LITMIR.BIZ

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began, drawn in his defending forces from the first line, leaving behind only a few, who fell victims to the first few direct hits scored by our side; and therein the raid had failed.

      In the next sector on our right, where a daylight raid had been undertaken two hours before ours got under way, the raiders had suffered a few casualties but had brought back two wounded captives; and in another sector, on our left, yet a third raid had produced four prisoners. I saw the unhappy four the following day on their way back to a laager under guard. One of them was a middle-aged, sickly-looking man, and the remaining three were weedy, half-grown, bewildered boys; very different looking, all of them, from the prime sinewy material which formed the great armies I had seen pouring through Belgium in the late summer of 1914.

      All four of them, moreover, were wall-eyed with apprehension, and flinchy and altogether most miserable looking. Not even a night of fair treatment and a decent breakfast had served to cure them of a delusion that Americans would take prisoners alive only for the pleasure of putting them to death at leisure afterward. What struck me as even more significant of the change in the personnel of the Kaiser’s present army – conceding that these specimens might be accepted as average samples of the mass – was that not one of them wore an Iron Cross on his blouse. From personal observations in the first year of the war I had made up my mind that the decoration of the Iron Cross in the German Army was like vaccination in our own country, being, as one might say, compulsory. Here, though, was evidence either that the War Lord was running out of metal or that his system had slipped a cog. Likewise it was to develop later that the prisoners I saw wore paper underclothing.

      But I am getting ahead of my story. The colonel, lying back on his cot with his head on a canvas pillow and his muddied legs crossed, said at the conclusion of his account:

      “Well, we failed to bag any live game, but anyhow our boys behaved splendidly. They went over the top cheering and they came back in singing. You’d never have guessed they were green hands at this game or that this was the first time they had ever crossed No Man’s Land.”

      To the truth of a part of what he said I could testify personally, for late that afternoon I had seen the squad marching forward to the spot where they were to line up for the sally later. They had been like schoolboys on a lark. If any one of them was afraid he refused to betray it; if any one of them was nervous at the prospect before him he hid his nervousness splendidly well. Only, from them as they passed us, they radiated a great pride in having been chosen for the job, and a great confidence in its outcome, and a great joy that to them thus early in their soldiering had come the coveted chance to show the stuff that was in them. And while they passed, our friend the major, standing alongside watching them go by, had said with all the fervency of a man uttering a prayer:

      “By Jove, aren’t they bully! No officer could ask for finer men than that for his outfit. But they’re leaving oodles of disappointment behind them at that.”

      “How’s that?” I asked.

      “I’ll tell you how,” he said: “Yesterday when the scheme for this thing was completed we were told that forty-five men out of our regiment were to be allowed to take part in tonight’s doings. That meant fifteen men out of each battalion. So yesterday evening at parade I broke the glad tidings to my battalion and called for volunteers, first warning the men as a matter of routine that the work would be highly dangerous and no man need feel called upon to offer himself. Do you want to know how many men out of that battalion volunteered? Every single solitary last dog-goned one of them, that’s all! They came at me like one man. So to save as much heartburning as possible I left the choice of fifteen out of nearly a thousand to the top sergeants of the companies. And in all your life you never saw fifteen fellows so tickled as the fifteen who were selected, and you never saw nine hundred and odd so downhearted as the lot who failed to get on the list.

      “That wasn’t all of it, either,” he went on. ‘’Naturally there were some men who had been off on detail of one sort or another and hadn’t been at parade. When they came last night and found out what had happened in their absence – well, they simply raised merry blue hell, that’s all. They figured somehow they’d been cheated. As a result I may say that my rest was somewhat broken. Every few minutes, all night long, some boy would break into my room, and in the doorway salute and say, in a broken-hearted way: ‘Now look here, major, this ain’t square. I got as much right to go over the top as any feller in this regiment has, and just because I happened to be away this evenin’ here I am chiselled out of my chance to go along. Can’t you please, sir, ask the adjutant or somebody to let me in on this?’

      “That substantially was what every one of them said. And when I turned them down some of ‘em went away crying like babies.”

      He glanced away across the blue hill. “I guess maybe I did a little crying myself.”

      I thought about what the major had said and what the colonel had said and what I myself had seen after I had climbed some shaky stairs to be bedded down for the night on a pallet of blankets upon the floor of a room where several tired-out officers already snored away, oblivious of the reverberations of the shelling from our guns and from the enemy’s, which went on until nearly daybreak.

      In the morning I got insight into another phase of the enlisted Yank’s understanding. We came downstairs to breakfast – to a Sunday morning breakfast. For the moment a Sabbath calm hung over the wrecked town and over the country roundabout; all was as peaceful as a Quaker meeting. Red, the colonel’s orderly, stood in the doorway picking his teeth. Red is six feet two inches tall, and disproportionately narrow. He is a member of a regiment recruited in the Middle West, but he hails from the Panhandle of Texas, and betrays the fact every time he opens his mouth. At the moment of our approach he was addressing an unseen and presumably a sympathetic listener beyond the threshold:

      “Me, I’m, plum’ outdone with these here French people,” I heard him drawl. “Here we’ve been camped amongst ‘em fer goin’ on four months and they ain’t learnt English yet. You’d think they’d want to know how to talk to people in a reg’lar honest-to-God language – but no, seein’ seemin’ly not a-tall. I’d be ashamed to be so ignorunt and show it. Course oncet in a while you do run acrost one of ‘em that’s picked up a word here and there; but that’s about all.

      “Now frinstance you take that nice-lookin’ little woman with the black eyes and the shiny teeth that runs that there little store in this here last town we stayed a spell in before we come on up here. I never could remember the name of that there town – it was so outlandish soundin’ – but you remember the woman, don’t you? Well, there’s a case in p’int. She was bright enough lookin’ but she was like all the rest – it seemed like she jest couldn’t or jest wouldn’t pick up enough reg’lar words to help her git around. Ef I went in her place and asked her fer sardines she’d know what I meant right off and hand ‘em over, but ef I wanted some cheese she didn’t have no idea whut I was talkin’ about. Don’t it jest beat all!”

      CHAPTER IV. ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

      WE left Paris at an early hour of March 25, which was the morning of the fourth day of perhaps the greatest battle in the history of this or any other war, and of the third day of the bombardment of Paris by the long-range steel monster which already had become famous as the latest creation of the Essen workshops.

      There were three of us and no more – Raymond Carroll, Martin Green and I. To each of the three the present excursion was in the nature of a reunion. For more than six years we held down adjoining desks in the city room of a New York evening newspaper. Since we parted, Carroll and I to take other berths and Green to bide where he was, this had been the first time we had met on the same assignment.

      I counted myself lucky to be in their company, for two better newspaper men never walked in shoe leather. Carroll among reporters is what Elihu Root is among corporation lawyers. There are plenty of men in the journalistic craft who know why certain facts pertinent to the proper telling of a tale in print may not be secured; he, better than almost any man I ever ran across in this business, knows how these facts may be had, regardless of intervening obstacles. In his own peculiar way, which is a calm, quiet, detached way, Green is just as effective. When it comes to figuring where unshirted Hades is going to break

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