The Glory of the Coming / What Mine Eyes Have Seen of Americans in Action in This Year of Grace and Allied Endeavor

To the swinging lilt of the air the column angled past where my cart was halted; and as it passed, the official minstrel of the company was moved to deliver himself of another verse, evidently of his own composition and dealing in a commemorative fashion with recent sentimental experiences. As I caught the lines and set them down in my notebook they were:

The troubadour with his mates rounded the outjutting corner of the church beyond the shrine, and I became aware of a highly muddied youngster who sat in a cottage doorway with his legs extending out across the curbing, engaged in literary labours. From the facts that he balanced a leather-backed book upon one knee and held a stub of a pencil poised above a fair clean page I deduced that he was posting his diary to date. Lots of the American privates keep war diaries—except when they forget to, which is oftener than not.

Three months before, or possibly six, the boy in the doorway would have been a strange figure in a strange setting. About him was scarce an object, save for the shifting figures of his own kind, to suggest the place whence he hailed. The broom that leaned against the wall alongside him was the only new thing in view. It was made of a sheaf of willow twigs bound about a staff. The stone well curb ten feet away was covered with the slow lichen growth of centuries. The house behind him, to judge by the thickness of its thatched and wattled roof and by the erosions in its three-foot walls of stone, had been standing for hundreds of years before the great-granddaddies of his generation fought the Indians for a right to a home site in the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies.

But now he was most thoroughly at home—and looked it. He spoke, addressing a companion stretched out upon the earth across the narrow way, and his voice carried the flat, slightly nasal accent of the midwestern corn-lands:

“Say, Murf, what's the name of this blamed town, anyhow?”

“Search me. Maybe they ain't never named it. I know you can't buy a decent cigarette in it, 'cause I've tried. The 'Y' ain't opened up yet and the local shops've got nothin' that a white man'd smoke, not if he never smoked again. What difference does the name make, anyway? All these towns are just alike, ain't they?”

With the sophisticated eyes of a potential citizen of, say, Weeping Willow, Nebraska, the first speaker considered the wonderfully quaint and picturesque vista of weathered, slant-ended cottages stretching away down the hill, and then, as he moistened the tip of his pencil with the tip of his tongue:

“You shore said a mouthful—they're all just alike, only some's funnier-lookin' than others. I wonder why they don't paint up and use a little whitewash once in a while. Take that little house yonder now!” He pointed his pencil toward a thatched cottage over whose crooked lines and mottled colours a painter would rave. “If you was to put a decent shingle roof on her and paint her white, with green trimmin's round the doors and winders, she wouldn't be half bad to look at. Now, would she? No cigarettes, huh? Nor nothin'!” Inspiration came to him as out of the skies and he grinned at his own conceit. “Tell you what—I'll jest put it down as 'Nowhere in France' and let it go at that.”

On the following day my friend, the lieutenant colonel, brought to the noonday mess a tale which I thought carried a distinct flavour of the Yankee trench essence. There was a captain in the regiment, a last year's graduate of the Academy, who wore the shiniest boots in all the land round about and the smartest Sam Browne belt, and who owned the most ornate pair of riding trousers, and by other signs and portents showed he had done his best to make the world safe for some sporting-goods emporium back in the States. This captain, it seemed, had approached a sergeant who was in charge of a squad engaged in policing the village street, which is army talk for tidying up with shovel and wheelbarrow.

“See here, sergeant,” demanded the young captain, “why don't you keep your men moving properly?”

“I'm tryin' to, sir,” answered the sergeant.

“Well, look at that man yonder,” said the captain, pointing toward a languid buck private who was leaning on his shovel. “I've been watching him and he hasn't moved an inch, except to scratch himself, for the last five minutes. Now go over there and stir him up! Shoot it into him good and proper! I want to hear what you say to him.”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting.

With no suspicion of a grin upon his face he charged down upon the delinquent.

“Here, you!” he shouted. “What do you mean, loafin' round here doin' nothin'? What do you think you are, anyhow—one of them dam' West Pointers?”

Floyd Gibbons, who was subsequently so badly wounded, rode one day into a battery of heavy artillery on the Montdidier Front. A begrimed battery man hailed him from a covert of green sods and camouflage where a six-inch gun squatted: “You're with the Chicago Tribune, ain't you?”

“Yes,” answered Gibbons. “Why?”

“Well, I just thought I'd tell you that the fellows in this battery have got a favourite line of daily readin' matter of their own, these days.”

“What do you call it?” inquired Gibbons. “We call it the Old Flannel Shirt,” answered the gunner. “Almost any time you can see a fellow round here goin' through his copy of it for hours on a stretch. He's always sure to find something interestin' too. We may not be what you'd call bookworms in this bunch, but we certainly are the champion little cootie-chasers of the United States Army.”

Body vermin or wet clothes or bad billets or the chance of a sudden and a violent taking-off—no matter what it is—the American soldier may be counted upon to make a joke of it.

This ability to distil a laugh out of what would cause many a civilian to swear or weep or quit in despair serves more objects than one in our expeditionary forces. For one thing it keeps the rank and file of the Army in cheerful mood to have the mass leavened by so many youths of an unquenchable spirit. For another, it provides a common ground for fraternising when Americans and Britishers are brigaded together or when they hold adjoining sectors; for the Britisher in this regard is constituted very much as the American is, except that his humour is apt to assume the form of underestimation of a thing, whereas the American's fancy customarily runs to gorgeous hyperbole and arrant exaggeration.

In a certain Canadian battalion that has made a splendid record for itself—though for that matter you could say the same of every Canadian battalion that has crossed the sea since the war began—there is a young chap whom we will call Sergeant Fulton, because that is not his real name. This Sergeant Fulton comes from one of the states west of the Great Divide, and he elected on his own account and of his own accord to get into the fighting nearly two years before his country went to war. In addition to being a remarkably handsome and personable youth, Sergeant Fulton is probably the best rifle shot of his age in the Dominion forces. This gift of his, which is so valuable a gift in trench fighting, was made apparent to his superior officers immediately after he crossed the Canadian line in 1915 to enlist, whereupon he very promptly was promoted from the ranks to be a non-com, and when his command got into action in France he was detailed for sniper duty.

At that congenial employment the youngster has been distinguishing himself ever since. Into the rifle pits young Fulton took something besides his ability to hit whatever he shot at, and his marvellous eyesight—he took a most enormous distaste for the institution of royalty; and this, too, in spite of the fact that when he joined up he swore allegiance to His Gracious Majesty George the Fifth. His ideas of royalty seemingly were based upon things he read in school histories. His conception of the present occupant of the English throne was a person mentally gaited very much like Henry the Eighth or Richard the Third, except with a worse disposition than either of those historic characters had. Apparently he conceived of the incumbent as rising in the morning and putting on a gold crown and sending a batch of nobles to the Tower, after which he enacted a number of unjust laws and, unless he felt better toward evening, possibly had a few heads off.

Acquaintance with his comrades at arms served to rid Sergeant Fulton of some of these beliefs, but despite broadening influences he has never ceased to wonder—generally doing his wondering in a loud clear voice—how any man who loved the breath of freedom in his nostrils found it endurable to live under a king when he might if he chose live under a President named Woodrow Wilson.

One morning just at daybreak a Canadian captain—who, by the way, told me this tale—crawled into a shell hole near the German lines where Sergeant Fulton and two other expert riflemen had been lying all night, like big-game hunters at a water hole, waiting for dawn to bring them their chance. One of Fulton's mates was a Vancouver lad, the other a London Tommy—a typical East-ender, but a very smart sniper.

“Cap,” whispered Fulton, from where he lay stretched on his belly in the herbage at the edge of the crater, “you've got here just in time. Ever since it began to get light a Fritzie has been digging over there in their front trench. I've had him spotted for half an hour. He has to squat down to dig; and that's telling on his back. Before long I figure he's going to straighten up to get the crick out of himself. When he does he'll show his head above the parapet, and that's when I'm going to part his hair in the middle with a bullet. Take a squint, Cap, through the periscope and you'll be able to locate him, dead easy. Then stay right there and you'll see the surprise party come off.”

So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and see the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy's parapet. He kept watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant had guessed right, and the sergeant's gun spoke once. Once was enough—a greenhorn at this game would have known that much.

For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched hands were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at nothing; and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the hole he had been digging.

Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach he turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a gratified grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said: “There goes another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”

The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge will be pleased w'en 'e 'ears wot you done fur 'im!”

Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these writings. The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One of the main compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because he used to be an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave his occupation in his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the expression on the other's face when a Minenwerfer from a German mortar fell near by on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made a hole in the earth deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide the average smokehouse in—it was, I repeat, to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel put this question:

“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and goes off, are you going to stay by me?”

“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain't goin' tell you no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I'll jest natch-elly be obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don't you set me down as no deserter. Jest put it in de books as 'absent without leave,' 'cause I'll be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”

“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest of the boys will do then?”

“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we'll shore render one service anyway: We'll spread de word all over France 'at de Germans is comin'!”

Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.

It was a member of the Fifteenth who in all apparent seriousness suggested to his captain that it might be a good idea to cross the carrier pigeon with the poll parrot so that when a bird came back from the Front it would be able to talk its own message instead of bringing it along hitched to its shank.

Speaking of carrier pigeons reminds me of a yam that may or may not be true—it sounds almost too good to be true—that is being related at the Front. The version most frequently told has it that a half company of a regiment in the Rainbow Division going forward early one morning in a heavy fog for a raid across No Man's Land carried along with the rest of the customary equipment a homing pigeon. The pigeon in its wicker cage swung on the arm of a private, who likewise was burdened with his rifle, his extra rounds of ammunition, his trenching tool, his pair of wire cutters, his steel helmet, his gas mask, his emergency ration and quite a number of other more or less cumbersome items.

It was to be a surprise attack behind the cloak of the fog, so there was no artillery preparation beforehand nor barrage fire as the squads climbed over the top and advanced into the mist-hidden beyond. Behind, in the posts of observation and in the post of command—“P.O.” and “P.C.” these are called in the algebraic terminology of modern war—the colonel and his aids and his intelligence officers waited for the sound of firing, and when after some minutes the distant rattle of rifle fire came to their ears they began calculating how long reasonably it might be before word reached them by one or another medium of communication touching on the results of the foray. But the ground telephone remained mute, and no runner returned through the fog with tidings. The suspense tautened as time passed.

Suddenly a pigeon sped into view flying close to the earth. With scores of pairs of eager eyes following it in its course the winged messenger circled until it located its portable cote just behind the colonel's position, and fluttering down it entered its familiar shelter.

An athletic member of the staff hustled up the ladder. In half a minute he was tumbling down again, clutching in one hand the little scroll of paper that he had found fastened about the pigeon's leg. With fingers that trembled in anxiety the colonel unrolled the paper and read aloud what was written upon it.

What he read, in the hurried chirography of a kid private, was the following succinct statement: “I'm tired of carrying this derned bird.” In London one night Don Martin, of the New York Herald, and I were crossing the Strand just above Trafalgar Square. In the murk of the unlighted street we bumped into a group of four uniformed figures. Looking close we made out that one was an American soldier, that one was a lanky Scot in kilts, slightly under the influence of something even more exhilarating than the music of the pipes, and that the remaining two were English privates. We gathered right away that an international discussion of some sort was under way. At the moment of our approach the American, a little dark fellow who spoke with an accent that betrayed his Italian nativity, had the floor, or rather he had the sidewalk. We halted in the half-darkness to listen.

“It's lika thees,” expounded the Yanko-Italian, “w'en I say 'I should worry' it mean—it mean—why, it mean I shoulda not worry. You getta me, huh?”

He glanced about him, plainly pleased with the very clear and comprehensive explanation of this expressive bit of Americanism, which had come to him in a sudden burst of inspiration.

The others stared at him blankly. It was one of the Englishmen who broke the silence.

“You 'ave nothin' to worry habout hat all, and so you say that you hare worryin'—his that hit?” he inquired. The American nodded. “Well, then, hall Hi can say his hit sounds like barmy Yankee nonsense to me.”

“Lusten here, laddie, to me,” put in the Scotchman. “If you've naught to worry about, why speak of it at all? That's whut I would be pleased to know.”

“Hoh, never mind,” spoke up the second Englishman; “let's go get hanother drink at the pub.”

“You're too late,” stated his countryman in lachrymose tones. “While we've been chin-chinnin' 'ere the bloomin' pub 'as closed—it's arfter hours for a drink.”

But the canny Scot already was feeling about with a huge paw in the back folds of his kilt. From some mysterious recess he slowly drew forth a flat flask.

“Lads,” he stated happily, “in the language of our American friend here, we should worry, because as it happens, thanks to me own forethought, we ha' na need to concern ourselves wi' worryin' at all, d'ye ken? Ha' the furst nip, Yank!”

This recital would not be complete did I fail to include in it a paragraph or so touching on the humorous proclivities of—guess who!—the commander of a German submarine, no less; a person who operated last winter mainly off the southernmost tip of Ireland with occasional incursions into the British Channel. This facetious Teuton was known to the crews of the British and American destroyers that did their best to sink him—and finally, it is believed, did sink him—as Kelly. Indeed in the derisive messages that this deep-sea joker used to send over the wireless to our stations he customarily signed himself by that name.

One day shortly before Kelly's U-boat disappeared altogether a commander of an American destroyer was sending by radio to a French port a message giving what he believed to be the probable location of the pestiferous but cheerful foe. It must have been that the subject of his communication was listening in on the air waves and that he knew the code which the American was that day employing. For all at once he broke in with his own wireless, and this was what the astonished operator at the receiving station on shore got:

“Your longitude is fine, your latitude is rotten. This place is getting too warm for me. I'm going to beat it. Good-bye. Kelly.”

Shortly after the first division of our new National Army reached France a group of fifty men were sent from it as replacements in the ranks of an old National Guard regiment which had been over for some time and which had suffered casualties and losses. When the squad went forward to their new assignment the general commanding the brigade from which the chosen fifty had been drawn sent to the commander of the regiment for which they were bound a letter reading somewhat after this style:

“There are not better men in our Army anywhere than the fifty I am giving you, in accordance with an order received by me from General Headquarters. Please see to it that no one in your regiment, whether officer or private, refers by word, look, deed or gesture to the circumstances under which these fifty men entered the service. Drafted men, regulars and volunteers are all on the same footing, and merely because my men came in with the draft and yours to a large extent came in a little earlier is no reason why any discrimination should be permitted in any quarter.”

A few weeks after the transfer had been accomplished the brigadier met the colonel, and recalling to the latter the sense of the letter he had written inquired whether there had been any suggestion of superiority on the part of the former National Guardsmen toward the new arrivals.

“General,” broke out the colonel, “do you know what those infernal cheeky scoundrels of yours have been doing ever since they joined? Well, I'm going to tell you. They've been walking to and fro in my regiment with their noses stuck up in the air, calling my boys 'draft-dodgers!”'

It's the essence of the trenches. And it's that—plus the courage they bring and the enthusiasm they have—which is winning this war sooner than some of the croakers at home expect it to be won.

CHAPTER XII. BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

AS I GO to and fro in the land I some-times wonder why the Germans keep a-picking on me. As heaven is my judge I tried to tell the truth about them and their armies when I was with them; but then, maybe that's the reason. At any rate I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a place in England or France either a battery of long-range guns shells it or else a hostile aëroplane happens along and bombs the town. The thing is more than a coincidence. It is getting to be a habit, an unhealthy habit at that. There must be method in it. And yet I have tried to bear myself in a modest and unostentatious way during this present trip. If in the reader's judgment the personal pronoun has occurred and recurred with considerable frequency in my writings I would say: Under the seemingly quaint but necessary rules of the censorship as conducted in these parts the only individual of American extraction at present connected in any way with war activities over here whom I may mention in my writings other than General Pershing is myself. Since the general to date has not figured to any extent in my personal experiences I am perforce driven to doing pieces largely about what I have seen and heard and felt.

Particularly is this true of these bombings and shellings. I repeat that I cannot imagine why the boche should single out a quiet, simple, private citizen for such attentions. It does not seem fair that I should ever be their target while shining marks move about the landscape with the utmost impunity. The German has a name for being efficient too. More than once in my readings I have seen his name coupled with the word efficiency. Take brigadier generals for example. Almost any colonel of our Expeditionary Forces in France, and particularly a senior colonel whose name is well up in the list, will tell you in confidence there are a number of brigadiers over here who could easily be spared and who would never be missed. Yet a brigadier general may move about from place to place in his automobile in comparative safety. But just let me go to the railroad station to buy a ticket for somewhere and immediately the news is transmitted by a mysterious occult influence to the Kaiser and he tells the Crown Prince and the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg or somebody, and inside of fifteen minutes the hands, August and Heinie, are either loading up the long-rangers or getting the most dependable bombing Gotha out of the sheds.

For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed away from London. I arrived in London sick with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That night the Huns flew over the Channel and spattered down inflammables and explosives to their heart's content. One chunk of a shell fell in the street within a few yards of my bedroom window, gouging a hole in the roadway. A bomb made a mighty noise and did some superficial damage in a park close by. It was my first experience at being bombed from on high, and any other time I should have taken a lively interest in the proceedings; but I was too sick to get up and dress and too dopy from the potions I had taken to awaken thoroughly.

But the next night, when I was convalescent, and the following night, when I was well along the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to sit up in bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche and repeated the original performance with variations.

In order to get away from the London fogs, which weren't doing my still tender throat any good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little seaside resort on the east coast of England, reaching there in the gloaming. What did the enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the neighbourhood within an hour after I got there? He went away at ten the same night, I the following morning at six-forty-five.

A delayed train was all that kept me from reaching Paris coincidentally with the first raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of months. The raiders covered up their disappointment by murdering a few helpless non-belligerents and departed, to return the next evening when I was present. I was domiciled in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the great long-distance gun began its bombardment of the city from the forest of Saint-Gobain nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell descended within two hundred yards of where I stood at a window and I saw the smoke of its explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulverized débris that rose; the jar of the crash shook the building. Throughout the following day, which was Palm Sunday—only we called it Bomb Sunday—the shelling continued. I was there, naturally.

On Monday morning I started for Soissons. So the gunners of the long-distance gun playing on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until the day after my party returned from the north. We got into the Gare du Nord late one night; the big gun opened up again early the next morning. I am not exaggerating; merely reciting a sequence of facts.

For nearly two years the Germans had left poor battered Soissons pretty much alone, though it was within easy reach of their howitzers; moreover, one of their speedy flying machines could reach Soissons from the German lines south of Laon within five minutes. But, as I say, they rather left it alone. Perhaps in their kindly sentimental way they were satisfied with their previous handiwork there. They had pretty well destroyed the magnificent old cathedral. It was not quite so utter a ruin as the cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at Rheims, or the Cloth Hall at Ypres, or the University at Louvain; nevertheless, I assume that from the Prussian point of view the job was a fairly complete one.

The wonderful, venerable glass windows, which can never be replaced, had been shattered to the last one, and the lines of the splendid dome might now only be traced like the curves of tottering arches, swinging up and out like the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of roofage where thousands of bickering ravens, those black devil birds of desolation, now fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their droppings the profaned sanctuary below. Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory monuments to Kultur to be found anywhere in Europe to-day.

Nor had the community at large been slighted. Everybody knows how thorough are the armies of the anointed War Lord. Relics which dated back to the days of Clovis had been battered out of all hope of restoration; things of antiquity and of inestimable historic value lay shattered in wreckage. Furthermore, from time to time, in 1914 and 1915 and even in 1916, when no military advantage was to be derived from visiting renewed affliction upon the vicinity and when no victims, save old men and women and innocent children, were likely to be added to the grand total of the grander tally which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had blasted away at the ancient city, leveling a homestead here and decimating a family there.

However, since the early part of 1916 they had somehow rather spared Soissons. But the train bearing us was halted within three miles of the station because, after keeping the peace for nearly two years, the enemy had picked upon that particular hour of that particular afternoon to renew his most insalubrious attentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore we entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accompaniment of whistling projectiles and clattering chimney-pots and smashing walls.

In Soissons we spent two nights. Both nights the Germans shelled the town and on the second night, in addition, bombed it from aëroplanes. It may have been fancy, but as we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly French staff officer it seemed to us that the firing behind us was lessening.

From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of the Amex Forces we motored one day to Nancy for a good dinner at a locally famous café. Simultaneously with our advent the foe's airmen showed up and the alerte was sounded for a gas attack. As between the prospect of spending the evening in an abri and staying out in the open air upon the road we chose the latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to the comparative quiet of the front lines. A little later a cross-country journey necessitated our changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connecting train was hours behind its appointed minute, as is usual in these days of disordered time cards, and while we waited hostile airships appeared flying so high they looked like bright iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As they swung lower, to sow bombs about the place, antiaircraft guns opened on them and they departed.

That same night our train, travelling with darkened carriages, was held up outside of Châlons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs at the tracks ahead of us and at a troop convoy passing through. The wreckage was afire when we crawled by on a snail's schedule an hour or so later.

Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental mess in a sector held by our troops. The colonel's headquarters were in a small wrecked village close up to the frontier. This village had been pretty well smashed up in 1914 and in 1915, but during the trench warfare that succeeded in this district no German shells had scored a direct hit within the communal confines. Yet the enemy that night, without prior warning and without known provocation, elected to break the tacit agreement for localised immunity. The bombardment began with a shock and a jar of impact shortly after we had retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in the top story of what once, upon a happier time, had been the home of a prominent citizen. It continued for three hours, and I will state that our rest was more or less interrupted. It slackened and ceased, though, as we departed in the morning after breakfast, and thereafter for a period of weeks during which we remained away all was tranquil and unconcussive there in that cluster of shattered stone cottages.

Another time we made a two-day expedition to the zone round Verdun. The great spring offensive, off and away to the westward, was then in its second week and the Verdun area enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big vociferous shells came pelting down upon an obscure hamlet well back behind the main defences within twenty minutes after we had stopped there. One burst in a courtyard outside a house where an American general was domiciled with his staff, and when we came in to pay our respects his aids still were gathering up fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs. The general said he couldn't imagine why the Him should have decided all of a sudden to pay him this compliment; but we knew why, or thought we knew: It was all a part of the German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.

At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.

As a result of this sort of experience, continuing through a period of months, I feel that I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also that I have acquired some slight facility at appraising the psychology of towns and cities persistently and frequently under shell or aërial attack. In the main I believe it may be taken as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of a small place behave after rather a different fashion from the way in which the inhabitants of a great city may be counted upon to bear themselves. For example, there is a difference plainly to be distinguished, I think, between the people of London and the people of Paris; and a difference likewise between the people of Paris and the people of Nancy. Certainly I have witnessed a great number of sights that were humorous with the grim and perilous humour of wartimes, and by the same token I have witnessed a manifold number of others that were fraught with the very essence of tragedy.

All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking tragedy that is compounded of a million lesser tragedies. You note that the door-opener at your favourite café in Paris uses his left hand only, and then you see that his right arm, with the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial arm; the real one was shot away. The barber who shaves you, the waiter who serves you, the chauffeur who drives you about in his taxicab moves with a limping awkward gait that betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a mutilated stump.

In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming toward you—a woman in nurse's garb and a splendid young boy soldier with decorations on his breast—bump into you, almost, it would seem, by intent. As mentally you start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed scar in the youth's temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face is beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the mark of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in the black and utter void of blindness.

Behind the battle lines you often see long lines of men whose ages are anywhere between forty and fifty—tired, dirty, bewhiskered men worn frazzle-thin by what they have undergone; men who should be at home with their wives and bairns instead of toiling through wet and cold and misery for endless leagues over sodden roads.

Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy burdens; their hands where they grip their rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and weary feet falter as they drag them, booted in stiff leather and bolstered with mud, from one cheerless billet to another. But they go on, uncomplainingly, as they have been going on uncomplainingly since the second year of this war, doing the thankless and unheroic labour at the back that the ranks at the front may be kept filled with those whom France has left of a suitable age for fighting.

You see that the highways are kept in repair by boys of twelve or thirteen and by grandsires in their seventies and their eighties, and by crippled soldiers, who work from daylight until dusk upon the rock piles and the earth heaps; that the fields are being tilled—and how well they are being tilled!—by young women and old women; that the shops in the smaller towns are minded by children, whose heads sometimes scarcely come above the counters.

You see where the tall shade trees along the roads and the small trees in the thickets are being shorn away in order that the furnaces and the hearthstones may not be altogether fireless, since the enemy holds most of the coal mines. I have come in one of the fine state forests upon a squad of American lumberjacks, big huskies from the logging camps of Northern Michigan, with their portable planing mill whining and their axes flashing, making the sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not long ago was a grove of splendid timber, where beeches and chestnuts, hundreds of years old, stood in close ranks; but which now is being turned into a wilderness of raw stumps and trodden earth and stacks of ugly planking.

You see an old woman, as fleshless as a fagot, helping a dog to drag a heavy cart up a rocky street, the two of them together straining and panting against the leather breast yokes. For every kilometre that the foe advances you see the refugees fleeing from their desolated steadings; indeed, you may very accurately gauge the rate of his progress by their number.

In one lonely little town in a territory as yet undefiled by actual hostilities I went one morning not long ago into a quaint thirteenth-century church. It was one of three churches in the place; and in point of membership, I think, the smallest of the three. But in the nave, upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with furrows and runnels, I found a little framed placard containing the names, written in fine script, of those communicants who had died in service for their country in this war. The list plainly was incomplete. It included only those who had fallen up to the beginning of last year; the toll for 1917 and for 1918 was yet to be added; and yet of the names of the dead out of this one small obscure interior parish there were an even one hundred. I dare say the poll of the whole commune would have shown at least three times as many. France has shown the world how to fight. Now it shows the world how to die.

But of all the tragedies that multiply themselves so abundantly here in this bloodied land it sometimes seems to me there is none greater than the look of things that is implanted upon an unfortified town that has been subjected to frequent bombings. It is not so much the shattered, ragged ruins where bombs have scored direct downward hits that drive home the lesson of what this mode of reprisal, this type of punishment means; rather it is the echoing empty street, as yet undamaged, whence the dwellers all have fled—long stretches of streets, with the windows shuttered up and the shops locked and barred and the rank grass sprouting between the cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats foraging like the gaunt ghosts of cats among forgotten ash barrels. And rather more than this it is the expression of those who through necessity or choice have stayed on.

I am thinking particularly of Nancy—Nancy which for environment, setting and architecture is one of the most beautiful little cities in the world; a city whose ancient walls and massy gateways still stand; whose squares and parks were famous; and whose people once led prosperous, contented and peaceful lives. Its Place Stanislaus, on a miniature scale, is, I think, as lovely as any plaza in Europe. Since it is so lovely one is moved to wonder why the Germans have so far spared it from the ruination they shower down without abatement upon the devoted city. It is well-nigh deserted now, along with all the other parts of the town. Those who could conveniently get away have gone; the state in the early part of this year transported thousands of women and children on special trains to safer territory in the south of France. Those who remain have in their eyes the haunting terror of a persistent and an unceasing fearsomeness.

To be in Nancy these times is to be in a stilled, half-deserted place of flinching and of danger, and of the death that comes by night, borne on whirring motors. I walked through its streets on a day following one of the frequent air raids and I had a conception of how these Old-World cities must have looked in the time of the plague. The citizens I passed were like people who dwelt beneath the shadow of an abiding pestilence, as indeed they did.

To them a clear still night with the placid stars showing in the heavens meant a terrible threat. It meant that they would lie quaking in their houses for the signal that would send them to the cellars and the dugouts, while high explosives and gas bombs and inflammable bombs came raining down. They knew full well what it meant to stay above ground during the dread passover of the Huns' planes, when hospitals had been turned into shambles and supply depots into craters of raging fire. Yet there remained traces of the racial temperament that has upbuoyed the French and helped them to endure what was unendurable.

A little waitress in a café said to three of us, with a smile: “Ah, but you should be in Nancy on a rainy night, for then the sound of snoring fills the place. We can sleep then—and how we do sleep!”

In Nancy they pray before the high altars for bad weather and yet more bad weather. And so do they in many another town in France that is within easy striking distance of the enemy's batteries and airdromes.

CHAPTER XIII. LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

OF all city dwellers I am sure the Londoner is the most orderly and the most capable of self-government, as he likewise is the most phlegmatic. Because of these common traits among the masses of the populace an air raid over London, considering its potential possibilities for destruction, is comparatively an unexciting episode everywhere in the metropolis, save and except only in those districts of the East End where the bulk of the foreign-born live. There, on the first wail of the shrieking sirens, before the warning “maroon” bombs go up or the barrage fire starts from protecting batteries in the suburbs and along the Thames, these frightened aliens, carrying their wives and children, flock pell-mell into the stations of the Underground. They spread out bedclothes on the platforms and camp in the Tube, which is the English name for what Americans call a subway, and sometimes refuse to budge until long after the danger has passed. At the height of the bombardment they pray and shriek, and the women often beat their breasts and tear at their hair in a very frenzy.

This is true only of the emotional Rus-and Rumanians. The native Londoners'ed in the most leisurely fashion walk to the subterranean shelters. Indeed, the chief task of the police is to keep them from exposing themselves in the open in efforts to get a sight the enemy. People who live on the lower floors of stoutly built houses mainly bide where they are, their argument—and a very sane one it is—being that since the chances of a man's being killed in his home at such a time are no greater than of his roof being pierced by lightning during a thunderstorm he is almost as safe and very much more comfortable staying in his bed than he would be squatting for hours in a damp Cellar.

No matter how intense the bombardment the busses keep on running, though they have few enough passengers. From one's window one may see the big double-deckers lumbering by like frightened elephants, empty of all but the drivers and the plucky women conductors, who invariably stick to their posts and carry on. The London bobby promenades at his usual deliberate pace no matter how thick the shrapnel from the defender guns may splash down about him in the darkened street; and the night postman calmly goes his rounds too.

One night in London after the alarm had been sounded I invaded the series of walled caverns and wine vaults known as the Adelphi Arches, which are just off the Strand, near Charing Cross. Several hundred men, women and children had already taken refuge there. Near one of the entrances a young mother was singing her baby to sleep; a little farther on a group of Australian soldiers were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to open beer bottles with their finger nails; and at the mouth of a side basement opening off a layer cave half a dozen typical Londoner civilians, of the sort who wear flat caps instead of hats and woollen neckerchiefs instead of collars, were warmly discussing politics in high nasal notes. Nowhere was there evident any concern or distress, or even any considerable amount of irritation at our enforced inconvenience.

Still, any man who figures that the Englishman is not stimulated to stouter resistance by these visitations from the German would be mistaken. Beneath the surface of his apparent indifference there is produced at each recurrent attack an enhanced current of hate ior the government that first inaugurated this system of barbaric warfare against unfortified communities. There is something so radically wrong in the Prussian propaganda it is inconceivable that any mind save a Prussian's mind could have conceived it. His imagination is on backward and he thinks hind part before. In the folly of his besetting madness he figures that he can subjugate a man by mangling that man's wife and baby to bits—the one thing that has always been potent to make a valiant fighter out of the veriest coward that lives.

They may not waste their rage in vain and vulgar mouthings—that would be the German, not the English way—but one may be sure that the people of London will never forgive the Kaiser for the hideous things his agents, in accordance with his policy of frightfulness, have wrought among innocent noncombatants in their city and in their island. They are entering up the balance in the ledgers of their righteous indignation against the day of final reckoning.

After I had seen personally some of the results of one of the nocturnal onslaughts I too could share in the feelings of those more directly affected, for I could realise that, given an opportunity now denied him by the mercy of distance and much intervening salt water, the Hun would be doing unto American cities what he had done to this English city; and I could picture the same unspeakable atrocities perpetrated upon New Haven or Asbury Park or Charleston as have been perpetrated upon London and Dover and Margate.

There was an old clergyman of the Established Church who lived in a rectory not far from Covent Garden, a man near seventy, who probably had never wittingly done an evil thing or a cruel thing in all his correct and godly life. He came to have the name of the Raid Preacher, because at every aerial attack he went forth fearlessly from his home, making the tour of all the shelters in the neighbourhood. At each place he would cheer and quiet the crowds there assembled, telling them there was no real danger, reading to them comforting passages of the Scriptures and encouraging them to sing homely and familiar songs. He had been doing this from the time when the Zeppelins first invaded the London district. He had held funeral services over the bodies of hundreds of raid victims, so they told me. Regardless of the religious affiliations of the dead, or the lack of church ties, their families almost invariably asked him to conduct the burials.

One night in the present year—I am forbidden to give the exact date or the exact place, though neither of them matters now—the raiders came. The old clergyman hurried to a cellar under a near-by business establishment, where a swarm of tenement dwellers of the quarter had congregated for safety. He was standing in their midst in the darkened place, bidding them to be of good and tranquil faith, when a two-hundred pound bomb of high explosives, sped from a Gotha eight thousand feet above and aimed by chance, came through the building, bringing the roof and the upper floors with it.

A great many persons were killed or wounded.

When the rescuers came almost the first body they brought out of the burning ruins was that of the Raid Preacher. They had found him, with torn flesh and broken bones, but with his face unmarred, lying on the floor. His thumbed leather Bible was under him, open at a certain page, and there was blood upon its leaves.

Men who saw his funeral cortège told me of it with tears in their eyes. They said that people of all faiths walked in the rain behind the hearse, and that the biggest of all the funeral wreaths was a gift from a little colony of poor Jewish folk in the district, and that one whole section of the sorrowful procession was made up of cripples and convalescents—pale, lame, halt men and women and children who limped on crutches or marched with bandaged heads or with twisted trunks; and these were the injured survivors of previous raids, to whom the dead man had ministered in their time of suffering.

In a hospital I saw a little girl who had been most terribly maimed by the same missile that killed the old rector. I am not going to dwell on the state of this child. When I think of her I have not the words to express the feelings that I have. But one of her hands was gone at the wrist, and the other hand was badly shattered; so she was just a wan little brutally abbreviated fragment of humanity, a living fraction, most grievously afflicted.

There was the pitiable wraith of a smile on her poor little pinched commonplace face, and to her breast, with the bandaged stump of one arm and with her remaining hand that was swarthed in a clump of wrapping, she cuddled up a painted china doll which somebody had brought her; and she was singing to it. The sight, I take it, would have been very gracious in the eyes of His Imperial Majesty of Prussia—except, of course, that the little girl still lived; that naturally would be a drawback to his complete enjoyment of the spectacle.