Ian Hay

“ Still no Gogarty.
“I wonder where he is,” muttered Boone restlessly. “We ought to have a watch on the far end of this ditch. If they come creeping along it, as they ought to do—Gee whizz!”
From behind the German line came a chorus of sharp discharges; then a whirring and a humming over Boone’s head. Then the earth rocked beneath the tremendous detonation, and the skies were lit up with the flash of a barrage of German trench-mortar bombs, exploding along two hundred yards of American wire. ”

“ Indeed, many of us never saw the ocean until last week. War and its appurtenances are for the present a game, full of interesting surprises and wonderful thrills. It is surprising, for instance, however good your appetite may have been in camp, to find how much more you can eat on board ship; and it is thrilling, if you happen to be a rustic beauty from a very small town in Central Iowa, to find yourself dancing the one-step, in a life-jacket, with a total stranger in uniform, upon an undulating deck to the music of a full military band. ”

“ We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept away forever. ”

“ Hitherto the summit of his ambition had been to stand one day in glorious apparel upon the tessellated flooring of a great New York hotel, opposite the elevators, and nod his head in Jove-like fashion whenever he thought it desirable that another elevator should go up. But now another and more restful career presented itself to him.
Every French peasant possesses a cow or two—peradventure half a dozen. To feed these, pastureland is required. But no thrifty Frenchman would set aside valuable arable land for this purpose, when the roadside is free to all. ”

“ Miss Lane assured her. “You can hear the firing.”
You certainly could. Up to their ears from the undergrowth on every side rose the mutterings of warfare—solitary rifle-shots, and the intermittent pup-pupping of machine guns. Down in the valley, at the foot of the road, they could see a stream. The road had once crossed it by a bridge; but the bridge was now a ruin, and the road had been diverted so as to cross higher up, by some sort of pontoon.
Not a human being was in sight. ”

“ American soldiers, white and black—mostly cheerful; French refugees—all sad. Guns, limbers, camions, carts, ambulances, tanks—all moving in an endless, tumultuous, profane stream. At cross-roads, traffic policeman struggling manfully with an impossible job. Automobiles everywhere—Cadillacs, Fords, and Dodges—all trying to make openings and steal a march upon the rest of Creation. Above us, the sky of France, weeping for her lost children. ”

“ Tier upon tier they rise—with their long, lean, American bodies, and tense, brown, American faces—seated in concentric circles on the deck itself, perched on hatches and deck-houses and sky-lights, clinging to davits and ventilators, or hanging in clusters from the rigging—all yelling themselves hoarse.
The “announcer”—one Buck Stamper—stands for the moment at the bottom of the vortex. With each of his muscular arms he encircles the shrinking figure of a competitor, and introduces the pair to the audience. ”

“ Boone and Jim shared a dugout in the front line, sunk below the forward parapet, under the sandbags. Having contracted the British habit of afternoon tea, they were occupied towards five o’clock in brewing that beverage in a mess-tin, when suddenly, with a whizz and a rush, a German shell passed over the trench and burst amid a cloud of flying clods fifty yards beyond it. ”

“ When that period of Reconstruction comes—and it may come sooner than we think—the first plank in its platform must be a solid understanding between the two English-speaking races. They, at least, must speak with one voice, or the whole fabric will fall to the ground.
Our two nations can never hope entirely to understand one another. Neither can they expect always to see eye to eye. Their national personalities are too robust. But to-day their sons are learning to know the worst of one another and the best of one another and the invincible humanity of one another. ”

“ In the depths, here and there, German is still spoken; but upon the face of the broad ocean it is a dead language.
Talking of nationalities, you will further observe that these ships all fly the Union Jack. But they are crowded with American soldiers. There must be thousands of these soldiers. They swarm everywhere—bunched on deck, peering through portholes, or plastering the rigging like an overflow of mustard sauce, which in truth they are. They are more than that. They are a portent. They are a symbol. ”

“ Greatly daring, he even justified the British custom of keeping to the left, on the ground that it dated back to the days when men rode on horseback, and riders and postilions, to mount or dismount, must perforce draw in to the near side of the road.
An American is forever battling between two instincts—native appreciation of what is modern and efficient, and inherited veneration for what is ancient and inconvenient. Common sense usually compels him to favour the former; but he is never so happy as when he can conserve or justify the latter.
Major Floyd gratified this instinct. ”

“ But in Central France these premonitory symptoms are lacking. Your company tramps along the winding road beside the river, through country cultivated to its last yard—a country of hedges and ditches and enclosed fields. A bend in the stream, and lo! before you rises a venerable city, piled up on the ground rising from the river, with ancient bridges spanning the stream and a grey cathedral crowning the whole. There are no suburbs, no advertising boards, no gasoline stations. The sea of green turf continues to the edge of the city, and very often laps against ramparts a thousand years old. ”

“ In at one end of the establishment goes a squalid torrent of torn clothing, unmated shoes, leaky rubber trench boots, odds and ends of equipment. In due course, after a drastic series of laundering, sorting, patching, stitching, or vulcanizing experiences—mainly at the hands of a twittering army corps of Frenchwomen—each item in this melancholy jumble finds itself reincarnated in various storehouses in the form of properly assorted pairs of boots and shoes, neat second-hand uniforms, and complete sets of equipment. Nothing is wasted. ”

“ Last year I met an American soldier in London. He was one of the first who had come over. I asked his impressions. He said:
“I have been in London three days, and not a soul has spoken to me.”
And therein was summed up the fundamental difference between our two nations. In the United States people like to see one another and talk to one another, and meet fresh people. If a stranger comes to town, reporters interview him as he steps off the train. Americans prefer when travelling to do so in open cars. At home their living-room doors are usually left open. Every room stands open to every other. ”

“ Certainly, the Armies of Invasion, both friendly and hostile, have transformed France, each in its own way. The Hun in the east has effected his share of the transformation in his own way, by fire, rapine, and pillage. But the British and Americans in the west have left a mark just as unmistakable and, it is to be hoped, more enduring. A great army cannot disembark upon the soil of another people’s country without importing a great deal of its own personality at the same time. ”

“ Perhaps some of them, before they came here, saw the Allied prisoners in Germany—starved, robbed, beaten, and forced to work in salt-mines or shell-areas until death made an end of their afflictions. These languishing grass-green captives must bless the Geneva Convention, and marvel at the uncultured folk who still stand by its provisions.
A camp of German prisoners practically runs itself. Fritz knows when he is well off. There is no insubordination. Men come rigidly to attention when an officer passes. The routine work is supervised by German sergeants. ”

“ The great Paris morning journals are nothing in our young lives. They are written in a language which we do not know, and their headlines are lacking in enterprise. The Paris issue of the London Daily Mail is better. It reaches us in the form of a special American edition, which caters generously to our national predilection for type several inches high. But beyond that it does not go. Blossom and blossom and blossom, but never the promise of fruit! The reading matter below the headlines is constrained, lacking in pep—dead stuff. ”

“ America, as a whole, has not yet felt this War: and she must, if she is to extract from it the benefit that belongs to her by right. What are a quarter of a million casualties to a nation the size of ours? We ought to suffer some more, if only to save us from unreadiness and mismanagement in the future. ”

“ The intervening space is a wilderness of shell-holes, splintered tree-stumps, and rusty barbed wire. Further observation is cut short by a sniper’s bullet, which travels past enquiring heads with a vicious crack. We have learned our first lesson. In trench warfare, by daylight at least, curiosity must be satisfied through peepholes or periscopes.
In the trench itself there is plenty to occupy us. There are watches to be kept and manual work to be done. A trench system is eternally throwing out annexes and undergoing repairs, for the artillery on the other side is always busy. ”

“ During the past four years the people of the British Isles have contributed to our common cause more than six million soldiers and sailors. On a basis of population, the purely British contribution to the forces of the British Empire should have been seventy-six per cent. The actual contribution has been eighty-four per cent; and when we come to casualties, not eighty-four but eighty-six per [x] cent of the total have been borne by those two little islands, Great Britain and Ireland, which form the cradle of our race. You can, therefore, imagine the strain upon our man-power. ”

“ Trench life is never comfortable at any time, but the first night in a strange trench is the most uncomfortable of all. For one thing, the trench feels unnaturally crowded. Moreover, we are young troops—the youngest troops in the world to-day—and that means much. ”

“ For a short time they stand uneasily apart; then Ikey Zingbaum, stimulated possibly by his supporters’ constant references to the ten-shilling certificate, leans suddenly forward and boxes his opponent’s ears. Miss Sissy, stung into indignant activity, lunges out with all his strength and counters fairly and squarely in the pit of Ikey’s [24] stomach. Mr. Zingbaum shuts up like a footrule, and shoots stern-foremost into the thick of the audience. He is extracted amid shouts of laughter, groaning horribly, and receives first aid from a dozen willing but inexperienced hands. ”

“ Moreover, the people at home are suffering badly. They have not too much to eat, and the casualty-list is approaching the three-million mark. They are not kicking: they are prepared to go on for another twenty years if national security demands it: but it is the sacrifice of the last few lives in a war at which national conscience boggles, and I fancy that if our statesmen see a chance of a victorious peace they will grab it. ”

“ Floyd, it seemed, was now attached to the American Army, having been appointed a liaison officer. Then Bond said: “Floyd, I am glad I met you. You are one of the most lucid exponents of British institutions in captivity, and I want you to explain to me just half a dozen or so of the most common variations of the British military salute.”
Floyd nodded sympathetically.
“I know,” he said. “It seems complicated, but all you have to do is to get hold of the fundamental idea. Here it is. The one thing a British soldier must never do is to remove his cap.” ”

“ But a hundred men had seen him die, and the gun which had knocked him out was in their hands three minutes later. Still, formations were broken up, communication with the rear was cut, and the brunt of the battle began to fall upon the individual. Now it is as an individual fighter that the American soldier excels. He has his faults. To-day attacks have to be carefully rehearsed; battles are fought on a strict time-table. The eager young fighter is too apt to jump off the mark before the signal is given, and overrun his objective when he reaches it. ”

“ You see, Major, we Americans consider ourselves the greatest nation on earth; and being Americans, we have to say so. Perhaps you have noticed that?”
“I have,” assented Floyd, “and I have lived in America long enough to learn to like hearing you say so. I like the young American’s passionate affection for his country and all her institutions, and his fixed determination to boost everything connected with her. The other day I was waiting in a village for an American Staff car which was being sent for me from Chaumont. ”

“ Human nature is a curious thing. Sissy Smithers was reckoned a quiet youth. In civil life he earned a romantic but unheroic livelihood by selling ladies’ hosiery. But his friend’s perfectly casual and reasonable observation stung him to the roots of his being. His face flamed. Without a word he scrambled upon the firing-step, heaved himself over the parapet, walked quite deliberately to the barbed wire, and brought back the helmet. The helmet had a chip in it. The chip was made by a German sniper as Sissy lifted the helmet out of the wire. ”

“ The other clerks may have to work in one room; but each clerk cherishes just one ambition, and that is to rise high enough in the business to secure honourable confinement in a hutch of his own.
For the same reason every Englishman keeps a fence round his garden—be it castle or cottage garden—just to show that it is his garden and no one else’s. ”

“ We have made another interesting discovery about Nature, and that is that habit can be stronger than instinct, and pride than either. The first law of Nature is said to be the instinct of self-preservation. Yet the average soldier, even in the inferno of modern warfare, gives less trouble to his leaders when under shell-fire than when his dinner does not come up to the usual standard, or he has run out of cigarettes. ”

“ The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—c’est la guerre! Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. ”