Being but a month out of the hospital and having spent a rather strenuous night, I was receiving medical attention at daybreak in front of a dressing station not far from the headquarters of Major General Harbord commanding the Second Division. As I lay there looking up through the trees, I saw a dark speck diving from the sky. Almost immediately I could hear the hum of its motors growing momentarily louder as it neared the earth. I thought the plane was out of control and expected to see it crash to the ground near me.
Several hundred feet above the tree tops, it flattened its wings and went into an easy swoop so that its under-gear seemed barely to skim the uppermost branches. The machine pursued a course immediately above one of the roads. Something dropped from it. It was a metal cylinder that glistened in the rays of the morning sun. Attached to it was a long streamer of fluttering white material. It dropped easily to the ground nearby. I saw an American signalman, who had been following its descent, pick it up. He opened the metal container and extracted the message containing the first aerial observations of the advance of the American lines. It stated that large numbers of prisoners had been captured and were bound for the rear.
Upon receipt of this information, Division Headquarters moved forward on the jump. Long before noon General Harbord, close behind his advancing troops, opened headquarters in the shattered farm buildings of Verte Feuille, the first community centre that had been taken by our men that morning. Prisoners were coming back in droves.
I encountered one column of disarmed Germans marching four abreast with the typical attitude of a "Kamerad" procession. The first eight of the prisoners carried on their shoulders two rudely constructed litters made from logs and blankets. A wounded American was on one litter and a wounded Frenchman on the other.
A number of German knapsacks had been used to elevate the shoulders of both of the wounded men so that they occupied positions half sitting and half reclining. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and chatting gaily as they rode high and mighty on the shoulders of their captives, while behind them stretched a regal retinue of eight hundred more.
As this column proceeded along one side of the road, the rest of the roadway was filled with men, guns and equipment all moving forward. Scottish troops in kilts swung by and returned the taunts which our men laughingly directed at their kilts and bare knees.
Slightly wounded Americans came back guarding convoys of prisoners. They returned loaded with relics of the fighting. It was said that day that German prisoners had explained that in their opinion, the British were in the war because they hated Germany and that the French were in the war because the war was in France, but that Americans seemed to be fighting to collect souveniers.
I saw one of these American souvenier collectors bound for the rear. In stature he was one of the shortest men I had ever seen in our uniform. He must have spent long years in the cavalry, because he was frightfully bowlegged. He was herding in front of him two enormous German prisoners who towered head and shoulders above him.
He manifested a confidence in his knowledge of all prisoners and things German. Germans were "foreigners." "Foreigners" spoke a foreign language. Therefore to make a German understand you, it was only necessary to speak with them in a foreign language. French was a foreign language so the bowlegged American guard made use of his limited knowledge.
"Allay! Allay! Allay veet t'ell outer here," he urged his charges.