One instance of this is worthy of recounting. I came upon the young Russian who was the battery saddler. He was a citizen of the United States whose uniform he wore, but he was such a new citizen, that he hardly spoke English. I found him handling a small piece of galvanised iron and a horse shoe. He appeared to be trying to fit the rumpled piece of metal into the shoe.
In his broken English he explained that he was trying to fashion a light metal plate that could be easily placed between a horse's shoe and the hoof, to protect the frog of the foot from nails picked up on the road. With all soldiers wearing hobnailed boots, the roads were full of those sharp bits of metal which had caused serious losses of horseflesh through lameness and blood poisoning.
The unloading had continued under the eyes of smiling French girls in bloomers who were just departing from their work on the early morning shift in the munition factory beside the station. These were the first American soldiers they had seen and they were free to pass comment upon our appearance. So were the men of Battery A, who overlooked the oiled, grimed faces and hands of the bloomered beauties, and announced the general verdict that "they sure were fat little devils."
The unloading completed, a scanty snack consisting of two unbuttered slices of white bread with a hunk of cold meat and maybe the bite of an onion, had been put away by the time the horses' nose bags were empty. With a French guide in the lead, we moved off the platform, rattled along under a railroad viaduct, and down the main street of Jarville, which was large enough to boast street car tracks and a shell-damaged cathedral spire.
The remaining townsfolk had lived with the glare and rumble of the front for three years now and the passage back and forth of men and horses and guns hardly elicited as much attention as the occasional promenade of a policeman in Evanston, Illinois. But these were different men that rode through those streets that day.
This was the first battery of American artillery that had passed that way. This was an occasion and the townspeople responded to it. Children, women and old men chirped "vivas," kissed hands, bared heads and waved hats and aprons from curb and shop door and windows overhead.
There was no cheering, but there were smiles and tears and "God bless you's." It was not a vociferous greeting, but a heart-felt one. They offered all there was left of an emotion that still ran deep and strong within but that outwardly had been benumbed by three years of nerve-rack and war-weariness.
Onward into the zone of war we rode. On through successive battered villages, past houses without roofs, windows with shattered panes, stone walls with gaping shell holes through them, churches without steeples, our battery moved toward the last billeting place before entering the line.
This was the ancient town of Saint-Nicolas-du-Port on the banks of the river Meurthe. Into the Place de la Republic of the town the battery swung with a clamorous advance guard of schoolchildren and street gamins.