With The Doughboy In France Part 9

"It was the hour of tea when the young man came in. In fresh white _coif_ and ap.r.o.n of blue, a Red Cross girl presided behind the altar of the sacred inst.i.tution, where the pot simmered and lemon and sugar graced the brew. In a charmed circle around the attractively furnished room which, among its other attractions, boasted a piano, a pretty reading lamp, and a writing desk, sat some fifteen other officers--most of them dusty and tired from long traveling, some shy, some talkative, two gray-bearded, most of them mere boys, all warming themselves in the civilizing atmosphere of the subtle ceremony. On the table piled on a generous dinner plate was the marvel on which the young lieutenant's eyes rested--doughnuts.

"Forty-eight thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five doughnuts. Not to be sure, all on that dinner plate--the great number is that of the doughnuts officially stirred up, dropped in deep fat, and distributed from the Red Cross houses and station canteens during the month of July, 1918. Other good things were served in a similar abundance that same month; 19,760 hot and cold drinks, 13,546 sandwiches, and 19,574 tartines, not to mention 2,460 salads and 4,160 dishes of ice cream--these last, of course, special hot-weather foods. But the doughnuts were the pride and glory of the Toul establishment--the masterpiece by which its praises were known and sung in the long trenches that scarred the fair Lorraine hills. They were the real American article--except also for the traditional rolling in the sugar barrel, now vanished like the dodo--soft and golden and winningly round.

They were made by a Frenchwoman, but her instructor was a genuine Yankee soldier cook, who learned the art from his mother in the Connecticut Valley, where they cherish the secret of why the doughnut has a hole. He was particularly detailed to initiate the Frenchwoman into the mysteries of the art by an army colonel who understood doughnuts and men and who sat at tea with the directress one day when the Red Cross outpost at Toul still was young."

The directress was, of course, Miss Andress, and it was in those early days she still was the staff and the staff was the directress; and never dreaming of the summer nights when her commodious resthouse in the Route de Paris, with its accommodations for eight men and twenty-five officers, would be called upon in a single short month to take care of 560 officers and 2,124 enlisted men--and would take care of every blessed one of them to the fullest extent.

Enough again of figures. At the best they tell only part of the story.

The boys who enjoyed the multifold hospitalities of the Red Cross in Toul--that quaint, walled, and moated fortress town of old France, with its churches and its exquisite cathedral rising above its low roofs--could tell the rest of it; and gladly did when the opportunity was given them. For instance here is a human doc.u.ment which came into my hands one day when I was at the Toul canteen:

"_Dear Red Cross Girls at the Canteen_:

"I always wanted to tell you how I appreciated all the nice things you have done for us since I have been over here and would have, but perhaps you'd think I was making love to you for I felt I wanted to get you in a great big bunch and give you a great big hug. No, I wouldn't need any moonlight and s.h.i.+very music, for it isn't that kind of a hug--the kind of hug I wanted to give is the kind a brother gives his sister; or a boy gives his mother when he wants her to know that he loves her and appreciates her.... You girls are for the boys of the fighting power and you don't ask any questions and you don't bestow any special favors and so we all love you.

"(A soldier) MR. BUCK PRIVATE."

Sometimes actions speak louder than words. There came a time--in September, 1918--when the troops were moving pretty steadily through Toul and up toward the Argonne. The Red Cross girls were hard put to it to see that all the boys had all the food and drink and lodgings and baths that they wanted; but they saw that these were given and in generous measure, even though it meant ten and twelve and fourteen and even sixteen hours of work at a stretch. They had their full reward for their strenuous endeavors, not always in letters, or even in words.

Sometimes the language of expression of the human face is the most convincing thing in all the world.

It was a boy from Grand Island, Nebraska, who slouched into the Toul canteen in the station yard on one of the hottest of those September nights. He was tired and dirty, and his seventy-five pounds of equipment upon his back must almost have been more than mortal might bear. But he did not complain--it was not the way of the doughboy. He merely shoved his pack off upon the floor and inquired in a quiet, tired voice:

"Anything that you can spare me, missy?"

He got it. Sandwiches, coffee, the promise of a bath; finally the bath itself.... When the boy--he was indeed hardly more than a boy despite his six feet of stature--left the Red Cross colony he had been fairly transformed. He was cleaner, cooler, almost younger, and seeping over with appreciation.

"It was wonderful," he blurted out. "I'd like to thank you--in a practical way, sort of. Let me send you something down from the front--a souvenir like."

The Red Cross girl who had first taken him in tow and to whom he was now talking did not fully comprehend his remark. Another boy from another Grand Island already was engrossing her attention. But the word "souvenir" registered ever and ever so slightly.

"Get me a German," she said laughingly and lightly as she gave him her name, and turned to the boy from the other Grand Island.

In a few days it came; a sizable pasteboard box by Uncle Sam's own army parcel post over there in France.

The girl opened it quickly. There it all was--the revolver, the helmet, the wallet, with all the German small change, the cigarette case, all the small accouterments of a private in an infantry regiment, even down to the b.u.t.tons. In the package was a roughly written little note.

"I was a-going to send you his ears, too," it read, "only our top sergeant didn't seem to think that ears was a nice thing to send a lady."

A chapter of this book could easily be confined to the episodes--sometimes discouraging and at other times highly amusing--in the personal histories of the canteen workers, both men and women. There were many times when girls rode eight miles in camions to their work, and many of these girls who were well used to limousines and who knew naught of trucks until they came to France. Often those were the lucky times. For there were the other ones, too, when there was a shortage of camions and a woman must pull on her rubbers and be prepared to walk eight or ten miles with a smile on her face, and after that was done to be on her feet for eight long hours of service. It was a hard test, but the American girls stood it.

There were the women in the little out-of-the-way canteens who struggled with coal which "acted like coagulated granite," to quote the words of one of them, and refused to ignite, save by patience and real toil.

There were long hours on station platforms feeding men by pa.s.sing food through car windows because there was not even time for the men to alight and enter the canteens. Moreover, the soldiers had a habit at times of leaving their savings for a canteen girl to send to the folks at home, and although this was not a recognized official part of their jobs, and, in fact, involved a tremendous amount of work, the trust was not refused. The women workers fussed with these and many other errands while the coffee brewed and the chocolate boiled.

In such canteens as those which at first catered to all of the Allies, the menus were arranged in favor of the heaviest patronage. For the visiting _poilus_ there was specialization in French dishes. When the Italians were expected, macaroni was quite sure to become the _piece de resistance_. But for the Yankee boy there has apparently never been anything to excel or even to equal good white bread, good ham, and good coffee. French coffee may be good for the French--far be it from me to decide upon its merits--but to the American doughboy give a cup of Yankee coffee, cooked, if you please, in Yankee style. On such a beverage he can live and work and fight. And perhaps some of the marvelous quality of our American fighting has been due in no small measure to the good quality of our American coffee.

Birds will sometimes revisit a country torn and swept bare by war--even as Picardy and Flanders have been torn--and so do the flowers creep back gently to cling to the earth's torn wounds--the sh.e.l.l holes, the trenches, the gaping walls, seeking to cover the hurts with their soft camouflage of green and glowing color. The tenderest sight I saw in bruised Peronne--Peronne which seemed so terribly hurt, even when one came to compare it with Cambrai, or St. Quentin, or Noyon--was a little new vine climbing up over the ruins of the parish church; and I thought of the centuries that the vines had been growing over the gothic traceries of Melrose Abbey. Flowers gathered by the American Army served to decorate the waysides of France. The folk of that land have no monopoly of sentiment. Indeed I have often wondered if ours might not also have been called the sentimental army as well as the amazing army.

"I know why I am here," said a doughboy who was pa.s.sing through Paris on his way toward leave in the south of France, and when some one asked him the reason, he replied:

"Because I am fighting for an idea. Our President says so."

I have disgressed--purposely. We were speaking of the flowers of France, which grow in such abundance in her moist and gentle climate. The very flowers that the boys of the A. E. F. picked when their trains were halted at the stations--or sometimes between them--were ofttimes given out by the Red Cross canteeners to other A. E. F. boys in far greater need of them. For these were the little costless, priceless tributes which were handed to the wounded men in the hospital trains that came rolling softly by the junction stations of the United States Military Railroad. And great, hulking men, who perhaps had given little thought at other times to the flowers underfoot, then tucked them in their s.h.i.+rts. Men blinded by gas held them to their faces.

"Wayside!"

The very word holds within its seven letters the suggestion of great and little adventures. It really is the traveler's own word. Is it not, after all, the special property of the wanderer, who reckons the beauty of the world not by beaten paths alone but by nooks and bypaths? To the vocabularies of stay-at-homes or such routine folk as commuters, for instance, it must remain unknown--in its real significance. The troops which journeyed across France from the ports where our gray s.h.i.+ps put them down--the laborers, the poets, the farmers, the business men who found themselves welded into a great undertaking and a supreme cause--will never forget the waysides of France. I mean the waysides that bore over their hospitable doors the emblem of the Red Cross and the emblem of the Stars and Stripes side by side. Sheltered in the hustle and bustle of railroad stations, in the quiet of chateau gardens beneath century-old trees and within Roman walls, they offered rare adventures in friendliness, in tenderness, in Americanism.

CHAPTER VII

THE RED CROSS ON THE FIELD OF HONOR

The _triage_ had been set up just outside of a small church which placed its b.u.t.tressed side alongside the market place of the village. It was a busy place. And just because you may not know what _triage_ really is any better than I did when I first heard the term, let me hasten to explain that it is an emergency station set up by the Army Medical Corps just back of the actual firing line--that and something more; for the _triage_ generally means a great center of Red Cross activities as well.

And this particular one, in the little village of Noviant, close behind the salient of Saint Mihiel--to which reference was made in the preceding chapter--was the initiation point of a Red Cross captain; his name is John A. Kimball and he comes from Boston.

Captain Kimball told it to me one day in Paris, and I shall try to give much of it to you in his own words. He was just a plain, regular business fellow who, well outside of the immediate possibilities of army service, had closed his desk in Boston and had offered himself to the Red Cross. And to work for the Red Cross at the front was to face death as an actuality.

"The wounded already were coming in, in good numbers, on that unforgetable morning of the twelfth of September, when they brought him in--the first dead man that I had faced in the war," said he. "We had had our experiences with handling iodine and ant.i.toxin and dressings, but this artillery captain was in need of none of these.... His feet stuck out underneath the blanket that was thrown over the stretcher and hid his body, his head, his arms, and his hands. I saw that his boots were new and that they had been recently polished, too. Of course they were muddy, but I remember beneath the caking of the clay that they were of new leather. One does remember details at such a time.

"I buried him. It was a new experience, and not a pleasant one. But war is no holiday; it is not filled with pleasant experiences. And sooner or later it brings to a man a test, which, if disagreeable, is all but supreme. This was my test. I rose to it. I had to. I buried the man, ran hastily through his papers first and then sealed them into a packet to send to those who held him dearer than life itself."

Because the Boston captain's experience was so typical of so many other Red Cross men who risked their all in the service at the front lines of battle, let us take time to consider it a little in detail. He came to France at the end of June, 1918. He stayed in Paris and chafed at the delay in being held back from the fighting front. In four weeks he received his reward. Having asked to be made a searcher among killed, wounded, and missing men, he was a.s.signed to the Second Division at Nancy, which had just come out of the hard fighting at Soissons and was resting for a brief week before going into action again.

The Second Division is one of the notable Divisions of our fighting forces that entered France. Because one wishes to avoid invidious comparisons and because, after all, it is so really hard to decide whether this Division, this regiment, or that is ent.i.tled to go down into history ahead of its fellows, I should very much hesitate to say that the Second or the First or the Third or the Twenty-sixth or the Seventy-seventh or any other one Division was the ranking Division of our Regular Army. But I shall not hesitate to write that the Second stood in the front rank. Out of some 2,800 Distinguished Service medals that had been awarded in France up to the first of March, 1919, some 800 had gone to this Division. And yet it was but one of eighty Divisions involved in the conflict over there.

In the Second Division were comprised two of the most historic Regular Army regiments of other days--the Ninth and the Twenty-third. The records of each of these commands in Cuba and in the Philippines are among the most enthralling of any in our military history. And the Ninth was the regiment chosen to enter Peking at the close of the j.a.panese-Chinese War and there to represent the United States Government. These regiments before being sent to the Great War in Europe were recruited up to the new fighting strength--very largely of boys from the central and western portions of New York State. In addition to these two regiments of the former Regular Army, the Second Division held several of marines, which leaves neither room nor excuse for comment.

The marines too long ago made their fighting reputation to need any more whatsoever added by this book.

The Second Division in the earlier days of the fighting of the American Army as a unit had already made a distinguished reputation at both Chateau-Thierry and at Soissons. It was at the first point that Major General Bundy, who then commanded it, was reputed to have replied to a suggestion from a French commanding officer that he had better retire his men from an exceptionally heavy _boche_ fire that they were then facing, that he knew no way of making his men turn back; literally they did not know the command to retreat. Our amazing army was a machine of many speeds forward, but apparently quite without a reverse gear.

When Kimball of Boston joined the Second as a Red Cross worker, General Bundy was just retiring from its command, and was being succeeded by Brigadier General John A. LeJeune, who took charge on the second of August, at Nancy; for the Division was spending a whole week catching its breath before plunging into active fighting once again. On the ninth its opportunity began to show itself. It moved to the Toul front in the vicinity of the Moselle River, and was put into a position just behind the Saint Mihiel sector--that funny little kink on the battle front that the Germans had so long succeeded in keeping a kink.

For a long time--in exact figures just a month, which to restless fighting men is a near eternity--the sector was quiet. There were practically no casualties; and this of itself was almost a record for the Second, which in four months of real fighting replaced itself with new men to a number exceeding its original strength. In that month the Division prepared itself for the strenuous service on the fighting front. It went into camp for eleven days at Colombes-les-Belles, within hiking distance of the actual front, and there practiced hand-grenade work while it made its final replacements. The work just ahead of it would require full strength and full skill.

On the twenty-seventh of August it began slowly moving into the front firing line. From the first day of September until the eighth it worked its way through the great Bois de Sebastopol (Sebastopol Forest), marching by night all the while, and covering from eight to nine miles a night. And upon the night of the eleventh--the eve of one of the most brilliant battles in American history--took over a section of the trenches north of the little town of Limey.

"Your objective is Triacourt," the officers told the men that evening as they were preparing for going over the top at dawn, "and the Second is given two days in which to take it."