By Ian Hay

THE LAST MILLION. How They Invaded France—and England.

ALL IN IT: K I CARRIES ON.

PIP: A ROMANCE OF YOUTH.

GETTING TOGETHER.

THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND.

SCALLY: THE STORY OF A PERFECT GENTLEMAN. With frontispiece.

A KNIGHT ON WHEELS.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Illustrated by Charles E. Brock.

A SAFETY MATCH. With frontispiece.

A MAN’S MAN. With frontispiece.

THE RIGHT STUFF. With frontispiece.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Boston and New York

THE LAST MILLION

The Last Million

How They Invaded France—and England

BY
IAN HAY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1919

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY IAN HAY BEITH

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO
THAT BORN FIGHTER
AND
MODERN CRUSADER
THE AMERICAN DOUGHBOY

CONTENTS

A WORD TO THE DEDICATEE

[Note: The following is the substance of a little “Welcome” which the author was requested to write to American soldiers and sailors visiting England for the first time during the fateful days of 1918. It was distributed upon the transports and in various American centres in England. Its purpose is to set forth some of our national peculiarities—and incidentally the author’s Confession of Faith. It has no bearing upon the rest of the story, and may be skipped by the reader without compunction.]

I. A Word of Explanation

I write this welcome to you American soldiers and sailors because I know America personally and therefore I know what the word “welcome” means. And I see right away from the start that it is going to be a difficult proposition for us over here to compete with America in that particular industry. However, we mean to try, and we hope to succeed. Anyway, we shall not fail from lack of good-will.

Having bid you welcome to our shores, I am next going to ask you to remember just one thing.

We are very, very short-handed at present. During the past four years the people of the British Isles have contributed to our common cause more than six million soldiers and sailors. On a basis of population, the purely British contribution to the forces of the British Empire should have been seventy-six per cent. The actual contribution has been eighty-four per cent; and when we come to casualties, not eighty-four but eighty-six per cent of the total have been borne by those two little islands, Great Britain and Ireland, which form the cradle of our race. You can, therefore, imagine the strain upon our man-power. Every man up to the age of fifty is now liable to be drafted. The rest of our male population—roughly five millions—are engaged night and day in such occupations as shipbuilding, coal-mining, munition-making, and making two blades of corn grow where one grew before. They are assisted in every department, even in the war zone, by hundreds and thousands of devoted women.

So we ask you to remember that the England which you see is not England as she was, and as she hopes to be again. You see England in overalls; all her pretty clothes are put away for the duration. Some day we hope once again to travel in trains where there is room to sit down; in motor omnibuses and trolley cars for which you have not to wait in line. We hope again to see our streets brightly lit, our houses freshly painted, flower boxes glowing in every window, and fountains playing in Trafalgar Square. We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept away forever.

That is the old London—London as we would have you see it—London as we hope you will see it when you come back to us as holiday visitors. Meanwhile, we know you will make allowances for us.

Also, you may not find us very hilarious. In some ways we are strangely cheerful. For instance, you will see little mourning worn in public. That is because, if black were worn by all those who were entitled to wear it, you would see little else. Again, you will find our theatres packed night after night by a noisy, cheerful throng. But these are not idle people, nor are they the same people all the time. They are almost entirely hard-worked folks enjoying a few days’ vacation. The majority of them are soldiers on leave from the Front. Few of them will be here next week; some of them will never see a play again. The play goes on and helps the audience to forget for a while, but it is a different audience every time.

And you will hear little talk about the War. We prefer to talk of almost anything else. Probably you will understand why. There is hardly a house in this country which has not by this time made a personal contribution to our cause. In each of these houses one of two trials is being endured—bereavement, the lesser evil, or suspense, the greater. We cannot, therefore, talk lightly of the War, and being determined not to talk anxiously about it, we compromise—we do not talk about it at all.

We want you to know this. To know is to understand.

II. First Impressions

Meanwhile, let us ask for your impressions of our country. It is only fair that we should be allowed to do this, for you know what happens to visitors in the United States when the reporters get their hooks into them.

So far as I have been able to gather, your impressions amount to something like this:

There is no ice-water, no ice-cream, no soda-fountains, no pie. It is hard to get the old familiar eats in our restaurants.

Our cities are planned in such a way that it is impossible to get to any place without a map and compass.

Our traffic all keeps to the wrong side of the street.

Our public buildings are too low.

There are hardly any street-car lines in London.

Our railroad cars are like boxes, and our locomotives are the smallest things on earth.

Our weather is composed of samples.

Our coinage system is a practical joke.

Nobody, whether in street, train or tube, ever enters in conversation with you. If by any chance they do, they grouch all the time about the Government and the general management of the country.

Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it. I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate, and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway, that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent want of hospitality.

III. The Land We live in

Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was unknown to him.

The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—c’est la guerre! Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on leave.

And while we are discussing London, let me recommend you to make a point of getting acquainted with the London policeman. He is a truly great man. Watch him directing the traffic down in the City, or where Wellington Street, on its way to Waterloo Bridge, crosses the Strand. He has no semaphore, no whistle; but simply extends an arm, or turns his back, and the traffic swings to right or left, or stops altogether. Foreign cities, even New York, are not ashamed to send their police to London to pick up hints on traffic control from the London “Bobby.” Watch him handle an unruly crowd. He is unarmed, and though he carries a club, you seldom see it. If you get lost, ask him to direct you, for he carries a map of London inside his head. He is everybody’s friend. By the way, if he wears a helmet he is one of the regular force. A flat cap is a sign of a “Special”—that is, a business man who is giving his spare time, by day or night, to take the place of those policemen who have joined the Colours. But, “Regular” or “Special,” he is there to help you.

There are no skyscrapers in England. The fact is, London is no place for skyscrapers. It was New York which set the fashion. That was because Manhattan Island, with the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other, is physically incapable of expansion, and so New York, being unable to spread out, shot upwards. Moreover, New York is built on solid rock—you ask the Subway contractors about that!—while the original London was built on a marsh, and the marsh is there still. So it will not support structures like the Woolworth Building.

Most of our national highways start from London. There is one, a Roman road, called Watling Street, which starts from the Marble Arch and runs almost as straight as a rod from London to Chester, nearly two hundred miles; and it never changes its name after the first few miles, which are called the Edgware Road. Another, the Great North Road, runs from London to Edinburgh, and is four hundred miles long. One hundred years ago the mail coaches thundered along that road night and day, and highwaymen had their own particular pitches where no other highwaymen dreamed of butting in. Five years ago that road was a running river of touring automobiles. Now, strings of grey military motor lorries rumble up and down its entire length. Perhaps you will ride on some of them.

London, easy-going London, has her short cuts, too. That is where she differs from the methodical, rectangular, convenient cities of the United States. She is full of cunning by-ways, and every street has a character of its own. The Strand was called “The Strand” a thousand years ago, because it was a strand—a strip of beach which ran alongside the Thames at the foot of a cliff (which has long since been smoothed and sloped out of existence) and was submerged each high tide. The English fought a great battle with Danish pirates near by, and to-day the dead Danes sleep their last sleep in St. Clement Danes’ Church, right in the middle of the Strand.

Charing Cross, again, is the last of a great chain of such Crosses, stretching from London to Scotland, each a day’s march from the next. They were set up at the end of the thirteenth century by King Edward the First of England, to commemorate the last journey of his beloved Queen—his Chère Reine—who died while accompanying him upon a campaign against the Scots. At each stopping-place on his homeward journey the King erected one of these crosses to mark the spot where the Queen’s body lay that night. Many have perished, but you can still trace some of them along the Great North Road—Neville’s Cross, Waltham Cross, and finally Chère Reine Cross, or Charing Cross. That strikes the imagination. So do Aldgate, Aldersgate, Moorgate, London Wall, and other streets which go back to the days when London really was a walled city.

But a walk around London repays itself. There is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment—the veteran among all monuments of the world, except perhaps its sister in Central Park, New York. It was in existence fifteen hundred years before Christ, in the city of Heliopolis. It looked down upon the Palace and Court of Queen Cleopatra in Alexandria. After that it lay prostrate in the sands of the Egyptian desert for another fifteen hundred years. It was finally presented to the British Government by the Khedive of Egypt. It was towed to England on a raft, and was nearly lost during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Recently, the Zeppelins have tried dropping bombs on it, as you can see for yourself. But a mere bomb or two is nothing to a veteran with a constitution like that.

In Warwickshire, around Stratford and the Forest of Arden, you will find yourself in Shakespeare’s country. At Gerrard’s Cross William Penn is buried. In the old days a watch was kept on the grave, as certain patriotic Americans considered that the proper place for William Penn to be buried was Pennsylvania, and tried to give practical effect to this pious opinion.

Scotland, if you happen to find yourself there, is entirely different from England. England is flat or undulating, and except in the manufacturing districts, is given up mainly to cornfields and pasture land. Scotland, especially in the north, is cut up into hills and glens. Not such hills as you possess in Colorado, or Nevada, or the Northwest. There is no Pike’s Peak, no Shasta, no Rainier. The highest mountain in the British Isles—Ben Nevis—is only a little over four thousand feet high, but naturally Scotsmen think a good deal of it.

Scotland is a great battle-ground. The Scot has always been fighting some one. There was perpetual warfare upon the border from the earliest days. The Romans, who were business men, built a wall right across England from Newcastle to Carlisle, to keep the Scots out. They failed, as you will find out for yourself, when you study a list of British Cabinet Ministers; but you can see parts of the wall still. Later, there were everlasting border raids, from one side or the other, maintained as a tradition by the great families of that region—the Percys, the Douglases, the Maxwells, the Elliotts. Besides this, various English kings tried to conquer Scotland. Sometimes one side would win a battle, sometimes the other, but no victory was lasting. At last, in 1707, the Act of Union was passed, and Scotland and England came under one central Government. Unfortunately, the Highlanders of the north were not consulted in the arrangement, and they put up two rebellions of their own. Prince Charles Edward, the last of the Stuarts, actually invaded England, and got as far as Derby. He was defeated, but the rebellion smouldered on for years among the Highland glens. The chain of forts along the Caledonian Canal to-day—Fort George, Fort Augustus, Fort William, now peaceful holiday resorts—is a reminder of that time. But those days are all over now, and for nearly two centuries English and Scottish soldiers have fought side by side all over the world. Ireland was united to England and Scotland by a similar Act of Union in 1800. This event, as you may possibly have heard, has provided a fruitful topic of conversation ever since.

IV. Our Climate

Then there is our weather. An Englishman never knows on going to work in the morning whether to take a palm-leaf hat, or a fur overcoat, or a diving-suit. The trouble is that our weather arrives too suddenly. We are an island in the middle of the ocean, and most of our weather comes in from the Atlantic, where there is no one to watch it. Our weather prophets simply have to take a chance. That is all. With you it is different. Your weather travels across a continent three thousand miles wide. You can see it coming, and telegraph to the next State what to expect.

So, if you are spending a day’s leave in London, and walk out of blazing sunshine at one end of the street into a thunderstorm at the other—well, have a heart, and put it down to the War. We will try to fix things for you when peace comes. But we cannot promise. Anyway, in peace-time we can always wear rubbers.

That is all about British weather.

V. Our Transportation

Then there are our railroads. These, like our boxed-in passenger coaches and little four-wheel freight cars, tickle you to death, I know. The compartment system is a national symptom. An Englishman loves one thing above all others, and that is to get a railway compartment to himself. Nobody knows why, but he does. Probably the craving arises from his inability to converse easily with strangers. That inability is passing away. I shall speak of it later. But the three-class system is a relic of antiquity. Fifty years ago there were three grades of comfort in British railroad travelling. You could have your family horse-coach lashed upon an open railroad truck and attached to the train. You thus travelled in your own carriage, or chaise. I do not know what happened to the horses. This was the usual custom of the grand folk of those days. Or you could travel by ordinary railway coaches, without cushions or windows. Or you could pack yourself into an open freight truck, much as soldiers on the Western Front are packed to-day, and so reach your destination with other merchandise.

That has all gone now. Practically the only difference between first, second, and third class in these days is a difference of price—which means elbow-room. (Second class, by the way, has almost entirely died out.) The three classes are almost equal in comfort, especially just now, when the War has abolished nearly all dining-cars and sleepers. Our sleeping-car system never amounted to much, anyway. The journeys were too short to make it necessary for such as were travelling by night (and they were comparatively few) to go to bed. The lordly Pullman car is almost unknown here.

I said just now that we used to be proud of our railroads in time of peace. We are doubly proud of them to-day in the stress of War. They passed automatically into Government hands the day the War broke out, and they have given our whole country a lesson in the art of carrying on. Thousands of their employees are away in the trenches; hundreds of their locomotives and freight cars are in France or Mesopotamia or Palestine, enlisted for the duration. You will notice them when you get over, marked R.O.D. (Railway Operating Department). They have all come from England. Miles of tracks here have been torn up and conveyed bodily overseas. There is little labour available to execute repairs, and none to build new stock. There is a shortage of coal, a shortage of oil, and no paint. Passenger services have been cut down by a half, and fares raised fifty per cent; yet the traffic is still enormous, and the strain on the depleted staffs is immense. But they manage somehow. Men who have long earned their retirement remain in service, while boys and women do the rest. Carry on!

VI. Our Gopher Runs

Then comes our substitute for your Subway, and street-car system generally. In London you will notice that there are two kinds of Subway—the so-called Underground, or shallow transit, and the deep Tubes. The system is so complicated, owing to the shape of London, that it has been found impossible to have a one-price ticket such as prevails everywhere in the United States.

The Underground is the oldest underground railroad in the world. You probably gathered that for yourself the first time you saw it. Twenty-five years ago its trains were drawn by ordinary steam locomotives, which were supposed to consume their own smoke. Perhaps they did, but it must have leaked out again somewhere.

The old Underground Railway of London got nearer to the ordinary conception of hell than anything yet invented. Stations and trains were lit by feeble gas or oil lamps; all glass was covered over with a film of soot, and the brightest illumination was provided by the glow of the locomotive furnaces as the train rumbled asthmatically into a station. The atmosphere was a mixture of soot, smoke, sulphur, and poison gas. The trains were on the box-compartment system, and small compartments at that. The train usually waited two or three minutes in each station (instead of ten seconds as now), and it required a full hour to travel from King’s Cross to Charing Cross. It was impossible to see to read a newspaper, so that passengers, to pass the time, used to rob, assault, and occasionally murder one another. With the coming of electric traction the old Underground was cleaned up and refurnished. At the same time, the Tubes were constructed away down in the London clay, where there could be no interference from oozy gravel, or gas mains, or sewers.

The chief trouble about the Tubes is that no one knows where they are. Of course, every one knows where the stations are. For instance, every Londoner knows where Piccadilly Circus Station is—the surface station. But where is the actual subterranean station? Or rather, where are the two stations, because at this point two roads cross, and each has its own subterranean station. Ah! They certainly are not where simple folk, like you and me, would expect them to be—under Piccadilly Circus. If they were, you would find them at the foot of the elevator. But that would be too easy. It would make Londoners fat and lazy, leading the sedentary life they do, to step straight into the train. So they have to walk about a mile. Where to, no one knows. But there is a school of philosophers which believes that a good many of the Tube stations have no subterranean stations at all. One subterranean is shared jointly by several surface stations. A short circular train ride is provided, just to furnish the necessary illusion, and the passenger, having really walked to his destination, steps out of the train well satisfied, and goes up the right elevator under the impression that he has been carried there. That is our Tube system as far as modern research has been able to fathom it. Of course, an Englishman could never have thought out such a good practical joke as these Tubes. The entire system was projected and constructed by an American.

VII. Our National Joke

But we have a sense of humour all the same. Our money system, like our joint system of weights and measures, is, as you very properly observe, a practical joke. It dates back to the time when an Englishman bought his Sunday dinner with a pound of rock. It is bound to go soon, and make way for the decimal system, just as inches and feet and yards are already making way in this country for metres and centimetres. Meanwhile we have got to put up with it.

The main points for an American to remember are—firstly, that a shilling over here, despite war scarcity, will still buy rather more than a quarter will buy in New York; and secondly, the necessity of keeping clearly in mind the difference between a half-crown and a two-shilling piece. Even taxi-drivers do not always know the difference. If you give them half a crown they will frequently hand you change for a two-shilling piece.

VIII. Ourselves

Lastly, ourselves. This chapter is going to be the most difficult.

Last year I met an American soldier in London. He was one of the first who had come over. I asked his impressions. He said:

“I have been in London three days, and not a soul has spoken to me.”

And therein was summed up the fundamental difference between our two nations. In the United States people like to see one another and talk to one another, and meet fresh people. If a stranger comes to town, reporters interview him as he steps off the train. Americans prefer when travelling to do so in open cars. At home their living-room doors are usually left open. Every room stands open to every other. In their clubs and hotels there are few private rooms. In their business houses the head of the firm, the staff, and the clerks, frequently work together in one great hall. If any partitions exist they are only table-high or they are made of glass. Plenty of light, plenty of air, plenty of publicity. That is America.

Now over here, somehow, we are different. I said before that an Englishman’s ambition in life was to get a compartment to himself. That principle, for good or ill prevails through all our habits. On the railroad we travel in separate boxes. At home all our rooms have doors, and we keep them shut. (This by the way, is chiefly in order to get warm, for there is no central heating.) In most of our clubs there are rooms where no one is allowed to speak. They are crowded with Englishmen. Only a few years ago one never thought of dining in a restaurant except when travelling. If he did, he always asked for a private room. If you dine at Simpson’s in the Strand to-day you will still see a relic of the custom in the curious boxed-in compartments which enclose some of the tables. In our business houses the head of the department is concealed in one hutch, the partners in another. The chief clerk has one too. The other clerks may have to work in one room; but each clerk cherishes just one ambition, and that is to rise high enough in the business to secure honourable confinement in a hutch of his own.

For the same reason every Englishman keeps a fence round his garden—be it castle or cottage garden—just to show that it is his garden and no one else’s. And if you look into any old English parish church you will see the same thing. Every family has its own pew; the humblest pew has a door, and when the family gets inside the pew it shuts the door. Some of the pews have curtains around them as well. The occupant can see the minister, and the minister can see him. The rest of the congregation are as invisible to him as he is to them. No one in the congregation resents this at all. They are rather proud of the custom. It represents to them only what is right and proper, the principle of a compartment to one’s self.

And so a nation which has lived for centuries upon this plan is not a nation which enters readily or easily into conversation outside its own particular compartment. But how was I to explain or excuse such a state of mind to my American soldier friend? Let me say right here that this constrained behaviour does not arise from churlishness, or want of good-will. Even the Germans admit that. A German philosopher once said, with considerable truth for a German: “The Englishman is a cold friend, but a good neighbour. He may shut himself up with his property, but he will never dream of invading yours.” This statement is only partially correct. The Englishman is one of the warmest-hearted and most hospitable of men. But he is a bad starter—a bad starter in War, Love, Business, and, above all, Conversation. Once get him started, and he refuses to leave off. But you must start him first. And you are doing it.

The Englishman’s passion for his own compartment goes back a very, very long way, right into the centuries. It goes back to the days when we lived in tribes and every tribe kept to itself, and an Englishman’s house was his castle—especially if the house were a one-room mud hut. That makes us what we are to this day. Also we are cooped up in a small island, and most of us have never left it. No Englishman ever speaks to another Englishman if he can help it. This is partly the old tribal instinct, partly laziness, and partly fear of a rebuff. Also, it may involve explanations, and an Englishman would rather be scalped than explain. So he saves trouble all round by burying himself in a newspaper and saying nothing.

That by the way. But the main object of this little book is to make you welcome to England, whoever you may be, and to show you why it is that in our inarticulate and undemonstrative English way, we love our small country just as you love your big continent.

“This fortress built by Nature by herself

Against infection and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world;

This precious stone set in a silver sea;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

That is how William Shakespeare felt about this “right little tight little island” three hundred years ago, in days when our nation was fighting for its life, neither for the first nor for the last time, against overwhelmingly superior forces. And we hope that when you go back safe and victorious, as we pray God you may, to your own beautiful land, you will carry with you a little of that same feeling, and a real understanding of the passionate sentiment that lies beneath it.

So we bid you welcome. And we ask you, our honoured guests, to do all you can to get into close touch with the habits and point of view of our country, both here and upon that battle-front whither you are bound, to play your own splendid part in the Great Game.

We are never going back to the old days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Australians, and Americans sat each in their own compartment, and thanked God that they had it to themselves. We English-speaking races have got together over this War. We have lost terribly, but we are gaining much. We are rubbing shoulders in London, and Paris, and countless other places, and we are rubbing the knobs and the angles off one another, good and plenty. It is not always easy or comfortable to have knobs rubbed off you, and the process sometimes involves a little friction; but we must be prepared for that.

For instance, we all speak English, but we all pronounce it in different ways. Well, why not? Hitherto we have been inclined to assume that the other man was talking like that to annoy us. That is one of the knobs that has to be rubbed off—intolerance of trivial matters of taste and habit. To-day, under the most searching test in the world—the test of comradeship in the face of battle and sudden death—we are acquiring a profound respect for one another. When we have acquired just one other thing—tolerance for one another’s point of view—we shall have laid the foundation of an understanding which is going to hold us all up through some difficult times hereafter. Getting this old world back on to a peace basis, after the Kaiser has been put where he belongs, is going to call for all our courage, sincerity, and loyalty to our common ideals. When that period of Reconstruction comes—and it may come sooner than we think—the first plank in its platform must be a solid understanding between the two English-speaking races. They, at least, must speak with one voice, or the whole fabric will fall to the ground.

Our two nations can never hope entirely to understand one another. Neither can they expect always to see eye to eye. Their national personalities are too robust. But to-day their sons are learning to know the worst of one another and the best of one another and the invincible humanity of one another. With that knowledge will come—if we have the will—tolerance of one another’s point of view. We must get that. There are thousands of reasons why, but to you, soldiers and sailors, I am only going to mention one.

When the Victory comes, we shall enjoy its rewards. But all the while we shall be conscious that we have not won these entirely by ourselves. We shall in great measure have inherited them from men who have not lived to enjoy the fruits of their own sacrifice—men whom we have left behind, in France, Belgium, and Italy; in Asia and Africa; whose bones cover the ocean floor—men who gave everything that the Cause might live. To these we shall desire to raise a lasting memorial. We can best do that by building up a fabric of understanding on the foundation which they laid, so truly, with their own lives. If we do that—and only if we do that—our Dead can sleep in peace; for they will know that what they died for was worth while, and above all that we, their heritors, have kept faith with them—

“… Famous men

From whose bays we borrow—

They that put aside To-day,

All the joys of their To-day,

And with toil of their To-day

Bought for us To-morrow.”

Ian Hay

London, July, 1918

The Last Million

CHAPTER ONE
THE ARGONAUTS

A ship is sailing on the sea—a tall ship, with several masts and an imposing array of smokestacks. She is moving at a strictly processional pace, with a certain air of professional boredom. In fact, the disconsolate hissing of her steam escape-pipes intimates quite plainly that she is accustomed to a livelier life than this. But a convoy belongs to the straitest sect of Labour-Unionism: its pace is regulated to that of the slowest performer; so ocean greyhounds in such company must restrain themselves as best they may.

All around her steam other ships. They are striped, spotted, and ringstraked as to their hulls, smokestacks, and spars in a manner highly gratifying to that school of unappreciated geniuses, the Futurists,—or Cubists, or Vorticists, or whatever the malady is called,—but exasperating to the submerged Hun, endeavouring to calculate knottage and obtain ranging-points through a perplexed periscope. On the outer fringe of the flotilla fuss the sheep-dogs—the escorting warships.

If you seek to ascertain the nationality of our tall ship, by internal evidence, you will probably begin by observing certain notices painted up about the decks and cabins, requesting you to keep off the bridge, or to refrain from throwing cigar-ends on the deck, or not to leave this tap running. You will next observe that these notices are inscribed in English, French, and another language. What language, it is impossible to say, for some one has pasted a strip of blank paper over the inscription in every case. But it is easy to guess. In the depths, here and there, German is still spoken; but upon the face of the broad ocean it is a dead language.

Talking of nationalities, you will further observe that these ships all fly the Union Jack. But they are crowded with American soldiers. There must be thousands of these soldiers. They swarm everywhere—bunched on deck, peering through portholes, or plastering the rigging like an overflow of mustard sauce, which in truth they are. They are more than that. They are a portent. They are a symbol. They are a testimonial—to the Kaiser; for has not that indefatigable bungler by his own efforts brought about a long-overdue understanding between all the English-speaking people in the world?

Above all, they are a direct answer to a particular challenge.

A few weeks ago the Men at the Top in Germany got together and held what is known in military circles as a pow-wow. A condensed report of their deliberations would have read something like this:

“Yes, Majesty, the Good Old German God is undoubtedly on the side of our Army. Still, the fact remains that we have not yet achieved anything, after three-and-a-half years of war, really worth while.… Belgium, Serbia, Roumania, Russia? Yes, no doubt. Each of those countries has now received the true reward of her stupidity and presumption; but none of them ever offered any serious difficulty from a military point of view, except Russia; and the credit for her collapse was due far more to our internal agents than to our external military pressure.… No, Hindenburg, I haven’t forgotten Tannenberg; but you haven’t done very much since then (except get gold nails knocked into yourself), and what you have accomplished has been chiefly under—ahem!—my direction.… No, no, I am not really pinning orchids on myself—not yet, anyway. I am merely trying to be candid and frank: in short, I am reminding you that you are only a figurehead. You know what irreverent people call you—‘General What-do-you-Say!’

“… Yes, Your Imperial Highness, your consummate generalship at Verdun undoubtedly achieved an historic victory over the French; but you will forgive me for pointing out that your casualties were at least twice as numerous as theirs, and that the ground which you captured has since been regained.… Submarines? My good Von Capelle, your submarines are as obsolete as our late lamented friend Von Tirpitz. Justify my statement? In a moment.… Yes, Majesty, the British Army failed utterly to break our line at the Somme, but they and the French took seventy thousand of our best troops prisoner, and we had to execute a ‘strategic’ retirement which lost us about a thousand square miles of French soil. Not much of a performance for the German Army—the German Army—to put up against a mob of half-trained mercenaries! We managed to delude our people into the belief that we had scored a great military triumph in so doing, but the German nation, excellent though their discipline is, are not likely to go on swallowing that stuff forever. You know that, better than most, Hertling! Bethmann-Hollweg knew it too: he was no match for Liebknecht, although he did lock him up.…

“And what of the situation since the Somme? Haig is within ten miles of Ostend, and has captured practically the whole of the Paschendaele Ridge.… The Eastern Front? Nothing matters in this war except the Western Front. What are we going to do about that?… Your Majesty will assume supreme command? Splendid!… And break the Western Front? Colossal! That was just what I was about to suggest. Now for the plan of campaign, which I do not doubt Your Majesty has already sketched out.… Perhaps Your Majesty will permit Hindenburg and myself to remain here a few moments longer, while you unfold it? We need not detain His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince. He is the man of Action: his task will come later. (For Heaven’s sake, Von Hertling, get him out of here, or our two military geniuses will be at loggerheads in five minutes!)

“… And now, Majesty, you suggest—?… That is a superb plan; but it appears to me—I mean, to Hindenburg—that you—we—are rating one of the nations opposed to us too lightly.… Yes, Your Majesty, I know you are going to stand no nonsense from them after the War,—in fact, you warned their Ambassador, most properly, if I may say so, to that effect,—but would it not be a good move, just as a preliminary, to stand no nonsense from them during the War?… Too far away? They can’t get over? Well—here are the approximate numbers of the American troops already in France. And there are a lot of them in England too.… Rather surprising? Yes. Indeed, quite a creditable feat for an unwarlike nation. I shall show these figures to Von Capelle: it will justify what I said about his submarines: in fact, it will annoy him extremely. And there are more coming. They are pouring over faster and faster. I shall tell him that too.… But the Americans have had no experience of intensive warfare? And they have fallen behind with their constructive programme—aeroplanes and artillery? Quite so. And, therefore, taking these facts into consideration, I—Hindenburg—Your Majesty will doubtless decide that our only chance is to concentrate in overwhelming strength, here and now, against one of the two enemy forces at present opposed to us, and destroy that force in detail before the Americans can throw any considerable body of troops into the line.… Expensive? Undoubtedly.… No one has ever succeeded during this War in breaking a properly organized trenchline? Agreed; but only because no one has yet been able or willing to pay the necessary price. The British might have done it on the Somme, but Haig was too squeamish about the lives of his men. British generals are handicapped in their military dispositions by a public opinion which happily does not exist in our enlightened Fatherland. I—Hin—Your Majesty can afford to do it. With all these unemployed Divisions from the Russian Front, we can go to the limit in the matter of casualties.… How many? Well, I think we can afford to lose a million men—say a million.… Yes, indeed, Majesty, your heart must bleed at the prospect; but after all, it is for the ultimate good of Humanity.… ‘One cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs?’ Admirable! Your Majesty’s felicity of phrase shows no falling off, I perceive. And yet the Americans talk of their Woodrow Wilson! Besides, it will be a million less to make trouble for Us after the War. Now, I suppose we are all agreed on the foe to be crushed?… The British? Naturally. The British! The time has come to drive them into the sea. Haig has recently extended his line twenty-eight miles—rather reluctantly, too. He has had to send troops to Italy, and he had heavy casualties in Belgium last autumn. Twenty-seven thousand killed, in fact. Still, without a supreme commander, you cannot blame the various Allied leaders for ‘passing the buck’ to one another, as the Yankees say. We can accumulate troops on his front—veterans from Russia—sufficient to outnumber him by at least three to one. That should suffice, if we stand by our decision about casualties. We will strike hard at his new positions, before his artillery has had time to register thoroughly. We will annihilate his front system of trenches by an intensive bombardment, while our new long-range gas-shells take his rest-billets by surprise and demoralize his Divisional and Corps Reserves. And I think, Majesty, that we have been a little punctilious about things like the Red Cross. After all, hospitals are a mere sentimental handicap to the efficient waging of war. Our new bombing aeroplanes might be instructed to deal faithfully with these, especially as the fool English have organized no preparation for their defence. Yes, I—we—Your Majesty will drive the whole pack of them into the sea this time! The French, isolated, can then be handled at leisure; and with Calais, Boulogne, and Havre in our hands the Americans will find that they have come too late. In fact, we can pick them off as they arrive. Thus it is that Your Majesty, like Cæsar and Napoleon, separates his enemies and then destroys them one by one.… Divide et Impera! Exactly! Most happily put, Your Majesty!”

And it was so—up to a point. Ludendorff’s plan was adopted. The necessary concentration of troops was effected with admirable secrecy and promptitude, and the parallel enterprises of sweeping the British Army into the sea and expending a million German lives were duly inaugurated. The latter undertaking succeeded better than the former: the line sagged and wavered; it was pushed here and there; but it never broke. Still, the strain was terrible, as news arrived of Monchy gone, Wytschaete gone, Messines gone, Kemmel gone; of Bapaume, Albert, Armentières, Bailleul, all gone—little hills and little towns all of them, but big and precious in certain unimportant eyes because of their associations. But the worst news never arrived. Instead, there came one morning the tale of an all-day assault by the Hun, delivered in mass from Meteren to Voormezeele, every wave of which had been broken and hurled back by impregnable rocks of French and British infantry. So disastrous was the failure of that tremendous lunge that the enemy drew off with his dead and his shame for several weeks, and the non-stop run to Calais was withdrawn from the time-table until further notice.

But the matter could not be left here. The Boche had laid a terrible stake on the table, and was bound to redeem it or perish. Plainly he would try again—maybe at some fresh point; but again. Already there were mutterings of trouble on the French Front. That he would break the line—the line which he had failed to break at Verdun in 1916, and at Ypres in 1914—seemed incredible; but he might succeed in straining it beyond the limits of perfect recovery; and if that happened, Ludendorff’s boast that America would arrive too late might be justified.

Hence the present Armada. It is only one of many. Transports have been crossing the Atlantic for months now, but never upon such a scale as this. There are thousands of soldiers in this convoy alone—men physically splendid, with nearly a year’s training behind them. They are going over—Over There—in answer to the call. Russia has stepped out of the scale, so America must step in at once if Prussianism is to kick the beam. Here they are—a sight to quicken the pulse—the New World hastening to redress the balance of the Old.

CHAPTER TWO
SHIP’S COMPANY

However, we have not reached our destination yet; which is just as well, for at present we are fully occupied in assimilating our new surroundings. To tell the truth, some of us have a good deal to assimilate. There is young Boone Cruttenden, for instance.

Little more than a year ago he was preparing to settle down in his ancestral home in Kentucky, there to prop the declining years of an octogenarian parent, Colonel Harvey Cruttenden, known in far-back Confederate days as one of General Sam Wheeler’s hardest-riding disciples. But President Wilson had upset the plans of Boone Cruttenden for all time, by inviting him and certain others to step forward and help make the World Safe for Democracy. Boone was one of the first to accept the invitation.

Several strenuous months at a training-camp of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps followed, and in due course he found himself, with a gilded metal strip on either shoulder, communicating his slender knowledge of the art of war to drafted persons who possessed no knowledge of the subject at all—just as thousands of other young men of the right spirit were doing all over the country, and just as thousands of other young men of similar spirit had been doing for more than three years in another country three thousand miles away.

“It was something fierce at first,” he confided to Miss Frances Lane, a United States Army nurse, proceeding, in company with ninety-nine others, to a Base Hospital in France.

By rights Miss Lane and her companions should not have been taking chances on a transport at all. She should have been crossing the Atlantic in a stately white-painted hospital ship, with the Red Cross emblazoned on its sides, immune by all the laws of God and Man from hostile attack. But the Red Cross makes the Hun see red. Therefore it is found safer in these days to adjust life-jackets over the splints and bandages of wounded men and send them across the water, together with the indomitable sisterhood which tends them, protected by something that makes a more intelligible appeal to Kultur than the mere symbol of Christianity.

“It was something fierce,” repeated Boone Cruttenden.

“Tell me!” commanded Miss Lane, with an air of authority which Boone found extremely attractive.

“Well, in the training-camps the main proposition was to make the boys understand what they were there for. They were full of enthusiasm, but very few of them had taken any interest in the early part of the war, and we were all a long way from Europe, anyhow. They were willing enough to fight, but naturally they wanted to know what they were fighting for. Even when we told them, they weren’t too wise. Two or three men of my company could neither read nor write; another man knew the name of his home town, but not the name of his State. The map of Europe was nothing in his young life. Then, lots of them thought we were going to fight the Yankees again, and whip them this time!”

Boone’s eyes flashed, and for a moment he forgot all about European complications. He was his father’s son all through. But a certain tensity in the atmosphere recalled him to realities.

“I guess you aren’t a Southerner?” he observed apologetically.

“Massachusetts,” replied Miss Lane coldly.

Boone Cruttenden offered a laboured expression of regret, and proceeded:

“Then they didn’t like saluting, or obeying orders on the jump. Neither did I, for that matter. It seemed undemocratic.”

“So it is,” affirmed Miss Lane sturdily.

“Well, I don’t know. We certainly made much quicker progress with our training once we had gotten the idea. Our instructors were very particular about it, too—both French and British. There was an English sergeant—well, the boys used to come running a hundred yards to see him salute an officer. I tell you, it tickled them to death, at first. Next thing, they were all trying to do it too.”

“What was it like?”

Boone rose from his seat upon the deck, stiffened his young muscles, and offered a very creditable reproduction of the epileptic salute of the British Guardsman.

“Like that,” he said.

“I’m not surprised they ran,” commented Miss Lane.

“Still,” continued Boone appreciatively, “that sergeant was a bird. At the start, we regarded him as a pure vaudeville act. He talked just like a stage Englishman, for one thing. For another, a German bullet had gone right through his face—in at one cheek and out at the other—and that didn’t help make a William Jennings Bryan of him. But William J. had nothing on him; neither had Will Rogers, for that matter. He would stand there in front of us and put over a line of stuff that made everybody weak with laughing—everybody, that is, except the fellow he was talking to. I shall never forget the first morning we held an Officers’ Instruction Class. There were about forty of us. Old man Duckett—that was his name; Sergeant Instructor Duckett—marched us around, and put us through our paces. We meant to show him something—we were a chesty bunch in those days—so we gave him what we imagined was a first-class West Point show. (Not that any of us had been at West Point.) When we had done enough, he lined us up, and said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I have run over your points, and before dismissin’ the parade I should like to say that I only wish the President of the United States was here to see you. If he did catch sight of you, I know that his first words would be—”Thank Gawd, from the bottom of my heart, we’ve got a Navy!“’”

To Boone and Miss Lane now enter others. (This is a trial to which Master Boone is growing accustomed, for Miss Lane is quite the prettiest girl on the ship.) Among them we note one Jim Nichols, who, previous to America’s entry into the War, has worked upon the New Orleans Cotton Exchange “ever since he can remember.” There is also Major Powers, wearing the ribbon of the Spanish War medal. There are two Naval officers, crossing over to pursue submarines. Until they begin, Miss Lane makes a very pleasant substitute. And there is a British officer who walks with a limp—Captain Norton—returning from a spell of duty as Military Instructor in a Texas training-camp.

Miss Lane, with the instinct of a true hostess, turns to the stranger.

“We were talking about our rookies, Captain,” she announces. “How did they compare with your Kitchener’s Army?”

“Very much the same, Miss Lane, in the early days. Fish out of the water, all of them. We had all sorts—miners, shipbuilders, farm-hands, railway-men, newspaper-boys—and not one of them knew the smallest thing about soldiering. They knew pretty well everything else, I admit. The ranks were chock-full of experts—engineers, plumbers, electricians, glass-blowers, printers, musicians. I remember one of my men put himself down as an ‘egg-tester’—whatever that may be! An actor, perhaps. But hardly one of them knew his right foot from his left when it came to forming fours.”

“Same here,” said Major Powers. “My first consignment of drafted men was a mixture of mountaineers from Tennessee—moonshiners, most of them—and East-Side Jews from New York. (I wonder who the blue-eyed boy at Washington was who mixed ’em!) The moonshiners looked the hardest lot of cases you ever set eyes on: they hated discipline worse than poison; and an officer was about as popular with them as a skunk at a picnic. But they were as easy as pie: they were scared to death half the time, by—what do you think?”

“The water-wagon?” suggested a voice.

“No—of getting lost! They could have found their way blindfold over their own hills back home; but they had never lived on a street before, and those huge camps had them paralyzed. They said the huts were all exactly alike—which was true enough—and not one of them would stray fifty yards from his own for fear he would not find it again. Curious, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Almost exactly what happened with our Scottish Highlanders,” said Norton. “But they took quite kindly to city life in the end. Regular clubmen, in fact. What about your East-Siders?”

“They were a more difficult proposition,” said Powers. “In the first place, they didn’t want to fight at all, whereas the moonshiners did. In fact, the moonshiners didn’t care whom they fought, so long as they fought somebody. They were like the Irishman who asked: ‘Is this a private fight, or can anybody join in?’ But the East-Siders were different. Their discipline was right enough: in fact, the average East-Side rookie usually acted towards an officer as if he wanted to sell him something. But they were city birds, born and bred. They were accustomed to behave well when a cop was in sight; but once around the corner you could not have trusted them with their own salary. They didn’t like country life, and they didn’t like the dark. They were never really happy away from a street with illuminated signs on it—and there aren’t many of those in Texas. If you put one of the bunch on sentry duty by himself in a lonely place, like as not he’d get so scared he’d go skating around the outskirts of the camp looking for cover. I once rounded up four of my sentries from different posts, all together in one pool-room. But discipline has them nicely fixed now. By the way, you heard the story of the Jew doughboy whose friends recommended him to take a Commission?”

“No. Tell me!” commanded Miss Lane.

“He refused, on the ground that it would be too difficult to collect. He said he might not be able to keep tally of all the Germans he killed: besides, his General might not believe him. Anyway, he preferred a straight salary! Tell us some more of your experiences, Captain.”

“They were much the same as yours,” said Norton. “The trouble with Kitchener’s Army was that practically every member of the rank-and-file enlisted under the firm belief that Kitchener would simply hand him a rifle and ammunition and pack him off right away to the Front—whatever that might be—to shoot the Kaiser. Their experiences during the first six months—chiefly a course of instruction in obedience and sobriety—was a bit of a jolt to them. But discipline told in the end. To-day I believe most of them would rather have a strict officer than an officer they could do what they liked with. Leniency usually means inefficiency; and inefficiency at the top of things usually means irregular meals and regular casualties for the men underneath!”

“What do you include under discipline, Captain?” enquired that upholder of personal liberty, Miss Lane, suspiciously.

“Little things, chiefly—things that don’t seem to matter much. Shaving, and tidiness—”

“What, in a trench?” asked several young officers. But Major Powers nodded his head approvingly.

“That is just what most of us ask who don’t know,” he said. “But I have seen enough service to have learned one thing, and that is that a dirty soldier is a bad soldier, all the world over. If a man is encouraged to neglect his personal appearance, he starts to neglect his work—gets careless with the cleaning of his rifle, and so forth. If a man takes no pride in his appearance, he takes no pride in his duty. The other way round, the best soldier is the soldier who keeps himself smart.”

“That is just what I think,” interpolated Miss Lane, virtuously. (She had succeeded during the Major’s homily in surreptitiously powdering her nose, and felt ready to take Florence Nightingale’s place at a moment’s notice.)

“We certainly found it so,” said Norton. “In fact, after a short experience of trench warfare we revived all the old peace-time stunts. The order was given that every man in the trenches was to be shaved by a certain hour each day. (Of course, if the Boche attacked in mass, the ceremony was liable to postponement.) In billets behind the line every one was expected to make himself as smart as possible—brush his uniform, shine his shoes, and so on. The band played for an hour every evening. Saluting and other little ceremonies like that were insisted on. These things all together had a tremendous effect. I don’t know why, but it was so. For one thing, it made life behind the lines more tolerable—more refreshing. In the line itself, it made officers more concise in giving their orders, and men more alert and intelligent in carrying them out. In fact, the greater the fuss a regiment made about its appearance—‘eye-wash,’ we called it—the better its work in the field.”

“Things worked out that way with us too, even in home training,” corroborated Powers.

“So I noticed. I was in four or five big camps, in different States, and I found that the rate of progress in training varied almost directly with the discipline.”

“Which camp did you like best?”

The British officer turned to Miss Lane, and shook his head. “No, you don’t, Miss Lane!” he replied. “I belong to the most tactless race in the world, but I know enough to keep out of trouble of that kind! I had a gorgeous time in all of them.”

At this point a timely bugle blew for boat drill, and the harassed veteran stumped off.

Boat drill occurs at frequent intervals, and is still sufficient of a novelty to be regarded as an amusement.

By all, that is, except the habitués—the crew, the stewards, and that anæmic race of troglodytes which only emerges from the lower depths of the ship under the stress of great emergency—the army of dish-washers and potato-peelers. These fall in at their posts with the half-ashamed self-consciousness of big boys who have been compelled by an undiscriminating hostess to participate in children’s games. They grin sheepishly, shiver ostentatiously in the fresh breeze, and offer profane but amusing comments in an undertone to one another.

But few of the present passengers have ever been on board a ship before. Indeed, many of us never saw the ocean until last week. War and its appurtenances are for the present a game, full of interesting surprises and wonderful thrills. It is surprising, for instance, however good your appetite may have been in camp, to find how much more you can eat on board ship; and it is thrilling, if you happen to be a rustic beauty from a very small town in Central Iowa, to find yourself dancing the one-step, in a life-jacket, with a total stranger in uniform, upon an undulating deck to the music of a full military band.

So most of us have entered upon the business with all the misguided enthusiasm of the gentleman who once blacked himself all over to play “Othello.” Some of us sleep in our clothes; others carry all their valuables about their person; not a few donned patent life-saving contraptions before we cleared Sandy Hook. But no one appears the least nervous: there is a pleasurable excitement about everything. And we listen with intense respect to the blood-curdling reminiscences of the crew, particularly the stewards. All our cabin stewards have been torpedoed at least three times, and every single one of them was on board the Lusitania when she was sunk. The survivors of the Lusitania must be almost as numerous by this time as the original ship’s company of the Mayflower.

CHAPTER THREE
THE LOWER DECK

If you clamber down the accommodation ladder on to the well-deck amidships, you will find yourself in a world which will enable you to contemplate War from yet another angle.

For a guide and director I can confidently recommend Mr. Al Thompson, late of Springfield, Illinois—“No, sir, not Massachusetts!” he will be careful to inform you—now a seasoned ornament of a Trench Mortar Battery.

“We sure are one dandy outfit,” he observes modestly. “Two hundred roughnecks! I’ll make you known to a few. There’s Eddie Gillette: you seen him box last night, out on the forward deck there? Yep? Well, you certainly seen something!”

We certainly had. Boxing is an ideal pastime for a large, virile, and closely packed community, for several reasons. In the first place, it requires very little space. A twelve-foot ring will do: indeed, towards the end of an exciting bout the combatants can—or must—make shift with mere elbow-room. In the second, the novice extracts quite as much exercise and excitement from the sport as the expert—possibly more. Thirdly and most important, boxing fulfils the cardinal principle of providing for the greatest good of the greatest number, because it affords far more undiluted happiness to the spectators than to the performers. Last night, for instance, when Mr. Hank Magraw (weight two hundred pounds), a gladiator mainly conspicuous for unruffled urbanity and entire ignorance of the rules of boxing, growing a trifle restive under the cumulative effect of three consecutive taps upon the point of the chin from an opponent half his size, suddenly gathered that gentleman into his arms and endeavoured to stuff him down one of those trumpet-mouthed ventilators which lead to the stokehold, the spectators voiced their appreciation by a vociferous encore.

A wonderful sight these spectators are. They are banked up all around the well-deck, forming a deep pit, in the bottom of which two boxers gyrate, clash, and recoil like nutshells in a whirlpool. Tier upon tier they rise—with their long, lean, American bodies, and tense, brown, American faces—seated in concentric circles on the deck itself, perched on hatches and deck-houses and sky-lights, clinging to davits and ventilators, or hanging in clusters from the rigging—all yelling themselves hoarse.

The “announcer”—one Buck Stamper—stands for the moment at the bottom of the vortex. With each of his muscular arms he encircles the shrinking figure of a competitor, and introduces the pair to the audience.

“Boys,” he bellows, in a voice which must be easily audible in the surrounding transports, “one of the English officers up there has come across with—with—a ten-shilling certificate”—he releases one of his protégés in order to display a pink-and-white British treasury note—“to be awarded to the winner of this bout.”

There is a little polite applause. Then a stentorian voice enquires:

“How much is that—in money?”

There is a great roar of laughter. The announcer retires, to seek an expert financier. A British marine enlightens him, and he announces:

“’Bout two dollars-and-a-half. On my right I have Ikey Zingbaum, of the Field Ambulance—”

The immediate conjunction of Ikey Zingbaum and two-and-a-half dollars appeals to the crowd’s sense of humour. When they have recovered, Buck Stamper proceeds:

“On my left”—he thrusts forward a smooth-chinned, pink-cheeked, lusty, country lad—“Miss Sissy Smithers, what has got in among the boys by mistake!”

Amid yells of delight the blushing Sissy shakes hands with his tallow-faced opponent, and falls promptly upon his neck. The pair, locked in a complicated embrace, circle slowly round the ring, feebly patting one another on the back. At the urgent suggestion of the spectators the referee separates them, caustically observing that this is a fight and not a fox-trot. For a short time they stand uneasily apart; then Ikey Zingbaum, stimulated possibly by his supporters’ constant references to the ten-shilling certificate, leans suddenly forward and boxes his opponent’s ears. Miss Sissy, stung into indignant activity, lunges out with all his strength and counters fairly and squarely in the pit of Ikey’s stomach. Mr. Zingbaum shuts up like a footrule, and shoots stern-foremost into the thick of the audience. He is extracted amid shouts of laughter, groaning horribly, and receives first aid from a dozen willing but inexperienced hands. Presently he recovers sufficiently far to be informed that he has been awarded the match—on a foul. Miss Sissy, not ill-pleased with himself, modestly disappears.

“Yes,” continued Al Thompson, “you seen something. Was you there when Eddie Gillette fit that duck what we call Coca-Kola? No? I’m sorry. Coca-Kola’s a Turk. Comes from Turkey, I mean. Las’ winter, when he was fighting around the Bowery, he would eat raw meat whenever he could get it. Said it kept him kinder fit. Anyway, he was put up las’ night against Eddie Gillette. We picked on Ed because he was the best man in the Trench Mortar Section, and Coca-Kola had been winning out all the time for the Machine Gunners, where he belonged, and they was blowing some. Ed was giving away more than seventeen pounds of weight, besides which the Turk was the sort of guy that if he was short of money he would go up to a person an’ say: ‘You give me two bits and I’ll let you hit me on the jaw any place you like!’ That was the kind of lobster Coca-Kola was, and gives you some sort of an idea what Ed was up against!

“The match was to be ten rounds of two minutes each. There was five dollars donated by an officer for the winner, and some powerful side-bets. But it was all over in one round. Eddie started by rushing in and giving the Turk a silly little tap on the nose. That seemed to get the Turk’s goat, for he went for Eddie like a cyclone, and rushed him all around the ring for maybe a minute. At the end of that he gave him a blow on the body that laid him flat on the deck. We all thought Eddie was gone for sure. The time-keeper had counted up to five before he come to life at all. Then he began to recover, very slow. At ‘seven’ he rolled over on his face. The Turk, reckoning that Eddie was too dopy to go on any more, just straddled around in the middle of the ring, looking up to the deck above for the officer that was donating the five bucks. But at ‘nine’ Eddie was on his feet again, like a streak. No one hardly saw him get up. All they did see was Eddie soak the Turk under the point of the jaw—which was well up in the air at the time. Coca-Kola fairly knocked a groan out of the deck when he struck it. It took them two hours to bring him round. Gee, but it was some soak! Some of the Machine Gun boys cut open Eddie’s glove after, because they suspicioned he might have a chunk of lead there. But there weren’t nothing there. No, sir! Nothing but Eddie’s little old punch!”

We are presented both to the victorious Eddie and the dethroned masticator of raw meat. The latter is inclined to be taciturn; but the former, true to national use and custom, is quite ready to be interviewed.

Yes, this is his first trip across, but he is not seasick, and does not expect to be. Reason; he has spent twelve years on the Great Lakes, and a man that can stand the up-and-down convulsions of, say, Lake Michigan during a winter storm, need not fear the spacious roll of the Atlantic.

“There’s a ten-thousand-ton ship has went down there before now,” says Eddie, referring apparently to Lake Michigan, “just because them twisty seas has sheered the heads clean off her bolts and opened her up. Kinder ripped her, I guess. Every October owners raises the pay of all hands on them ships fifteen per cent—raises it voluntary.”

“Why?”

“Because the whole bunch would quit if they didn’t!”

This does not sound like a very convincing example of the voluntary system; but the great are permitted to be inconsistent. Mr. Gillette, proceeding, considers that life on board this ship is tolerable, but the food monotonous. Another gentleman, chewing tobacco, now joins the symposium. He is introduced as Joe McCarthy, of Oklahoma.

“You said it!” he announces, referring apparently to the food question. “Especially the coffee. The stuff they serve on board this packet ain’t got no kick to it.”

He is reminded that he has passed out of the coffee belt, and that he is approaching a land of tea-drinkers.

“Tea or coffee,” he rejoins, with the dogged persistence of the professional grumbler, “it don’t make no difference to me. And another thing. This yer travelling by sea is a lonesome business. Give me a railroad! There you can look out of the window of the car and see folks waving their hands to you; and presents of candy at the deepo, and everything. While this”—he flings a disparaging glance over the heaving Atlantic—“this is all the same, all the time!”

“Well, Joe,” explains the fair-minded Al Thompson, “I guess we got to travel to Europe this way, seeing there ain’t no railroad across—leastways not at present.”

But Mr. McCarthy refuses to be comforted.

“Europe!” he exclaims. “There y’ are! Europe—four thousand miles from America! Some folks must be darned anxious for war, if they got to send us four thousand miles to find it!”

This last sentiment produces a distinct sensation. It is adjudged by those who hear it to border on pro-Germanism. Heads turn sharply in Joe’s direction. A certain licence is permitted to professional grouchers; but “knocking” the Cause is the one thing that the New Crusaders will not permit.

That simple-hearted American, Al Thompson, conveys the necessary reproof, in a manner which more highly-placed diplomatists might envy.

“Listen, Joe,” he remarks: “that stuff don’t go here. I know you been mighty seasick, and you’re sore on the food, and the monotony, and the other little glooms that come around on a slow trip like this. But whenever I git sore on things just now, like we all do, I just remember them dirty bums over there marching through Belgium with little babies on their bayonets; and then—well, all I care about is getting over there and killing any guy that calls himself a Dutchman. Let me kill a few of them first—and, even if they kill me after, I should worry!”

CHAPTER FOUR
THE DANGER ZONE

There are many other types on board. Here is one at your elbow. He is a sentry, on Number Nine post. His duties appear to be confined to scrutinizing the ocean for periscopes. This is not a very arduous task, for we are not in the danger zone at present. Indeed, a good deal of this sentry’s time appears to be spent in gazing over the taffrail towards the setting sun—towards America. Possibly he ought to be straining his eyes towards France. But we are all human, especially the American soldier boy, and this boy is unaffectedly and avowedly homesick. Jim Cleaver’s thoughts at the present moment are nowhere near Number Nine post; they are centred upon a little township called Potsdam, far away. This sounds good and blood-thirsty: unfortunately this particular Potsdam is not in Prussia, but “way up” somewhere in the State of New York; and Jim’s imagination is concerned less with the House of Hohenzollern than with the House of Cleaver—particularly the feminine portion thereof. Moreover, it happens to be Sunday evening; and we all know what that means.

At the other corner of the deck stands Antonio. That is not his real name, but no matter. He will inform you that he has already crossed the ocean—once. A brief exercise in mental arithmetic will presently cause you to realize that Antonio cannot have been born in America. This is so. He crossed over ten years ago, in the steerage of an Austrian Lloyd liner, outward bound from Trieste, on his way from the sunny but unremunerative plains of Lombardy, in search of a mysterious Eldorado called Harlem, New York. And now here he is, aged twenty-six, picked out by the groping hand of the Selective Draft, on his way back again, to help rend those same plains (among others) from the Hun and restore them to their rightful owners. He is quite cheerful at the prospect, though he would sooner be with the Italian Army than with the American. Not that he is lacking in patriotism towards the land of his adoption, but—

“I gotta two brother over there,” he explains. “Besides, here I gotta talka da Ingleese. Alla same, I feela fine!”

Antonio is not the only man who is going back with a personal interest in the European situation. On a coil of rope on the well-deck, broad-faced and Turanian, sits another young man. If Antonio’s real name is difficult to pronounce, this man’s is out of range altogether; for he is a Russian. He is addressed indifferently as Clambakovitch or Roughneckski.

“I live fifty miles from German border,” he says. “I come over here seven years ago: I go through Berlin and sail from Hamburg. Now the Germans have my home. I do not hear from my people for three years. So now I go home—through Berlin again!”

“And after that?”

After that, Clambakovitch Roughneckski’s plans are perfectly definite. He is coming back to America—for good. Already he is wedded to the soil of Pennsylvania. Antonio’s views are the same.

The affection of her children for America is a wonderful thing. Domestic or imported, it makes no matter. To the native-born American, America is still the little country—the little strip of coastline—which stood up successfully to a dunder-headed monarch in days when men did not govern themselves: to the naturalized American, America is the land which gave him his first real taste of personal liberty. Each cherishes America to-day—the one because he helped to make her free, the other because she has made him free.

We are in the danger zone now. It is difficult to realize that thrilling circumstance, because no one seems to worry at all.

The same games of shuffle-board, bull-board, chess, checkers, and bridge are in progress; each day sees the same guard-mountings, parades, and inspections; off duty, the same quantity of tobacco and chewing-gum is being consumed. Only if the ship is brought up short by a heavy sea, or an iron door clangs suddenly in some distant stokehold, are we conscious of any tension at all. For a moment heads are turned, or conversation breaks. But that is all. A year ago, old hands tell us, things were different. There really was cause for nervousness. But now, we are escorted, we are well-armed, and the worst we need fear is a few hours in the boats.

There is much speculation as to our destination. Is it the Mersey; the Clyde; Queenstown? Or France direct? Where are we now, anyway? Each noon, when the ship’s officers appear upon the bridge in a body, and perform mysterious sun-worshipping rites with sextants, the amateur experts look knowing, and refer darkly to probable latitudes and longitudes. One, diagnosing the present commotion of billows as a “ground-swell,” announces positively that we are just off the Bay of Biscay. Another, basing his conclusions upon the lengthening hours of daylight and the presence in our wake of certain sea-birds (herring-gulls, really) which he describes as “penguins,” announces confidently that we are now well within the Arctic Circle and will ultimately fetch a compass to Aberdeen, via Iceland. The battle rages between these two extremes: probably a carefully worked-out average of opinion would bring us somewhere near the truth. Gunners are quite familiar with the process: they call it “bracketing.” But it does not matter. The real fun will begin when we sight land, and the authorities upon the subject start in to identify it.

Another night has passed, and the question is settled. We have sighted land, and are informed that we may expect to make our port to-night. It is a breathless summer morning, and our great ships, which looked forlorn and insignificant amid the ocean wastes, appear to have swelled a good deal during the night. Certainly we form a stately pageant, for our escorting forces have been augmented. Destroyers are beating the bounds, nosey little patrol-boats thread their way in and out of the flotilla; silver-grey monsters float above our heads in the blue, occasionally descending to dip a suspicious nose towards the glittering wavelets. One of them dives down gracefully to within hailing distance of our own ship. It is a sublime moment. A thousand Stetsons are waved in welcome, and an earnest query—the spontaneous greeting of Young America to Old England—is roared from one of our portholes:

“Say, you got any beer up there?”

At the forward end of the boat-deck Boone Cruttenden and Miss Lane were leaning over the rail, in that confidential conjunction invariable in all young couples, whether in war or peace, on the last day of a voyage. Boone’s blue eyes surveyed the scene around him, and glowed.

“It makes you think a bit!” he exclaimed. “Here we are, thousands of us Americans, on board British ships, being convoyed into a British port by the British Navy. I wish the old Kaiser was here! And I wish some of our folks at home who are asking what the British Navy is doing in this war could be here too! They might learn then what is meant by the freedom of the seas!”

“Still,” complained the youthful seeker after sensation, Miss Lane, “I did hope that we might have seen just one little submarine.”

It is hard to refuse some people anything—especially American girls of twenty-three. Miss Lane’s wish was promptly gratified. A few hundred yards away, right in the middle of the convoy, there was suddenly protruded from the unruffled surface of the ocean a few feet of something grey, slender, and perpendicular—something which, after a hurried and perfunctory survey of the situation, retired unobtrusively whence it came. But not before it had been seen, and welcomed. For a brief minute shells burst around it, machine guns pattered imprecations over it, bombs descended upon it from the heavens above, and depth-charges detonated in the waters beneath. The convoy altered its formation, as prudence dictated. But nothing further happened. Calm reigned once more upon the face of the waters.

“Some little surprise for him, I guess,” said Cruttenden. “Lying on the bottom, and just came up for a look around! He did not expect to poke his periscope into this hornet’s nest, I should say. I wonder if anything hit him. I guess not: he was too slick. But you had your thrill right enough, Miss Lane!”

Miss Lane sighed rapturously.

“The censor has just got to pass that when I write home,” she announced.

Late that evening we made our port. On our way in we passed a British cruiser, coaling. The band was playing, as is usual during coaling. Our tall ship slid past in the dusk, undemonstratively, almost surreptitiously. One of the tragedies of modern warfare lies in its anonymity. You may not display your true colours or advertise your presence anywhere—even to your friends. So we crept past. But a sailor can read ships as a landsman reads books. The cruiser’s band stopped suddenly, right in the middle of a tune, and in two minutes the cruiser’s sides, rigging, and tops were crowded with half-naked, coal-grimed humanity yelling themselves hoarse to the roaring multitude on the liner.

“Listen!” shouted Boone Cruttenden into his companion’s ear, as a fresh burst of sound added itself to the tumult; “their band has struck up again. Can you hear it?”

“No! Yes, I do now. I guess it’s ‘God Save the King,’ or one of those tunes.”

But Miss Lane was wrong. Suddenly the cheering died away for a moment, and the band made itself heard, joyfully and triumphantly, for the first time.

And the tune it played was “Over There.”

“Oh, gee!” said Miss Lane, with a sob in her voice. “Oh, gee!”

CHAPTER FIVE
TERRA INCOGNITA

We have not yet reached France, but we have discovered England. It is a small island, and the visitor must be prepared for a primitive civilization—for instance, The Saturday Evening Post costs at least fifteen cents—but it offers a fruitful and interesting field for exploration.

Our debarkation was not attended by any marked popular demonstration. Some of us were inclined to resent the omission as savouring of insular aloofness. But now we know the real reason. We are not supposed to be here. We are a dead secret. The port in which we disembarked has no name. Its inhabitants are plunged into an official trance. Therefore it would hardly be reasonable to expect the insensible population of an anonymous city to proffer a civic welcome to American soldiers who are officially invisible anyway.

However, by a fortunate accident at the moment of our arrival, a band of musicians happened to be discoursing melody on the wharf, including such airs as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie.” Moreover, a group of British Staff Officers groped their way on board our imperceptible vessel and greeted us cordially. They furthermore presented to every man of us copies of a letter written by King George with his own hand, bidding us welcome to his realm and expressing a wish that it were possible for him to shake hands with each one of us in person. Scores of copies of that letter are now already on their way home to America—the first souvenir of the War.

Thereafter we were packed into a child’s train, drawn by a toy engine, and conveyed at a surprising pace through a country of green fields, cut up into checker-board squares by hedges and narrow lanes, populated mainly by contemplative cows and dotted with red-roofed farms and villages.

Occasionally we passed a camp. The tents were toylike and tidy, like the country. They fitted the landscape, just as a great four-square American Army tent, with its wooden walls and dust-coloured canvas top, fits in with a Texan horizon. In these camps were men in khaki—some drilling, some performing ablutions in buckets, some kicking a football. Mr. Joe McCarthy’s passion for being waved at was at length gratified.

Occasionally we stopped at the station of some town. These were always crowded, as were the trains. The strange little compartments in which the English confine themselves when travelling were packed with humanity—some of it standing up and clinging to the luggage-rack—all of it encumbered with much personal property in the shape of bundles and babies. Evidently the War has cut down transportation. At either end of these trains a seething mob contended, with surprising good temper, around a mountain of heavy baggage piled upon the platform beside the express-van.

“Ain’t they got no Red Caps in this country?” enquired Mr. McCarthy in disparaging tones.

“Their Red Caps are all wearing tin helmets over in France,” replied the well-informed Al Thompson. “Everybody here up to fifty is drafted. Folks have to tote their own grips. I notice quite a few women porters around. I guess their husbands are in France, and these are holding down their jobs for them.”

In which Al spoke no more than the truth.

Meanwhile, in another part of the train, our friend Jim Nichols, Major Powers, and one Bond, a stout, comfortable representative of the Medical Service, together with Boone Cruttenden—the latter somewhat distrait, for Miss Frances Lane had been swept away with the other ninety-and-nine, by a different train, to be no more seen—were sharing a compartment with Captain Norton and a British Staff Officer—a youthful Major. The Major’s name was Floyd; he had materialized during the chaos of debarkation. Norton had introduced him to the American officers; stately salutes had been exchanged; gentlemen had stated in a constrained manner that they were pleased to know one another; the whole party had crowded into one compartment, and the train had started.

For nearly an hour almost total silence reigned. Americans are sensitive folk, and Floyd’s melancholy visage and paralyzing monocle fulfilled our friends’ most pessimistic anticipations of the British Staff Officer. After a few laboured commonplaces the conversation lapsed altogether, and the Americans devoted their attention to the flying landscape.

Norton, a little uncomfortable, glanced occasionally in the direction of his brother officer. Major Floyd sat bolt upright in his seat, his gaze focussed upon infinity. Norton, who was a man of warm heart and quick temper, was conscious of a vague feeling of resentment.

“I wonder,” he mused, “why an image like this should have been sent as conducting officer. No wonder Americans think us unsociable and rude. And people over there were so good to us—”

At this moment Floyd removed his monocle and addressed his right-hand neighbour—Boone Cruttenden.

“And now, Lieutenant, what are your impressions of our country?”

Boone Cruttenden smiled. “You have not given me much time to formulate any, Major,” he said, glancing at his wrist-watch. “Just an hour!”

“That is fifty-nine minutes longer than the World reporter gave me when I landed at West Twenty-Third Street ten years ago,” replied Floyd.

“You know America?” Four homesick Americans spoke simultaneously.

Floyd’s eyes twinkled.

“Some of it,” he said. “I was with the General Electric Company at Schenectady for three years. After that I worked on various electrical-engineering jobs for about four years; I got as far west as Cincinnati. I’m not a professional warrior, like Norton there.”

“Still, you have seen service in this War?” said Major Powers.

“Oh, yes, I managed to get home from America just in time for the start of things.”

“Have you served in France, or on one of your other fronts?” asked Cruttenden. “The British Army has such a large selection.”

“France all the time—and Belgium. Most of us have taken a course of the Ypres Salient.”

“I guess those ribbons the Major is wearing would give us details, if we could read them,” observed Jim Nichols. “What do they stand for, Major?”

Floyd laughed.

“As a traditional Englishman,” he said, “I suppose I ought to hang my head confusedly and decline to answer. But I have spent ten years outside my own country, so I will tell you. This little fellow with the rainbow effect you probably know: Norton has it too. It means that we were both in Flanders in Nineteen Fourteen. The khaki, red, and blue is the Queen’s Medal for the South African War. By the way, Major Powers, I notice that you have the Spanish War ribbon. What is your other one—the yellow and blue?”

“That relates to our Mexican Border troubles,” replied Powers. “More discomfort than danger getting that. What is that third ribbon of yours—the red with the blue edges?”

“That? Oh, that is the D.S.O.”

“What does that stand for?” asked Boone.

“Well, before the War it was popularly supposed to stand for ‘Dam Silly Officer!’ Since then, however, the military profession has risen in the eyes of the world; so it now means ‘Done Something or Other’!”

“And what did you get it for?” pursued the insatiable Boone.

Floyd laughed.

“Counting jam-tins at the Base!” he said.

“I suppose it was while counting jam-tins you lost your arm,” suggested the quiet voice of Major Bond.

Floyd laughed again.

“You are too sharp for me, Doctor,” he said. “I plead guilty. My left arm is an understudy. The original is astray somewhere around Beaumont Hamel. I have had to stay at home since then. But now I want to get back to my first question, Lieutenant. What are your impressions of this country—your first impressions? I really do want to know. I have been aching to ask you for the last hour, but I felt that I had to play up a little first. Monocle—vacant stare, and all that! The traditional Englishman, in fact. I felt you were entitled to meet one,” continued this eccentric man; “and I took especial pains to give you a good impersonation, because you may experience some difficulty in finding another. The fact is, the traditional Englishman is getting rare. We have all been shaken out of ourselves these days. After the War he may come back—perhaps. Perhaps not.” He sighed gently. “But at present I am here to supply you with information about the customs and institutions of this country. I am detailed for the job. I am paid for it. Please ask me questions, somebody?”

No one could resist this solemn appeal. First one query was proffered, then another. Presently the American passion for getting to the root of the matter was in full play.