The Glory of the Coming

“Don’t worry,” said the Major with a grin which proved he was holding back something. “You can get away from here in – well, let’s see – .” He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “In just one hour and three-quarters, or to be exact, in one hour and forty-six minutes from now, you can be on your way. It’s now 2:15. At precisely one minute past four you can climb into your car and beat it from here and if you hurry you’ll be home in ample time for dinner.”

“You talk as though you were in the confidence of these Germans,” quoth Green.

“In a way of speaking, I am,” said the Major. “I’ve been here for eight days now, and every day since I arrived, promptly at 2 p. M. those batteries over yonder open up on this place and all hands go underground. The shelling continues – in the ratio of one shell every two minutes – until four o’clock sharp. Then it stops, and until two o’clock the next day, things around here are nice and quiet and healthy. So don’t get chesty and think this show was put on especially on your account, because it wasn’t: it’s in accordance with the regular programme. Therefore, judging to-day’s matinee by past performances, I would say that at one minute past four you chaps can be on your way with absolutely nothing to worry about except the chances of a puncture.”

“Funny birds – these Germans,” exclaimed one of us, still half in doubt as to whether the Major joked.

“Funny birds is right,” he said, “and then some. We’ve got it doped out after this fashion: The officer in command of the German battery just over the hill from where you were to-day probably has instructions to shoot so many rounds a day into us. So in order to simplify the matter he, being a true German, starts at two and quits at four, when he has used up his supply of ammunition for the day. Now that we’re wise to his routine we don’t take any chances, but withdraw ourselves from society during the two hours of the day when he is enjoying his customary afternoon hate. Old George J. Methodical we call him. You fellows still don’t quite believe me, eh? Well, wait and see whether I’m right.”

We waited and we saw, and he was right.

Somewhere over our heads a charge of shrapnel or of high explosive exploded every two minutes until precisely four o’clock. Sharp on the hour the shells quit falling and before the dust had settled after the farewell blast we were gathering up our dunnage for the departure. As we sped out of the huddle of shattered cottages and struck the open road there was a half-mile stretch ahead of us and while we traversed it we were within easy range and plain view of the Germans. But no one took a wing shot at us as we whizzed across the open space.

After we slid down over the crest into the protection of the wooded valley below, I remembered an old story – the story of the peddler who invaded a ten-floor office building in New York and made his way to the top floor before one of the hall attendants found him. The attendant kicked the peddler down one flight of stairs to the ninth floor and there another man fell upon him and kicked him down another flight to the eighth floor where a third man took him in hand and kicked him a flight and so he progressed until he had been kicked down ten flights by ten different men and had landed upon the sidewalk a bruised and battered wreck, with the fragments of his wares scattered about him. He sat up on the pavement then and in tones of deep admiration remarked: “Mein Gott, vot a berfect system!”

In the original version of the tale the peddler was Yiddish. But I’m certain now that he was German and that he went back to the Vaterland after the war broke out and became the commander of a battery of five-inch guns on the old Luneville front.

On the day before Decoration Day of this year of 1917 I was in a sea-port town on the northeastern coast of France which our people had taken over as a supply base. The general in command of our local forces said to me as we sat in his headquarters at dinner that evening; “I wish you’d get up early in the morning and go for a little ride with me out to the cemetery. You’ll be going back there later in the day, of course, for the services but I want you to see something that you probably won’t be able to see after nine or ten o’clock.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Never mind now,” he answered. “To tell you in advance doesn’t suit my purposes. But will you be ready to go with me in my car at seven o’clock?”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

I should say? it was about half-past seven when we rode in at the gates of the cemetery and made for the section which, by consent of the French, had been set apart as a burial place for our people. For considerably more than a year now, dating from the time I write this down, a good many thousands of Americans have been stationed in or near this port, and many, many times that number have passed through it. So quite naturally, though it is hundreds of miles from any of the past or present battle fronts, we have had numerous deaths there from accident or from disease or from other causes.

We rounded a turn in the winding road and there before us stretched the graves of our dead boys, soldiers and sailors, marines and members of labor battalions; whites and blacks and yellow men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics, Protestants and Mohammedans – for there were four followers of the faith of Islam taking their last sleep here in this consecrated ground – row upon row of them, each marked, except in the case of the Mohammedans, by a plain white cross bearing in black letters the name, the age, the rank and the date of death of him who slept there at the foot of the cross.

Just beyond the topmost line of crosses stood the temporary wooden platform dressed with bunting and flags, where an American admiral and an American brigadier, a group of French officers headed by a major-general, a distinguished French civic official, and three chaplains representing three creeds were to unite at noon in an hour of devotion and tribute to the memories of these three-hundred-and-odd men of ours who had made the greatest of all human sacrifices.

But it was not the sight of the rows of graves and the lines of crosses nor the peculiar devices uprearing slantwise at head and foot of the graves of the four Musselmans nor yet the brave play of tri-coloured bunting upon the sides and front of the platform yonder which caught my attention. For at that hour the whole place was alive with the shapes of French people – mostly of women in black but with a fair sprinkling of shapes of old men and of children among them. All these figures were busy at a certain task – and that task was the decorating of the graves of Americans.

As we left the car to walk through the plot I found myself taking off my cap and I kept it off all the while I was there. For even before I had been told the full story of what went on there I knew I stood in the presence of a most high and holy thing and so I went bare-headed as I would in any sanctuary.

We walked all through this God’s acre of ours, the general and I. Some of the women who laboured therein were old and bent, some were young but all of them wore black gowns. Some plainly had been recruited from the well-to-do and the wealthy elements of the resident population; more though, were poor folk and many evidently were peasants who, one guessed, lived in villages or on farms near to the city. Here would be a grave that was heaped high with those designs of stiff, bright-hued immortelles which the French put upon the graves of their own dead. Here would be a grave that was marked with wreaths of simple field flowers or with the great lovely white and pink roses which grow so luxuriantly on this coast. Here would be merely great sheaves of loose blossoms; there a grave upon which the flowers had been scattered broadcast, until the whole mound was covered with the fragrant dewy offerings; and there, again, I saw where fingers patently unaccustomed to such employment had fashioned the long-stemmed roses into wreaths and crosses and even into forms of shields.

Grass grew rich and lush upon all the graves. White sea-shells marked the sides of them and edged the narrow gravelled walks. We came to where there were two newly made graves; their occupants had been buried there only a day or so before as one might tell by the marks in the trodden turf, but a carpeting of sods cut from a lawn somewhere had been so skillfully pieced together upon the mounds that the raw clods of clay beneath were quite covered up and hidden from sight, so that only the seams in the green coverlids distinguished these two graves from graves which were older than they by weeks or months.

Alongside every grave, nearly, knelt a woman alone, or else a woman with children aiding her as she disposed her showing of flowers and wreaths to the best advantage. The old men were putting the paths in order, raking the gravel down smoothly and straightening the borderings of shells. There were no soldiers among the men; all were civilians, and for the most part humble-appearing civilians, clad in shabby garments. But I marked two old gentlemen wearing the great black neckerchiefs and the flowing broadcloth coats of ceremonial days, who seemed as deeply intent as any in what to them must have been an unusual labour. Coming to each individual worker or each group of workers the general would halt and formally salute in answer to the gently murmured greetings which constantly marked our passage through the burying-ground. When we had made the rounds we sat down upon the edge of the flag-dressed platform and he proceeded to explain what I already had begun to reason out for myself. Only, of course I did not know, until he told me, how it all had started.

“It has been a good many months now,” he said, “since we dug the first grave here. But on the day of the funeral a delegation of the most influential residents came to me to say the people of the town desired to adopt our dead. I asked just what exactly was meant by this and then the spokesman explained.

“‘General,’ he said to me, ‘there is scarcely a family in this place that has not given one or more of its members to die for France. In most cases these dead of ours sleep on battlefields far away from us, perhaps in unmarked, unknown graves. This is true of all the parts of our country but particularly is it true of this town, which is so remote from the scenes of actual fighting. So in the case of this brave American who is to-day to be buried here among us, we ask that a French family be permitted formally to undertake the care of his grave, exactly as though it were the grave of their own flesh-and-blood who fell as this American has fallen, for France and for freedom. In the case of each American who may hereafter be buried here we crave the same privilege. We promise you that for so long as these Americans shall rest here in our land, their graves will be as our graves and will be tended as we would tend the graves of our own sons.

“‘We desire that the name of each family thus adopting a grave may be registered, so that should the adults die, the children of the next generation as a sacred charge, may carry on the obligation which is now to be laid upon their parents and which is to be transmitted down as a legacy to all who bear their name. We would make sure that no matter how long your fallen braves rest in the soil of France, their graves will not be neglected or forgotten.

‘"We wish to do this thing for more reasons than one: We wish to do it because thereby we may express in our own poor way the gratitude we feel for America. We wish to do it because of the thought that some stricken mother across the seas in America will perhaps feel a measure of consolation in knowing that the grave of her boy will always be made beautiful by the hands of a Frenchwoman whose home, also, has been desolated. And finally we wish to do it because we know it will bring peace to the hearts of our French women to feel they have a right to put French flowers upon the graves of your dead since they can never hope, most of them, to be able to perform that same office for their heroic dead.’”

The general stopped and cleared his voice which had grown a bit husky. Then he resumed:

“So that was how the thing came about, and that explains what you see here now. You see, the French have no day which exactly corresponds in its spiritual significance to our Decoration Day and our Memorial Day. All Souls’ Day, which is religious, rather than patriotic in its purport, is their nearest approach to it. But weeks ago, before the services contemplated for to-day were even announced, the word somehow spread among the townspeople. To my own knowledge some of these poor women have been denying themselves the actual necessities of life in order to be able to make as fine a showing for the graves which they have adopted as any of the wealthier sponsors could make.

“Don’t think, though, that these graves are not well kept at all times. Any day, at any hour, you can come here and you will find anywhere from ten to fifty women down on their knees smoothing the turf and freshening the flowers which they constantly keep upon the graves. But I knew that at daylight this morning all or nearly all of them would be here doing their work before the crowds began to arrive for the services, and I wanted you to see them at it, in the hope that you might write something about the sight for our people at home to read. If it helps them better to understand what is in the hearts of the French you and I may both count our time as having been well spent.”

He stood up looking across the cemetery, all bathed and burnished as it was in the soft rich sunshine.

“God,” he said under his breath, “how I am learning to love these people!”

So I have here set down the tale and to it I have to add a sequel. Decoration Day was months ago and now I learn that the custom which originated in this coast town is spreading through the country; that in many villages and towns where Americans are buried, French women whose sons or husbands or fathers or brothers have been killed, are taking over the care of the graves of the Americans, bestowing upon them the same loving offices which they would visit, if they could, upon the graves of their own men-folk.

It was one of those days which will live always in my memory – my feet wouldn’t let me forget it even if my brain wanted to – when I had to walk to keep up. The available forces offered by Pershing to the French and British at the time of the great spring push of the Germans were moving up across Picardy. I, as one of the correspondents assigned each to a separate regiment, had set out at dawn to foot it for fifteen miles across country at the tail of the headquarters company. This happened to be a day, of which there were several, when neither a side-car, a riding-horse, or a seat in an ambulance or a baggage-wagon was available, and when the colonel’s automobile was so crowded with the colonel and his driver and his adjutant and his French liaison officer and all their baggage, there was no room in it for me. That painful period of my martial adventures has elsewhere in these writings been described at greater or less length.

I was hoofing it over the flinty highway, trying to favour my blisters, when I heard a hail behind me. I turned around and there was an angel from Heaven, temporarily disguised as a Y. M. C. A. worker, sitting at the wheel of a big auto-truck with the sign of the red triangle on its sides.

“Could you use a little ride?” he inquired, grinning through the dust clouds as he drew up alongside and halted.

Could I use a little ride! For fear he might change his mind or something, I boarded him over a front wheel before I began expressing my eternal gratitude.

This ceremony being over, he told me who he was, and I told him who I was, and after that we became friends for life. He was a minister from a city in southern California but he didn’t look it now, what with a four-days’ growth of stubbly red whiskers on his weatherbeaten chops and grease spots on his service uniform. He had given up a good salary and he had left behind him a wife and three children – I am sure about the wife and I’m pretty sure there were three children, or two anyhow – to come over here and at the age of forty-four or thereabouts to run a perambulating canteen for the boys. There are a lot more like him in France, serving with the “Y” or the K. of C.‘s or the Salvation Army or the Red Cross and as a rule they assay about nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine pounds of true gold to the ton.

“Willing to earn your passage, ain’t you?” he inquired when the introductions were concluded. “Well then, climb into the back of my bus and stand by to get busy, heaving out the cargo.”

I looked then and saw his truck was loaded to the gunwales with boxes of California oranges.

“What the-?” I began, in surprise.

“Go on and say it,” he urged. “Don’t hang back just because I’m a parson by trade. Trailing around with this man’s army, I’m used to hearing cuss words. Quite a jag of freight, isn’t it? Some good fellow out in my state shipped a train-load of oranges across with the request that they be distributed among the boys, free gratis for nothing, and it’s my present job to catch up with this division and give part of the stuff away. I lit out from Paris before daylight this morning and here I am. But I can’t steer this wagon and pass out the truck at the same time so if you’ll go aft and do the Walter Johnson, I’ll play Bobby Waltour here at this end and between us we can spread the light and keep right on moving at the same time.”

Before we ran out of oranges, which was about three o’clock in the afternoon just as we rolled into the village where the headquarters company and the colonel and his staff – and incidentally I – were to be billeted for the night, I had a sore arm to keep company with my sore feet. All day this had been our procedure: As we ranged up behind a column of marching troops my new pal, the red-haired dominie, would yell out “Who wants a nice, juicy orange, fellows?” and then as we rolled on by I would fling out the fruit, trying to make sure that every man got one orange and that no man got more than one.

I threw oranges to men afoot, to men on wagons and on guns, to men and officers on horseback and to men perched upon ambulances and wagons. My throwing was faulty but the catching approximated perfection. An arm would fly up and the flying orange would find a home in the deftly cupped palm of the band at the far end of the arm. The news travelled ahead of us, somehow, and whole companies would be lined up as we arrived, to get their share.

A few minutes before the finish of the trip came, we caught up with a couple of French battalions. Neither of us remembered the French word for orange, but that made no difference. His whoop of announcement and my first fling in the direction of a trudging Poilu, were as signals to all the rest and up went their paws. Their intentions were good, but I don’t think I ever in all my life witnessed such a display of miscellaneous muffing, and I used to see some pretty raw fielding back at Paducah in the days of the old Kitty League. As the scorers would say, there was an error for nearly every chance. Among the Americans not one orange in ten had been dropped; among the Frenchmen not one in ten was safely held.

“Get the answer, don’t you?” inquired the preacher-driver as we left the trudging Frenchmen behind and hurried ahead to connect with a khaki-clad outfit just defiling out of a crossway into the main road a quarter of a mile ahead of us.

“Sure,” I answered, “the Yanks make traps of their paws but the Frenchmen make baskets of theirs. The orange stays in the trap but it rolls out of a butter-fingered basket.”

“Yes,” he said, “but the real cause goes deeper down than that. Baseball – that’s the answer. Probably every American in France played baseball when he was a kid, or else he still plays it. No Frenchman ever knew anything about baseball until we came over here last year and introduced it into the country. The average Frenchman looks on a sporting event as a spectacle, but the average American, at some time or other in his life, has been an active participant in his national sport and the lessons we learn as children we never entirely forget even though lack of practice may make us rusty.”

Which, of course, was quite true. Likewise, I think it is the underlying reason for the fact that our boys are the best hand-grenade tossers among the Allies.’

We certainly are creatures of habit. Because somebody, a century or so behind us, speaking with that air of authority which usually accompanies the voicing of a perfectly wrong premise, stated that all Irishmen were natural wits and that no Englishman, could see a joke, the world accepted the assertion as a verity. Never was a greater libel perpetrated upon either race. It has been my observation that the Irish at heart are a melancholy breed.

Certain it is that no people have produced more first-rate humourists and more first-rate comedians than the English. Witness the British output of humour in this war; witness Bairnsfather and those satirical verses on war topics that have been running in Punch lately. I’m mostly Celt myself – North of Scotland and South of Ireland, with some Welsh and a little English mixed up in my strain – and I feel myself qualified to speak on these matters.

Another common delusion among outsiders and particularly among Americans is that Englishmen are stolid unimaginative creatures who fail to show their feelings in moments of stress because they haven’t any great flow of feelings to show. Now, as a general proposition, I think it may be figured that a Frenchman on becoming sentimental will give free vent to the thoughts that are in his heart; that an American will try to hide his emotions under a mask of levity and that an Englishman, expressing after a somewhat different pattern the racial embarrassment which he shares with the American, will seek to appear outwardly indifferent, incidentally becoming more or less inarticulate. The Frenchman takes no shame to himself that he weeps or sings in public; the Yankee is apt to laugh very loudly; the Englishman will be mute and will exhibit slight confusion which by some might be mistaken for mental awkwardness. But there are exceptions to all rules. In so far as the rule pertains to the Britisher, I am thinking of two exceptions. To one of these instances I was an eye-witness; the other incident was told to me by a man who had been present when it occurred. He said he was passing through Charing Cross station one night when he saw two Canadian subalterns emerging from one of the refreshment booths. Both of them had been wounded. One had his right arm in a sling and limped as he walked. The other was that most pitiable spectacle which this war can offer – a young man blinded. Across his eyes was drawn a white cloth band and he moved with the uncertain fumbling gait of one upon whom this affliction has newly come. With his uninjured arm the lame youth was steering his companion. The two boys – for they were only boys, my informant said – halted in an arched exitway to put on their top-coats before stepping out into the drizzle. The crippled officer released his hold upon his friend’s elbow to shrug his own garment up upon his shoulders. The second blessé was making a sorry job at finding the armholes of his coat, when an elderly officer with the badges of a major-general upon his shoulders and a breast loaded with decorations, stepped up and with the words, “Let me help you, please,” held the coat in the proper position while deftly he guided the blind boy’s limbs into the sleeve openings.

All in a second the unexpected denouément came. The youngster reached in his pocket, then felt for the hand of his volunteer who had come to his assistance. “Thank you very much,” he said. And there in the palm of the astonished general lay a shilling.

The other lieutenant hobbled to his comrade’s side. He may have meant to whisper, but in his distress he fairly shouted it out: “You’ve just handed a tip to a major-general!” Horrified, the blind boy spun about on his heels to apologise.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” he gasped. “I – I thought it was a porter, of course. I beg your pardon, a thousand times, sir. I hope you’ll forgive me – you know, I can’t see any more, sir.” And with that he held out his hand to take back the miserable coin.

The splendid-looking old man put both his hands upon the lad’s shoulders. His ruddy face was quivering and the tears were running down his cheeks.