CHAPTER 5

LIFE IN AN ARMY AREA

The billeting of the men was a problem. As I mentioned before, the constitution of the United States forbids billeting, taking as ground for this action that when soldiers are placed under a private roof constant friction is bound to arise. In Europe the masses of troops were so great and the country so thickly settled that this method of caring for the soldiers was of necessity the only one that could be adopted. In the average French farm the houses have big barns attached to them. In the barn on the ground floor are the pigs, cows, and numberless rabbits, also farm implements, wagons, and the like. Up a shaky ladder, which had been doing service for generations, is the hay-loft.

There, among the hay, the soldiers are billeted and sleep.

When we first came over, according to our best army traditions, cots were brought for the men. We tried to fit these into the barns, but soon found it impossible, and, after we had been there a certain length of time, we turned them all in, and they were never again used by the troops. Instead, we bought hay from the natives, spread it on the floor of the loft, and the men slept on it. This sounds pleasant, but it isn't as pleasant as it sounds. It is fairly good in summer, as the weather is warm, the days are long, and the barn is generally full of cracks, which let in the air, and you can get along quite well as to light. When winter comes, however, the barns are freezing cold, and the men, after their hard work in the rain, come back soaking wet. It gets dark early, and the sun does not rise until late. On account of the hay the greatest care must be used with lights. Smoking has to be strictly forbidden. You have, therefore, at the end of the day tired, wet men, who have nowhere to go except to their billets, and in the billets no light to speak of, very little heat, and a strict prohibition against smoking.

The officers, of course, fared better. They slept in the houses, and generally got beds. Europeans do not like fresh air. They feel a good deal like the gentleman in Stephen Leacock's story, who said he liked fresh air, and believed you should open the windows and get in all you could. Then you should shut the windows and keep it there. It would keep for years.

I have been in many rooms where the windows were nailed shut. The beds also are rather remarkable. They are generally fitted with feather mattresses and feather quilts. Very often they are arranged in a niche in the wall like a closet, and have two doors, which the average European, after getting into the bed, closes, thereby rendering it about as airy and well ventilated as a coffin.

I remember my own billet in one of the towns where we stopped. As I was commanding officer, it was one of the best and was reasonably warm. It was warm because the barnyard was next door, literally in the next room, as all that separated me from a cow was a light deal door by the side of the bed. The cow was tied to the door. When the cow slept I slept; but if the cow passed a restless night I had all the opportunity I needed to think over my past sins and future plans. In another town an excellent billet was not used by the officers because over the bed were hung photographs of all the various persons who had died in the house, taken while they lay dead in that bed.

Human nature is the same the world over, and we became very fond of some of the persons with whom we were billeted, while others stole everything that was left loose. One hoary old sinner, with whom I lived, quite endeared herself to me by her evident simplicity and her gentleness of manner, until I discovered one day that, under the aegis of the commanding officer billeting there, she was illicitly selling cognac to the soldiers.

The struggle of certain sergeants with some of these French inhabitants concerning the neatness of their various company kitchens or billets always amused me. I remember a feud in one village which was carried on between a little Frenchwoman and a sergeant called Murphy. Sergeant Murphy liked everything spick and span. The French woman had lived all her life where things were not, to put it mildly, according to Sergeant Murphy's army-trained idea of sanitation. The rock that they finally split on was the question of tin cans, old boxes, and egg-shells in front of Sergeant Murphy's kitchen. I shall never forget coming around a corner and seeing Sergeant Murphy, tall and dignified, the Frenchwoman small and voluble, facing one another in front of his kitchen, she chattering French without a break and he saying with great dignity, "Ma'am, it is outrageous. It is the third time to-day that this stuff has been taken away. I shall throw it in your back yard." He did, and next morning the conflict was joined again. Although Murphy kept up the struggle nobly, no impression was made on the French-woman.

Most generally, in France, the small French village contains about one battalion of infantry. As a result, the battalion commander is post commander, and to him all the woes of the various inhabitants as well as the troubles of his own troops come. One complaint which filled me with delight was made by a Frenchwoman. The basis of the complaint was that my men, by laughing and talking in her barn, prevented her sheep and pigs from getting a proper amount of sleep.

A constantly recurring source of trouble were the rabbits. The rabbits in all French country families are a sort of Lares and Penates. You find them in hutches around the houses, wandering in the barns, hopping about the kitchens, and, last but by no means least, in savory stews. I don't maintain for a moment that none of my men ever took a rabbit; I simply maintain that it would be a physical impossibility for these men to have eaten the number of rabbits they were accused of eating. Every little while in each town some peasant would come before me with a complaint, the gist of which was that the men had eaten a dozen or so rabbits. With great dignity I would say that I would have the matter investigated. The man would then suggest that I come and count the rabbits in the village, so that I would know if any were missing. I would explain in my best French that from a long and accurate knowledge of rabbits, gathered through years when, as a boy, I kept them in quantities, counting rabbits one day did not mean that there would be the same number the next day.

Eventually we adopted the scheme of making some officer claim adjuster. After this it was smooth sailing for me. I simply would tell the mayor that Lieutenant Barrett would adjust the matter under dispute, and from then on Lieutenant Barrett battled with the aggrieved. He told me once he thought he was going to be murdered by a little woman, who kept an inn, over a log of wood that the men had used for the company kitchen. Several times persons offered to go shares with him on what he was able to get for them from the government.

In this part of France there was quite a little wild life. Sail-winged hawks were constantly soaring over the meadows. Coveys of European partridges were quite plentiful. Among the other birds the magpie and the skylark were the most noticeable, the former ubiquitous with his flamboyant contrast of black and white, the latter a constant source of delight, with clear song and graceful spirals. The largest wild animal was the boar. There were quite a number of these throughout the woods. As a rule, they were not large, and there was, so far as I could find out, no attempt made to preserve them. We would scare them up while maneuvering. They are good eating, and occasionally we would organize a hunt. The French Daniel Boone, of Boviolles, was a delightful old fellow. When going on a hunt he would put on a bright blue coat, a green hat, and sling a silver horn over his shoulders, resembling for all the world the huntsman in Slovenly Peter.

During August a number of the field officers were sent on their first trip to the trenches. I was among them. We went by truck to Nancy, a charming little city, known as the Paris of northern France. At this time the Huns had not started their air raids on it, which drove much of the population away and reduced the railroad station to ruins. Round it cling many historic memories; near by was fought the battle between Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, and Louis 11, in which feudalism was struck its death blow; on the hills to the north the Kaiser stood at the commencement of this war, when the German troops were flowing over France, seemingly resistless.

From Nancy we went to the Pont-a-Mousson sector, where we spent a day with French officers of the corresponding grade. This was a rest sector, and there was little to indicate that war was raging. Occasionally a shell would whistle over, and if you exposed yourself too much some Hun might take a shot at you with a rifle.

Pont-a-Mousson, the little French village, was literally in the French front lines, and yet a busy life was going on there. There I bought cigarettes, and around the arcade of the central square business was much as usual. A bridge spanned the river right by the town, where everyone crossing was in plain view of the Germans. The French officers explained to me that so long as only small parties crossed by it the Germans paid no attention, but if columns of troops or trucks used it shelling started at once. In the same way the French did not shell, except under exceptional circumstances, the villages in the German forward area.

On a high hill overlooking Pont-a-Mousson were the ruins of an old castle built by the De Guises. In old days it was the key to the ford where the bridge now stands. It was being used as an observation post by the French. I crawled up into its ivy-draped, crumbling tower, and through a telescope looked far back of the German lines, where I saw the enemy troops training in open order and two German officers on horseback superintending.

In the trenches where the soldiers were there were vermin and rats and mud to the waist. There I made my first acquaintance with the now justly famous "cootie."

During this night I went on my first patrol. No Man's Land was very broad, and deep fields of wire surrounded the trenches. The patrol finished without incident. The only casualty in the vicinity while I was on this front was a partridge, which was hit on the head by a fragment of shell, and which the French major and I ate for dinner and enjoyed very much. We returned to our training area by the same way we came. The principal knowledge we had gained besides general atmosphere was relative to the feeding of men in trenches.

These were the primitive days of our army in France. We being the first troops who had arrived, received a very large proportion of the attention of General Pershing and his staff. 

The General once came out to look over the Twenty-sixth Infantry, and stopped in front of the redoubtable Sergeant Murphy and his platoon. Now, Sergeant Murphy could stand with equanimity as high an officer as a colonel, but a general was one too many. He was not afraid of a machine gun or a cannon, but a star on a man's shoulder petrified him. After the General had watched for a minute, the good sergeant had his platoon tied up in thirteen different ways. The General spoke to him. That finished it; and if the General had not left the field, I think Sergeant Murphy would have.

With all of us comic incidents in plenty occurred. Our most notable characteristic was our seriousness, and, running it a close second, our ignorance. I remember one solemn private who threw a hand grenade from his place in the trench. It hit the edge of the parapet and dropped back again. He looked at it, remarked "Lord God," slipped in the mud, and sat down on it just as it exploded. Fortunately for him it was one of the light, tin-covered grenades, and beyond making sitting down an almost impossible action for him for several days following he was comparatively undamaged. Often the comic was tinged with the tragic. We had men who endeavored to open grenades with a rock, with the usual disastrous effects to all.

Once Sergeant O'Rourke was training his men in throwing hand grenades. I came up and watched them a minute. They were doing very well, and I called, "Sergeant, your men are throwing these grenades excellently." O'Rourke evidently felt there was danger of turning their heads by too much praise. "Sor-r-r, that and sleep is all they can do well," he replied.

In order to get the men trained with the rifle, as we had no target material, we used tin cans and rocks. A tin can is a particularly good target; it makes such a nice noise when hit, and leaps about so. I liked to shoot at them myself, and could well understand why they pleased the soldiers.

Why more persons were not killed in our practice I don't know, as the whole division was in training in a limited space, all having rifle practice, with no possibility of constructing satisfactory ranges.

Some officers in another unit organized a rifle range in such a position that the overs dropped gently where we were training. One eventually hit my horse, but did not do much damage.

Lieutenant Lyman S. Frazier, an excellent officer, who finished the war as major of infantry, commanded the machine-gun company of my battalion. He was very keen on indirect fire, but we could get little or no information on it. One evening, however, he grouped his guns, made his calculations as well as he could, and then fired a regular barrage. As soon as the demonstration was over he galloped out as fast as he could to the target, and found to his chagrin that only one shot had hit. Where the other 10,000 odd went we never knew.

We had many incidents that were really humorous with the men in the guard mount. A young fellow, named Cobb, who lost his leg later in the war, was standing guard early in his military career. A French girl passed him in the dark. He challenged, "Who is there?" She replied, "Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?" Young Cobb didn't know French, but he did know that when in doubt on any subject you called the corporal of the guard. So he shouted at the top of his voice, "Corporal of the guard, queskidee!"

We emphasized the manual of formal guard mount as a disciplinary exercise. One of the regulations is that when the ranking officer in a post passes the guardhouse, the sentry calls, "Turn out the guard—commanding officer," and the guard is paraded. We had lived so long by ourselves that although we sometimes had the colonel in the same town, when we were in the Montdidier sector, I never could persuade them to pay any attention to him. They had it firmly rooted in their minds that the ceremony was for me and no one else.

Occasionally a German airplane would come over and bomb the towns in the area. This furnished a real element of excitement, as we had anti-aircraft guns set up. The one trouble was that we could not tell at night which was a German and which was a French plane, with the result that if we should happen to hit one it was as likely that we would hit a French one as not. We were saved this embarrassment by never hitting one. Later, in the Montdidier sector, I remember hearing how, in a burst of enthusiasm, the gun crew of one of our 75’s had fired at an airplane, and by some remarkable coincidence had torn a wing off and brought it down. On rushing out to inspect it they found it contained a very irascible Frenchman.