SERGEANTS DUNN, TAPSCOTT AND JONES AT THE PORT
But it was a most kind Providence that sent us away from the scenes of devastation and death for our first service, and placed us where we could come into a comprehensive knowledge and appreciation of our non-combatant forces. Seven months of continuous service and daily contact in the camp with these men warrant our writing with assurance certain definite impressions left upon our minds by them. We take it that the 20,000 soldiers whom we served, those visited at Brest and other S. O. S. points and those who rested with us in the Leave Area from Bordeaux, Marseilles, and other camps were typical of the one hundred thousand or so men who formed the non-combatant group.
These men were known chiefly as stevedores and labor battalions. Somehow a widely circulated report gained credence that they had been gathered indiscriminately, and had been landed on foreign soil, a mere group of servants for the white soldiers. We do not know who first sought to thus humiliate these soldiers by such unjust and undeserved rating. One might easily believe, of course, because of the constantly unfair attitude of some of their officers toward them, that there was some such assumption to that effect. But the world has learned now, that in spite of all handicaps, there could be found nowhere in the army stouter and braver hearts, or more loyal and self-sacrificing spirits. Subjected to a stern discipline; with discriminations, cruel in their intent and execution; long hours of toil; scant recognition for service or hope of promotion, they still kept their faith. Throughout the war they wrought as weavers who are given to see only the wrong side of the glorious pattern they are weaving. Indeed, through these men we came into an abiding belief that the colored man was in the war to justify his plea for democracy. The first day we entered that busy military port of St. Nazaire, we saw a colored lad standing under the ancient clock in the center of the square. He had M. P. (military police) on his arm band in large red letters, and in his hand a stick with which he quietly directed the tremendous traffic of that town. Auto-trucks, auto-cars of officers from the highest to the lowest rank, auto-busses for welfare workers, sidecars, bicycles, used so constantly by French women as well as men, and the typical French voiture made a constant noisy stream. And this colored lad, who had come from a rural district of the far South, stood there calmly pointing his stick, now left, now right, or holding it up in demand for a pause. Surely he was there by Divine Thought.
The very first group of colored soldiers to leave for France in the autumn of 1917 were stevedores and labor battalions. Another group reached St. Nazaire, by way of Brest, Christmas eve of the same year. Time and time again in camp they told us the story of that first winter of hardship. Christmas day found them cold and cheerless, with hard tacks and beans for their rations. All that winter they worked, poorly equipped for their severe task. In the dark hours of the night and the morning, they plunged through the deep mud of the camp and city, without boots. On the dock they handled the cold steel and iron without gloves. But they were soldiers, and so they worked without complaint.
When the first American Forces reached the Continent, the French were calling loudly for help. All seemed chaos for a little, as thousands of troops began to reconstruct the ports of France. These quiet ports, many of them centuries gray, became centers of throbbing activity. Hundreds of warehouses, most modern in their construction, rose as if by magic. From the south where Marseilles looks out on the blue Mediterranean, to Brest at the entrance to the English Channel, our own stevedores, labor battalions and engineers, have rebuilt much of the water front of France, thus making a real epoch in the history of French navigation. During the last year of the war, these thousands of men were at work in the S. O. S., connecting it with the great battle front. System and efficiency, with the greatest possible haste, were required in speeding the supplies to combatant troops. All of this these soldiers comprehended and ever they responded with a decisive and soldier-like spirit. The incessant tramp of many feet through the city street, the constant rush and rumble of auto-trucks kept the camps of these ports closely linked with the docks.
All who were at work in France well remember that “Race to Berlin” contest, upon which the last great forward move of our troops so largely depended. The world looked out only toward Metz, where our great combat army was centering, but just as often, anxious eyes were upon the rear where our men were toiling like mad that peace should not be delayed through any failure of theirs. With feverish haste and anxiety they battled with great bulks of ammunition and supplies. For weeks at Marseilles, Bordeaux, St. Nazaire, Brest and other ports they worked with almost superhuman strength. Those serving these men during this contest labored with the same feverish spirit that possessed the men themselves. How they tried to cheer, encourage, and entertain our determined heroes as they contested for the honors! If by chance you see somewhere a soldier wearing the emblem of the S. O. S., with an arrow running through it and pointing skyward, you will know that he belongs to those service battalions at Brest who by their inexhaustible reserves of energy and endurance, won in the “Race to Berlin.”
Although these men were not called upon to face the shot and shell at the front, they paid their toll in death from accident, cold and exposure. No more at the rear than at the front did they pause to consider personal danger. They were truly heroes, carrying not bayonet and gun, but connecting the wonderful resources of their own country, three thousand miles away, with the greatest battlefields the world has ever known.
There went to rest in the land of light and peace a short time ago, one of the world’s poets whose divinest gift was her great human understanding and sympathy. Long and well did Ella Wheeler Wilcox write to lift the souls of men from the sordid things of earth to the purer realms of sympathetic knowledge and co-operation. She was given entrée to the heart of the war, and saw the grim conflict in all its various settings. Riding along the coast one day, looking out upon the long lines of warehouses, hearing the hum of the thousands of men at work, she said: “I have gained with the years a growing appreciation and love for the colored people, and I have seen nothing in France finer than the work of the stevedores. I have written and dedicated a poem to them.” That afternoon, after she had spoken for a few minutes to the thousands of swarthy soldiers, assembled to pay her homage, her companion read the poem as follows:
We are the army stevedores, lusty and virile and strong.