But the condition does not last; you may be very sure of that. If there exists a more adaptable creature than the American soldier he has not yet been tagged, classified and marked Exhibit A for identification. Once the newly arrived Yank has lost his sea legs and regained his shore ones; once the solemnity and incidentally the novelty of the ceremony of his entrance into Europe has worn away; once he has learned how to think of dollars and cents in terms of francs and centimes and how to speak a few words in barbarous French—he reverts to type. His native irreverence for things that are stately and traditional rises up within him, renewed and sharpened; and from that moment forward he goes into this business of making war against the Hun with an impudent grin upon his face, and in his soul an incurable cheerfulness that neither discomfort nor danger can alloy, and a joke forever on his lips. That is the real essence of the trenches—the humour that is being secreted there with the grimmest and ghastliest of all possible tragedies for a background.
I wouldn't call it exactly a new type of humour, because always humour has needed the contrast of dismalness and suffering to set it off effectively, but personally I am of the opinion that it is a kind of humour that is going to affect our literature and our mode of living generally after the war is ended.
Bairnsfather, the English sketch artist, did not invent the particular phase of whimsicality—the essentially distinctive variety of seriocomic absurdity—which has made the world laugh at his pictures of Old Bill and Bert and Alf. He did a more wonderful thing: he had the wit and the genius to catch an illusive atmosphere which existed in the trenches before he got there and to put it down in black on white without losing any part of its savoury qualities. In slightly different words he practically told me this when I ran across him up near the Front the other day while he was setting about his new assignment of depicting the humour of the American soldier as already he had depicted that of the British Tommy. He had, he said, made one discovery already—that there was a tremendous difference between the two schools.
This is quite true, and if some talented Frenchman—it will take a Frenchman, of course—succeeds in making sketches that will reflect the wartime humour of the French soldier as cleverly as Bairnsfather has succeeded at the same job with the British high private for his model it will no doubt be found that the poilu's brand of humour is as distinctively his own as the American soldier's is or the English soldier's is.
There is an indefinable something, yet something structurally French, I think, in the fact that when Captain Hamilton Fish—called Ham Fish for short—arrived in France a few weeks before this was written the French soldiers with whom his command was brigaded immediately rechristened him Le Capitaine Jambon Poisson, and under this new Gallicised name he is to-day one of the best-known personages among the French in the country.
Likewise there is a certain African individuality, or rather an Afro-American individuality, in the story now being circulated through the expeditionary forces, of the private in one of our negro regiments who bragged at his company mess of having taken out a life-insurance policy for the full amount allowed a member of the Army, under the present governmental plan.
“Whut you wan' do dat fur?” demanded a comrade. “You ain't married an' you ain't got no fambly. Who you goin' leave all dat money to ef you gits killed?”
“I ain't aimin' to git killed,” stated the first darky. “Dat's de very reason I taken out all dat insho'ence.”
“How come you ain't liable to git killed jes' de same ez ary one of de rest of us is?”
“W'y, you pore ign'ant fool, does you s'pose w'en Gin'el Pershing finds out he's got a ten-thousand-dollar nigger in dis man's Army dat he's gwine take any chances on losin' all dat money by sendin' me up to de Front whar de trouble is? Naw suh-ree, he ain't!”