before he had joined the army and been through a lot of front-line stuff jimmy mcgee thought that it was mighty romantic to wear a uniform and carry a gun off to war. but somebody spilled the beans for him pretty soon. jimmy couldn’t find any romance in the mud and rain when his chief ration was black coffee, canned beef, and hardtack. when o. d. said that he would have mary write to him something stirred ’way down in him that hadn’t stirred since he had quit thinking about war as a romantic expedition, and jimmy was pretty sure that the romance stuff was coming back to life again.
“wonder if mary would want a souvenir of this guerre?” asked jimmy, thoughtfully.
“i know she would, because before i left she made me promise to bring back a german helmet or something from the battles. but of course i haven’t been near a fight yet,” answered o. d.
“mary gets the helmet that i took from that boche major, and toot sweet, you can bet on that,” declared mcgee.
“but you’ll want to keep the helmet yourself, jimmy.”
“hell afire, the helmet’s mary’s. there’s no use waitin’ until the guerre is finee before i give it to her, is there?” blurted out jimmy, confusedly.
“no—guess not. send it to her, then. mary’ll be tickled to death with it and to know that it comes from a real soldier who’s been wounded. but go on with what you were tellin’ me. when did you get sent up to the front?”
“arrh, we hung ’round coetquidan until ’bout february first, then we got orders to partee. we was darn sure that we was goin’ to the front, but didn’t have no idea what part of it. anyhow, if you had told us we wouldn’t have known any better, as we never paid any particular attention to any special fronts. all we knew was that the front was the front.
“guess you know by now that we don’t travel first-class in this country. you’ve seen them little cars that looks like a shoe-box set on wheels, marked, ‘40 hommes’—that’s forty like you and me—and ‘8 chevaux’—means eight horses or as many mules. well, that’s the kind of parlor-cars that i’ve been tourin’ france in. i always get in a horse-car if i can, as it’s warmer, and, supposin’ the chevaux don’t step all over you, there’s a chance to lay down and cork off a bit.
“they loaded us bag and baggage on a train of them kind of cars and a frog blew some kind of a horn. we was off for the front. god a’mighty, you should have heard them yanks cheerin’ as we headed for the front. passed through a lot of big towns and beaucoup villages where all of the frogs came out to look at us as if we was a travelin’ circus. come pretty near starvin’ before we got where we was goin’.
“stayed on the train all one night and one whole day. about seven o’clock of the second night i squirmed into about three feet of floor space and cushayed. must have slept pretty good, ’cause next thing i knew somebody was shakin’ me and yellin’, ‘hey, come out of it, jimmy—get up, we’re at the front.’ gee! i snaps into it and rushes out of the door expectin’ to see the front right outside. it was pretty dark, but i looked hard and couldn’t see no germans or trenches. it was quiet as death. i says to frank reynolds, who was top-sergeant of e battery—you see, i had transferred from c to e—‘where the hell is it?’ ‘what?’ he asks. ‘the front, you nut,’ i told him. ‘oh, it’s right around here,’ and he waved his arms around pointin’ in every direction.
“i couldn’t see nothin’ but a railroad station and some flat cars. ‘funniest front i’ve ever been on,’ said one of them mexican-border veterans. ‘this ain’t no front,’ says i.
“’bout that time it sounded as if there was goin’ to be a thunder-shower. everybody looked at one another kinda funny-like. we heard the thunder encore. i looked to the north and there was a lot of flashes showin’ against the sky. the thunder began to growl like a bunch of bears over a big bone. some rockets shot up and spilled a lot of sparks. a smart guy had to remark that they must be havin’ a fourth of july up there, but i was too busy tryin’ to compree that them things meant war. i kept sayin’ to myself, ‘that’s a war goin’ on out there; that’s the thing we came up here to get in.’
“they talk a lot about thrills in love-stories and books, but those story-page people don’t know a thrill from a bowl of mush compared to the things that was runnin’ up and down my backbone that first night. course you know the guns and flashes was quite a ways, ’bout twenty kilos from where we was, and there wasn’t much danger of us gettin’ in any trouble ourselves. but seein’ and hearin’ just got me to thinkin’ about the old guerre and knowin’ that we was in it at last—well, it kind of made me feel a little different, that’s all.
“we harnessed the old chevaux up, hooked ’em to the guns and got all the other junk, includin’ them fourgeons—french wagons, you know—started. ’bout dawn we rumbled through a town that looked as if it had been shut up for the winter. wasn’t a light goin’. not a pup on the streets. nothin’ but us. there was beaucoup houses all shot to hell—roofs gone, windows out, walls cavin’ in. some places were nothin’ but rubbish. there was so little left of a few houses that you couldn’t have salvaged a thing even if you had a pull with the guy at the salvage dump. i found out later that the name of the place was swasson (soissons). must have been some battlin’ ’round that joint.
“after leavin’ swasson we hit a road that led right up to the trenches, or damn near it, anyway. anybody, even an s. o. s. bird with six months’ experience in paris, would have guessed that we must be somewhere near the front. there was old trenches runnin’ every which way; at that time i thought the detail that dug ’em must have been zigzag, as all of the trenches was crooked like a bunch of old dead snakes. i saw beaucoup barbed wire stretched ’round. but i’ve seen lots more since that day.
“as we hiked along a gun would boom out some place up along the front. wasn’t none of that war stuff that you look for after readin’ some war books. just now and then a boom and a flash or two.
“it was mighty cold ridin’ a horse that night. bein’ from florida, i ain’t used to much cold weather, and my hands and feet come pretty near bein’ ice before we finally got to our échelon near a tumbled-down village called chassemy. listen ’bout that échelon stuff. it was somethin’ new to me before i got to the front, as i never took greek at school. well, it seems that échelon means the place that ain’t quite at the front, but just about as bad, bein’ as how the boche can always shell échelons with big guns. the men, horses, and other things that ain’t needed at the front all the time stay at the échelon till they send for them. time we made the échelon everybody was so sleepy that we didn’t wait to unroll, but just sprawled about on the barrack floor and cushayed.
“i came to about four o’clock in the afternoon and we started to hunt somethin’ to eat, naturally. everybody was damn curious to know just where the front was. nobody seemed to know just exactly what way to take to get to it and to our positions. you see, we were to relieve the french. there was nothin’ else to do but wait ’round.
“finally, two days later, three french officers came over and got the cap to go off with them to reconnoiter. he came back that night and told us that we would move the guns into position next day.
“next night we took the four pieces and everythin’ needed to fight the guerre with and hit for the front. you can imagine us goin’ to the front for the first time. lots of the boys was expectin’ a battle before we got up there and other guys kept lookin’ for dead men or wounded. it was the same as walkin’ to church on sunday. we got to the front without knowin’ it.
“‘here we are,’ says the skipper, and he halted the column on the side of a road. the top-sergeant thought he was tryin’ to fool us and asked him what the halt was for. ‘do you want to go out in no man’s land?’ asked the cap. to tell the truth, it was hard for any of us to believe that we were at the front. you’ll find that the front ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, in a way.
“we put the guns in four positions that had already been built by the french and camouflaged ’em with a lot of nettin’. when i saw ’em in daylight i thought i was lookin’ at a scene in a theater. the gun positions was right on the road, mind you—any one passin’ could see ’em, and i thought that we would hide the things ’way down in some kind of a mysterious valley, or somethin’ like that.
“our homes were ’way down under the earth, dug-outs they call ’em. no chance much to keep warm in dug-outs, and two men couldn’t pass each other in ’em, they was so narrow. we cushayed on wooden planks. every thing, kitchens, officers’ quarters, and all, were down in dug-outs. when you did get upon the ground you had to be mighty careful as there was beaucoup shell-holes. the fields looked as if they had the smallpox—and it was hard to keep from fallin’ into them shell-holes.
“after foolin’ around with the old army stuff of changin’ orders a hundred times a day we put over our first shots by registerin’ on a brewery that the germans was supposed to live in. before i forget it let me tell you one of the funniest things about fronts. our guns pointed one way and the front was in another, or almost that bad, anyway. i kept thinkin’ the lines was out beyond the muzzles of our pieces, but the cap said that it was off to the right more and that if we walked that way we’d most likely run into the germans’ first-line trenches. sure was a puzzle to me for a long time.
“well, can’t say that there was any too much excitement up on the old cheman de damns front (chemin des dames) except the mornin’ that jimmy leach, our cook, made real biscuits. it’s a wonder the heinies didn’t hear us hollerin’ and come over, we made so much fuss over those biscuits. then there was hell to pay after we put over a big barrage once. you compree barrages, don’t you, that’s when all the big and little guns start popping off at once accordin’ to some kind of a schedule and generally the doughboys go over under the barrage to attack the boche trenches. you see, before we got up there the boches and french were fightin’ the guerre like this, ‘you don’t shoot and i won’t.’ we changed that argument toot sweet by startin’ in with barrages and raids. naturally the germans got mad and came back at us. that made the french hotter than hell. a general came right over to our general and said it had to be stopped. no wonder the guerre ain’t ended. as we was under the french command we had to do accordin’ to orders.
“you might think that we got into the ways of the guerre with an awful jolt. but we didn’t. it just came to us gradual like. we got used to the whine of a shell and got so we could tell when they was comin’ and goin’. there wasn’t many casualties. few fellows got bumped off in the infantry on raidin’ parties. we lost a couple or so in the artillery.
“i saw my first dead man, killed in the guerre, about three weeks after goin’ in the line. fragments of a shell had hit him in two or three places. he was messed up all over one side of the road. i couldn’t tell much if he was a man or mule, the way he was scattered ’round. a fellow standin’ near said it was bill rand, a lad i used to sleep in the same tent with at boxford. course i was sorry for poor bill, but it didn’t worry me much. never thought of it anymore—that’s the way it’s been for all the boys. just got used to takin’ the guerre as it came along.
“the cooties got on us up there and i ain’t been lonesome for ’em since that time—don’t believe a fellow can ever get rid of the damn things. gas was the big thing that scared me at first. now it’s bombs. o. d., one of them boche planes dronin’ over your bean, waitin’ to pull up his tailboard and let a bomb drop, is the worst thing i ever want to be up against. you ’ain’t got a bit of protection, unless, of course, you’re ’way under the ground.
“talkin’ about the gas stuff reminds me of what happened to bill conway. bill was an old regular, been in the service eighteen years, soldiered every place the american flag ever flew and told us that gas, bombs, and shrapnel all tied up in one bag couldn’t made him budge. we knew bill pretty well and if there was anything that had him licked it was gas. he used to go to sleep with his mask on sometimes. well, jimmy leach and a few of us decided to get bill one night, so we hid his old gas-mask and when he got in the dug-out somebody beat on a tin can and bawled out, ‘gas—gas!’
“say, you would have died laughin’ at old bill. he jumps for his mask. nothin’ doin’. he tried to take jimmy leach’s, but couldn’t. everybody had piled into the bunks and pulled blankets over their heads. some of ’em began groanin’ and coughin’. ‘oh, my god, i’m gassed, i’m gassed!’ yelled bill, and he dived under a pile of his own blankets. ‘so am i,’ shouted leach, comin’ up for air. the rest of us all threw the blankets back and began smokin’. finally, after ’bout half an hour, and he nearly suffocated, bill stuck his head out and saw us and that there wasn’t any gas. maybe he didn’t cuss us out! said we were tin soldiers and belonged to a tin army. some day if i ever get back to my old newspaper job and a typewriter i’m goin’ to write a book about bill conway and call it tin sojers.”
