Visualizing "over there"—Camping out in France—Unimportance of the leaders—Adopting "Jake"—America finding maturity—Playing the game—The coating of propaganda.

If one by one all the sounds at the front from the thunders of the artillery to the rumble of the columns of motor-trucks were to pass from my recollection, the last to go would be that of the rasping beat of the infantry's hobnails upon the roads in the long stretches of the night, whether in the vigor of a rested division, in rhythmic step going forward into line, or of an exhausted division in dragging steps coming out of line. It was mechanical and yet infinitely human, this throbbing of the pulse of a country's man-power.

Whether or not the draft boards were always impartial, whether or not favoritism provided safe berths for certain sons, I know that the fathers or friends who kept a young man of fighting age out of uniform or away from France did him an ill turn. He had missed something which those who went to training camps or to France were to gain: something not to be judged in terms of medals or bank balances.

When the men returned from overseas, people wondered at their inarticulateness over their experiences. Subscribing to Liberty Loans and War Savings Stamps, eating war bread, making innumerable sacrifices, relatives and friends had been living in their habitual world, traversing the same streets or fields in their daily work, and meeting the same people,—and sleeping in their accustomed beds. The war news that they had read came through the censorship, speaking in the assuring voice of propaganda, which had men cheering and singing in battle. Their sons and brothers had been in another world, whose wonders, agony, and drudgery had become the routine of existence in the face of death, which was also routine. They had seen the realities of war behind the curtain, which had offered the pictures of war as it was designed to be seen by the public. There was so much to say that they found themselves saying nothing to auditors who did not know that the Meuse-Argonne was a greater battle than ChÂteau-Thierry, or that the S. O. S. was the Services of Supply, or the difference between rolling kitchens and the ammunition train. Some finally worked up a story which was the kind that friends liked to hear. Only when they had their American Legion gatherings would they be able to find a common ground where all their fundamental references would be understood.

Much was written about the democratic results of millionaire and bootblack, farmer's son and son of the tenements, day laborer and cotton-wool youth, fastidious about his cravats, mixing together in the ranks. At the training camps our soldiers were on the background of home, and they were not facing death together. They knew their own country by railroad journeys and by living with men from different States; but some observers think that one does not really know his own country until he has seen other countries. The training camp had become a kind of home. Its discipline was modest beside that of France; there were no hardships except the hard drill and routine. In France our soldier had no home. He was always changing his boarding place, though never his task as a fighting man.

He did not see France as the tourist saw it, from a car spinning past finished old landscapes, between avenues of trees along roads that linked together red-tile-roofed villages, while his chauffeur asked him, after he had had a good dinner at an inn, at what time he wanted his car in the morning. He marched these roads under his pack, often all night long, while he was under orders not to strike a match to light a cigarette. He was drenched with winter rain when he was conducted to a barn door and told to crawl up into the hayloft, or conducted to a house door where he stretched himself on the floor in a room that had no heat.

He was billeted in villages where the people had been billeting soldiers for four years. They wanted the privacy of their homes again as surely as he wanted to be back in his own home. The roads over which he marched he had to help repair, in winter rains, when old cathedral spires lacked the impressiveness which they had to the tourists because they looked as cold as everything else, and when picturesque, winding canals merely looked wet when everything was wet.

He knew other roads which were swept by the blasts of hell; he saw the beautiful landscapes through the mud of trenches and from the filthy fox-holes where he waited in hourly expectation of an attack; he knew the beautiful woods which fleck the rolling landscape with their patches of green as the best possible places for being gassed.

The hand of authority was on him even in his holidays—he, the free American. He might not go beyond certain limits when he went for a walk, for otherwise all our soldiers within walking distance of the largest town would spend the day there, to the discomfiture of discipline and French regulations. If he secured leave, it was not to the Paris of which he dreamed, but to the area which the army had prescribed. For months and months our men fought and marched, going and coming past Paris, without a glimpse of the city of their desire. That Paris was not good for them all the high authorities agreed; besides, their services were too valuable to be spared for sight-seeing.

From the day of their arrival they were under the whip of a great necessity: first, of keeping the Germans from winning the war, and then of winning the war before Christmas came. In the last stages of the war, they bore more than American soldiers have ever borne—more than the British, in their own limited sector with its settled appointments a day's travel from England; more than the French, fighting in their own country with leave to go to their homes—their own homes—once in four months. Our men had a real rest only when they were wounded or ill and were sent back to the hospitals and rest camps.

When a soldier was not fighting, somebody was lecturing to him. His education was never complete. There was some new gas which he must avoid, some new wrinkle in fighting machine-guns which he must learn. As he had so much lecturing on the drill-ground and on the march and in billets about making sure that he did not destroy any property or take a piece of wood or use a tool that did not belong to him, the orators who came from the United States to tell him how to be "good" though a soldier, and how all the country admired him and depended upon him, were not so popular as they might have been, because he knew the character of his job by very bitter experience. How little such visitors knew of him—in his own world!

As distinguished from the officers of commissioned rank, we spoke of the privates as the men; also as the "doughboys," a name which long ago the cavalry, looking down haughtily from their saddles, applied to the infantry, as kneaders of mud. There was a gulf between officers and privates, settled in old military customs, which at least at the front grew narrower as the old influences were dissolved in the crucible of fire. Many of the privates were superior to their officers. Many won their commissions in the training-camp of battle. I preferred always to think of the whole of generals, colonels, "kid" lieutenants, and privates as men. It was the whole that was majestic; manhood as manhood, which was supreme.

Officers, whether with one bar or two stars on their shoulders, were only the nails holding the structure of manhood together. They might be promoted and demoted; prune themselves on their rank; but the mighty current of soldiery was elemental as the flow of a river. Never had the part of any high commander been relatively less important than in this war; in no army was this so true probably as in ours. By running through a list of names in this age of universal ability, you might find a score of leaders for corps or army who might be better than those in the field; but fresh divisions of infantry were not in such easy call. The names of officers who commanded more men than Napoleon or Wellington had at Waterloo, Meade or Lee at Gettysburg, were unknown to the public. Never had a single human being, no matter how many orders on his breast, appeared more dispensable than in this machine war with its enormous masses of troops. We had two million men in France. Every officer and man counted as one unit in the machine, according, not to rank, but to the giving of all that he had in him. Manhood and not soldiering was glorified.

It was the great heart of our men, beating as the one heart of a great country—simple, vigorous, young, trying out its strength—on the background of old Europe, which appealed to me. It was the spontaneous incidents of emotion breaking out of routine which revealed character. One day on a path across the fields near headquarters town, I met a soldier with a wound stripe who had been invalided back from the front. He was thick-set, bow-legged, with a square, honest face, and eyes slightly walled, and he was leading a bow-legged sturdy child of four years, whose one visible eye showed a cast resembling the soldier's own. The other eye was hidden by a drooping wool Tam-o'-Shanter about four sizes too large for the child's head, while his wool sweater and wool leggings were not more than two sizes too large. It was evident that a man and not a woman had bought his wardrobe, having in mind that the child was to be kept warm at any cost. The pair aroused my interest.

"I heard all about adopting French war orphans through the societies," the soldier said, "and I concluded, when they sent me here, to pick out my own orphan. So I adopted Jake. Yes, I calls him Jake. You see, his father was killed by the boche and his mother croaked. He hadn't anybody to look after him, so I took over the job. Didn't I, Jake?"

Jacob looked up with an eye that seemed to consider this a wonderful world created by the soldier, and removed his finger from his mouth long enough to say "Yep," which he had learned in the place of "Oui."

"I'm going to take Jake home with me, and make him an American, ain't I, Jake? You're learning English too, ain't you, Jake?"—with Jake taking up his cue to prove that he was by responding "Yep!" again.

When they started on, I paused to look after them, with something catching in my throat, and as the soldier paused I overheard him saying:

"I'm going to take you home. Don't you worry—I'm sticking to that, Jake. The French regulations will say that they ain't going to let you leave France when they're so short of kids over here, and the American regulations will say there ain't no room for kids on transports, and probably the censor will lip in too—but I'll bring you after the war if I can't now. You and me's fixed up a life pardnership, ain't we? You'll make a hit with my mother, all right. All you've got to do is look up at her just the way you're looking up at me and say 'Yep.' Oh, it'll be all right over there—no more of this war and regulation stuff!"

"Speaking a few words of French" could only open a chink in the barrier of language between our men and the French people. Wherever two Americans met they could begin talking without waiting on an interpreter. The common bond of language promoted the family feeling of the A. E. F. In all their relations our men saw with fresh eyes, in the light of foreign surroundings, how like they were, not only in uniform and equipment and ways of thought, but how distinctly American even the European born and the sons of European parents had become. Old differences disappeared in this new sense of a fundamental similarity. Men from the different parts of the United States came together not only in the combat divisions but around the docks and railway yards and wherever they labored in the Services of Supply. Kansas, Oregon, and Maine had adjoining beds at a hospital, while a doctor from Pittsburgh or Oskaloosa, or a nurse from New York or Cheyenne, looked after them. Reserve officers who had been lawyers, merchants, engineers, gang foremen, bakers, bankers, manufacturers, lived and worked together in keeping the army fed with shells and food.

"The gang's all here," was as expressive of the soldier's feeling in the Great War as "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" in the little war with Spain. To all in whom there was the germ from which it could develop, the stern fighting and effort brought a sense of personal power, quiet, observant, undemonstrative; and their sense of the presence there in France of two millions of Americans—scattered far and wide, omnipresent in their energy, welded into one mighty organization, pulsing with the heart of the home country three thousand miles away, as California looked Maine in the eye in that common family—brought a new sense of national power. It occurred to me that the A. E. F. symbolized how a great overgrown boy of a nation, with a puzzled feeling about its expanding physique, had suddenly become a dignified, poised, self-respecting adult.

The men knew why they were in France, even if they did not express it in the phrases of oratory or propaganda. Their logic was as cold as their steel, as vivid as gun flashes. They were in France to beat the Germans. The period for argument had passed for them. They had the business in hand. Their bitterness toward the foe was not as great as that at home. Why waste words on him when you had bullets and shells to fire at him? He was taken for granted no less than burglary and murder: a positive material force to be overcome.

Whether college graduates or street-sweepers, the privates were a guild as exclusive in its way—as it always has been—as a regular mess. They had voted themselves into their task. It was the will of the majority of their country that we go to France. The majority rules; general and other officers may act as legatees for the majority. The thing was to "play the game." Those who rebelled found that there was nothing else to do. They were in the machine's grip. "Play the game!" No phrase better expressed their attitude than this. It was a wicked, filthy, dangerous game. They had signed on for it; they would see it through.

Given this conviction, and no soldier will endure more hardship than the American. It was the bedrock of adherence to that rigid discipline which in our western democracy surprised Europeans. We saluted on all occasions—what a punctiliously saluting army we were!—and followed all the rules of etiquette that the experts said were necessary, and learned to take "bawlings out" with soldierly philosophy. As children know their parents, the men knew their officers' characters; a fresh replacement lieutenant was promptly "sized up," but final judgment was reserved until he had led them under fire, where he must stand the real test. It was a relief to them that they did not have to add an extra salute for every grade of an officer's rank. One salute would do for a general as well as a second lieutenant. Generals passed them on the road in cars; generals inspected them. They did not take much interest in generals, who were also a part of the game to them. Company and battalion commanders alone could make their personal leadership felt. They were the "heroes" when they were good, and rightly so.

Officers made strange guesses sometimes as to what their men were thinking. The men were wiser than many officers knew; for they were the mass intelligence of America. They understood that the Stars and Stripes was propaganda; but it was interesting. They read it with avidity. Propaganda was one of the parts of the mysterious, ugly game. I have heard it compared to the coaching from the bleachers at a league game. The men smiled over the communiquÉ's records of actions in which they participated. CommuniquÉs were a part of the game, helping propaganda to coach from the side lines. It would not do to say that a company had been sent by mistake into interlocking machine-gun fire to take a town which the survivors had to yield. When the men read the home papers, there was no mention of their losses or their suffering. One might think from the accounts that they were enjoying themselves immensely, and were quite comfortable in the fox-holes. This, too, was a part of the game.

They were there to see the game through. The sooner it was through, the sooner they would go home. Veterans who had spent one winter in France did not want to spend another; those who had not did not care to try the experience. They had no more reason for liking France than a man who sleeps on the ground in Central Park in December, eating cold rations, under machine-gun fire, has for liking New York City. "I want to get back to the cactus!" as an Arizona man said. All were fighting to reach home and be free men again; freedom having a practical application for them. The longer they were in France, the more they felt that they were fighting for America. As Americans they were on their mettle. Such was the spirit that carried them as Americans through the Meuse-Argonne, which was the American army's battle.