best to sink him – and finally, it is believed, did sink him – as Kelly. Indeed in the derisive messages that this deep-sea joker used to send over the wireless to our stations he customarily signed himself by that name.
One day shortly before Kelly’s U-boat disappeared altogether a commander of an American destroyer was sending by radio to a French port a message giving what he believed to be the probable location of the pestiferous but cheerful foe. It must have been that the subject of his communication was listening in on the air waves and that he knew the code which the American was that day employing. For all at once he broke in with his own wireless, and this was what the astonished operator at the receiving station on shore got:
“Your longitude is fine, your latitude is rotten. This place is getting too warm for me. I’m going to beat it. Good-bye. Kelly.”
Shortly after the first division of our new National Army reached France a group of fifty men were sent from it as replacements in the ranks of an old National Guard regiment which had been over for some time and which had suffered casualties and losses. When the squad went forward to their new assignment the general commanding the brigade from which the chosen fifty had been drawn sent to the commander of the regiment for which they were bound a letter reading somewhat after this style:
“There are not better men in our Army anywhere than the fifty I am giving you, in accordance with an order received by me from General Headquarters. Please see to it that no one in your regiment, whether officer or private, refers by word, look, deed or gesture to the circumstances under which these fifty men entered the service. Drafted men, regulars and volunteers are all on the same footing, and merely because my men came in with the draft and yours to a large extent came in a little earlier is no reason why any discrimination should be permitted in any quarter.”
A few weeks after the transfer had been accomplished the brigadier met the colonel, and recalling to the latter the sense of the letter he had written inquired whether there had been any suggestion of superiority on the part of the former National Guardsmen toward the new arrivals.
“General,” broke out the colonel, “do you know what those infernal cheeky scoundrels of yours have been doing ever since they joined? Well, I’m going to tell you. They’ve been walking to and fro in my regiment with their noses stuck up in the air, calling my boys ‘draft-dodgers!”’
It’s the essence of the trenches. And it’s that – plus the courage they bring and the enthusiasm they have – which is winning this war sooner than some of the croakers at home expect it to be won.
CHAPTER XII. BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED
AS I GO to and fro in the land I some-times wonder why the Germans keep a-picking on me. As heaven is my judge I tried to tell the truth about them and their armies when I was with them; but then, maybe that’s the reason. At any rate I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a place in England or France either a battery of long-range guns shells it or else a hostile aëroplane happens along and bombs the town. The thing is more than a coincidence. It is getting to be a habit, an unhealthy habit at that. There must be method in it. And yet I have tried to bear myself in a modest and unostentatious way during this present trip. If in the reader’s judgment the personal pronoun has occurred and recurred with considerable frequency in my writings I would say: Under the seemingly quaint but necessary rules of the censorship as conducted in these parts the only individual of American extraction at present connected in any way with war activities over here whom I may mention in my writings other than General Pershing is myself. Since the general to date has not figured to any extent in my personal experiences I am perforce driven to doing pieces largely about what I have seen and heard and felt.
Particularly is this true of these bombings and shellings. I repeat that I cannot imagine why the boche should single out a quiet, simple, private citizen for such attentions. It does not seem fair that I should ever be their target while shining marks move about the landscape with the utmost impunity. The German has a name for being efficient too. More than once in my readings I have seen his name coupled with the word efficiency. Take brigadier generals for example. Almost any colonel of our Expeditionary Forces in France, and particularly a senior colonel whose name is well up in the list, will tell you in confidence there are a number of brigadiers over here who could easily be spared and who would never be missed. Yet a brigadier general may move about from place to place in his automobile in comparative safety. But just let me go to the railroad station to buy a ticket for somewhere and immediately the news is transmitted by a mysterious occult influence to the Kaiser and he tells the Crown Prince and the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg or somebody, and inside of fifteen minutes the hands, August and Heinie, are either loading up the long-rangers or getting the most dependable bombing Gotha out of the sheds.
For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed away from London. I arrived in London sick with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That night the Huns flew over the Channel and spattered down inflammables and explosives to their heart’s content. One chunk of a shell fell in the street within a few yards of my bedroom window, gouging a hole in the roadway. A bomb made a mighty noise and did some superficial damage in a park close by. It was my first experience at being bombed from on high, and any other time I should have taken a lively interest in the proceedings; but I was too sick to get up and dress and too dopy from the potions I had taken to awaken thoroughly.
But the next night, when I was convalescent, and the following night, when I was well along the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to sit up in bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche and repeated the original performance with variations.
In order to get away from the London fogs, which weren’t doing my still tender throat any good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little seaside resort on the east coast of England, reaching there in the gloaming. What did the enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the neighbourhood within an hour after I got there? He went away at ten the same night, I the following morning at six-forty-five.
A delayed train was all that kept me from reaching Paris coincidentally with the first raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of months. The raiders covered up their disappointment by murdering a few helpless non-belligerents and departed, to return the next evening when I was present. I was domiciled in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the great long-distance gun began its bombardment of the city from the forest of Saint-Gobain nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell descended within two hundred yards of where I stood at a window and I saw the smoke of its explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulverized débris that rose; the jar of the crash shook the building. Throughout the following day, which was Palm Sunday – only we called it Bomb Sunday – the shelling continued. I was there, naturally.
On Monday morning I started for Soissons. So the gunners of the long-distance gun playing on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until the day after my party returned from the north. We got into the Gare du Nord late one night; the big gun opened up again early the next morning. I am not exaggerating; merely reciting a sequence of facts.
For nearly two years the Germans had left poor battered Soissons pretty much alone, though it was within easy reach of their howitzers; moreover, one of their speedy flying machines could reach Soissons from the German lines south of Laon within five minutes. But, as I say, they rather left it alone. Perhaps in their kindly sentimental way they were satisfied with their previous handiwork there. They had pretty well destroyed the magnificent old cathedral. It was not quite so utter a ruin as the cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at Rheims, or the Cloth Hall at Ypres, or the University at Louvain; nevertheless, I assume that from the Prussian point of view the job was a fairly complete one.
The wonderful, venerable glass windows, which can never be replaced, had been shattered to the last one, and the lines of the splendid dome might now only be traced like the curves of tottering arches, swinging up and out like the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of roofage where thousands of bickering ravens, those black devil birds of desolation, now fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their droppings the profaned sanctuary below. Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory monuments to Kultur to be found anywhere in Europe to-day.
Nor had the community at large been slighted. Everybody knows how thorough are the armies of the anointed War Lord. Relics which dated back to the days of Clovis had been battered out of all hope of restoration; things of antiquity and of inestimable historic value lay shattered in wreckage. Furthermore, from time to time, in 1914 and 1915 and even in 1916, when no military advantage was to be derived from visiting renewed affliction upon the vicinity and when no victims, save old men and women and innocent children, were likely to be added to the grand total of the grander tally which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had blasted away at the ancient city, leveling a homestead here and decimating a family there.
However, since the early part of 1916 they had somehow rather spared Soissons. But the train bearing us was halted within three miles of the station because, after keeping the peace for nearly two years, the enemy had picked upon that particular hour of that particular afternoon to renew his most insalubrious attentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore we entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accompaniment of whistling projectiles and clattering chimney-pots and smashing walls.
In Soissons we spent two nights. Both nights the Germans shelled the town and on the second night, in addition, bombed it from aëroplanes. It may have been fancy, but as we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly French staff officer it seemed to us that the firing behind us was lessening.
From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of the Amex Forces we motored one day to Nancy for a good dinner at a locally famous café. Simultaneously with our advent the foe’s airmen showed up and the alerte was sounded for a gas attack. As between the prospect of spending the evening in an abri and staying out in the open air upon the road we chose the latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to the comparative quiet of the front lines. A little later a cross-country journey necessitated our changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connecting train was hours behind its appointed minute, as is usual in these days of disordered time cards, and while we waited hostile airships appeared flying so high they looked like bright iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As they swung lower, to sow bombs about the place, antiaircraft guns opened on them and they departed.
That same night our train, travelling with darkened carriages, was held up outside of Châlons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs at the tracks ahead of us and at a troop convoy passing through. The wreckage was afire when we crawled by on a snail’s schedule an hour or so later.
Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental mess in a sector held by our troops. The colonel’s headquarters were in a small wrecked village close up to the frontier. This village had been pretty well smashed up in 1914 and in 1915, but during the trench warfare that succeeded in this district no German shells had scored a direct hit within the communal confines. Yet the enemy that night, without prior warning and without known provocation, elected to break the tacit agreement for localised immunity. The bombardment began with a shock and a jar of impact shortly after we had retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in the top story of what once, upon a happier time, had been the home of a prominent citizen. It continued for three hours, and I will state that our rest was more or less interrupted. It slackened and ceased, though, as we departed in the morning after breakfast, and thereafter for a period of weeks during which we remained away all was tranquil and unconcussive there in that cluster of shattered stone cottages.
Another time we made a two-day expedition to the zone round Verdun. The great spring offensive, off and away to the westward, was then in its second week and the Verdun area enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big vociferous shells came pelting down upon an obscure hamlet well back behind the main defences within twenty minutes after we had stopped there. One burst in a courtyard outside a house where an American general was domiciled with his staff, and when we came in to pay our respects his aids still were gathering up fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs. The general said he couldn’t imagine why the Him should have decided all of a sudden to pay him this compliment; but we knew why, or thought we knew: It was all a part of the German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.
At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.
As a result of this sort of experience, continuing through a period of months, I feel that I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also that I have acquired some slight facility at appraising the psychology of towns and cities persistently and frequently under shell or aërial attack. In the main I believe it may be taken as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of a small place behave after rather a different fashion from the way in which the inhabitants of a great city may be counted upon to bear themselves. For example, there is a difference plainly to be distinguished, I think, between the people of London and the people of Paris; and a difference likewise between the people of Paris and the people of Nancy. Certainly I have witnessed a great number of sights that were humorous with the grim and perilous humour of wartimes, and by the same token I have witnessed a manifold number of others that were fraught with the very essence of tragedy.
All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking tragedy that is compounded of a million lesser tragedies. You note that the door-opener at your favourite café in Paris uses his left hand only, and then you see that his right arm, with the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial arm; the real one was shot away. The barber who shaves you, the waiter who serves you, the chauffeur who drives you about in his taxicab moves with a limping awkward gait that betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a mutilated stump.
In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming toward you – a woman in nurse’s garb and a splendid young boy soldier with decorations on his breast – bump into you, almost, it would seem, by intent. As mentally you start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed scar in the youth’s temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face is beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the mark of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in the black and utter void of blindness.
Behind the battle lines you often see long lines of men whose ages are anywhere between forty and fifty – tired, dirty, bewhiskered men worn frazzle-thin by what they have undergone; men who should be at home with their wives and bairns instead of toiling through wet and cold and misery for endless leagues over sodden roads.
Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy burdens; their hands where they grip their rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and weary feet falter as they drag them, booted in stiff leather and bolstered with mud, from one cheerless billet to another. But they go on, uncomplainingly, as they have been going on uncomplainingly since the second year of this war, doing the thankless and unheroic labour at the back that the ranks at the front may be kept filled with those whom France has left of a suitable age for fighting.
You see that the highways are kept in repair by boys of twelve or thirteen and by grandsires in their seventies and their eighties, and by crippled soldiers, who work from daylight until dusk upon the rock piles and the earth heaps; that the fields are being tilled – and how well they are being tilled! – by young women and old women; that the shops in the smaller towns are minded by children, whose heads sometimes scarcely come above the counters.
You see where the tall shade trees along the roads and the small trees in the thickets are being shorn away in order that the furnaces and the hearthstones may not be altogether fireless, since the enemy holds most of the coal mines. I have come in one of the fine state forests upon a squad of American lumberjacks, big huskies from the logging camps of Northern Michigan, with their portable planing mill whining and their axes flashing, making the sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not long ago was a grove of splendid timber, where beeches and chestnuts, hundreds of years old, stood in close ranks; but which now is being turned into a wilderness of raw stumps and trodden earth and stacks of ugly planking.
You see an old woman, as fleshless as a fagot, helping a dog to drag a heavy cart up a rocky street, the two of them together straining and panting against the leather breast yokes. For every kilometre that the foe advances you see the refugees fleeing from their desolated steadings; indeed, you may very accurately gauge the rate of his progress by their number.
In one lonely little town in a territory as yet undefiled by actual hostilities I went one morning not long ago into a quaint thirteenth-century church. It was one of three churches in the place; and in point of membership, I think, the smallest of the three. But in the nave, upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with furrows and runnels, I found a little framed placard containing the names, written in fine script, of those communicants who had died in service for their country in this war. The list plainly was incomplete. It included only those who had fallen up to the beginning of last year; the toll for 1917 and for 1918 was yet to be added; and yet of the names of the dead out of this one small obscure interior parish there were an even one hundred. I dare say the poll of the whole commune would have shown at least three times as many. France has shown the world how to fight. Now it shows the world how to die.
But of all the tragedies that multiply themselves so abundantly here in this bloodied land it sometimes seems to me there is none greater than the look of things that is implanted upon an unfortified town that has been subjected to frequent bombings. It is not so much the shattered, ragged ruins where bombs have scored direct downward hits that drive home the lesson of what this mode of reprisal, this type of punishment means; rather it is the echoing empty street, as yet undamaged, whence the dwellers all have fled – long stretches of streets, with the windows shuttered up and the shops locked and barred and the rank grass sprouting between the cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats foraging like the gaunt ghosts of cats among forgotten ash barrels. And rather more than this it is the expression of those who through necessity or choice have stayed on.
