Chapter NINE: The Exiles

So tremendous was America’s response when in the spring of this year the call came to her from the Western Front to hurry, so overwhelming the host which she sent over, that our chief difficulty to-day is not to withstand the Hun, but to find a vacant spot on his carcass to hit.

We have been in France for over a month now, but so far our services as a unit have not been required in the Line. But we are acclimatized by this time. The days of our green youth in the big camps back home have faded away as though they never had been. In this Old-World, constricted country it requires quite an effort of memory to recall those spacious days upon our own open, rolling plains and hillsides. Gone are the great streets of wooden two-storey huts, with their electric light, steam heat, and hot showers; the various social centres; the roaring Liberty Theatre and the Hostess House; the candy-stores and the shoe-shine parlours. They are but a memory, blurred by four months of incredibly novel experience.

To-day we sleep in French barracks—bleak, cheerless buildings, redolent of floor-soap and whitewash; or in billets up and down a little village; or in some great barn, on straw, or under the summer stars in our dog-tents. We perform our ablutions in the open air, mainly at a farm pump or street hydrant, to the diversion of the female population. For recreation we still play baseball; for creature comforts we can turn to the Red Cross, or the Y.M.C.A., or the Knights of Columbus, or the Salvation Army, or the Jewish Welfare Board. There is also a French institution, known as _Le Foyer du Soldat_, where we consort with grave-faced, courteous _poilus_. We have encountered no British troops so far. They are farther north: several of our units have gone up to be brigaded with them.

So here we are—right here in France—absorbing new atmosphere through our pores. We are on a strict war footing, too. Everything, as the Colonel has explained to us, must be “just so.” If you are ordered to be at a certain cross-road ten miles away, with your company, at 9 A.M. to-morrow morning, with picks and shovels and two days’ rations, you have to be there—just there—not at 9.05, with picks but no shovels, or with one day’s rations instead of two, but at 9 precisely, with the exact outfit prescribed. The accomplishment of this feat is not so easy as it sounds: it involves much study, and occasional weariness of the flesh. You must be able not only to read a map correctly, but to visualize from a scrutiny of the same the exact nature of the country through which you are going to lead your company—whether it is hilly or no; whether the hill runs up or down; whether there are grade crossings or narrow bridges or one-way roads to be considered; whether a ford marked “Passable for troops” is also passable for the wheeled transport which carries your picks and shovels. All these possibilities make for delay—sometimes most excusable delay. But excuses are not accepted in war-time. Either you succeed or you fail: there is no intermediate stage. Boone Cruttenden’s plan—and a very good one too—is to try experiments, not upon his men, but upon himself. In his spare moments he is accustomed to figure out, with the aid of the map and a mekometer, how long it would take a body of armed men to cover some given distance on the map, having regard to the possibility of—

(1) Unexpectedly heavy going.

(2) Roads blocked by other troops.

(3) Having to scatter or take cover, owing to enemy aeroplanes.

(4) The cussedness of transport mules.

(5) Other visitations of Providence.

He then enlists the services of a friend—usually Jim Nichols—and the pair proceed to test their own theories by performing the journey in person, at the pace of a marching company, correcting their calculations as they proceed. It is upon such painful foundations that your true soldier is built up.

And discipline is rigid. If the top sergeant instructs Mr. Joe McCarthy to empty certain buckets of kitchen garbage, and that right speedily, Joe no longer explains that he is here not to empty garbage, but to make the world safe for Democracy. He simply departs with the buckets, somewhat dazed at his own alacrity. War has her victories, no less than Peace.

Saluting is universal now. We take a pride in it. Formerly we did not. Our independent natures rebelled against its suggestion of servility. But we have recently realized that a slave is a man who bends his knee and bows his head. A soldier does neither. He holds himself erect, looks his brother in arms straight in the face, and exchanges with him the proudest of all masonic signs.

We are much interested in the saluting methods of our Allies. The Frenchman salutes with the open hand, palm forward and fingers pointing upward. The Britisher brings his elbow into play, and salutes with horizontal forearm. Both French and British officers salute in different fashion from their men.

The British practise strange refinements of their own. Bond, the stout medical Major whom last we met travelling in a railway compartment from Liverpool,—yes, we may as well divulge it; it was Liverpool,—was one of the first Americans to make a serious attempt to grapple with the fundamental laws of the subject. Almost immediately on arrival he was sent to Belgium, with other members of the craft, to render invaluable assistance at a British Casualty Clearing-Station not far from Ypres—that graveyard of British soldiers and German hopes. He observed with approval the punctilious, if complicated, fashion in which all ranks greeted one another in public places, and set himself to take notes and master the combination. Two months later, a prey to overstrain, he took a week’s leave in Paris, where he encountered that eccentric but companionable Anglo-American, Major Floyd.

They exchanged greetings and news. Floyd, it seemed, was now attached to the American Army, having been appointed a liaison officer. Then Bond said: “Floyd, I am glad I met you. You are one of the most lucid exponents of British institutions in captivity, and I want you to explain to me just half a dozen or so of the most common variations of the British military salute.”

Floyd nodded sympathetically.

“I know,” he said. “It seems complicated, but all you have to do is to get hold of the fundamental idea. Here it is. The one thing a British soldier must never do is to remove his cap.”

“Why?”

“If he takes it off, he is ‘improperly dressed’; and that practically disqualifies him from ‘getting on with the war’ for the time being. So he remains covered, indoors and out, except in church and during certain portions of the burial service. In fact, at moments of ceremonial intensity, such as the playing of the National Anthem, when civilians are reverently baring their heads, the soldier has to grab his cap and put it on quickly.”

“Otherwise he cannot come to the salute?”

“Cannot? Must not! It is a military crime to salute bareheaded. It says so in the book.”

“I see,” said Bond musingly. “That accounts for the fact that if I happened to meet a hospital orderly around the Casualty Clearing-Station without his cap, he never saluted me?”

“Precisely.”

“Then why—” Bond hesitated.

“I know your trouble,” said Floyd, fixing his melancholy gaze upon the Major’s puzzled face. “Instead of saluting you, he gave you a glare of withering contempt?”

“He certainly did. But how did you know?”

“Because that was what it looked like—to you. In reality the poor fellow was only doing what the Book says. He was turning his head ‘smartly towards the officer, while passing.’”

“That explains quite a lot. I was afraid it was I who was in wrong in some way, and he wanted to tell me so, but was prevented by the bonds of discipline from doing more than give me a good fierce look.”

“His proceeding was perfectly regular,” said Floyd gravely. “But that is not all. A British soldier is debarred from saluting not only when bareheaded, but whenever he is occupied in such a manner as to prevent him doing the thing in proper style. For instance, if you meet Tommy carrying a bucket or riding a bicycle, he merely gives his celebrated head-jerk, without employing his hand at all.”

“That is a good notion,” said Bond. “I shall adopt it. Last week I was riding a bicycle myself, and I nearly broke my collar-bone through letting go with one hand in order to salute a Brigadier-General in a muddy lane. Luckily I fell soft!”

“It’s a carefully thought-out system,” agreed Floyd, “and perfectly sound. Nearly everything in the British Drill Book is—so far as it goes. In nineteen fourteen that Drill Book put into the field the finest army that has ever fought under the British flag. Unfortunately very few of the nation had read it. When the War broke out there were still some forty millions of us who regarded it as a purely humorous publication. If they had listened to Lord Roberts and absorbed its gritty contents, instead of lapping up predigested pap from the politicians, perhaps there would have been no War. Anyway, some of my best friends would have been alive to-day. Those were the fellows, Bond! In the First Battle of Ypres three divisions of them, dead beat after eight weeks’ continuous fighting, stopped four fresh German Army Corps. The Drill Book taught them how to do that. They have mostly gone West now; but I for one will salute their memory so long as I live, cap or no cap!”

* * * * *

We are marching up the Loire now, getting nearer the front of things every day. Nantes is behind us—an ancient city astride the river, its historic quays crowded with American shipping and its wharves piled high with the products of those two mighty Allied bases, Chicago and Minneapolis.

The Loire is a pleasant stream. It is neither so broad as the Mississippi nor so deep as the Hudson, but it will serve. Shoals and sand-bars are frequent upon its surface, but on the opposite side the bank rises up to a quite respectable height, pleasantly reminiscent, at one or two points, of the Palisades.

And the towns we pass through are fascinating. For one thing, they come upon you suddenly. American towns absorb you gradually. First an outlying suburb, with maybe the terminus of the street-car system. Then an untidy No Man’s Land, neither cultivated nor inhabited—mainly vacant building lots—decorated along the route with huge advertisements, chiefly of automobile accessories. Here and there you pass a gasoline station or roadhouse. After that, by degrees, trim white wooden houses, with shady piazzas; increasing traffic; and finally, fifteen-storey office-buildings, shops, hotels, and the roar of the town.

But in Central France these premonitory symptoms are lacking. Your company tramps along the winding road beside the river, through country cultivated to its last yard—a country of hedges and ditches and enclosed fields. A bend in the stream, and lo! before you rises a venerable city, piled up on the ground rising from the river, with ancient bridges spanning the stream and a grey cathedral crowning the whole. There are no suburbs, no advertising boards, no gasoline stations. The sea of green turf continues to the edge of the city, and very often laps against ramparts a thousand years old. You march in under the resounding arch of an ancient gateway.

The streets are narrow; the gradient is frequently such as to discommode any one save a native of Lynchburg, Virginia. The shops are small, and the proprietors thereof appear to transact most of their business upon the doorstep. The inhabitants are friendly, especially the children. But most welcome sight of all, wherever we march, and through whatever town or village we pass, there are familiar greetings awaiting us, in the form of signs over doorways or at street-corners, thus—_A.E.F. Commanding General’s Headquarters_; or, _To A.P.M.’s Office_; or, _American Red Cross Headquarters_. And at each street-crossing, upright, sunburned, and immensely alert, stands an American Military Policeman, directing the tide of country carts, errant cows, antediluvian street-cars, despatch-riders, motor-cycles, and marching troops, with all the solemn austerity of a New York Traffic Cop.

If the American soldier has one characteristic which singles him out from the rest of the Allies, it is that Home is seldom absent from his thoughts—possibly because he is farther away from home than any one else. It is true that more water rolls between, say, France and Australia, than between France and America. But then to the Australian England itself is Home. In his own land he still refers to her as such. The true exile in this war is the American-born Doughboy. In most cases he has never been outside his own great and beautiful land before, for the simple reason that he has always found abundant elbow-room therein; and if the desire to roam has ever possessed him, he has been able to gratify it without stepping off the soil of his country or even beyond the border of his own State. Therein he is in different case from the inhabitants of those congested islets, Great Britain and Ireland, many of whose younger sons are thrust out in early life by the concomitant forces of natural increase and external pressure from the land of their birth to seek a living in distant portions of the globe—and in so doing have quite inadvertently created that unmethodical, loosely connected organization known as the British Empire, which is either a federation of free communities, providing decent government where otherwise there would be no government at all, or else a voracious octopus, according to the way you look at it.

But the American soldier, being for the most part familiar with no country but his own, adapts himself less happily to foreign conditions than Britons who have been schooled by stern necessity to make themselves equally comfortable in Wei-Hai-Wei or Wigan. Add to this the natural outspoken American affection for, and belief in, American institutions and mode of life, and you will understand why American troops on the march through Europe will cheer themselves hoarse at the sight of such reminders of Home as an American policeman directing the traffic in a French town, or an imported American locomotive puffing along a French railroad.

And there is one other American institution for which the American soul thirsts in this barren land—the American newspaper. Behold us billeted for a day or two in the little town of Crapaudville-sur-Loire. Existence there is a series of _queues_. In the morning we arise right early and make a careful toilet. For this purpose we form a _queue_, or water-line, at the town pump. This is not a lengthy business, because it does not take long to fill a pannikin with water: the only interruptions which occur are due to natural gallantry, as when an attractive Ally arrives to fill her family kettle. After that comes breakfast-time, which entails standing in another _queue_, or chow-line. After that as many of us as can contrive to do so hurry off to stand in the most important _queue_ of the day—the news-line. A train from Paris, of arthritic tendencies and irregular habits, is due about noon, bearing newspapers, which are doled out at a price of twenty-five centimes.

There are, of course, sharp degrees of comparison. The great Paris morning journals are nothing in our young lives. They are written in a language which we do not know, and their headlines are lacking in enterprise. The Paris issue of the _London Daily Mail_ is better. It reaches us in the form of a special American edition, which caters generously to our national predilection for type several inches high. But beyond that it does not go. _Blossom and blossom and blossom, but never the promise of fruit!_ The reading matter below the headlines is constrained, lacking in pep—dead stuff. At least, so Joe McCarthy says. The Paris editions of the _New York Herald_ and _Chicago Tribune_ furnish more nourishment, although in these days of paper famine they are sadly attenuated affairs—mere single sheets, sometimes. Then there is our own A.E.F. weekly—_The Stars and Stripes_. It is ably conducted and full of meat; but at the best it is only an official publication, mainly about the War. And it was not printed in America. What we crave for is home news—home gossip—home advertisements. A single copy of an American Sunday newspaper, with comic supplement complete, would fetch its weight in dollar bills over here. Our spirits yearn to participate once more in the Bringing up of Father, or the fratricidal rivalries of Mutt and Jeff; or to witness the perennial discomfitures of those two intensely human impostors, Percy and Ferdy. Even those nasty little Boche abortions, the Katzenjammer Kids, would be something.

The happiest man is he who receives once in a while a copy of his local newspaper from home. These come rarely enough, for second-class mail matter is incurring mysterious casualties these days.

However, one of these priceless packages arrived not long ago for Eddie Gillette, all the way from a little town in the Northwest. Eddie tore off the wrapper, and almost set his teeth into the paper. Everything was there for which his soul hungered—news about America, about his own town, about people whom he knew personally—conveyed by means of the arresting headline, the pointed phrase, and the intellectual pemmican of the heavily leaded summary. The War news, of course, was weeks old, but Ed devoured it rapturously. He knew now how the War was really going.

“This guy Allenby must be some dandy fighter,” he observed to Al Thompson, looking up.

“Sure, Ed!” replied Al pleasantly. “Why?”

“He’s been doing fine in the Holy Land. See what it says here.”

Ed held up the newspaper for Al to see, and pointed to the head of a column:

BRITISH CRUSADERS IN NAZARETH

ALLENBY WINS JESUS CHRIST’S HOME TOWN FROM TURKS

“That’s the goods!” remarked Ed approvingly, as he folded the paper with reverent care and tucked it inside his shirt. “The feller that writes that stuff has gotten the real idea for a story. The others over here”—designating apparently the editors of the London _Times_ and Paris _Matin_—“ain’t got nothing _to_ them. No, _sir_! They don’t write nothing but small-town stuff!”

“You said it, Ed!” agreed Al.

“All the same,” observed the critic, rising and stretching his giant limbs, “this yer reading the papers from home may give a feller a grand and glorious feeling, but it makes him feel mighty lonesome and homesick too.” He raised a pair of great fists heavenward. “Oh, _Boy_! when I get back home after this War, if the Statue of Liberty ever wants to see Ed Gillette again, she’ll have to turn around to do it!”