"It will not, if you don't work hard and win the war."
"I'm goin' to work ve'y hard. We've gotta win this war, seh; or we'll all freeze to death—only it's pow'ful hard keeping yo' mind on work, seh, when so much is goin' on."
Thus at the front the colored man kept open the passageway for the supplies which the colored man had unloaded at the ports. He was truly the Hercules of physical labor for us.
In the zone of battle, back of the infantry and artillery lines, many men had many parts, all under shell-fire and hardships; the rolling kitchen men, the ammunition train and ambulance drivers; the salvage men gathering up the overcoats, blankets, rifles, gas masks, and other equipment discarded in the course of an attack; and the much-abused military policemen, who made drivers keep their lights turned off, and insisted, in the latter days of their high authority, upon colonels' automobiles obeying orders, with the same impartiality that policemen at street crossings show in "stop" and "go" to the "flivver" delivery wagon and the limousine of the man who groans over the size of his income tax.
Out of the shelled zone in the early morning the shattered companies of expended divisions came marching back from the front. Sometimes they broke into song. Usually they were too tired to sing; the recollection of what they had seen was too near for rollicking gayety, at least. They were going into "rest" in some ruined village or series of dugouts, or possibly into a village that had not been shelled; to be "Y. M. C. A.'d" and deloused, to receive fresh clean clothing and warm meals. There were no beds or cots for them, with rare exceptions, but floors and lofts, as we know. Of course, they were not rested in one day, or two or three, or even ten. They had given an amount of their store of reserve energy which it would take them a long time to renew. Drill began as soon as they had had their first long round of sleep. New officers took the place of the fallen: officers who often did not know their men or the battle. Replacements came to fill the gaps in the ranks, and share all the drills and the lectures which applied the latest battle lessons. Tired brains reeled with instruction.
There was a plan to return convalescent wounded to their original divisions, but in the pressure to hurry all available man-power forward to fill the greedy maw of the front it could be carried out only in a limited way. Thus, whether convalescent or newcomers, the replacements might come from a part of the country widely separated from that of the division which they were joining, and upon the division's welcome home to the locality of its origin by relatives and friends find themselves still far from their own homes. Maine was fighting in the ranks of a battalion from Chicago; New York in the ranks of a battalion from Kansas. The longer a division had fought, the less regional its character. The fortune of war never fell more unkindly than upon the National Army divisions which arrived late in France and were broken up for replacements, or, even in those final days when victory beckoned us to our utmost endeavor, turned into labor troops in the S. O. S. In that vital juncture, they went where they were most needed, which is a soldier's duty. I have seen groups of replacements, who had had so little training that they hardly knew how to use their rifles, moving up through the shelled area to find the battalion in reserve to which they were assigned. Only two or three weeks from American training camps, shot across France, strangers indeed on that grim field, they were man-power which could take the place of the fallen.
In the late afternoon on the roads near the front one might see the troops of rested divisions marching forward to relieve expended troops. At Château-Thierry, our men, I know, went singing toward the line of shell-bursts. I am told that many put flowers in their rifle barrels and their button-holes. No doubt they did. So did the French and British in the early days of the war. There were no flowers on the Meuse-Argonne field, only withering grass and foliage. To sing was to attract the enemy's attention. The first enthusiasm had passed; our spring of war was over; our winter of war had come. Most of the men whom I watched going forward looked as if they appreciated that there was wicked, nasty business ahead, and they meant to see it through.
It was dark when they came into the zone where the transport had its dead line. The length of their march was often in darkness if we were making concentrations for an attack. Some went to their appointed places as reserves in the warrens dug on reverse slopes; others in cautious files, led by guides from the troops in position who knew the ground, went on until they came to the little pits where the outposts were lying, or to machine-gun posts which faced the enemy under the whipping of bullets and the bursts of shell-fire and gas. They were the very point of the wedge which all the strength of our nation was driving. Wet to the skin, filthy, hollow-eyed, the occupants gave up their places to the newcomers, whose officers located their positions on the map, and received local information from their predecessors about the character and direction of fire and many details. It was like a change of shift in a factory—all as businesslike as possible.
How different this front from the days of stationary warfare, with the deep trenches with parapets of sand-bags! Individualism here returned to its own. Patrols must be sent out to keep watch of the enemy; machine-guns and riflemen must be ready for a counter-attack,—which were variations from that deadly monotony of lying in a wet hole in the ground, whether on a bare crest or among the roots of trees in a wood. Blood-stains, torn bits of uniform, meat tins, and hard bread boxes formed the litter around the fox-holes, which marked the stages of progress where we had dug in. The young officers had to creep from fox-hole to fox-hole, keeping touch with their platoons, and bearing in mind all the instructions, regardless of exposure to cold and fire. The men must not forget anything they were told. Their gas masks must always be ready; they must "stick to the death" when that served the purpose of their superiors. Nothing except war's demands could have won them to such willing submission to such a hideous existence.
If there were to be an attack the next morning, then stealthily the men of the first wave came up to the line of the fox-holes and hugged the clammy moist earth, while they were to keep their spirits hot for their charge. Their officers had to study the ground over which they were to advance; consider the speed of the barrage which they were to follow; carry out amazingly intricate maneuvers,—not knowing what volume of shell and machine-gun fire would meet them as they rose to the charge in the chilliest hour of the day, at dawn, when the ground reeked in slipperiness from the mist. The night before an attack always had the same oppressive suspense, the same urgency on the part of all hands in trying to be definite under the camouflage of darkness—hazard omnipotent in its grip on every man's thought.