''And they thought we wouldn't fight'', Floyd Phillips Gibbons [hot novels to read .TXT] 📗

sections that the battery would get ready to move immediately. Orders were to clear the village by six o'clock. Neither men nor horses were rested, but we moved out on time and breakfasted on the road.

The way seemed long, the roads bad and the guns heavy. But we were passing through an Eden of beauty—green fields and rolling hills crested by ancient châteaux. At times, the road wound down through hillside orchards, white and pink with apple blooms. Fatigue was heavy on man and beast, but I heard one walking cannoneer singing, "When It's Apple Blossom-time in Normandie." Another rider in the column recalled the time when his father used to give him ten cents for standing on the bottom of an upturned tin basin and reciting, "Over the mountains winding down, horse and foot into Frederickstown."

"The jar of these guns as they grind over the gravel is enough to grind the heart out of you," said a sweating cannoneer who was pressing a helping shoulder to one of the heavies as we negotiated a steep hill.

"What in hell you kicking about," said the man opposite. "Suppose you was travelling with one of them guns the Germans are using on Paris—I mean that old John J. Longdistance. You'd know what heavy guns are then. They say that the gun's so big and takes so many horses to haul it, that the man who drives the lead pair has never spent the night in the same town with the fellow who rides wheel swing."

A young reserve lieutenant with mind intensely on his work, combined for my benefit his impressions of scenery with a lesson in artillery location. His characterisation of the landscape was as technical as it was unpoetical.

"A great howitzer country," was the tenor of his remarks. "Look at the bottom of that slide. Fine position for one fifty-five. Take that gully over there. That's a beaut of a place. No use talking. Great howitzer country."

During the afternoon, a veterinarian turned over two horses to a French peasant. One was exhausted and unable to proceed, and the other suffered a bad hoof, which would require weeks for healing. News that both animals were not going to be shot was received with joy by two men who had ridden them. I saw them patting the disabled mounts affectionately on the neck and heard one of them say,

"'Salright, old timer—'salright. Frenchy here is going to take care of you all right. Uncle Sam's paying the bill and I am coming back and get you soon's we give Fritzie his bumps."

An hour later, a young cannoneer gave in to fatigue and ignored orders to the extent of reclining on gun trail and falling asleep. A rut in the road made a stiff jolt, he rolled off and one ponderous wheel of the gun carriage passed over him. One leg, one arm and two ribs were broken and his feet crushed, was the doctor's verdict as the victim was carried away in an ambulance.

"He'll get better all right," said the medico, "but he's finished his bit in the army."

The column halted for lunch outside of a small town and I climbed on foot to the hilltop castle where mediæval and modern were mixed in mute mélange. A drawbridge crossed a long dry moat to cracked walls of rock covered with ivy. For all its well preserved signs of artistic ruin, it was occupied and well fitted within. From the topmost parapet of one rickety looking tower, a wire stretched out through the air to an old, ruined mill which was surmounted by a modern wind motor, the tail of which incongruously advertised the words "Ideal power," with the typical conspicuity of American salesmanship.

Near the base of the old mill was another jumble of moss-covered rocks, now used as a summer house, but open on all sides. At a table in the centre of this open structure, sat a blond haired young American soldier with black receivers clamped to either ear. I approached and watched him jotting down words on a paper pad before him. After several minutes of intent silence, he removed the harness from his head and told me that he belonged to the wireless outfit with the artillery and this station had been in operation since the day before.

"Seems so peaceful here with the sun streaming down over these old walls," he said.

"What do you hear out of the air?" I asked.

"Oh, we pick up a lot of junk," he replied, "I'm waiting for the German communiqué now. Here's some Spanish stuff I just picked up and some more junk in French. The English stations haven't started this afternoon. A few minutes ago I heard a German aeroplane signalling by wireless to a German battery and directing its fire. I could tell every time the gun was ordered to fire and every time the aviator said the shot was short or over. It's kinder funny to sit back here in quiet and listen in the war, isn't it?" I agreed it was weird and it was.

In darkness again at the end of a hard day on the road, we parked the guns that night in a little village which was headquarters for our regiment and where I spent the night writing by an old oil lamp in the Mayor's office. A former Chicago bellhop who spoke better Italian than English and naturally should, was sleeping on a blanket roll on the floor near me. On the walls of the room were posted numerous flag-decked proclamations, some now yellow with the time that had passed over them since their issue back in 1914. They pertained to the mobilisation of the men of the village, men whose names remain now only as a memory.

But in their place was the new khaki-clad Chicago bellhop snoring there on the floor and several thousand more as sturdy and ready as he, all billeted within a stone's throw of that room. They were here to finish the fight begun by those village peasants who had marched away four years before when the Mayor of the town posted that bulletin. These Americans stood ready to go down to honoured graves beside them.

Our division was under the French high command and was buried in the midst of the mighty preparations then on foot. Our ranks were full, our numbers strong, our morale high. Every officer and man in the organisation had the feeling that the eyes of dashing French comrades-in-arms and hard fighting British brothers were on them. Our inspiration was in the belief that the attention of the Allied nations of the world and more particularly the hope and pride of our own people across the sea, was centred upon us. With that sacred feeling, the first division stood resolute to meet the test.

Some of the disquieting news then prevalent in the nervous civilian areas back of the lines, reached us, but its effect, as far as I could see, was nil. Our officers and men were as unconcerned about the reports of enemy successes as though we were children in the nursery of a burning house and the neighbourhood was ringing with fire alarms. German advances before Amiens, enemy rushes gaining gory ground in Flanders, carried no shock to the high resolve that existed in the Allied reserves of which we were a part.

Our army knew nothing but confidence. If there was other than optimism to be derived from the current events, then our army was inclined to consider such a result as gratifying, because it could be calculated to create a greater measure of speed and assistance from the slowly functioning powers in America. The reasoning was that any possible pessimism would hurry to the wheel every American shoulder that had failed to take up its individual war burden under the wave of optimism. The army had another reason for its optimism. Our officers knew something about the dark days that had preceded the first battle at the Marne. They were familiar with the gloomy outlook in 1914 that had led to the hurried removal of the French government from Paris to Bordeaux. Our men recalled how the enemy was then overrunning Belgium, how the old British "Contemptibles" were in retreat, and how the German was within twenty miles of the French capital.

In that crisis had come the message by Foch and the brilliant stroke with which he backed it up. What followed was the tumble and collapse of the straddling German effort and the forced transformation in the enemy's plans from a war of six weeks to a war of four years.

Our army knew the man who turned the trick at the Marne. We knew that we were under his command, and not the slightest doubt existed but that it was now our destiny to take part in another play of the cards which would call and cash the German hand. Our forces in the coming engagements were staking their lives, to a man, on Foch's ace in the hole.

That was the deadly earnestness of our army's confidence in Foch. The capture of a hill top in Picardy or the loss of a village in Flanders had no effect upon that confidence. It found reinforcement in the belief that since March 21st, America had gained a newer and keener appreciation of her part in the war.

Our army began to feel that the American people, more than three thousand miles away from the battle fronts, would have a better understanding of the intense meaning that had been already conveyed in General Pershing's words, "Confidence is needed but overconfidence is dangerous." In other words, our soldiers in the field began to feel that home tendencies that underrated the enemy's strength and underestimated the effort necessary to overcome him, had been corrected. The army had long felt that such tendencies had made good material for Billy Sunday's sermons and spread-eagle speeches, but they hadn't loaded guns or placed men in the front line.

We felt that this crisis had brought to America a better realisation of the fact that Germany had not been beaten and that she was yet to be beaten and that America's share in the administration of that beating would have to be greater and more determined than had heretofore been deemed necessary. It was the hope of the army that this realisation would reach the people with a shock. Shocks were known to make realisations less easy to forget. Forgetfulness from then on might have meant Allied defeat.

Lagging memories found no billet in the personnel of that First Division. Its records, registering five hundred casualties, kept in mind the fact that the division had seen service on the line and still had scores to settle with the enemy.

Its officers and men, with but few exceptions, had undergone their baptism in German fire and had found the experience not distasteful. The division had esprit which made the members of every regiment and brigade in it vie with the members of any other regiment and brigade. If you had asked any enlisted man in the division, he would have told you that his company, battery, regiment or brigade "had it all over the rest of them."

That was the feeling that our division brought with them when we marched into Picardy to meet the German push. That was the spirit that dominated officers and men during the ten days that we spent in manœuvres and preparations in that concentration area in the vicinity of the ancient town of Chaumont-en-Vexin in the department of the Oise. It was the feeling that made us anxious and eager to move on up to the actual front.

CHAPTER XI UNDER FIRE

On the day before our departure for the front from the concentration area in Picardy, every officer in the division, and they numbered almost a thousand, was summoned