And they thought we wouldn't fight Part 10

"Did the Captain wish to see me?"

"Yes, Blank, it is about this letter written in German," the Captain replied. "Who is it addressed to?"

"My father, in Cincinnati, sir," Blank replied.

"I am unfamiliar with German," the Captain said. "I notice the letter is brief. Is there anything in it which the company has been ordered to omit mentioning?"

"No, sir," Blank replied.

"Will you translate it for me?" the Captain asked.

"Yes, sir," said Blank, with just a bare suggestion of a blush. Then he read as follows:

"Dear Father: I am in good health. Food is good and we are learning much. I am becoming an expert grenadier. In this village where we are billeted there is a French girl named Germain. Before the war she lived in northern France, near the German frontier, and she speaks German. So it is possible for us to talk together. She fled before the German troops reached her village. She lives here now with her aunt.

"I carry water from a well for her and she has given me each day a roll of fresh made b.u.t.ter for our mess. In the evening we sit on the front seat of her uncle's small carriage, which is in the front yard, and we imagine we are taking a drive, but of course there are no horses. Her uncle's horses were taken by the army a long time ago. She is very anxious to know all about America, and I have told her all about you and mother and our home in Cincinnati.

"She asked me what I am going to do after the war, and I told her that I would return to Cincinnati to help you at the store. She cried because she said she did not know where she was going after the war. Her father and two brothers have been killed and her aunt and uncle are very old.

"I have some more to write to you about Germain later. But must stop here because the Sergeants are a.s.sembling the men for indoor instruction. Love to all. It is raining very hard. Your son, ----"

Blank's face seemed to redden as he hesitated over a postscript line at the bottom of the page.

"This is nothing," he said. "I just asked father to ask mother to send me one of the photographs I had taken on the day I enlisted."

"For Germain?" the Captain enquired, smilingly.

"Yes, sir," replied Blank.

"Why didn't you write this in English?" the Captain asked.

"My father reads only German," Blank replied.

Blank was instructed to rewrite his letter in English and address it to some friend who could translate it into German for his father. As the door closed on this American soldier of German extraction, I asked the Captain, "Do you think Germain could stand for Blank's German name, after all she has lost at the hands of the Germans?"

"She'll probably be wearing it proudly around Cincinnati within a year after the war is over," the Captain replied.

It might be rea.s.suring at this point to remark that girls in America really have no occasion to fear that many of our soldiers will leave their hearts in France. The French women are kind to them, help them in their French lessons, and frequently feed them with home delicacies unknown to the company mess stoves, but every American soldier overseas seems to have that perfectly natural hankering to come back to the girls he left behind.

The soldier mail addressed daily to mothers and sweethearts back in the States ran far into the tons. The men were really homesick for their American women folks. I was aware of this even before I witnessed the reception given by our men to the first American nurses to reach the other side.

The hospital unit to which they belonged had been transported into that training area so quickly and so secretly that its presence there was unknown for some time. I happened to locate it by chance.

Several of us correspondents seeking a change of diet from the monotonous menu provided by the hard-working madam of our modest hostelry, motored in a new direction, over roads that opened new vistas in this picture book of the world.

Long straight avenues of towering trees whose foliage roofed the roadways were sufficient to reanimate recollections of old masters of brush realism. Ploughed fields veiled with the low-hanging mist of evening time, and distant steeples of homely simplicity faintly glazed by the last rays of the setting sun, reproduced the tones of "The Angelus" with the over-generous hugeness of nature.

And there in that prettiest of French watering places--Vittel--we came upon those first American nurses attached to the American Expeditionary Forces. They told us that all they knew was the name of the place they were in, that they were without maps and were not even aware of what part of France they were located in.

It developed that the unit's motor transportation had not arrived and, other automobiles being as scarce as German flags, communication with the nearby camps had been almost non-existent. Orders had been received from field headquarters and acknowledged, but its relation in distance or direction to their whereabouts were shrouded in mystery. But not for long.

Soon the word spread through the training area that American nurses had a hospital in the same zone and some of the homesick Yanks began to make threats of self-mutilation in order that they might be sent to that hospital.

The hospital unit was soon followed by the arrival of numerous American auxiliary organisations and the kindly activities of the workers as well as their numbers became such as to cause the men to wonder what kind of a war they were in.

I happened to meet an old top sergeant of the regular army, a man I had known in Mexico, with the American Punitive Expedition. He had just received a large bundle of newspapers from home and he was bringing himself up-to-date on the news. I asked him what was happening back home.

"Great things are going on in the States," he said, looking up from his papers. "Here's one story in the newspaper that says the Y. M. C. A. is sending over five hundred secretaries to tell us jokes and funny stories. And here's another account about the Red Cross donating half a million dollars to build recreation booths for us along the front. And here's a story about a New York actor getting a committee of entertainers together to come over and sing and dance for us. And down in Philadelphia they're talking about collecting a million dollars to build tabernacles along the front so's Billy Sunday can preach to us.

What I'm wondering about is, when in h.e.l.l they're going to send the army over."

But that was in the early fall of 1917, and as I write these lines now, in the last days of 1918, I am aware and so is the world, that in all of France n.o.body will ever ask that question again.

That army got there.

CHAPTER V

MAKING THE MEN WHO MAN THE GUNS

While our infantry perfected their training in the Vosges, the first American artillery in France undertook a schedule of studies in an old French artillery post located near the Swiss frontier. This place is called Valdahon, and for scores of years had been one of the training places for French artillery. But during the third and fourth years of the war nearly all of the French artillery units being on the front, all subsequent drafts of French artillerymen received their training under actual war conditions.

So it was that the French war department turned over to the Americans this artillery training ground which had been long vacant. Three American artillery regiments, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh, comprising the first U. S. Artillery Brigade, began training at this post.

The barracks had been long unoccupied and much preparatory work was necessary before our artillerymen could move in. Much of this work devolved upon the shoulders of the Brigade Quartermaster.

The first difficulty that he encountered was the matter of illumination for the barracks, mess halls and lecture rooms. All of the buildings were wired, but there was no current. The Quartermaster began an investigation and this was what he found:

The post had been supplied with electricity from a generating plant located on a river about ten miles away. This plant had supplied electrical energy for fifteen small French towns located in the vicinity. The plant was owned and operated by a Frenchman, who was about forty years old. The French Government, realising the necessity for illumination, had exempted this man from military service, so that he remained at his plant and kept the same in operation for the benefit of the camp at Valdahon and the fifteen small towns nearby.

Then the gossips of the countryside got busy. These people began to say that Monsieur X, the operator of the plant, was not patriotic, in other words, that he was a slacker for not being at the front when all of their menfolk had been sent away to the war.

Now it so happened that Monsieur X was not a slacker, and his inclination had always been to get into the fight with the Germans, but the Government had represented to him that it was his greater duty to remain and keep his plant in operation to provide light for the countryside.

When the talk of the countryside reached Monsieur X's ears, he being a country-loving Frenchman was infuriated. He denounced the gossips as being unappreciative of the great sacrifice he had been making for their benefit, and, to make them realise it, he decided on penalising them.

Monsieur X simply closed down his plant, locked and barred the doors and windows, donned his French uniform and went away to the front to join his old regiment. That night those villagers in the fifteen nearby towns, who had been using electrical illumination, went to bed in the dark.

It required considerable research on the part of the Artillery Quartermaster to reveal all these facts. The electric lights had been unused for fifteen months when he arrived there, and he started to see what he could do to put the plant back to work. It required nothing less finally than a special action by the French Minister of War whereby orders were received by Monsieur X commanding him to leave his regiment at the front and go back to his plant by the riverside and start making electricity again.

With the lights on and water piped in for bathing facilities, and extensive arrangements made for the instalment of stoves and other heating apparatus, the purchase of wood fuel and fodder for the animals, the Brigade moved in and occupied the camp.

The American officer in command of that post went there as a Brigadier General. As I observed him at his work in those early days, I seemed to see in his appearance and disposition some of the characteristics of a Grant. He wore a stubby-pointed beard and he clamped his teeth tight on the b.u.t.t end of a cigar. I saw him frequently wearing the $11.50 regulation issue uniform of the enlisted men. I saw him frequently in rubber boots standing hip deep in the mud of the gun pits, talking to the men like a father--a kindly, yet stern father who knew how to produce discipline and results.

While at the post, he won promotion to a Major General's rank, and in less than six months he was elevated to the grade of a full General and was given the highest ranking military post in the United States. That man who trained our first artillerymen in France was General Peyton C.

March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army.