Irvin S. Cobb

“ The aviator is the one exception to a common rule. To him falls the great adventure. He goes jousting in the blue lists of the sky, helmeted and corseleted like a crusader of old. His lance is a spitting machine gun. His steed is a twentieth-century Pegasus, with wings of fine linen and guts of tried steel. Thousands of envying eyes follow him as he steers his single course to wage his single combat, and if he takes his death up there it is a clean, quick, merciful death high above the muck and more and jets of noxious laboratory fumes where the rest take theirs. ”

“ Here again at last was war in the open, as different from battle in the trenches as football is from trap shooting. The action of it was spread out before one's eyes, not masked in mud ambuscades. Each instant our eyes beheld some new and stirring picture, standing out by reason of its swift vigour from the vaster panorama of which it was a part. What I had seen of battle formations in the preceding three weeks had made me think mainly of subway diggin's or of construction work for a new railroad or of engineering operations in connection with a dam, say, or a dike. ”

“ The ability of the French so well to hide a group of five big pieces, each with a carriage as large as a two-ton truck and each with a snout projecting two or three yards beyond it, and with a limber projecting out behind it, shows what advances the gentle arts of ambuscade and camouflage have made since this war began. Seen upon the open road a big cannon painted as it is from muzzle to breach with splotchings of yellows and browns and ochres seems, for its size, the most conspicuous thing in the world. ”

“ We halted at a spot where the trench was broken in somewhat and where the fresh new clods upon the dirt shelf halfway up it were all stained a strange, poisonous green colour. The afternoon before a shell had dropped there, killing one American and wounding four others. It was the fumes of the explosive which had corroded the earth to make it bear so curious a tint. This company then had had its first fatality under fire; its men had undergone the shock of seeing one of their comrades converted into a mangled fragment of a man, but they bore themselves as though they had been veterans. ”

“ All the world appeared to have put on cartridge belts and gone to war. As far as the eye could reach, away off yonder to where sky line and earth line met behind the dust screen, cavalry, artillery, infantry, supply trains, munition trains, and all imaginable branches of the portable machinery of an army were in sight and in motion. Their masses hid the earth with a shifting pattern as though a vast blue-grey carpet were magically weaving itself. Overhead, singly, in pairs and in formations, like flights of wild fowl, the scout planes, the observation planes and the battle planes went winging. ”

“ On a day when the atmosphere was better fitted for automobiling in closed cars than for bombings we headed away from our billets, travelling in what I shall call a general direction, there being four of us besides the sergeant who drove. Things were stirring along the Front. Miles away we could hear the battery heavies thundering and drumming, and once in a lull we detected the hammering staccato of a machine gun tacking down the loose edges of a fight that will never be recorded in history, with the earnestness and briskness of a man laying a carpet in a hurry. ”

“ And every hour in this beehive of industry the man who looked close would come upon things eloquently bespeaking the tragedy or the comedy of war's flotsam and jetsam. Now perhaps it would be a battered German bugle picked up by some souvenir-loving soldier, only to be flung into the camp salvage dump when its finder wearied of carrying it; and now it would be a khaki blouse with a bullet hole in the breast of it and great brown stains, stiff and dry, in its lining. ”

“ For every man who with set jaw climbs the top to sink his teeth, figuratively or actually, in the embodied enemy, there are a dozen who toil and moil far back behind in manual labours of the most exacting and exhausting forms imaginable. A night raid is a variety of sublimated burglary, better adapted to the temperament of the prowler and the poacher than to the upstanding soldier man's instincts. If there be fear of gas he adds to the verisimilitude of the imitation by hiding his face behind a mask as though he were a footpad. ”

“ There are times when one cares to smoke and times when one does not care to smoke. As we scuttled for the shelter of the trench four more shells fell in rapid succession and burst within a short distance of where the first one had gone off, and each time we felt the earth shake under our feet and out of the tails of our eyes saw the soil rising in a column to spread out mushroom fashion and descend in pattering showers.
So, using the trench as an avenue, we continued to go away from there; and as we went guns continued to bay behind us. ”

“ The woman who vended papers is a crushed mass under the wreckage of her kiosk; the girl who sold car tickets is dead and mangled beneath her flattened booth; the waiter who wiped the table-tops off lies among his tables now, the whole crown of his head sliced away by slivers of glass; here and there in the square are scattered small motionless clumps that resemble heaps of bloodied and torn rags. Wounded men and women are being carried away, groaning and screaming as they go. But in the edge of the woods at St. Gobain the Kaiser is climbing into his car to ride to his headquarters. ”

“ For swagger, for snap, for smartness in the drill and for cockiness in the billet; for good humour on the march and for dash and spunk and deviltry in the fighting into which just now they have been sent, our army can show no better soldiers and no more gallant spirits than the lads who mainly make up the rank and file of this particular division.
They are the foreign-born Jews and Italians and Slavs of New York's East Side, that were called up for service in the first draft.
No wonder the mother who didn't raise her boy to be a soldier has become an extinct species back home. ”

“ Think of a French garden fenced in after the style of a Nebraska ranch yard. Also I have taken note that the peasants are removing the plank shorings from the sides of old, disused trenches and with the boards thus secured are knocking up barns and chicken-sheds and even makeshift dwellings.
Assuredly it will never be the old France, physically. But spiritually, the new France, wearing the scars of her sacrifice as the Redeemer of Mankind wore the nail-marks of His crucifixion, will be a vision of glory before the eyes of men forevermore. ”

“ As mentally you start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed scar in the youth's temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face is beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the mark of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in the black and utter void of blindness. ”

“ I think, though, of two men I have met over here who were designed by nature and by environment to typify exactly what they are. One is Haig and the other is Pershing. Either would make the perfect model for a statue to portray the common notion of a field-marshal. General Sir Douglas Haig is a picture, drawn to scale, of the kind of British general that the novelists love to describe; in mannerism, in figure, in size, in bearing, in colouring and expression, he is all of that. And by the same tokens Pershing in every imaginable particular is the typical American fighting-man. ”

“ At a French railway station any day one sees weeping women but they do not weep until after the trains which carry their men-folk back to the trenches have gone. To this rule I have never seen an exception.
A soldier who has finished his leave—a permissionaire the French call him—comes to the station, returning to his duties at the Front. It may be he is a staff officer gorgeous in gold lace. It may be he is a recruit of this year's class with the fleece of adolescence still upon his cheeks but with the grave assurance of a veteran in his gait. ”

“ They knew—these war-worn elders did—what the chosen man children of the generation just emerging from the first stages of its adolescence would very shortly be called upon to face; and so they shook their heads in silent but regretful affirmation of the certain prospect of an added burden of woefulness and suffering for the flowered youth of their stricken land. For these men who had trod the paths of glory that are so flinty and so hard could understand what must lie ahead so much better than those stripling lads to whom the road to war was as yet a shining and a golden highway! ”

“ In common with nearly every other man to whom has been given similar opportunity I have seen hundreds of splendid things at the Front where our people hold for defence or move for attack—heroism, devotion, sacrifice, an unquenchable cheerfulness, and a universal determination that permeates through the ranks from the highest general to the greenest private to put through the job that destiny has committed into our keeping, after the only fashion in which this job properly may be put through. ”

“ Merely by squinting straight ahead he could have seen at the farther edge of the little glade a triple row of white crosses, each set off by the wooden rosette device in red, white and blue with which the French, when given time, mark the graves of their fallen fighters. Merely by sniffing he could have caught from a mile distant the faint but unmistakable reek that hangs over battlefields when they are getting to be old battlefields but are not yet very old, and that nearly always distresses green work animals at the first time of taking it into their nostrils. ”

“ And from far up on the rise toward Passchen-daele came the dull regurgitations of the big guns, as though the war had sickened of its own horrors and was retching in its nausea.
What now was here must, in a measure, always be here. For surely no husbandman would dare ever to drive his ploughshare through a field which had become a stinking corruption; where in every furrow he would inevitably turn up mortal awfulness, and where any moment his steel might strike against one of the countless unexploded shells which fill the earth like horrid plums in a yet more horrid pudding. ”

“ He gets used to being bombed and is bored thereby; gets used to gas alarms and bombardments; to high explosives, spewing shrapnel, and purring bullets; gets used to eating his meals standing up and taking his rest in broken bits. He gets used to all of war's programme—its impossibilities and its contradictions, its splendours, its horrors and its miseries. In short he gets used to living in a world that is turned entirely upside down, with every normal aspect in it capsised and every regular and ordained phase of it standing upon its head. ”

“ Now an army might very well be likened to a snake, which sometimes squeezes its enemy by an enveloping movement but more often strikes at him with sudden blows. In the case of our own Army I particularly like the simile of a great snake—a rattlesnake, by preference, since in the first place the rattlesnake is essentially an American institution, and since once before our ancestors fought for their own freedom, much as we now are fighting for the freedom of the world, under a banner that carried the device of a rattler coiled. ”

“ The great awakening came, though, before the first of June. Over-night, it almost seemed, our army began to function as an army. The sea became alive with our transports, the land became alive with our troops. Instead of two hundred and some odd thousands of men on French soil, we had half a million, then a million, then a million and a half. No longer were our forces without tanks of American manufacture, without machine-guns of American manufacture, without a proper and adequate equipment of heavy guns of American manufacture. ”