We have been in France for over a month now, but so far our services as a unit have not been required in the Line. But we are acclimatized by this time. The days of our green youth in the big camps back home have faded away as though they never had been. In this Old-World, constricted country it requires quite an effort of memory to recall those spacious days upon our own open, rolling plains and hillsides. Gone are the great streets of wooden two-storey huts, with their electric light, steam heat, and hot showers; the various social centres; the roaring Liberty Theatre and the Hostess House; the candy-stores and the shoe-shine parlours. They are but a memory, blurred by four months of incredibly novel experience.
To-day we sleep in French barracks—bleak, cheerless buildings, redolent of floor-soap and whitewash; or in billets up and down a little village; or in some great barn, on straw, or under the summer stars in our dog-tents. We perform our ablutions in the open air, mainly at a farm pump or street hydrant, to the diversion of the female population. For recreation we still play baseball; for creature comforts we can turn to the Red Cross, or the Y.M.C.A., or the Knights of Columbus, or the Salvation Army, or the Jewish Welfare Board. There is also a French institution, known as Le Foyer du Soldat, where we consort with grave-faced, courteous poilus. We have encountered no British troops so far. They are farther north: several of our units have gone up to be brigaded with them.
So here we are—right here in France—absorbing new atmosphere through our pores. We are on a strict war footing, too. Everything, as the Colonel has explained to us, must be “just so.” If you are ordered to be at a certain cross-road ten miles away, with your company, at 9 A.M. to-morrow morning, with picks and shovels and two days’ rations, you have to be there—just there—not at 9.05, with picks but no shovels, or with one day’s rations instead of two, but at 9 precisely, with the exact outfit prescribed. The accomplishment of this feat is not so easy as it sounds: it involves much study, and occasional weariness of the flesh. You must be able not only to read a map correctly, but to visualize from a scrutiny of the same the exact nature of the country through which you are going to lead your company—whether it is hilly or no; whether the hill runs up or down; whether there are grade crossings or narrow bridges or one-way roads to be considered; whether a ford marked “Passable for troops” is also passable for the wheeled transport which carries your picks and shovels. All these possibilities make for delay—sometimes most excusable delay. But excuses are not accepted in war-time. Either you succeed or you fail: there is no intermediate stage. Boone Cruttenden’s plan—and a very good one too—is to try experiments, not upon his men, but upon himself. In his spare moments he is accustomed to figure out, with the aid of the map and a mekometer, how long it would take a body of armed men to cover some given distance on the map, having regard to the possibility of—
(1) Unexpectedly heavy going.
(2) Roads blocked by other troops.
(3) Having to scatter or take cover, owing to enemy aeroplanes.
(4) The cussedness of transport mules.
(5) Other visitations of Providence.
He then enlists the services of a friend—usually Jim Nichols—and the pair proceed to test their own theories by performing the journey in person, at the pace of a marching company, correcting their calculations as they proceed. It is upon such painful foundations that your true soldier is built up.
And discipline is rigid. If the top sergeant instructs Mr. Joe McCarthy to empty certain buckets of kitchen garbage, and that right speedily, Joe no longer explains that he is here not to empty garbage, but to make the world safe for Democracy. He simply departs with the buckets, somewhat dazed at his own alacrity. War has her victories, no less than Peace.