Upton Sinclair - "The Machine"

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Jack London - "The Son of the Wolf"

The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

W >> William Allen White >> The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me




[Illustration: "What part of the States do you Canadians come
from?"]

WE: "Now, boys, does that always happen? How often do you fellows
polish Fritzie off and clean up the trench?"

THEY (after the short one had nodded to the tall one): "Well,
mister, I'll tell you. It's got so it's mighty damn risky for any
Prussian to surrender to any Canadian!"

When the line out there in the training camp has gone to its
objective, which usually is the third or fourth enemy trench, the
men begin digging in. Then they go back to the sergeant major for
more instructions. The digging in is usually done under a curtain
of fire to protect them. It is a great picture.

In another part of the field we saw the engineers learning to
make tunnels under the enemy; saw the engineers blowing up enemy
trenches--a pleasant and exciting spectacle; saw the engineers
making camouflage, and it may interest the gentle reader to know
that one of the niftiest bits of camouflage we saw was over a French
seventy-five gun. It was set in the field. A rail-road siding ran
to it. On a canvas over the gun two rails and the usual number of
ties were painted, and the track ran on beyond. Fifty feet in the
air one could not tell that the gun was there.

The liveliest part of this martial cloister was the section devoted
to the bayonet practice. And as we watched the men trying to rip
the vest buttons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrangements
with a bayonet, while loping along at full speed, we recalled a
Civil War story which may well be revived here. A Down-easter from
Vermont and a Southerner were going around and around one day at
Shiloh, each trying to get the other with the bayonet, but both
were good dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting winded he
cried between puffs:

"Watch aout--! Mind what yer dewin'! Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yew
got no sense! You'll stick the pint of thet thing in my boawels,
if you ain't keerful!"

We heard a lot of shivery stories around that training camp. They
told us that the French chasseurs, the famous blue devils, were
more or less careless about the way they forgot to take prisoners.
They are a proud people, from the French Alps, and exceedingly
democratic. A German brigadier, caught under their barrage, came
up to a troop of chasseurs and when they demanded his surrender
asked curtly, "Where's your superior officer?" They pointed down
the hill, and he started down. At a safe distance they threw a hand
grenade into him and obliterated him, remarking, "Well, the world
is that much safer for democracy." It is told of a Canadian who
came across a squad of Germans with their hands up that he asked:
"How many are you?" Eleven, they said. He reached in his pocket;
found his hand grenade, and threw it at them, remarking, "I'm sorry
I have but the one; but divide it between you!" There is also the
story of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go out on a night raiding
party--crawling on their bellies with their knives as their only
weapons. Finally two of them returned with new pairs of boots.
Showing them proudly to their amazed Captain, they said humbly,
"Yes, sire! But you would be pained to learn how long we had to
hunt for a fit!" There is also the story of the festive Tommy who
tried to play a practical joke on his German prisoner by slipping
a lighted bomb in the German's pocket. The Tommy then started to
run; the German thought he must keep up with his captor and Tommy
realized that the joke was on him, just as the bomb went off and
killed them both.

Such stories are innumerable. They are probably untrue. But they
indicate what men at war think is funny; they reflect a certain
impoliteness and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it wears
on it grows more or less unneighbourly. And yet the upheaval of
war is just a passing emotional disturbance in the normal life of
men. Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no glorifying
of war; men in war, at least on our side of the line, hate war
more than they hate the Germans. And with the whole heart of the
civilized world--if one frankly may call the Turk and the Prussian
the savages that they are--set upon maintaining this war to a
victory for the allies, civilization may be said to be in the war
as a make-shift. Everywhere one hears that it is a war against war.
Every one is "longing for the dawn of peace" when it shall come
with justice, and in the meantime France is as deeply devoted to
healing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the war. Six hundred
French societies are devoted to various war works of mercy! Every
man and woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse is working
in one of these societies. And yet life goes on with all this
maladjustment of its cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordinary
routine. There never were more joyous dahlias and phlox and china
asters than we saw coming back from that training camp where men
were learning the big death game. And when we came to Paris the
real business of war seemed remote. Of course, Paris is affected by
the war. But Paris is not war-like. One doesn't associate Paris with
"grim-visaged war!" For if Paris is not gay, still it remains mighty
amiable. At noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side-walks,
and until nine o'clock at night they give a fair imitation of
their former happiness. Then they close and the picture shows are
crowded, and the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and their
women folk at the opera and at the vaudeville shows more than at
the other shows. During the summer and the autumn a strong man put
on a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was the talk of the
town. His game was a tug of war. He announced that he would give
fifty dollars to any soldier who could withstand him. The strong
man sat the soldier down on the floor, foot to foot before him.
Both grasped a pole, and it was the strong man's "act" to throw
the soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back of the strong
man. It is a simple act; one that soon would tire Broadway, but
when one remembers that soldiers bring their local pride with them
to Paris from the ends of the earth, from New Zealand, from India,
from Canada, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China, from
Australia, and then when one remembers that the men of his country
are gathered in the theater to back every local athlete, it is
easy to see why the strong man holds week after week, month after
month, season after season. Every night some proud nation gathers
in the show house to get that fifty dollars with its favourite
son. And every night some favourite son almost gets it. And if the
strong man didn't fudge a little, pinch the favourite son's hands
on the pole and make him let go, almost every night the strong man
would be worsted. The struggle sets the house yelling. It is the
only real drama in Paris. We noticed that the shows of Paris which
appealed to the eyes and ears were far below the American standard.
In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher
grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than
Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish,
that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste.
Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies
was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be
in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville
house this year. Sometimes they were done in French, sometimes
in English. In Genoa, one may say in passing that we heard one of
the songs from "Hitchy-Coo" done in Italian. It was eery! American
artists are popular in Paris. We saw a girl at three show houses
in Paris, under the name of Betty Washington, doing a gipsy dance,
playing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, who has a keen
eye, noticed that she had her toes rouged! But she always was good
for four encores, and she usually got a good start at the fifth from
Henry and me; we had just that much national pride! Great throngs
of soldiers filled these gay show houses. The French, the English,
and the Australians seemed satisfied with them. But the Canadians
and Americans sniffed. To them Paris is a poor show town.

One night we fell into a Boulevard show the like of which we had
never seen before. It was a political revue! The whole evening was
devoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration,
at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at the
high taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skits
were done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms of
burlesque. A good crowd--but not a soldier crowd--sat through it
and applauded appreciatively. Imagine an American audience devoting
a whole evening to a theatrical performance exclusively concerned
with Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roosevelt, former Mayor
Mitchel, and LaFollette. In America we get little politics out of
the theater. In France, where they distrust the newspapers, they get
much politics from the theater. The theater is free in France--and
apparently not so closely censored as the newspapers. We learned that
night at the revue of a coming cabinet crisis, before the newspapers
announced it. And in learning of the crisis we had this curious
social experience, which we modestly hoped was quite as Parisian as
the Revue. During the first act of the show it was Greek to Henry
and me. We could understand a vaudeville show, and by following
the synopsis could poke along after the pantomime in a comedy. But
here in this revue, where the refinements of sarcasm and satire
were at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. Henry was
for getting out and going somewhere else. But we had a dollar a seat
in the show and it seemed to me that patience would bring results.
And it did! A good-looking, middle-aged couple sat down in the seats
next to us, and the woman began talking English. She was sitting
next to me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. We asked her
if it would be too much trouble to interpret the show for two jays
from Middle Western America. She replied cordially enough. And she
gave us a splendid running interpretation of the show. The man with
her seemed friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding her hand
in the dark, and that once he slipped his arm around her when the
lights went clear down. But that spelled a newly married middle-aged
couple, and we would have bet money that he was a widower and she,
late from his office, was at the head of his household. Between
acts he and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with the lady. We
exchanged confidences of one sort and another after the manner of
strangers in a strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: "What
does your husband do for a living?"

"My--what?" she exclaimed.

"Your husband, there?"

"Who--that man? Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked him
up in a cafe an hour ago!"

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy "Oh." But we had a good chat
just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the
cabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics.
But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters
are free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takes
all kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world.
And the war really is being fought so that they may work out their
lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of
their own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, the
kind is easy to find. There is kultur!

Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry did
not mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable and
as improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Every
man has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love from
marriage, and establishing it beautifully in another relation, is
my aversion, and it will have to stand. Henry was patient with me,
but we were both genuinely glad when a day or two later we came back
to the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperoned
on the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we could
understand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity all
over France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth in
the hospital at--we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not the
place--we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The letter
she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to other
hands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should have
been. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimental
work in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. But
the cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital four
hours out of Paris. The place had that curious French quality
of charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put into
our "places and palaces." Down a winding village street--a kind
of low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened with
uniforms like the streets of most French villages these days--we
wormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building--an
official looking building. It was not official, we learned--just
a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road
leads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse,
or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. But
when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard,
gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into
a garden--the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners
of the garden were fine old trees--tall, spike-shaped evergreens
of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and
a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the
walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox
and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay
sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital--a
new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the
street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was
made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built
architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to
represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board
partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be;
and stoves furnished the heat. The beds--acres and acres of iron
beds--were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the
long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was
American--new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We
were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students
who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their
brand new uniforms--young crown princes of democracy, twice as
handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if
they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all
the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place
a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a
king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and
were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was
sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias--wounded.
It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but
from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet
wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles
permanently--but no one could know. Then he sat there in the
mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us
how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on
out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land,
stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the
wounded. In time he came to a wounded German--a Prussian officer
with a shell-wound in his leg.

He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something like
a first aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor paused, picked
a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the
narrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the
ambulance." Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a half
mile back and the shells were still popping--more or less--around
us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled
and went on without lifting his voice. "Then he did it"

"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry.

"Well, how?" from me.

"Oh, I don't know. He just did it," droned the Young Doctor. "We
were talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked
up. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. It
got my hand!" He stopped, began poking the gravel with his toe,
and smiled again as one who has heard an old story and wants to be
polite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on the
hoary, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless of
our spanking new uniforms and cried: "Well, my Heavenly home!" He
nodded, drew a deep breath and said, "That's the how of it."

[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is
listening to another man's story in his own mouth]

"Well, what do you know about--"

Then Henry checked me with, "You weren't expecting it? Did he make
no warning sign?"

"Not a peep--not a chirrup," answered the Doctor, still diffidently.
Then he added, as one reflecting over an incident in a rather
remote past: "It was odd, wasn't it. You would think that two men
who stood where we were together--I, who had put my hands in his
live flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fingers, and
he who was clinging to my body for support--you would think we had
come together not as foes, but as friends; for the war was over
for him!"

The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His mouth set. He went on:
"This man should have abandoned his military conscience. But no--,"
the Doctor shook his head sadly, "he was a Prussian before he was
a man! He carefully figured it out, that it takes four years to
make a doctor, and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a
doctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's all very scientific,
this German warfare--scientific and fanatical; Nietzsche and Mahomet,
what a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and the Sultan."

Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, in submarines,
in air, in their planes bombing hospitals, and on land, looting
and dynamiting villages--in all their martial enterprises, think
unlike the rest of civilized men. They are a breed apart--savage,
material-minded, diabolic, unrestrained by fear or love of God,
man or devil. We talked of these things for a time; but something,
the quiet beauty of the garden maybe, took the edge off our hate.
And gradually it became apparent to me, at least, that the Young
Doctor was marking time until we should have the sense to tell him
something of the Eager Soul. What did he care for the war? For the
Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? For his wounded hand?
What were gardens made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctuaries
of lovers? One does not go to a garden to hate, to buy, or sell, to
fight, to philosophize, but to adore something or someone, somehow
or somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his Holy Temple, and we
knew it. So Henry asked: "You received your letter?" And when he
thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: "Did she tell you
that the Gilded Youth was there at her hospital?"

"Only in a pencilled postscript after she had decided to send the
letter to me by you," answered the Doctor.

That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the Young
Doctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably she
had not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to him
after the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicate
that she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis,
and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth. The
only question which occurred to me to develop this fact was this:
"Did she tell you that she was made assistant to the new head
nurse that came to supply the place of the one who was slain by
the Germans?" Henry looked at me as if he thought the question was
unfair.

"Yes," laughed the Doctor, "in the very first line."

"What odds are you giving now, Bill?" asked Henry bitterly.

"In the very first line,--" we could all three see the Eager face, the
proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the straying
crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there
in the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion in
pride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that it
meant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understand
about the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in,
"Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital
yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have two
to one. It's all over but the shouting." And Henry laughed at the
Young Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his
bandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yard
was disturbing news to him.

"Ah, don't worry about that," Henry reassured him. "Why, man, you
ought to have heard what she said about you!" And Henry, being
a good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had said
to the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzing
monsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of death
in the moonlight.

We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the
news we had of the girl. Long after we had passed through the garden
gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch
and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we
thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into
china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox,
and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the
melancholy yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and desolation,
with war's alarms on every wind.

And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even
in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the
alchemy of love in youth!




CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY


As the autumn deepened we found our Red Cross work ending. This
work had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper offices
in Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the big
war. For days and days we had been riding in motor cars along
the line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances had
hauled us--always more or less frightened--up near the trenches of
the front line. We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had
snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the
first aid posts. We had learned many new and curious things--most
of which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon or
the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how
to fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope,
and how to duck when a shell comes in. Also we had stood god-father
to a serial love affair that began on the boat coming over and
was for ever being "continued in our next." And it was all--riding
along the line, huddling in abris, sneaking scared to death along
trenches, and ducking from the shells--all vastly diverting. We
had grown fat on it; not that we needed just that expression of
felicity, having four hundred pounds between us. But it was almost
finished and we were sadly turning our faces westward to our normal
and reasonably honest lives at home, when Medill McCormick came
to Paris and tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temptation;
"beyond the Alps lies Italy," as a copy book sentence has lure in
it, and as a possible journey to a new phase of the war, it caught
us; and we started.

So we three stood on the platform, at the station at Modane, in
Savoy, a few hundred yards from the Italian border, one fair autumn
day, and our heavy clothes--two Red Cross uniforms and a pea-green
hunting suit, made us sweat copiously and unbecomingly. The two
Red Cross uniforms belong to Henry and me; the pea-green hunting
outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, congressman at large from
Illinois, U. S. A. He was going into Italy to study the situation.
As a congressman he felt that he should be really informed about
the war as it was the most vital subject upon which he should have
to vote. So there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illinois
congressman, while the uniforms of the continent brushed by us,
in uniforms ourselves, after a fashion, but looking conspicuously
civilian, and incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea-green
hunting outfit looked more soldierly than we. For although
we wore Sam Browne belts, to indicate that we were commissioned
officers--commissioned as Red Cross Colonels--and although we wore
Parisian uniforms of correct cut, we knew in our hearts that they
humped in the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at the
shoulders. A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform
without looking like a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling the
tunics our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and enviously at the
slim-waisted boys in khaki; but we never could get their god-like
effects. For alas, the American uniform is high-waisted, and a
fat man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! So we paced the
platform at Modane trying to look unconcerned while the soldiers
of France, Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania walked by
us, clearly wondering what form of military freak we were. For the
American Red Cross uniform was not so familiar in those latitudes
as it was to be a month later, when Major Murphy came swinging
through Modane with forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies,
a young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, and half a million
dollars in ready cash to spend upon the stricken cities of Northern
Italy choked with refugees fleeing before the German invasion!
Today, the American flag floats from a hundred flag-poles in Italian
cities, from Venice to Naples. Under that flag the American Red
Cross has soup kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian
relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, and the Red Cross
uniform which made the soldiers' eyes bug out there at the border
in the early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in Italy. But we
three unsoldierly looking civilians took that uniform into a strange
country.

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