The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

by Heywood Broun

THE chief press officer told us that we could spend the first night in the trenches with the American army. There were eight correspondents and we went jingling up to the front with gas masks and steel helmets hung about our necks and canned provisions in our pockets. It was dusk when we left ——. Bye-and-bye we could hear the guns plainly and the villages through which we traveled all showed their share of shelling. The front was still a few miles ahead of us, but we left the cars in the square of a large village and started to walk the rest of the way. We got no further than just beyond the town. An American officer stood at the foot of an old sign post which gave the distance to Metz, but not the difficulties. He asked us our destination and when we told him that we were going to spend the first night in the trenches with the American army he wouldn't hear of it.

"There'll be trouble enough up there," he said, "without newspapermen."

He was a nervous man, this major. Every now and then he would look at his watch. When he looked for the fourth time within two minutes he felt that we deserved an explanation.

"I'm a little nervous," he said, "because the Boches are so quiet tonight. I've been up here looking around for almost a week and every night the Germans have done some shelling." He looked at his watch again. "The first company of my battalion must be going in now." He stood and listened for six or seven seconds but there wasn't a sound. "I wonder what those Germans are up to?" he continued. "I don't like it. I wish they'd shoot a little. This business now doesn't seem natural."

We turned back toward the town and left the major at his post still listening for some sound from up there. Soon we heard a noise, but it came from the opposite direction. Soldiers were coming. There was a bend in the road where it straightened out in the last two miles to the trenches. It was so dark that we could not see the men until they were almost up to us. The Americans were marching to the front. The French had instructed them and the British and now they were ready to learn just what the Germans could teach them.

The night was as thick as the mud. The darkness seemed to close behind each line of men as they went by. Even the usual marching rhythm was missing. The mud took care of that. The doughboys would have sung if they could. Shells wouldn't have been much worse than the silence. One soldier did begin in a low voice, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching." An officer called, "Cut out that noise." There was no tramp, tramp, tramp on that road. Feet came down squish, squish, squish. There was also the sound of the wind. That wasn't very cheerful, either, for it was rising and beginning to moan a little. It seemed to get hold of the darkness and pile it up in drifts against the camouflage screens which lined the road.

At the spot where the road turned there was a café and across the road a military moving picture theater. The door of the café was open and a big patch of light fell across the road. The doughboys had to go through the patch of light and it was almost impossible not to turn a bit and look through the door. There was red wine and white to be had for the asking there, and persuasion would bring an omelette. The waitress was named Marie, but they called her Madelon. She was eighteen and had black hair with red ribbons. She could talk a little English, too, but nobody came to the door of the café to see the soldiers go by. There had been a good many who passed the door of that café in three years.

The pictures could not be seen from the road, but we could hear the hum of the machine which made them move. Presently, we went to the door and looked. The theater was packed with French soldiers who were back from the front to rest. American troops were going into the trenches for the first time. Our little group of civilians had come thousands of miles to see this thing, but the poilus did not stop to watch marching men. They paid their 10 centimes and went into the picture show. They had an American Western film that night, and French soldiers who only the day before had been face to face with Germans, shelled and gassed and harassed from aeroplanes, thrilled as Indians chased cowboys across a canvas screen. It grew more exciting presently, for the United States cavalry came riding up across the screen and at the head of the cavalcade rode Lieutenant Wallace Kirke. The villain had spread the story that he wasn't game, but there was nothing to that. The poilus realized that before the film was done and so did the Indians.

Meanwhile the doughboys were marching by as silently as the soldiers on the screen, for this wasn't a movie-house where they synchronized bugle calls and rifle fire to the progress of the film. At one point in the story there was some gun thunder, but it came at a time when the orchestra should have been playing "Hearts and Flowers" for the love scene in the garden. Of course, these were German guns, and they were fired with the usual German disregard for art.

Probably the men who were marching to the trenches would have enjoyed the scene of the home-coming of the cavalry, when Lieutenant Wallace Kirke confounded the villain, who actually held a commission as major in the United States army. However, the doughboys might have spotted him for a villain from the beginning, on account of his wretched saluting. The director should have spoken to him about that.