Our Army at the Front

by Heywood Broun

These things cemented the international friendliness that the statesmen of the two countries had made so much talk of. And by the time the war training was to begin, doughboys and Blue Devils tramped over the long white roads together with nothing more unfriendly left between them than rivalry.

The first thing they were set to do was trench-digging. The Vosges boast splendid meadows. The Americans were told to dig themselves in. The method of training with the French was to mark a line where the trench should be, put the French at one end and the Americans at the other. Then they were to dig toward each other as if the devil was after them, and compare progress when they met.

Trench-digging is every army's prize abomination. A good hate for the trenches was the first step of the Americans toward becoming professional. It was said of the Canadians early in the war that though they would die in the last ditch they wouldn't dig it.

No army but the German ever attempted to make its trenches neat and cosey homes, but even the hasty gully required by the French seemed an obnoxious burden to the doughboy. The first marines who dug a trench with the Blue Devils found that their picks struck a stone at every other blow, and that by the time they had dug deep enough to conceal their length they were almost too exhausted to climb out again.

The ten days given over to trench-digging was not so much because the technic was intricate or the method difficult to learn. They were to break the spirit of the soldiers and hammer down their conviction that they would rather be shot in the open than dig a trench to hide in. They were also to keep the aching backs and weary shoulders from getting overstiff. Toward the end of July the first batch of infantrymen were called off their trenches and were started at bomb practice. At first they used dummy bombs. The little line of Blue Devils who were to start the party picked up their bombs, swung their arms slowly overhead, held them straight from wrist to shoulder, and let their bombs sail easily up on a long, gentle arc, which presently landed them in the practice trenches.

"One-two-three-four," they counted, and away went the bombs. The doughboys laughed. It seemed to them a throw fit only for a woman or a substitute third baseman in the Texas League. When their turn came, the doughboys showed the Blue Devils the right way to throw a bomb. They lined them out with a ton of energy behind each throw, and the bombs went shooting straight through the air, level above the trench-lines, and a distance possibly twice as far as that attained by the Frenchmen. They stood back waiting for the applause that did not come.

"The objects are two in bomb-throwing, and you did not make either," said the French instructor. "You must land your bomb in the trenches—they do no more harm than wind when they fly straight—and you must save your arm so that you can throw all afternoon."

So the baseball throw was frowned out, and the half-womanish, half-cricket throw was brought in.

After the doughboys had mastered their method they were put to getting somewhere with it. They were given trenches first at ten metres' distance, and then at twenty. Then there were competitions, and war training borrowed some of the fun of a track meet. The French had odds on. No army has ever equalled them for accuracy of bomb-throwing, and the doughboys, once pried loose from their baseball advantage, were not in a position to push the French for their laurels. The American Army's respect for the French began to have growing-pains. But what with driving hard work, the doughboys learned finally to land a dummy bomb so that it didn't disgrace them.

With early August came the live grenades, and the first serious defect in the American's natural aptitude for war-making was turned up. This defect had the pleasant quality of being sentimentally correct, even if sharply reprehensible from the French point of view. It was, in brief, that the soldiers had no sense of danger, and resisted all efforts to implant one, partly from sheer lack of imagination in training, and partly from a scorn of taking to cover.