WHEN our soldiers arrive on foreign soil, almost invariably, so it has seemed to me watching them, they come ashore with serious faces and for the most part in silence. Their eyes are busy, but their tongues are taking vacation. For the time being they have lost that tremendous high-powered exuberance which marks them at home, in the camps and the cantonments, and which we think is as much a part of the organism of the optimistic American youth as his hands and his legs are.
I noticed this thing on the day our ship landed at an English port. We came under convoy in a fleet made up almost entirely of transports bearing troops—American volunteers, Canadian volunteers, and aliens recruited on American soil for service with the Allies. A Canadian battalion, newly organised, marched off its ship and out upon the same pier on which the soldiers who had crossed on the vessel upon which I was a passenger were disembarking. The Canadians behaved like schoolboys on a holiday.
It was not what the most consistent defender of the climate of Great Britain would call good holidaying weather either. A while that day it snowed, and a while it rained, and all the while a shrewish wind scolded shrilly in the wireless rig and rampaged along the damp and drafty decks. Nevertheless, the Canadians were not to be daunted by the inhospitable attitude of the elements.
One in three of them, about, carried a pennant bearing the name of his home town or his home province, or else he carried a little flag mounted on a walking stick. Nine out of ten, about, were whooping. They cheered for the ship they were leaving; they cheered for the sister ship that had borne us overseas along with them; they cheered to feel once more the solid earth beneath their feet; they cheered just to be cheerful, and, cheering so, they traversed the dock and took possession of the train that stood on a waterside track waiting to bear them to a rest camp. I imagine they were still cheering when they got there.
Now if you knew the types we had aboard our packet you might have been justified in advance for figuring that our outfit would be giving those joyous Canadian youngsters some spirited competition in the matter of making noises. We carried a full regiment of a Western division, largely made up, as to officers and as to men, of national guardsmen from the states of Colorado, Wyoming and Washington. They were cow-punchers, ranch hands, lumbermen, fruit growers, miners—outdoor men generally. Eighty men in the ranks, so I had learned during the voyage, were full-blooded Indians off of Northwestern reservations. We had men along who had won prizes for bronco-busting and bull-dogging at Frontier Day celebrations in Cheyenne and in California; also men who had travelled with the Wild West shows as champion ropers and experts at rough-riding. Never before, I am sure, had one vessel at one time borne in her decks so many wind-tanned, bow-legged, hawk-faced, wiry Western Americans as this vessel had borne.
But did one hear the lone-wolf howl as our fellows went filing down the gang-planks? Did one catch the exultant, shrill yip-yip-yip of the round-up or the far-carrying war yell of the Cheyenne buck? One most emphatically did not. If those three thousand and odd fellows had all been pallbearers officiating at the putting away of a dear departed friend they could not have deported themselves more soberly. Nobody carried a flag, unless you would except the colour bearers, who bore their colours furled about the staffs and protected inside of tarpaulin holsterings. Nobody waved a broad-brimmed hat either in salute to the Old World or in farewell to the ocean. Barring the snapped commands of the officers, the clinking in unison of hobbed and heavy boot soles, the shuffle of moving bodies, the creak of leather girthings put under strain, and occasionally the sharp clink and clatter of metal as some dangling side arm struck against a guard rail or some man shifted his piece, the march-off was accomplished without any noise whatsoever. It was interesting—and significant, too, I think—to spy upon those intent, set faces and those eager, steady eyes as the files went by and so away, bound, by successive stages of progress, with halts between at sessioning billets and at training barracks, for the battle fronts beyond the channel.
As between the Canadian and the United States soldiers I interpreted this striking difference in demeanour at the disembarking hour somewhat after this fashion: To a good many of the Dominion lads, no doubt, the thing was in the nature of a home-coming, for they had been born in England. A great many more of them could not be more than one generation removed from English birth. Anyhow and in either event, they as thoroughly belonged to and were as entirely part and parcel of the Empire as the islanders who greeted them upon the piers. One way or another they had always lived on British soil and under the shadow of the Union Jack. They were not strangers; neither were they aliens, even though they had come a far way; they were joint inheritors with native Englishmen of the glory that is England's. The men they would presently fight beside were their own blood kin. Quite naturally therefore and quite properly they commemorated the advent into the parent land according to the manner of the Anglo-Saxon when he strives to cover up, under a mien of boisterous enthusiasm, emotions of a purer sentiment. I could conceive some of them as laughing very loudly because inside of themselves they wanted to cry; as straining their vocal cords the better to ease the twitch-ings at their heart cockles.
But the Americans, even if they wore names bespeaking British ancestry—which I should say at an offhand guess at least seventy-five per cent of them did—were not moved by any such feelings. Such ties as might link their natures to the breed from which they remotely sprang were the thinnest of ties, only to be revealed in times of stress through the exhibition of certain characteristics shared by them in common with their very distant English and Scotch and Irish and Welsh kinsmen. For England as England they had no affectionate yearnings. England wasn't their mother; she was merely their great-great-grandmother, with whom their beloved Uncle Sam had had at least two serious misunderstandings. To all intents and purposes this was a strange land—certainly its physical characteristics had an alien look to them—and to it they had come as strangers.
I fancy, though, the chief reasons for their quiet seriousness went down to causes even deeper than this one. I believe that somehow the importance of the task to which they had dedicated themselves and the sense of the responsibility intrusted to them as armed representatives of their own country's honour were brought to a focal point of realisation in the minds of these American lads by the putting of foot on European soil. The training they had undergone, the distances they had travelled, the sea they had crossed—most of them, I gathered, had never smelt salt water before in their lives—the sight of this foreign city with its foreign aspect—all these things had chemically combined to produce among them a complete appreciation of the size of the job ahead of them; and the result made them dumb and sedate, and likewise it rendered them aloof to surface sensations, leaving them insulated by a sort of noncommittal pose not commonly found among young Americans in the mass—or among older Americans in the mass for that matter.
Perhaps a psychologist might prove me wrong in these amateur deductions of mine. For proof to bolster up my diagnosis I can only add that on three subsequent occasions, when I saw American troops ferrying ashore at French ports, they behaved in identically this same fashion, becoming for a period to be measured by hours practically inarticulate and incredibly earnest. Correspondents who chanced to be with me these three several times were impressed as I had been by the phenomenon.