“That is a good notion,” said Bond. “I shall adopt it. Last week I was riding a bicycle myself, and I nearly broke my collar-bone through letting go with one hand in order to salute a Brigadier-General in a muddy lane. Luckily I fell soft!”
“It’s a carefully thought-out system,” agreed Floyd, “and perfectly sound. Nearly everything in the British Drill Book is—so far as it goes. In nineteen fourteen that Drill Book put into the field the finest army that has ever fought under the British flag. Unfortunately very few of the nation had read it. When the War broke out there were still some forty millions of us who regarded it as a purely humorous publication. If they had listened to Lord Roberts and absorbed its gritty contents, instead of lapping up predigested pap from the politicians, perhaps there would have been no War. Anyway, some of my best friends would have been alive to-day. Those were the fellows, Bond! In the First Battle of Ypres three divisions of them, dead beat after eight weeks’ continuous fighting, stopped four fresh German Army Corps. The Drill Book taught them how to do that. They have mostly gone West now; but I for one will salute their memory so long as I live, cap or no cap!”
We are marching up the Loire now, getting nearer the front of things every day. Nantes is behind us—an ancient city astride the river, its historic quays crowded with American shipping and its wharves piled high with the products of those two mighty Allied bases, Chicago and Minneapolis.
The Loire is a pleasant stream. It is neither so broad as the Mississippi nor so deep as the Hudson, but it will serve. Shoals and sand-bars are frequent upon its surface, but on the opposite side the bank rises up to a quite respectable height, pleasantly reminiscent, at one or two points, of the Palisades.
And the towns we pass through are fascinating. For one thing, they come upon you suddenly. American towns absorb you gradually. First an outlying suburb, with maybe the terminus of the street-car system. Then an untidy No Man’s Land, neither cultivated nor inhabited—mainly vacant building lots—decorated along the route with huge advertisements, chiefly of automobile accessories. Here and there you pass a gasoline station or roadhouse. After that, by degrees, trim white wooden houses, with shady piazzas; increasing traffic; and finally, fifteen-storey office-buildings, shops, hotels, and the roar of the town.
But in Central France these premonitory symptoms are lacking. Your company tramps along the winding road beside the river, through country cultivated to its last yard—a country of hedges and ditches and enclosed fields. A bend in the stream, and lo! before you rises a venerable city, piled up on the ground rising from the river, with ancient bridges spanning the stream and a grey cathedral crowning the whole. There are no suburbs, no advertising boards, no gasoline stations. The sea of green turf continues to the edge of the city, and very often laps against ramparts a thousand years old. You march in under the resounding arch of an ancient gateway.
The streets are narrow; the gradient is frequently such as to discommode any one save a native of Lynchburg, Virginia. The shops are small, and the proprietors thereof appear to transact most of their business upon the doorstep. The inhabitants are friendly, especially the children. But most welcome sight of all, wherever we march, and through whatever town or village we pass, there are familiar greetings awaiting us, in the form of signs over doorways or at street-corners, thus—A.E.F. Commanding General’s Headquarters; or, To A.P.M.’s Office; or, American Red Cross Headquarters. And at each street-crossing, upright, sunburned, and immensely alert, stands an American Military Policeman, directing the tide of country carts, errant cows, antediluvian street-cars, despatch-riders, motor-cycles, and marching troops, with all the solemn austerity of a New York Traffic Cop.
If the American soldier has one characteristic which singles him out from the rest of the Allies, it is that Home is seldom absent from his thoughts—possibly because he is farther away from home than any one else. It is true that more water rolls between, say, France and Australia, than between France and America. But then to the Australian England itself is Home. In his own land he still refers to her as such. The true exile in this war is the American-born Doughboy. In most cases he has never been outside his own great and beautiful land before, for the simple reason that he has always found abundant elbow-room therein; and if the desire to roam has ever possessed him, he has been able to gratify it without stepping off the soil of his country or even beyond the border of his own State. Therein he is in different case from the inhabitants of those congested islets, Great Britain and Ireland, many of whose younger sons are thrust out in early life by the concomitant forces of natural increase and external pressure from the land of their birth to seek a living in distant portions of the globe—and in so doing have quite inadvertently created that unmethodical, loosely connected organization known as the British Empire, which is either a federation of free communities, providing decent government where otherwise there would be no government at all, or else a voracious octopus, according to the way you look at it.
But the American soldier, being for the most part familiar with no country but his own, adapts himself less happily to foreign conditions than Britons who have been schooled by stern necessity to make themselves equally comfortable in Wei-Hai-Wei or Wigan. Add to this the natural outspoken American affection for, and belief in, American institutions and mode of life, and you will understand why American troops on the march through Europe will cheer themselves hoarse at the sight of such reminders of Home as an American policeman directing the traffic in a French town, or an imported American locomotive puffing along a French railroad.
And there is one other American institution for which the American soul thirsts in this barren land—the American newspaper. Behold us billeted for a day or two in the little town of Crapaudville-sur-Loire. Existence there is a series of queues. In the morning we arise right early and make a careful toilet. For this purpose we form a queue, or water-line, at the town pump. This is not a lengthy business, because it does not take long to fill a pannikin with water: the only interruptions which occur are due to natural gallantry, as when an attractive Ally arrives to fill her family kettle. After that comes breakfast-time, which entails standing in another queue, or chow-line. After that as many of us as can contrive to do so hurry off to stand in the most important queue of the day—the news-line. A train from Paris, of arthritic tendencies and irregular habits, is due about noon, bearing newspapers, which are doled out at a price of twenty-five centimes.