A Yankee in the Trenches Part 9

Bones, who was educated and a thoughtful reader, had it figured out that the war was all due to the tyranny of the ruling cla.s.ses, with the Kaiser the chief offender.

A lot of the men wanted peace at any reasonable price. Anything, so they would get back to 'Arriet or Sadie or Maria.

I should say offhand that there was not one man in a hundred who was fighting consciously for any great recognized principle. And yet, with all their grousing and criticism, and all their overwhelming desire to have it over with, every one of them was loyal and brave and a hard fighter.

A good deal has been written about the brilliancy of the Canadians and the other Colonials. Too much credit cannot be given these men.

In an attack there are no troops with more dash than the Canadians, but when it comes to taking punishment and hanging on a hopeless situation, there are no troops in the wide world who can equal, much less surpa.s.s, the English. Personally I think that comparisons should be avoided. All the Allies are doing their full duty with all that is in them.

During most of the war talk, it was my habit to keep discreetly quiet. We were not in the war yet, and any remarks from me usually drew some hot shot about Mr. Wilson's "blankety-blinked bloomin'

notes."

There was another American, a chap named Sanford from Virginia, in B company, and he and I used to furnish a large amount of entertainment in these war talks. Sanford was a F.F.V. and didn't care who knew it. Also he thought General Lee was the greatest military genius ever known. One night he and I got started and had it hot and heavy as to the merits of the Civil War. This for some reason tickled the Tommies half to death, and after that they would egg us on to a discussion.

One of them would slyly say, "Darby, 'oo th' blinkin' 'ell was this blighter, General Grant?"

Or, "Hi sye, Sandy, Hi 'eard Darby syin' 'ow this General Lee was a bleedin' swab."

Then Sanford and I would pa.s.s the wink and go at it tooth and nail. It was ridiculous, arguing the toss on a long-gone-by small-time sc.r.a.p like the Civil War with the greatest show in history going on all around us. Anyway the Tommies loved it and would fairly howl with delight when we got to going good.

It is strange, but with so many Americans in the British service, I ran up against very few. I remember one night when we were making a night march from one village to another, we stopped for the customary ten-minutes-in-the-hour rest. Over yonder in a field there was a camp of some kind,--probably field artillery. There was dim light of a fire and the low murmur of voices. And then a fellow began to sing in a nice tenor:

Bury me not on the lone prairie Where the wild coyotes howl o'er me.

Bury me down in the little churchyard In a grave just six by three.

The last time I had heard that song was in New Orleans, and it was sung by a wild Texan. So I yelled, "h.e.l.lo there, Texas."

He answered, "h.e.l.lo, Yank. Where from?"

I answered, "Boston."

"Give my regards to Tremont Street and go to h.e.l.l," says he. A gale of laughter came out of the night. Just then we had the order to fall in, and away we went. I'd like to know sometime who that chap was.

After knocking about all over the north of France seemingly, we brought up at Canchy of a Sunday afternoon. Here the whole brigade, four battalions, had church parade, and after that the band played ragtime and the officers had a gabfest and compared medals, on top of which we were soaked with two hours' steady drill. We were at Canchy ten days, and they gave it to us good and plenty. We would drill all day and after dark it would be night 'ops. Finally so many men were going to the doctor worn out that he ordered a whole day and a half of rest.

Mr. Blofeld on Sat.u.r.day night suggested that, as we were going into the Somme within a few weeks, the non-coms ought to have a little blow-out. It would be the last time we would all ever be together.

He furnished us with all the drinkables we could get away with, including some very choice Johnny Walker. There was a lot of canned stuff, mostly sardines. Mr. Blofeld loaned us the officers'

phonograph.

It was a large, wet night. Everybody made a speech or sang a song, and we didn't go home until morning. It was a farewell party, and we went the limit. If there is one thing that the Britisher does better than another, it is getting ready to die. He does it with a smile,--and he dies with a laugh.

Poor chaps! Nearly all of them are pus.h.i.+ng up the daisies somewhere in France. Those who are not are, with one or two exceptions, out of the army with broken bodies.

CHAPTER IX

FIRST SIGHT OF THE TANKS

Late in the summer I acc.u.mulated a nice little case of trench fever.

This disease is due to remaining for long periods in the wet and mud, to racked nerves, and, I am inclined to think, to sleeping in the foul air of the dug-outs. The chief symptom is high temperature, and the patient aches a good deal. I was sent back to a place in the neighborhood of Arras and was there a week recuperating.

While I was there a woman spy whom I had known in Abalaine was brought to the village and shot. The frequency with which the duck walk at Abalaine had been sh.e.l.led, especially when ration parties or troops were going over it, had attracted a good deal of attention.

There was a single house not far from the end of that duck walk west of Abalaine, occupied by a woman and two or three children.

She had lived there for years and was, so far as anybody knew, a Frenchwoman in breeding and sympathies. She was in the habit of selling coffee to the soldiers, and, of course, gossiped with them and thus gained a good deal of information about troop movements.

She was not suspected for a long time. Then a gunner of a battery which was stationed near by noticed that certain children's garments, a red s.h.i.+rt and a blue one and several white garments, were on the clothesline in certain arrangement on the days when troops were to be moved along the duck walk the following night.

This soldier notified his officers, and evidence was acc.u.mulated that the woman was signalling to the Boche airplanes.

She was arrested, taken to the rear, and shot. I don't like to think that this woman was really French. She was, no doubt, one of the myriad of spies who were planted in France by the Germans long before the war.

After getting over the fever, I rejoined my battalion in the early part of September in the Somme district at a place called Mill Street. This was in reality a series of dug-outs along a road some little distance behind our second lines, but in the range of the German guns, which persistently tried for our artillery just beside us.

Within an hour of my arrival I was treated to a taste of one of the forms of German kultur which was new at the time. At least it was new to me--tear gas. This delectable vapor came over in sh.e.l.ls, comparatively harmless in themselves, but which loosed a gas, smelling at first a little like pineapple. When you got a good inhale you choked, and the eyes began to run. There was no controlling the tears, and the victim would fairly drip for a long time, leaving him wholly incapacitated.

Goggles provided for this gas were nearly useless, and we all resorted to the regular gas helmet. In this way we were able to stand the stuff.

The gas mask, by the way, was the bane of my existence in the trenches--one of the banes. I found that almost invariably after I had had mine on for a few minutes I got faint. Very often I would keel over entirely. A good many of the men were affected the same way, either from the lack of air inside the mask or by the influence of the chemicals with which the protector is impregnated.

One of the closest calls I had in all my war experience was at Mills Street. And Fritz was not to blame.

Several of the men, including myself, were squatted around a brazier cooking char and getting warm, for the nights were cold, when there was a terrific explosion. Investigation proved that an unexploded bomb had been buried under the brazier, and that it had gone off as the heat penetrated the ground. It is a wonder there weren't more of these accidents, as Tommy was forever throwing away his Millses.

The Mills bomb fires by pulling out a pin which releases a lever which explodes the bomb after four seconds. Lots of men never really trust a bomb. If you have one in your pocket, you feel that the pin may somehow get out, and if it does you know that you'll go to glory in small bits. I always had that feeling myself and used to throw away my Millses and scoop a hatful of dirt over them with my foot.

This particular bomb killed one man, wounded several, and shocked all of us. Two of the men managed to "swing" a "blighty" case out of it. I could have done the same if I had been wise enough.

I think I ought to say a word right here about the psychology of the Tommy in swinging a "blighty" case.

It is the one first, last, and always ambition of the Tommy to get back to Blighty. Usually he isn't "out there" because he wants to be but because he has to be. He is a patriot all right. His love of Blighty shows that. He will fight like a bag of wildcats when he gets where the fighting is, but he isn't going around looking for trouble. He knows that his officers will find that for him a-plenty.

When he gets letters from home and knows that the wife or the "nippers" or the old mother is sick, he wants to go home. And so he puts in his time hoping for a wound that will be "cushy" enough not to discommode him much and that will be bad enough to swing Blighty on. Sometimes when he wants very much to get back he stretches his conscience to the limit--and it is pretty elastic anyhow--and he fakes all sorts of illness. The M.O. is usually a bit too clever for Tommy, however, and out and out fakes seldom get by. Sometimes they do, and in the most unexpected cases.

I had a man named Isadore Epstein in my section who was instrumental in getting Blighty for himself and one other. Issy was a tailor by trade. He was no fighting man and didn't pretend to be, and he didn't care who knew it. He was wild to get a "blighty one"

or sh.e.l.l shock, or anything that would take him home.

One morning as we were preparing to go over the top, and the men were a little jumpy and nervous, I heard a shot behind me, and a bullet chugged into the sandbags beside my head. I whirled around, my first thought being that some one of our own men was trying to do me in. This is a thing that sometimes happens to unpopular officers and less frequently to the men. But not in this case.

It was Issy Epstein. He had been monkeying with his rifle and had shot himself in the hand. Of course, Issy was at once under suspicion of a self-inflicted wound, which is one of the worst crimes in the calendar. But the suspicion was removed instantly.

Issy was hopping around, raising a terrific row.

"Oi, oi," he wailed. "I'm ruint. I'm ruint. My thimble finger is gone. My thimble finger! I'm ruint. Oi, oi, oi, oi."

The poor fellow was so sincerely desolated over the loss of his necessary finger that I couldn't accuse him of shooting himself intentionally. I detailed a man named Bealer to take Issy back to a dressing station. Well, Bealer never came back.