''And they thought we wouldn't fight'' by Floyd Phillips Gibbons (smart books to read .txt) π
This was the peril of the troop ship. This was the tremendous advantage which the enemy held over our armies even before they reached the field. This was the unprecedented condition which the United States and Allied navies had to cope with in the great undertaking of transporting our forces overseas.
Any one who has crossed the ocean, even in the normal times before shark-like Kultur skulked beneath the water, has experienced the feeling of human helplessness that comes in mid-ocean when one considers the comparative frailty of such man-made devices as even the most modern turbine liners, with the enormous power of the wilderness of water over which one sails.
In such times one realises that safety rests, first upon the kindliness of the elements; secon
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"I marched 'em back that night to the next town and took 'em into a grocery store, where there was a lot of Tommies helping themselves to the first meal in days. While we were eating bread and cheese and sardines and also feeding me two prisoners, we talks to them and finds out that, as far as they are concerned, the Kaiser will never get their vote again.
"One Tommy says to one of my prisoners: 'Kaiser no goodβpas bon, ain't it?' and the prisoner said, 'Yah,' and I shoved my elbow into his ribs and right quick he said, 'Nein.' Then the Tommy said: 'Hindenburg dirty rotter, nacy pa?' and the Fritz said, 'Yah. Nein,' and then looked at me and said 'Yah' again. They was not bad prisoners and I marched 'em twenty miles that night, just the three of usβtwo of them in front and me in back with the rifle over me arm.
"And the joke of it was that both of them could have taken the gun and killed me any minute for all I could have done."
"How do you figure that, Corporal?" I asked.
For reply, Jimmy Brady drew from beneath the blankets a pair of knotted hands with fingers and thumbs stiffened and bent in and obviously impossible to use on a trigger. Brady is not in the hospital for wounds. Four days and nights in water and mud in the battle of battles had twisted and shrunken him with rheumatism. But he is one rheumatic who helped to save Amiens.
Upon the heels of the German successes in Picardy, developments followed fast. Principal among these, was the materialisation of a unified command of all the armies of the Allies. General Ferdinand Foch was selected and placed in supreme command of every fighting man under the Allied flags.
One of the events that led up to this long delayed action, was the unprecedented action of General Pershing, when he turned over the command of all the American forces in France to General Foch. He did this with the words:
"I come to say to you that the American people would hold it a great honour for our troops were they engaged in the present battle. I ask it of you in my name and in that of the American people.
"There is at this moment no other question than that of fighting. Infantry, artillery, aviationβall that we have are yours to dispose of as you will. Others are coming which are as numerous as will be necessary. I have come to say to you that the American people would be proud to be engaged in the greatest battle in history."
The action met with the unqualified endorsement of every officer and man in the American forces. From that minute on, the American slogan in France was "Let's go," and every regiment began to hope that it would be among the American organisations selected to do battle with the German in Picardy. Secretary of War Baker, then in France, expressed his pleasure over General Pershing's unselfish offer with the following public statement on Mar. 30th:
"I am delighted with the prompt and effective action of General Pershing in placing all American troops at the disposal of the Allies in the present situation. His action will meet with hearty approval in the United States, where the people desire their Expeditionary Force to be of the utmost service to the common cause.
"I have visited practically all the American troops in France, some of them quite recently, and had an opportunity to observe the enthusiasm with which the officers and men receive the announcement that they may be used in the present conflict. Regiments to which the announcement was made, broke spontaneously into cheers."
Particularly were there cheers when the news spread through the ranks of the First United States division, then on duty on the line in front of Toul, that it had been the first American division chosen to go into Picardy. I was fortunate enough to make arrangements to go with them.
I rode out from old positions with the guns and boarded the troop train which took our battery by devious routes to changes of scenery, gratifying both to vision and spirit. We lived in our cars on tinned meat and hard bread, washed down with swallows of vin ordinaire, hurriedly purchased at station buvettes. The horses rode well.
Officers and men, none of us cared for train schedule simply because none of us knew where we were going, and little time was wasted in conjecture. Soldierly curiosity was satisfied with the knowledge that we were on our way, and with this satisfaction, the hours passed easily. In fact, the blackjack game in the officers' compartment had reached the point where the battery commander had garnered almost all of the French paper money in sight, when our train passed slowly through the environs of Paris.
Other American troop trains had preceded us, because where the railroad embankment ran close and parallel to the street of some nameless Faubourg, our appearance was met with cheers and cries from a welcoming regiment of Paris street gamins, who trotted in the street beside the slow moving troop train and shouted and threw their hats and wooden shoes in the air. Sous and fifty centime pieces and franc pieces showered from the side doors of the horses' cars as American soldiers, with typical disregard for the value of money, pitched coin after coin to the scrambling mob of children. At least a hundred francs must have been cast out upon those happy, romping waves of childish faces and up-stretched dirty hands.
"A soldier would give his shirt away," said a platoon commander, leaning out of the window and watching the spectacle, and surreptitiously pitching a few coins himself. "Hope we get out of this place before the men pitch out a gun or a horse to that bunch. Happy little devils, aren't they? It's great to think we are on our way up to meet their daddies."
Unnumbered hours more passed merrily in the troop train before we were shunted into the siding of a little town. Work of unloading was started and completed within an hour. Guns and wagons were unloaded on the quay, while the animals were removed from the cars on movable runways or ramps. As each gun or wagon reached the ground, its drivers hitched in the horses and moved it away. Five minutes later we rode out of the yards and down the main street of the town.
Broad steel tires on the carriages of the heavies bumped and rumbled over the clean cobbles and the horses pranced spryly to get the kinks out of their legs, long fatigued from vibrations of the train. Women, old and young, lined the curbs, smiling and throwing kisses, waving handkerchiefs and aprons and begging for souvenirs. If every request for a button had been complied with, our battery would have reached the front with a shocking shortage of safety pins.
Darkness came on and with it a fine rain, as we cleared the town and halted on a level plain between soft fields of tender new wheat, which the horses sensed and snorted to get at. In twenty minutes, Mess Sergeant Kelly, from his high altar on the rolling kitchen, announced that the last of hot coffee had been dispensed. Somewhere up ahead in the darkness, battery bugle notes conveyed orders to prepare to mount. With the rattle of equipment and the application of endearing epithets, which horses unfortunately don't understand, we moved off at the sound of "forward."
Off on our left, a noiseless passenger train slid silently across the rim of the valley, blue dimmed lights in its coach windows glowing like a row of wet sulphur matches. Far off in the north, flutters of white light flushed the night sky and an occasional grumbling of the distant guns gave us our first impression of the battle of battles. Every man in our battery tingled with the thrill. This was riding frontward with the gunsβthis was rolling and rumbling on through the night up toward the glare and glamour of war. I was riding beside the captain at the head of the column. He broke silence.
"It seems like a far cry from Honolulu with the moon playing through the palm trees on the beach," he said quizzically, "to this place and these scenes and events to-night, but a little thing like a flip of coin decided it for me, and I'm blessing that coin to-night.
"A year ago January, before we came into the war, I was stationed at San Antonio. Another officer friend of mine was stationed there and one day he received orders to report for duty at Honolulu. He had a girl in San Antonio and didn't want to leave her and he knew I didn't have a girl and didn't give a damn where I went, or was sent, so long as it was with the army. He put up the proposition of mutual exchange being permitted under regulations.
"He wanted to take my place in San Antonio and give me his assignment in Honolulu, which I must say looked mighty good in those days to anybody who was tired of Texas. I didn't think then we'd ever come to war and besides it didn't make much difference to me one way or the other where I went. But instead of accepting the proposition right off the reel, I told Jim we'd flip a coin to decide.
"If it came tails, he would go to Honolulu. If it came heads, I would go to Honolulu. He flipped. Tails won. I'm in France and poor Jim is out there in Honolulu tending the Ukulele crop with prospects of having to stay there for some time. Poor devil, I got a letter from him last week.
"Do you know, man knows no keener joy in the world than that which I have to-night. Here I am in France at the head of two hundred and fifty men and horses and the guns and we're rolling up front to kick a dent in history. The poor unfortunate that ain't in this fight has almost got license to shoot himself. Life knows no keener joy than this."
It was a long speech for our captain, but his words expressed not only the feeling of our battery, but our whole regiment, from the humblest wagon driver up to the colonel who, by the way, has just made himself most unpopular with the regiment by being promoted to a Brigadier Generalship. The colonel is passing upward to a higher command and the regiment is sore on losing him. One of his humblest critics has characterised the event as the "first rough trick the old man ever pulled."
Midnight passed and we were still wheeling our way through sleeping villages, consulting maps under rays of flashlights, gathering directions some of the time from mile posts and wall signs, and at other times gaining knowledge of roads and turns and hills from sleepy heads in curl wrappers that protruded from bedroom chambers and were over-generous in advice.
The animals were tired. Rain soaked the cigarettes and made them draw badly. Above was drizzle and below was mud. There were a few grumbles, but no man in our column would have traded places with a brother back home even if offered a farm to boot.
It was after three in the morning when we parked the guns in front of a chΓ’teau, brought forward some lagging combat wagons and discovered the rolling kitchen had gone astray. In another hour the animals had been unhitched but not unharnessed, fed and watered in darkness and the men, in utter weariness, prepared to lie down and sleep anywhere. At this juncture, word was passed through the
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