Send the word, send the word over there,
That the Yanks are coming——
We’ve waited and we’ve hoped—and many of the boys who hoped have died. We’ve heard that they were present at the great retreat before Cambrai in 1917. We’ve been told that they were coming by their thousands, but as yet we have seen none of them. Hun prisoners have consistently assured us that there were no Americans in France—that they were not coming. Now we are to see the Yanks with our own eyes.
“Battery, eyes front. March to attention”—the order passes smartly down the column.
We go by them, looking neither to left nor to right—so, after all, we can scarcely be said to have seen them. They are coloured troops—tremendous chaps with flashing teeth and rolling eyes. Our first Americans!
We no longer remember the wire-entanglements, the gun-emplacements and the new trendi-systems which are being constructed by Chinamen so many miles back of the line. Our tails are up. We shan’t retreat. The Yanks are no longer coming. They have come. We know now whither we are marching—to the end of the war and to conquest.
V
THE village into which we inarched this morning is an old friend; we were billeted here earlier in the summer when we were withdrawn from the line for training. It consists of, perhaps, a hundred grey farmhouses clustered together in a willow-swamp.