The War Board, said Dick to himself, has settled down to enjoy the war.
It spent its nightly sessions in recounting tales of heroism. Every list of citations for bravery was gone over item by item, under the leadership of Captain Billy. At first they set out to remember the names, those wonderful names, not only American, but Russian, Greek, Rumanian, Pole, Italian, Serb, Chinese and—yes, German—even German. “By the Jumping Jehoshaphat,” Captain Billy would say, “we’ve got them all—every blamed nation on earth—and every one Americans. They have all got it—good American grit. It don’t make any difference where their names come from, there isn’t one of them but dies with his face to the Hun.” Over and over they recounted the gallant stories—of men going out from shelters into which they had been ordered, to carry in wounded, and sometimes receiving their own death bullet as they laid their man in a place of safety—of their quick strategy in surrounding machine gun nests and their fearless hand to hand fights with the crews. And then those tales of the way they ran in their prisoners. Captain Billy was never tired relating the historic tale of the sergeant from the New York East Side who came back with 159 prisoners and complained to his superior officer that “one had died on him.”
And nothing so delighted Captain Billy as the tales that came over of the doughboy’s directness and common sense in an emergency. “Just like them. Don’t phase them a bit. Just as much at home over there as here. I guess they’re teaching them down-trodden European countries the kind of men a free country makes. Read about the doughboy and his mules? Harness broke—mules ran away—turned them into a tree—smashed one—jumped out, looked at him, saw he was done up, shot him, rigged up and went ahead,—never said a word, never asked anybody anything, just did what was necessary. They say those French poilus haven’t stopped talking about it yet. They would have held an inquest, sent in a report, and probably stopped the work of that train for a week. That’s the difference.”
Dick was deeply touched to notice how every now and then in the rejoicings somebody in the War Board would nod up at Lieutenant Mikey, looking down on them from the wall, and say, “What a pity he couldn’t have been in it now; couldn’t have fought with his own men. But he was our first one, we must never forget that.” Nor did they forget their other heroes. Often and often they would nod up to Albert on the wall, and say, “Hold on, old fellow, your time is coming.” Or to Joffre, “Feeling pretty good to-night, ain’t you, Papa Joffre?” Oh, the War Board was certainly enjoying the war—now that it was going their way.
While the War Board regaled itself with stories of doughboy exploits at Cantigny and Château-Thierry, the saving of Rheims, the capture of Soissons; while it speculated over the big gun—where it was, how it operated—quarreled over the merits of arms, and exhausted itself in devising methods of destroying Germany—the town outside, the busy, working town, seemed sometimes to Dick almost to be living in France with the boys. Quite wonderfully and naturally they had built up from what came to them in letters and news the life of their boys over there. Of course they were proud of their exploits, but they did not want to dwell too much on them; they meant ghastly wounds or death—what they wanted to know was just how the boys lived, and where, the kind of beds they slept on, the kind of food they ate, whether it was really true that when they fell ill they had the care that they ought to have; and all of this, this eagerness to know where the boys were and how they were getting on in detail, made every letter that came almost a matter of town importance.
It was quite amazing how the contents of these letters circulated. The very arrival of one was known, sometimes, in advance of its delivery, for the post office force took notice when a letter from anybody in the A. E. F. arrived, and I have known it more than once to happen that if a letter came in Saturday night—there was no Sunday delivery—one of the postal clerks would run immediately to the telephone and call up, “Hello, Mrs. B., here’s a letter for you from Tom, if you want to come down and get it. None of us can get away much before midnight.” You can imagine how quickly Mrs. B. went or sent.
The great interest and excitement of the postmen’s life in those days was delivering the letters from the A. E. F. It was the practice of these functionaries in Sabinsport to put the mail in the box outside, if you had one; to throw it on the steps if you had not; or sometimes, if it rained, to try your door and throw it in the hall; but whenever there was a letter from a soldier none of these things were sufficient. Your bell rang with an eager, insistent cry which said, “There’s a letter from Tom.” And the next morning, the probabilities are that the postman lingered a bit to see if you didn’t come out and tell him personally something of what was in the letter. And you did it. Oh, how you loved to tell what was in the letter! And how it went up and down the town and everybody telephoned and compared it with what was in Frank’s letter, or Will’s letter.
After the letters, Sabinsport’s great interest was The Stars and Stripes. There was no paper published on the globe so popular in the town. A half dozen of the boys had been inspired to send it home by the clever appeal of the paper itself. “Do the home folks a good turn by having us send them The Stars and Stripes every week,” the editor said at the head of his page, in an appealing display type. “There are not many things you can do from this side of the water,” he said, “for your folks or your old pal or that girl back home. The Stars and Stripes would come to them like another letter every week or another little present.”
The doughboys had not passed it up, as he advised, and the paper came to be to the home folks all that he had prophesied. Intimate, natural, humorous, eloquent, the best bit of editing the war had inspired, The Stars and Stripes brought to Sabinsport such a sense of how the boys were thinking and feeling and acting, the whole town was comforted and helped. One supreme consolation it brought—the certainty that whatever the war might be doing to their boys, it was not changing their tastes. The Stars and Stripes proved that. It was “just like them.”
Although it was known that many of their men were with the divisions fighting along the Marne, and although every night when the Argus came, the first thing that the town turned to was the casualty list, they went a long time untouched—so long that Sabinsport came to have a curious kind of jealousy. The City, twenty-five miles away, had lost heavily. She rejoiced, and yet she somehow wanted to pay her price.