''And they thought we wouldn't fight'' - Floyd Phillips Gibbons (fantasy books to read txt) 📗

the battalion of Americans that was to take over the first American sector in France. Major Griffiths survived those strenuous days on the Pont-à-Mousson front, but he received a fatal wound three months later at the head of his battalion in front of Catigny, in Picardy. He died fighting under his own flag.

Just before daylight failed that wintry day, three poilus walked down the road from the front and into Ansauville. Two of them were helping a third, whose bandaged arm and shoulder explained the mission of the party. As they passed the rolling kitchens where the Americans were receiving their last meal before entering the trenches, there was silence and not even an exchange of greetings or smiles.

This lack of expression only indicated the depth of feeling stirred by the appearance of this wounded French soldier. The incident, although comparatively trivial, seemed to arouse within our men a solemn grimness and a more fervent determination to pay back the enemy in kind. In silence, our men finished that last meal, which consisted of cold corned beef, two slices of dry bread per man, and coffee.

The sight of that one wounded man did not make our boys realise more than they already did, what was in front of them. They had already made a forty mile march over frozen roads up to this place and had incurred discomforts seemingly greater than a shell-shattered arm or a bullet-fractured shoulder. After that gruelling hiking experience, it was a pleasant prospect to look forward to a chance of venting one's feelings on the enemy.

At the same time, no chip-on-the-shoulder cockiness marked the disposition of these men about to take first grips with the Germans,—no challenging bravado was revealed in the actions or statements of these grim, serious trail-blazers of the American front, whose attitude appeared to be one of soldierly resignation to the first martial principle, "Orders is orders."

As the companies lined up in the village street in full marching order, awaiting the command to move, several half-hearted attempts at jocularity died cold. One irrepressible made a futile attempt at frivolity by announcing that he had Cherokee blood in his veins and was so tough he could "spit battleships." This attempted jocularity drew as much mirth as an undertaker's final invitation to the mourners to take the last, long look at the departed.

One bright-faced youngster tingling with the thrill of anticipation, leaped on a gun carriage and absently whistled a shrill medley, beginning with "Yaka-hula," and ending with "Just a Song at Twilight." There was food for thought in the progress of his efforts from the frivolous to the pensive, but there was little time for such thoughts. No one even told him to shut up.

While there was still light, an aerial battle took place overhead. For fifteen minutes, the French anti-aircraft guns banged away at three German planes, which were audaciously sailing over our lines. The Americans rooted like bleacherites for the guns but the home team failed to score, and the Germans sailed serenely home. They apparently had had time to make adequate observations.

During the entire afternoon, German sausage balloons had hung high in the air back of the hostile line, offering additional advantages for enemy observation. On the highroad leading from Ansauville, a conspicuous sign L'enemie vous voit informed newcomers that German eyes were watching their movements and could interfere at any time with a long range shell. The fact was that the Germans held high ground and their glasses could command almost all of the terrain back of our lines.

Under this seemingly eternal espionage punctuated at intervals by heavy shelling, several old women of the village had remained in their homes, living above the ground on quiet days and moving their knitting to the front yard dugout at times when gas and shell and bomb interfered. Some of these women operated small shops in the front rooms of their damaged homes and the Americans lined up in front of the window counters and exchanged dirty French paper money for canned pâté de foi gras or jars of mustard.

A machine gun company with mule-drawn carts led the movement from Ansauville into the front. It was followed at fifty yard intervals by other sections. Progress down that road was executed in small groups—it was better to lose one whole section than an entire company.

That highroad to the front, with its border of shell-withered trees, was revealed that night against a bluish grey horizon occasionally rimmed with red. Against the sky, the moving groups were defined as impersonal black blocks. Young lieutenants marched ahead of each platoon. In the hazy light, it was difficult to distinguish them. The only difference was that their hips seemed bulkier from the heavy sacks, field glasses, map cases, canteens, pistol holsters and cartridge clips.

Each section, as it marched out of the village, passed under the eye of Major Griffiths, who sat on his horse in the black shadow of a wall. A sergeant commanding one section was coming toward him.

"Halt!" ordered the Major. "Sergeant, where is your helmet?"

"One of the men in my section is wearing it, sir," replied the Sergeant.

"Why?" snapped the Major.

"Somebody took his and he hadn't any," said the Sergeant, "so I made him wear mine, sir."

"Get it back and wear it yourself," the Major ordered. "Nothing could hurt the head of a man who couldn't hang on to his own helmet."

The order was obeyed, the section marched on and a bareheaded Irishman out of hearing of the Major said, "I told the Sergeant not to make me wear it; I don't need the damn thing."

Another section passed forward, the moonlight gleaming on the helmets jauntily cocked over one ear and casting black shadows over the faces of the wearers. From these shadows glowed red dots of fire.

"Drop those cigarettes," came the command from the all watchful, unseen presence mounted on the horse in the shadow of the wall. Automatically, the section spouted red arcs that fell to the road on either side in a shower of sparks.

"It's a damn shame to do that." Major Griffith spoke to me standing beside his horse. "You can't see a cigarette light fifty yards away, but if there were no orders against smoking, the men would be lighting matches or dumping pipes, and such flashes can be seen."

There was need for caution. The enemy was always watchful for an interval when one organisation was relieving another on the line. That period represented the time when an attack could cause the greatest confusion in the ranks of the defenders. But that night our men accomplished the relief of the French Moroccan division then in the line without incident.

Two nights later, in company with a party of correspondents, I paid a midnight visit to our men in the front line trenches of that first American sector. With all lights out, cigarettes tabooed and the siren silenced, our overloaded motor slushed slowly along the shell-pitted roads, carefully skirting groups of marching men and lumbering supply wagons that took shape suddenly out of the mist-laden road in front of us.

Although it was not raining, moisture seemed to drip from everything, and vapours from the ground, mixing with the fog overhead, almost obscured the hard-working moon.

In the greyness of the night sight and smell lost their keenness, and familiar objects assumed unnatural forms, grotesque and indistinct.

From somewhere ahead dull, muffled thumps in the mist brought memories of spring house cleaning and the dusting out of old cushions, but it was really the three-year-old song of the guns. Nature had censored observation by covering the spectacle with the mantle of indefiniteness. Still this was the big thing we had come to see—night work in and behind the front lines of the American sector.

We approached an engineers' dump, where the phantoms of fog gradually materialised into helmeted khaki figures that moved in mud knee-deep and carried boxes and planks and bundles of tools. Total silence covered all the activity and not a ray of light revealed what mysteries had been worked here in surroundings that seemed no part of this world.

An irregular pile of rock loomed grey and sinister before us, and, looking upward, we judged, from its gaping walls, that it was the remains of a church steeple. It was the dominating ruin in the town of Beaumont.

"Turn here to the left," the officer conducting our party whispered into the ear of the driver.

The sudden execution of the command caused the officer's helmet to rasp against that of the driver with a sound that set the cautious whispering to naught.

"Park here in the shadow," he continued. "Make no noise; show no light. They dropped shells here ten minutes ago. Gentlemen, this is regimental headquarters. Follow me."

In a well buttressed cellar, surmounted by a pile of ruins, we found the colonel sitting at a wooden table in front of a grandfather's clock of scratched mahogany. He called the roll—five special correspondents, Captain Chandler, American press officer, with a goatee and fur coat to match; Captain Vielcastel, a French press officer, who is a marquis and speaks English, and a lieutenant from brigade headquarters, who already had been named "Whispering Willie."

The colonel offered sticks to those with the cane habit. With two runners in the lead, we started down what had been the main street of the ruined village.

"I can't understand the dropping of that shell over here to-night," the colonel said. "When we relieved the French, there had been a long-standing agreement against such discourtesy. It's hard to believe the Boche would make a scrap of paper out of that agreement. They must have had a new gunner on the piece. We sent back two shells into their regimental headquarters. They have been quiet since."

Ten minutes' walk through the mud, and the colonel stopped to announce: "Within a hundred yards of you, a number of men are working. Can you hear 'em?"

No one could, so he showed us a long line of sweating Americans stretching off somewhere into the fog. Their job was more of the endless trench digging and improving behind the lines. While one party swung pick and spade in the trenches, relief parties slept on the ground nearby. The colonel explained that these parties arrived after dark, worked all night, and then carefully camouflaged all evidences of new earth and departed before daylight, leaving no trace of their night's work to be discovered by prying airman. Often the work was carried on under an intermittent shelling, but that night only two shells had landed near them.

An American-manned field gun shattered the silence, so close to us that we could feel its breath and had a greater respect for its bite. The proximity of the gun had not even been guessed by any of our party. A yellow stab of flame seemed to burn the mist through which the shell screeched on its way toward Germany.

Correspondent Junius Woods, who was wearing an oversized pair of hip rubber boots, immediately strapped the tops to his belt.

"I am taking no chance," he said; "I almost jumped out of them that time. They ought to send men out with a red flag before they pull off a blast like that."

The colonel then left us and with the whispering lieutenant and runners in advance, we continued toward the front.

"Walk in parties of two," was the order of the soft-toned subaltern. "Each party keep ten yards apart. Don't smoke. Don't talk. This road is reached by their field pieces. They also cover it with indirect machine gun fire. They sniped the brigade commander right along here this morning. He had to get down into the mud. I can afford to lose some of you, but not the entire party. If anything comes over, you are to jump into the communicating trenches on the right side of the road."

His instructions were obeyed and it was