The Glory of the Coming

He resigned this commission forthwith, hurried back to the States and joined up at the first recruiting office he saw after he reached New York. And now when I met him, he had his majority in an American regiment which has a long and a most honourable record behind it.

During this past month I saw a good deal of him. So far as I could judge, he had one, and just one, bit of affectation about him – if you could call it that. He wore always the British trench helmet that he had worn in the Canadian forces and he liked to finger the gap in its brim where a bit of shrapnel chipped it as he climbed up Vimy Ridge, and he liked to tell about that day of Vimy so glorious and so tragic for the valorous whelps of the British lion who hail from our own side of the blue water. He had another small vanity too, as I now understand – a vanity which to-day is being gratified.

Six days ago I left the regiment to spend a day and a night with a battery of five-inch guns just west of Montdidier. As I was starting off he hailed me and we made an engagement for a dinner together here in this town where the food is very, very good, said dinner to take place “sometime soon.” He was standing in the road as I rode away and when I looked back out of the car he waved his hand at me.

The village where I stayed for that night and the following day, formed a hinge in the line that our forward forces had taken over. It was within two miles of the German trenches and within three or four miles of some of their heavy batteries. Through the night I slept at battalion headquarters, in the only house in the town which up until then had escaped serious damage from German gunfire.

Coming back again to my regiment – as I shall call it – on the second day following, I learned that almost immediately after my departure the batteries I left in and near this village had been ordered to take up a prepared position in a patch of woods a mile farther in the rear and that my friend’s battalion had gone up to hold the town and to act as a reserve unit there until its turn should come to relieve part of another infantry regiment in the trenches proper. So I knew that in all probability he now was domiciled in the cottage where I had slept the night previous. As it turned out my guess was right – that was where he was. Three days ago I borrowed a side-car and ran on down here where I could get in touch with the divisional censor and file some of the copy I have been grinding out lately.

Yesterday afternoon in the main square I bumped into the adjutant of my regiment and with him, one of the French liaison officers attached to the regiment.

“Hello,” I said, “what brings you two down here?”

“We came to get some flowers for the funeral to-morrow,” the adjutant told me.

“Whose funeral?” I asked.

When they told me whose funeral, I was stunned for a moment. From them I learned when my friend died and how. And this, then, is the story of it:

Night before last he and his battalion liaison officer, a Frenchman of course, and his battalion adjutant were eating supper in that same small red brick house which had sheltered me for a night. The Germans had been punishing the place at long distance; now there was a lull in the bombardment, but just as the three of them finished their meal, the enemy reopened fire. Almost at once a shell fell in the courtyard before the house and another demolished a stone stable in the orchard behind it. All three hurried down into an improvised bomb-proof shelter in the cellar.

“You fellows stay here,” said the major when they had reached the foot of the stairs. “I left my cigars and a couple of letters from home upstairs in the kitchen. I’ll go up and get them and be back again with you in a minute.”

Thirty seconds later, to the accompaniment of a great rending crash, the building caved in. Wreckage cascaded down the cellar stairs but the floor rafters above their heads stood the jar and the two who were below got off with bruises and scratches. They made their way up through the debris. A six-inch shell had come through the roof, blowing down two sides of the kitchen, and under the shattered walls the Major was lying, helpless and crushed.

They hauled him out. He was conscious but badly hurt, as they could tell. The adjutant ran to a dug-out on the other side of the village and brought back with him the regimental surgeon. It didn’t take the surgeon long to make his examination.

To the others he whispered that there was no hope – the Major’s spine was broken. But because he dreaded to break the word to the victim he essayed a bit of excusable deceit.

“Major,” he said, bending over the figure stretched out upon the floor, “you’ve got it pretty badly, but I guess we’ll pull you through. Only you’d better let me give you a little jab of dope in your arm – you may begin to suffer as soon as the numbness of the shock wears off.”

My friend, so they told me, looked up in the surgeon’s face with a whimsical grin.

“Doc,” he said, “your intentions are good; but there comes a time when you mustn’t try to fool a pal. And you can’t fool me – I know. I know I’ve got mine and I know I can’t last much longer. I’m dead from the hips down already. And never mind about giving me any dope. There are several things I want to say and I want my head clear while I’m saying them.”

He told them the names and addresses of his nearest relatives – a brother and a sister, and he gave directions for the disposal of his kit and of his belongings. He didn’t have very much to leave – professional soldiers rarely do have very much to leave.

After a bit he said: “I’ve only one regret. I’m passing out with the uniform of an American soldier on my back and that’s the way I always hoped ‘twould be with me, but I’m sorry I didn’t get mine as I went over the top with these boys of ours behind me. Still, a man can’t have everything – can he? – and I’ve had my share of the good things of this world.”

He began to sink and once they thought he was gone; but he opened his eyes and spoke again:

“Boys,” he said, “take a tip from me who knows: this thing of dying is nothing to worry about. There’s no pain and there’s no fear. Why, dying is the easiest thing I’ve ever done in all my life. You’ll find that out for yourselves when your time comes. So cheer up and don’t look so glum because I just happen to be the one that’s leaving first.”

The end came within five minutes after this. Just before he passed, the liaison officer who was kneeling on the floor holding one of the dying man’s hands between his two hands, felt a pressure from the cold fingers that he clasped and saw a flicker of desire in the eyes that were beginning to glaze over with a film. He bent his head close down and in the ghost of a ghost of a whisper, the farewell message of his friend and mine came to him between gasps.

“Listen,” the Major whispered, “Old Blank,” – naming the regimental chaplain – “has pulled off a lot of slouchy funerals in this outfit. Tell him, for me, to give me a good swell one, won’t you?”

He went then, with the smile of his little conceit still upon his lips.

That was why the two men whom I met here yesterday rode in to get flowers and wreaths. They told me the Colonel was going to have the regimental band out for the services to-day too, and that a brigadier-general and a major-general of our army would be present with their staffs and that a French general would be present with his staff. So I judge they are giving my friend what he wanted – a good swell one.

The France to which tourists will come after the war will not be the France which peacetime visitors knew. I am not speaking so much of the ruined cities and the razed towns, each a mute witness now to thoroughness as exemplified according to the orthodox tenets of Kul-tur. For the most part these never can be restored to their former semblances – Hunnish efficiency did its damned work too well for the evil badness of it ever to be undone. Indeed I was told no longer ago than last week, when I went through Arras, dodging for shelter from ruin-heap to ruin-heap between gusts of shelling from the German batteries, that it is the intention of the French government to leave untouched and untidied certain areas of wanton devastation, so future generations of men looking upon these hell’s quarter-sections, will have before their eyes fit samples of the finished handicraft of the Hun. I am sure this must be true of Arras because in the vicinity of the cathedral – I mean the place where the cathedral was once – signs are stuck up in rubble-piles or fastened to upstanding bits of splintered walls forbidding visitors to remove souvenirs or to alter the present appearance of things in any way whatsoever. I sincerely trust the French do carry out this purpose. Then in the years to come, when Americans come here and behold this spot, once one of the most beautiful in all Europe and now one of the foulest and most hideous, they may be cured of any lingering inclination to trust a people in whose veins there may linger a single trace of the taints of Kaiserism and militarism. However, I dare say that by then our present enemies will have been purged clean of the blight that now is in their blood.

When I say that the France of the future will never be the France which once was a shrine for lovers of beauty to worship at – which was all one great altar dedicated to loveliness – I am thinking particularly of the rural districts and not of the communities. I base my belief upon the very reasonable supposition that after the armies are withdrawn or disbanded – or, as in the case of our foes, killed off or captured or driven back, – the peasants in their task of making the devastated regions fit once more for human habitation, will turn to the material most plentifully at hand and that of which the quickest use can be made. This means then, that instead of rebuilding with masonry and cement and plaster after the ancient modes, they will employ the salvage of military constructions. And by that same sign it means that ugly characterless wooden buildings with roofs of corrugated iron, and all slab-sided and angular and hopelessly plain, will replace the quaint gabled houses that are gone – and gone forever; and that where the picturesque stone fences ran zig-zagging across the faces of the meadows, and likewise where the centuries-old, plastered walls rose about byre and midden and stable-yard, will instead be stretched lines of barbed wire, nailed to wooden posts.

The stuff will be there – in incredible quantities – and it will be cheap and it will be available for immediate use, once the forces of the Allies have scattered. It is only natural to assume therefore that the thrifty country-folk and the citizens of the villages will take it over. For a fact in certain instances they are already doing so. Just the other day, up near the Flanders border in the British-held territory, I saw a half grown boy wriggling through a maze of rusted wire along an abandoned defence line, like Brer Rabbit through the historic brier-patch; and when I drew nearer, curious to know what sort of game he played all alone here in a land where every game except the great game of war is out of fashion, I saw that he was tearing down the strands of the wire, and through the interpreter he told me he was going to enclose his mother’s garden with the stuff. 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. I like this simile as I set it down in my note-book. And I mean no irreverence as I liken the barbed wire to the Crown of Thoms and think of two cross-pieces of ugly wood out of a barrack or a rest-billet as being erected into the shape of The Cross.

When the military policemen first came upon him in the Gare du Nord he made a picture worth looking at. For he stood above six-feet-two in his soleless and broken brogans, and he was as black as a coal-hole at twelve o’clock at night during a total eclipse of the moon and he was as broad across between the shoulders as the back of a hack. He wore a khaki shirt, a pair of ragged, blue overalls and an ancient campaign hat. He didn’t appear to be going anywhere in particular; he was just standing there.

Now the M. P.9 have a little scheme for trapping deserters and malingerers. They edge close up behind a suspect and then one of them snaps out “Shun!” in the tones of a drill-officer. If the fellow really is a truant from service, force of habit and the shock of surprise together make him come to attention and then he’s a gone gosling, marching off the calaboose with steel jewelry on both his wrists.

But when this pair slipped nearer and nearer until they could touch the big darky, and one of them barked the command right in his ear, he merely turned his head and without straightening his languid form inquired politely;

“Speakin’ to me, Boss?”

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, one of them asked for his papers.

“Whut kinder papers?”

“Your military papers – your pass – something to identify you by.”

“W’y, Boss,” he asked, “does you need papers to go round wid yere in Sant Nazare?” “This ain’t St. Nazare,” they told him. “This is Paris.”

“Paris? My Lawd! Den dat ‘splains it.”

“Explains what?” They were getting cross with him.

“‘Splains w’y I couldn’t fine all dem niggers dey tole me wuz in Sant Nazare. Here I been in Paris all dis time – ever since early dis maw-nin’ – an’ I didn’t know it. No wonner I couldn’t locate dem big wharf-boats an’ dem niggers.”

“Never mind that now – I just asked you where’re your papers?”

“Papers? Me? Huh, Boss, I ain’t got no more papers ‘n a ha’nt. Effen you needs papers to git about on, you gen’elmen better tek me an’ lock me up right now, ‘ka’se I tells you, p’intedly, I ain’t got nary paper to my name.”

“That’s precisely what we aim to do. Come on, you.”

They took him to number ten Rue St. Anne where our provost-marshal in Paris has his headquarters and there the tale came out. I got it first hand from the captain of the Intelligence Department who examined him and I know I got it straight, because the captain was a monologist on the Big Time before he signed up for the war, and he has both the knack of narrative and the gift of dialects. Then later I myself saw the central figure in the comedy and interviewed him. In a way of speaking, I think his adventure was the most remarkable of any I have heard of on this side of the ocean – and I have heard my share. How a big lubberly American negro with absolutely nothing on his person to vouch for him or his purposes, could travel half way across a country where no one else may stir a mile without a pocket full of passes and vises and credentials; and how, lacking any knowledge of the language, he managed to do what he did do – but I am anticipating.

It was at ten Rue St. Anne that my friend the ex-vaudevillian took him in hand with the intention of conferring the third degree. For quite a spell the interrogator couldn’t make up his mind whether he dealt with the most guileless human being on French soil or with a shrewd black fugitive hiding his real self behind a mask of innocence. After he had made sure the prisoner was what he seemed to be, the intelligence officer kept on at him for the fun of the thing.

Batting his eyes as the questions pelted at him, the giant made straightforward answers. His name was Watterson Towers; his age was summers ‘round twenty-fo’ or twenty-five, he didn’t perzactly ‘member w’ich; he was born and fotched up in Bowlin’ Green, Kintucky, and at the time of his coming to France he resided at number thirty-fo’, East Pittsburgh.

“Number thirty-four what?” asked the inquisitor.

“Naw suh, not no thirty-fo’ nothin’ – jes’ plain thirty-fo’.”

“But what street is it on?”

“‘Tain’t on no strett, Boss.”

“What do you mean – no street?”

“Boss, wuz you ever in East Pittsburgh? Well suh, den does you ‘member dat string of little houses dat stands in a row right ‘longside de railroad tracks ez you comes into town f’um de fur side? ‘Taint no street, it’s jes’ only houses. Well suh, I lives in de thirty-fo’th one.”

“I see. How did you get here?”

“Me? I rid, mostly.”

“Rode on what?”

“Rid part de time on a ship an’ part de time on de steam-cyars but fust an’ last I done a mighty heap of walkin’, also.”

Further questioning elicited from Watterson Towers these salient facts: He had taken a job which carried him from East Pittsburgh to New York and left him stranded there. He had heard about the draft. He knew that sooner or later the draft would catch him and send him off to France where he would be expected to fight Germans, so he decided that before this could happen, he would visit France on his own hook, and as a civilian bystander, a private observer, so to speak, would view some of the operation of war at first-hand, with a view to deciding whether he cared enough for it as a sport, to take a hand in it voluntarily.

He had smuggled himself aboard a transport – Heaven alone knew how! – and fortified with a bag of ginger-snaps he had remained hidden away in a cargo-hold until the ship sailed. Two days out from land a new and very painful sickness overcame the stowaway and he made his way up on deck for air. There he had been caught and had been sent to the galley to work his passage across. When he had progressed thus far, his cross-examiner broke in. “What was the name of the ship?”

“Boss, I plum’ disremembers, but it muster been de bigges’ ship dey is. W’y suh, dey wuz ‘most six-hund’ed folks on dat ship, an’ I had to wash up after ever’ las’ one of ‘em. W’ite folks suttinly teks a lot of dishes w’en dey eats – I’ll tell de world dat.”

“Well, where did the ship land? – do you know that much?”

“Boss, hit wuz some place wid a outlandish name an’ dat’s all I kin tell you. I never wuz no hand fur ‘memberin’ reg’lar names let alone dese yere jabber kind of words lak dese yere French folks talks wid.”

“What happened when you came ashore?”

“W’y, suh, dey let me off de ship an’ a w’ite man on de wharf-boat he tells me I’se landed right spang in France an’ he axes me does I want a job of wuk an’ I tells him ‘Naw suh, not yit.’ I tells him I’se aimin’ to travel round an’ see de country an’ de war ‘fore I settles down to anythin’. Den ‘nother w’ite man dat’s standin’ dere he tells me dey’s a lot of my colour in a place called Sant Nazare an’ I ‘cides I’ll go dere an’ ‘sociate aw’ile wid dem niggers. So I changed my money an’ I – ”

“I thought you said you didn’t have any money when you started?”

“I didn’t, Boss, but de w’ite folks on de ship dey taken up a c’lection fur me, account of me washin’ all dem dishes so nice an’ clean. It come to twenty dollahs. So I changes it into dese yere francs. De man give me twenty francs fur my twenty dollahs – didn’t charge me no interes’ a-tall, but jes’ traded even; an’ den I sets out to find dis yere Sant Nazare place. Dat wuz two days ago an’ I been mov-in’ stiddy ever sense.”

“How did you know what train to take?”

“I didn’t. I jes’ went to de depot an’ I dim’ abo’d de fus’ train I sees dat look lak she might be fixin’ to go sommers. An’ after ‘w’ile one of dese Frenchies come ‘round to me whar I wuz settin’ sin’ he jabber somethin’ at me an’ I tell him plain ez I kin, whar I wants to go an’ is dis de right train? An’ den he jabber some mo’ an’ I keep on tellin’ him an’ after ‘w’ile he jes th’ow up both hands, lak dis, an’ go on off an’ leave me be in peace. W’ich dat very same thing happen to me ever’ time I git on a train an’ I done been on three or fo’ ‘fore I gits to dis place, dis mawnin’.

“My way wuz to stay by de train t’well she stop an’ don’t start no mo’ an! den I’d git off an’ walk round lookin’ for de big wharf-boats where de w’ite man tole me dem niggers would be wukkin’, but not no place I went did I see ary wharf-boats, so I jes’ kept a-movin’ t’well I got yere, lak I’m tellin’ it to you, an’ I says to myself den, ‘Dis sutt’inly must be Sant Nazare – it’s shore big enough to be, anyway.’ But I walked ‘bout ten miles an’ I couldn’t find no wharf-boats an’ no niggers neither, scusin’ some Frenchified niggers all dressed up lak Misty Shriners, an’ dey couldn’t talk our way of talkin’. I seen plenty of our soldiers but I wuz’n’ aimin’ to be pesterin ‘round wid no soldiers ‘till I’d done seen de war. So finally I sees a big place dat look lak it mout be ‘nother depot, an’ I went on in there an’ wuz fixn’ to tek de next train out, w’en dem two soldier-men of your’n wid de bands on dere arms dey come up to me an’ dey run me in. An’ yere I is.”

It was explained to Watterson Towers that, to avoid complications he had better enter the army forthwith and very promptly he agreed. Travel, seemingly, was beginning to pall on him. Then to spin out his gorgeous humour of the interview, the intelligence officer put one more question and when he told me the answer I agreed with him the reward had been worth the effort.

“Now, Watterson,” he said, “what kind of a regiment would you prefer to join – an all-white regiment or an all-black regiment or a mixed regiment, part black and part white? You can ‘take your choice – so speak up.”

“Boss,” said Watterson, “it don’t make no dif’ence a-tall to me w’ich kind of a regiment ‘tis – jes’ so it’s got a band!”

One’s war-time experiences is crowded with constant surprises. For five months, off and on, I have been living on the fourth floor of one of the largest and most noted of Paris hotels, and not until to-day did I find out that two floors of the building have all along been in possession of the government for hospital purposes. The patients, mainly wounded men who have been invalided back from the trenches are brought by night and carried in through a rear entrance, which opens on a barred and guarded alley-way. The guests never see them and they never come in contact with the guests.

Under my feet all these weeks hundreds of disabled fighting-men have been getting better or getting worse, recovering or dying, and I would never have guessed their presence had it not been for the chance remark of a government official who is connected with one of the bureaus having charge of the blessés.

I learn now that the same thing is true of several other prominent hotels, but so carefully is the business carried on and so skillfully do the authorities hide their secret that I am sure not one guest in a thousand ever stumbles upon the fact.

When I was writing a tale about one visit of several which I paid to the old Luneville sectors where our buddies, in the spring of this year, first left their tooth-marks on the Heinies, I forgot to tell of an incident that occurred on the last day of our stay up there as the guests of a regiment of the Rainbows.

Martin Green and I had just returned from a four-hour tramp through some of our trenches. It was long after the hour for the mid-day meal when we got back, weary and mud-coated, to regimental headquarters in a knocked-about village. But the colonel’s cook obligingly dished up some provender for us and for the young intelligence officer who had been our guide that day. Just as we were finishing the last round of flap-jacks with molasses, the Germans began shelling the battered town so we adjourned to the nearest dug-out, which was the next door cellar, that had been thickened as to its roof with sand-bags and loose earth and strips of railroad iron. Down there we came upon several others who had taken shelter, including one of the majors.

“When were you fellows figuring on starting back to your own billet?” he inquired. “Sometime this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Green, “we had counted on leaving here about three o’clock. But I guess we’ll be delayed, if the Germans keep up their strafing. Neither of us fancies trying to make a break out of here while the bombardment is going on, and I don’t suppose our chauffeur would be so very enthusiastic over the prospect, either. I only hope the Germans let up on the fireworks display before dark. It’s forty-odd miles to where we’re going and the thought of riding that distance after nightfall over these torn-up roads with no lights burning on our car and the road full of supply trains coming up to the front, does not strike me as a particularly alluring prospect.”