The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

CHAPTER XIX
THE AMERICAN ARMY MARCHES TO THE TRENCHES

THE chief press officer told us that we could spend the first night in the trenches with the American army. There were eight correspondents and we went jingling up to the front with gas masks and steel helmets hung about our necks and canned provisions in our pockets. It was dusk when we left – . Bye-and-bye we could hear the guns plainly and the villages through which we traveled all showed their share of shelling. The front was still a few miles ahead of us, but we left the cars in the square of a large village and started to walk the rest of the way. We got no further than just beyond the town. An American officer stood at the foot of an old sign post which gave the distance to Metz, but not the difficulties. He asked us our destination and when we told him that we were going to spend the first night in the trenches with the American army he wouldn't hear of it.

"There'll be trouble enough up there," he said, "without newspapermen."

He was a nervous man, this major. Every now and then he would look at his watch. When he looked for the fourth time within two minutes he felt that we deserved an explanation.

"I'm a little nervous," he said, "because the Boches are so quiet tonight. I've been up here looking around for almost a week and every night the Germans have done some shelling." He looked at his watch again. "The first company of my battalion must be going in now." He stood and listened for six or seven seconds but there wasn't a sound. "I wonder what those Germans are up to?" he continued. "I don't like it. I wish they'd shoot a little. This business now doesn't seem natural."

We turned back toward the town and left the major at his post still listening for some sound from up there. Soon we heard a noise, but it came from the opposite direction. Soldiers were coming. There was a bend in the road where it straightened out in the last two miles to the trenches. It was so dark that we could not see the men until they were almost up to us. The Americans were marching to the front. The French had instructed them and the British and now they were ready to learn just what the Germans could teach them.

The night was as thick as the mud. The darkness seemed to close behind each line of men as they went by. Even the usual marching rhythm was missing. The mud took care of that. The doughboys would have sung if they could. Shells wouldn't have been much worse than the silence. One soldier did begin in a low voice, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching." An officer called, "Cut out that noise." There was no tramp, tramp, tramp on that road. Feet came down squish, squish, squish. There was also the sound of the wind. That wasn't very cheerful, either, for it was rising and beginning to moan a little. It seemed to get hold of the darkness and pile it up in drifts against the camouflage screens which lined the road.

At the spot where the road turned there was a café and across the road a military moving picture theater. The door of the café was open and a big patch of light fell across the road. The doughboys had to go through the patch of light and it was almost impossible not to turn a bit and look through the door. There was red wine and white to be had for the asking there, and persuasion would bring an omelette. The waitress was named Marie, but they called her Madelon. She was eighteen and had black hair with red ribbons. She could talk a little English, too, but nobody came to the door of the café to see the soldiers go by. There had been a good many who passed the door of that café in three years.

The pictures could not be seen from the road, but we could hear the hum of the machine which made them move. Presently, we went to the door and looked. The theater was packed with French soldiers who were back from the front to rest. American troops were going into the trenches for the first time. Our little group of civilians had come thousands of miles to see this thing, but the poilus did not stop to watch marching men. They paid their 10 centimes and went into the picture show. They had an American Western film that night, and French soldiers who only the day before had been face to face with Germans, shelled and gassed and harassed from aeroplanes, thrilled as Indians chased cowboys across a canvas screen. It grew more exciting presently, for the United States cavalry came riding up across the screen and at the head of the cavalcade rode Lieutenant Wallace Kirke. The villain had spread the story that he wasn't game, but there was nothing to that. The poilus realized that before the film was done and so did the Indians.

Meanwhile the doughboys were marching by as silently as the soldiers on the screen, for this wasn't a movie-house where they synchronized bugle calls and rifle fire to the progress of the film. At one point in the story there was some gun thunder, but it came at a time when the orchestra should have been playing "Hearts and Flowers" for the love scene in the garden. Of course, these were German guns, and they were fired with the usual German disregard for art.

Probably the men who were marching to the trenches would have enjoyed the scene of the home-coming of the cavalry, when Lieutenant Wallace Kirke confounded the villain, who actually held a commission as major in the United States army. However, the doughboys might have spotted him for a villain from the beginning, on account of his wretched saluting. The director should have spoken to him about that.

The marching men looked at the theater as they passed by, but only one soldier spoke. He said: "I certainly would like to know for sure whether I'll ever get to go to the movies again."

They went a couple of hundred yards more without a word, and then a soldier who couldn't stand the silence any longer shouted, "Whoopee! Whoopee!" It was too dark to conduct an investigation and too close to the line to administer any rebuke loud enough to be effective, and so the nearest officer just glared in the general direction of the offender. A little bit further on the soldiers found that the road was pock-marked here and there with shell holes. They began to realize the importance of silence then, for they knew that where a shell had gone once it could go again. It was necessary to walk carefully, for the road was covered with casual water in every hollow, and there was no seeing a hole until you stepped in it. They managed, however, to avoid the deeper holes and to jump most of the pools.

That is, the infantry did. Late that night a teamster reported that he had driven his four mules into a shell hole and broken the rear axle of his wagon.

"Why didn't you send a man out ahead to look out for shell holes?" asked the officer.

"I did," said the soldier. "He fell in first."

Presently the marching men came to the beginning of the trench system, and they were glad to get a wall on either side of them. There was no scramble, however, to be the first man in, and even the major of the battalion has forgotten the name of the first soldier to set foot in the French trenches. Some twenty or thirty men claim the honor, but it will be difficult to settle the matter with historical accuracy. A Middle Western farm boy, an Irishman with red hair or a German-American would seem to fit the circumstances best, but it's all a matter of choice. As the Americans came in the French marched out.

A trench during a relief is no good place for a demonstration, but some of the poilus paused to shake hands with the Americans. There were rumors that one or two doughboys had been kissed, but I was unable to substantiate these reports. Probably they are not true, for it would not be the sort of thing a company would forget.

Although the trenches for the most part were far from the German lines, there was noise enough to attract attention over the way. The Germans did not seem to know what was going on, but they wanted to know, and they sent up a number of star shells. These are the shells which explode to release a bright light suspended from a little silk parachute. These parachutes hung in the air for several minutes and brightly illumined No Man's Land. It was impossible to keep the Americans entirely quiet then. Some said "Oh!" and others exclaimed "Ah!" after the manner of crowds at a fire-works show.

Persiflage of this kind helped to make the men feel at home. Indeed, the trenches did not seem altogether unfamiliar, after all their days and nights in the practice trenches back in camp. The men were a little nervous, though, and took it out in smoking one cigarette after another. They shielded the light under their trench helmets. After an hour or so a green rocket went up and all the soldiers in the American trenches put on their gas masks. They had been drilled for weeks in getting them on fast and a green rocket was the signal agreed upon as the warning for an attack. Presently the word came from the trenches that the masks were not necessary. There had been no attack. The rocket came from the German trenches. It was quiet then all along the short trench line with the exception of an occasional rifle shot. The wind was making a good deal of noise out in the mess of weeds just beyond the wire and it sounded like Germans to some of the boys. It was clearer now and a sharp eyed man could see the stakes of the wire. They were a bit ominous, too.

"I was looking at one of those stakes," a doughboy told me, "and I kept alooking and alooking and all of a sudden it grew a pair of shoulders and a helmet and I let go at it."

There were others who suffered from the same optical illusion that night, but let it be said to their credit that when a working party examined the wire several days later they found some stakes which had been riddled through and through with bullets.

CHAPTER XX
TRENCH LIFE

THEY dragged the gun up by hand to fire the first shot in the war for the American army. The lieutenant in charge of the battery told us about it. He was standing on top of the gun emplacement and the historic seventy-five and a few others were being used every little while to fire other shots at the German lines. He had to pause, therefore, now and then in telling us history to make a little more.

"I put it up to my men," said the lieutenant, "that we would have to wait a little for the horses and if we wanted to be sure of firing the first shot it would be a good stunt to drag the gun into place ourselves. We had a little talk and everybody was anxious for our battery to get in the first shot, so we decided to go through with it and not wait for the horses. We dragged the gun up at night and I can tell you that the last mile and a half took some pulling. Excuse me a second – " He leaned down to the pit and began to shout figures. He made them quick and snappy like a football signal and he looked exactly like a quarterback with the tin hat on his head which might have been a leather head guard. There was a sort of eagerness about him, too, as if the ball was on the five-yard line with one minute more to play. It was all in his manner. Everything he said was professional enough. After the string of figures he shouted "watch your bubble" and then he went on with the story.

"We fired the first shot at exactly six twenty-seven in the morning," he said. "It was a shrapnel shell." He turned to the gunners again. "Ready to fire," he shouted down to the men in the pit. "You needn't put your fingers in your ears just yet," he told us.

"It was pretty foggy when we got up to the front and we thought first we'd just have to blaze away in the general direction of the Germans without any particular observation. But all of a sudden the fog lifted and right from here we could see a bunch of Germans out fixing their wire. I gave 'em shrapnel and they scattered back to their dugouts like prairie dogs. It was great!"

The lieutenant smiled at the recollection of the adventure. It meant as much to him as a sixty-yard run in the Princeton game or a touchdown against Yale. He was fortunate enough to be still getting a tingle out of the war that had nothing to do with the cold wind that was coming over No Man's Land. A moment later he grinned again and he suddenly called, "Fire," and the roar of the gun under our feet came quicker than we could get our fingers in our ears.

The gun had earned a rest now and we went down and looked at it. The gunners had chalked a name on the carriage and we found that this seventy-five which fired the first shot against the Germans was called Heinie. We wanted to know the name of the man who fired the first shot. Our consciences were troubling us about that. This was our first day up with the guns in the American sector and the men had been in two days. There were drawbacks in writing the war correspondence from a distance as we had been compelled to do up to this time. We'd heard, of course, that the first gun had been fired and that made it imperative that the story should be "reconstructed," as the modern newspaperman says when he's writing about something which he didn't see. Of course, everybody back home would want to know who fired the first shot. Censorship prevented the use of the name, but we couldn't blame the censors for that, because when we wrote the stories we didn't know his name or anything about him. With just one dissenting vote the correspondents decided that the man who fired the first shot must have been a red-headed Irishman. And so it was cabled. Now we wanted to know whether he was.

The lieutenant told us the name, but that didn't settle the question. It was a more or less non-committal name and the officer volunteered to find out for us. He led the party over to the mouth of another dugout and called down: "Sergeant – , there's some newspapermen here and they want to know whether you're Irish."

Immediately there was a scrambling noise down in the dugout and up came the gunner on the run. "I am not," he said.

"Haven't you got an Irish father or mother or aren't any of your people Irish?" asked one of the correspondents hopefully. He was committed to the red-headed story and he was not prepared to give up yet. "Not one of 'em," said the sergeant, "I haven't got a drop of Irish blood in me. I come from South Bend, Indiana."

The party left the gunner rather disconsolately. That is, all but the hopeful correspondent. "He's Irish, all right," he said. We turned on the optimist.

"Didn't you hear him say he wasn't Irish?" we shouted.

"Oh, that's all right," answered the optimist, "you didn't expect he was going to admit it. They never do."

"Say," inquired another reporter, "did anybody notice what was the color of the sergeant's hair?"

I had, but I said nothing. There had been disillusion enough for one day. It was black with a little gray around the temples.

The lieutenant took us to his dugout and we tried to get some copy out of him. A man from an evening newspaper spoiled our chances right away.

"I suppose," he said, "that you made a little speech to the men before they fired that first shot?"

The little lieutenant was professional in an instant. He felt a sudden fear that his manner or his youth had led us to picture him as a romantic figure.

"What would I make a speech for?" he inquired coldly.

"Well," said the reporter, "I should think you'd want to say something. You were going to fire the first shot of the war, and more than that, you were going to fire the first shot in anger which the American army has ever fired in Europe. Of course, I didn't mean a speech exactly, but you must have said something."

"No," answered the officer, "I just gave 'em the range and then I said 'ready to fire' and then, 'fire.' It was just like this afternoon. We made it perfectly regular."

"In the army a thing like that's just part of the day's work," the lieutenant added, with an attempted assumption of great sophistication in regard to war matters, as if this was at least his twentieth campaign.

And yet I think that if we had heard our little quarterback give his order at six twenty-seven on that misty morning there would have been something in his voice when he said "fire" which would have betrayed him to us. I think it must have been a little sharper, a little faster and a little louder for this first shot than it will be when he calls "fire" for the thousand-and-tenth round.

The guns had decided to call it a day by this time and so we headed for the trenches. We had to travel across a big bare stretch of country which was wind-swept and rain-soaked on this particular afternoon. Every now and then somebody fell into a shell hole, for the meadow was well slashed up, although there didn't seem to be anything much to shoot at. On the whole, the sector chosen for the first Americans in the trenches might well be called a quiet front. There was shelling back and forth each day, but many places were immune. Some villages just back of the French lines had not been fired at for almost a year, although they were within easy range of field pieces, and the French in return didn't fire at villages in the German lines. This was by tacit agreement. Both sides had held the lines in this part of the country lightly and both sides were content to sit tight and not stir up trouble.

Things livened up after the Americans came in because the Germans soon found out that new troops were opposing them and they wanted to identify the units. Some of the increasing liveliness was also due to the fact that American gunners were anxious to get practice and fired much more than the French had done. Indeed, an American officer earned a rebuke from his superiors because he fired into a German village which had been hitherto immune. This was a mistake, for the Germans immediately retaliated by shelling a French village and the civilian population was forced to move out. For more than a year they had lived close to the battle lines in comparative safety. On the night the American troops moved in to the trenches a baby was born in a village less than a mile from one of our battalion headquarters. Major General Sibert became her godfather and the child was christened Unis in honor of Les Etats Unis.

The increase in artillery activity had hardly begun on the day we paid our visit. No German shells fell near us as we crossed the meadow, but when we reached a battalion headquarters the major in charge pointed with pride to a German shell which had landed on top of his kitchen that morning. The rain had played him a good service, for the shell simply buried itself, fragments and all. He did not seem properly appreciative of the weather. "All Gaul," he said, "is divided into three parts and two of them are water."

Still, we found ourselves drier in the trenches than out of them. They were floored with boards and well lined. As trenches go they were good, but, of course, that isn't saying a great deal. We were the first newspapermen to enter the American trenches and so we wanted to see the first line, although it was growing dark. We wound around and around for many yards and it was hard walking for some of us, as the French had built these trenches for short men. It was necessary to walk with a crouch like an Indian on the movie warpath. This was according to instructions, but we may have been unduly cautious, for not a hostile shot was fired while we were in the first line. It was barely possible to see the German trenches through the mist and still more difficult to realize that there was a menace in the untidy welts of mud which lay at the other side of the meadow. But the point from which we looked across to the German line was the very salient where the Germans made their first raid a week later and captured twelve men, killed three, and wounded five.

The doughboys wouldn't let us go without pointing out all the sights. To the right was the apple tree. Here the Germans used to come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the French on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and gather fruit without molestation so long as not more than two came at a time. This was another tacit agreement in this quiet front, for the tree was in easy rifle range. One of the doughboys unwittingly broke that custom by taking a shot at two Germans who went to get apples.

"I like apples myself," he said, "and I just couldn't lie still and watch a squarehead carry them away by the armful."

The Hindenburg Rathskeller lay to the left of our trench, but it was only dimly visible through the rain. This battered building was once a tiny roadside café. Now patrols take shelter behind its walls at night and try to find cheer in the room where only a few broken bottles remain. The poilus maintain that on dark nights the ghosts of cognac, of burgundy and even champagne flit about in and out of the broken windows and that a lucky soldier may sometimes detect, by an inner warmth and tingle, the ghost of some drink that is gone. Sometimes it is a German patrol which spends the night in No Man's Café. It is more or less a custom to allow whichever side gets to the café first to hold it for the night, since it is a strong defensive position in the dark. The night before our visit an American patrol reached the café and found that the Germans who had been there the night before had placed above the shattered door of the little inn a sign which read: "Hindenburg Rathskeller." Silently but swiftly one of the doughboys scratched out the name with a pencil and left a sign of his own. When next the Germans came they found that Hindenburg Rathskeller had become the Baltimore Dairy Lunch.

Several hundred yards behind the Baltimore Dairy Lunch is another ruined house and it was here that the Americans killed their first German. Even on clear days Germans in groups of not more than two would sometimes come from their trenches to the house. The French thought that they had a machine gun there, but it was not worth while to waste shells on parties of one or two and as the range was almost 1700 yards the Germans felt comparatively immune from rifle fire. Two doughboys saw a German walking along the road one bright morning and as they had telescopic sights on their rifles they were anxious to try a shot. One of the men was a sergeant and the other a corporal.

"That's my German," said the sergeant.

"I saw him first," objected the corporal, and so they agreed to count five and then fire together. One or both of them hit him, for down he came.

When we got back to the second line the men were having supper. The food supplied to the soldiers in the trenches was hot and adequate and moderately abundant. A few of the men complained that they got only two meals a day, but I found that there was an early ration of coffee and bread which these soldiers did not count as enough of a breakfast to be mentioned as a meal. This comes at dawn and then there are meals at about eleven and five. One of the men with whom I talked was mournful.

"We don't get anything much but slum," he said, when I asked him, "How's the food?" That did not sound appetizing until I found out that slum was a stew made of beef and potatoes and carrots and lots of onions. We ate some and it was very good, but perhaps it does pall a little after the third or fourth day. It forms the main staple of army diet in the trenches, for it is not possible to give the men in the line any great variety of food. The most tragic story in connection with food which we heard concerned a company which was just beginning dinner when a gas alarm was sounded. The men had been carefully trained to drop everything and adjust their masks when this alarm was sounded. So down went their mess tins, spilling slum on the trench floor as the masks were quickly fastened. Five minutes later word came that the gas alarm was a mistake.

Before we left we saw a patrol start out. The doughboys took to patrolling eagerly and officers who asked for volunteers were always swamped with requests from men who wanted to go. One lieutenant was surprised to have a large fat cook come to him to say that he would not be happy unless allowed to make a trip across No Man's Land to the German wire. When the officer asked him why he was so anxious to go, he said: "Well, you see, I promised to get a German helmet and an overcoat for a girl for Christmas and I haven't got much time left."

It was dark when we left the trenches and started cross country. The German guns had begun to fire a little. They were spasmodically shelling a clump of woods half a mile away and seemed indifferent to correspondents. But by this time the weather was actively hostile. The rain had changed to snow and the wind had risen to a gale. Every shell hole had become a trap to catch the unwary and wet him to the waist. Little brooks were carrying on like rivers and amateur lakes were everywhere. We walked and walked and suddenly the French lieutenant who was guiding us paused and explained that he hadn't the least idea where we were. Nothing could be seen through the driving snow and there was no certainty that we hadn't turned completely around. We wondered if there were any gaps in the wire and if it would be possible to walk into the German lines by mistake. We also wondered whether the Kaiser's three hundred marks for the first American would stand if the prisoner was only a reporter. Just then there was a sudden sharp rift in the mist ahead of us. A big flash cut through the snow and fog and after a second we heard a bang behind us.

"Those are American guns," said our guide, and we made for them. We were lost again once or twice, but each time we just stood and waited for the flash from the battery until we reached our base. Shortly after we arrived the shelling ceased. There was hardly a warlike sound. It was a quiet night on a tranquil front. The weather was too bad even for fighting.

We went to the hospital in the little town and were allowed to look at the first German prisoner. He was a pretty sick boy when we saw him. He gave his age when examined as nineteen, but he looked younger and not very dangerous, for he was just coming out of the ether. The American doctors were giving him the best of care. He had a room to himself and his own nurse. The doughboys had captured him close to the American wire. There had been great rivalry as to which company would get the first prisoner, but he came almost unsought. The patrol was back to its own wire when the soldiers heard the noise of somebody moving about to the left. He was making no effort to walk quietly. As he came over a little hillock his outline could be seen for a second and one of the Americans called out to him to halt. He turned and started to run, but a doughboy fired and hit him in the leg and another soldier's bullet came through his back. The patrol carried the prisoner to the trench. He seemed much more dazed by surprise than by the pain of his wounds. "You're not French," he said several times as the curious Americans gathered about him in a close, dim circle illuminated by pocket flash lamps. The prisoner next guessed that they were English and when the soldiers told him that they were Americans he said that he and his comrades did not know that Americans were in the line opposite them. Somebody gave him a cigarette and he grew more chipper in spite of his wounds. He began to talk, saying: "Ich bin ein esel."

There were several Americans who had enough German for that and they asked him why. The prisoner explained that he had been assigned to deliver letters to the soldiers. Some of the letters were for men in a distant trench which slanted toward the French line, and so to save time he had taken a short cut through No Man's Land. It was a dark night but he thought he knew the way. He kept bearing to the left. Now, he said, he knew he should have turned to the right. He said it would be a lesson to him. The next morning we heard that the German had died and would be buried with full military honors.

There was another patient whom we were interested in seeing. Lieutenant Devere H. Harden was the first American officer wounded in the war. His wound was not a very bad one and the doctors allowed us to crowd about his bed and ask questions. In spite of the British saying, "you never hear a shell that hits you," Harden said he both saw and heard his particular shell. He thought it would have scored a direct hit on his head if he had not fallen flat. As it was the projectile exploded almost fifty feet away from him and his wound was caused by a fragment which flew back and lodged behind his knee. He did not know that he had been hit, but sought shelter in a dugout. Just as he got to the door he felt a pain in his knee and fell over. He noticed then that his leg was bleeding a little. A French officer ran over to him and said: "You are a very lucky man."

"How is that?" asked Harden.

"Why, you're the first American to be wounded and I'm going to recommend to the general that he put up a tablet right here with your name on it and the date and 'first American to shed his blood for France.'"

The thought of the tablet didn't cheer the lieutenant up half so much as when we prevailed on the doctors to let him take some cigarettes from us and begin smoking again. By this time we had almost forgotten about the slum of earlier in the evening and so we stopped at the first café we came to on the road back to the correspondents' headquarters. Several American soldiers were sitting around a small stove in the kitchen, and although they said nothing, an old woman was cooking omelettes and small steaks and distributing them about to the rightful owners without the slightest mistake. At least there were no complaints. Perhaps the doughboys were afraid of the old woman for whenever one of them got in her way she would say nothing but push him violently in the chest with both hands. He would then step back and the cooking would go on.

Presently a noisy soldier came roaring into the kitchen. It took him just half a minute to get acquainted and about that much more time to tell us that he was driving a four mule team with rations. We asked him if he had gotten near the front and he snorted scornfully. He told us that the night before he had almost driven into the German lines. According to his story, he lost his way in the dark and drove past the third line trench, the second line and the first line and started rumbling along an old road which cut straight across No Man's Land and into the German lines.