YOU rode along a highroad that was built wide and ran straight, miles on, and through a birch forest that was very dense and yet somehow very orderly, as is the way with French highroads, and with French forests, too, and after a while you came to where the woods frazzled away from close-ranked white trunks into a fringing of lacy undergrowth, all giddy and all gaudy with wild flowers of many a colour.
Here, in a narrow clearing that traversed the thickets at right angles to the course you had been following, there disclosed himself a high-garbed North American mule, a little bit under weight, so that his backbone stood out sharply like the ridgepole of a roof pitched steep, with hollows by his hip joints to catch the rain water in. Viewing him astern or on the quarter you discerned that his prevalent architecture, though mixed, inclined to the mansard type. Viewing him bow-on you observed that he wore a gas mask upon his high and narrow temples and that from beneath this adornment, which would be startling elsewhere but which at the Front is both commonplace and customary, he contemplated the immediate foreground with half-closed, indolent eyes and altogether was as much at home as though his chin rested upon the hickory top rider of a snake fence in his native Ozarks instead of resting, as it did, athwart the crosspiece of a low signpost reading: “Danger Beyond—All Cars Halt Here! Proceed Afoot!”
You might be sure that never did any mule born in Missouri take his languid ease amid surroundings more unique for a mule to be in, inside or outside of that sovereign commonwealth. There was, to begin with, his gas mask, draped upon the spindled brow and ready, on warning, to be yanked down over the muzzle and latched fast beneath the throat; probably as a veteran mule he was used to that. But there were other things: High-velocity shells from a battery of six-inches somewhere in the woods to the west were going over his head at regular half-minute intervals, each in its passage making a sound as though everybody on earth in chorus had said “Whew-w-w-! “—like that. Merely by cocking an eyelid aloft he could have beheld, sundry thousands of feet up, three French combat planes hunting a German raider back to his own lines, the French motors humming steadily like honeybees but the German droning to a deeper note with sullen heavy rift tones breaking into its cadences, for all the world like one of those big noisy beetles that invade your bedchamber on a hot night. Merely by squinting straight ahead he could have seen at the farther edge of the little glade a triple row of white crosses, each set off by the wooden rosette device in red, white and blue with which the French, when given time, mark the graves of their fallen fighters. Merely by sniffing he could have caught from a mile distant the faint but unmistakable reek that hangs over battlefields when they are getting to be old battlefields but are not yet very old, and that nearly always distresses green work animals at the first time of taking it into their nostrils. None of these things he did though, but remained content and motionless save for his wagging ears and his switching tail and his uneasy lower lip. He was just standing there, letting the hot sunshine seep into him through all his pores.
Otherwise, however, his more adjacent settings were in a manner of speaking conventional and according to mules. For he was attached by virtue of an improvised gear of wire ropes and worn leather breeching to a small fiat car that bestraddled a rusty railroad track; and at his head stood a ginger-coloured youth of twenty years or thereabouts. In our own land you somehow expect, when you find a mule engaged in industry, to find an American of African antecedents managing him. So the combination was in keeping with the popular conception. Only in this instance the attendant youth wore part of a uniform and had a steel shrapnel helmet clamped down upon his skull.
Said youth caught a nod from a corporal of his own race who lounged against a broken wall, the wall being practically all that remained of what once had been the home of a crossings guard alongside a railroad that was a real railroad no longer; and at that he climbed nimbly on muleback.
He gathered up the guiding strings, and this then was the starting signal he gave as he showed all his teeth—he seemed to have fifty teeth at least—in a gorgeous and friendly grin: “All abo'd fur the Fifty-nint' Street crosstown line!”
By that you would have known, if you knew your New York at all, that this particular muleteer must hail from that nook of Li'l Ole Manhattan which since the days of the Yanko-Spanko war, when a certain group of black troopers did a certain valiant thing, has been called San Juan Hill, and that away off here where now he was, in the back edges of France, he had in his own mind at the moment a picture of West Fifty-ninth Street as it might look—and probably would—on this bright warm afternoon, stretching as a narrow band, biaswise, of the town from the Black Belt on the West Side with its abutting chop-suey parlours and its fragrant barber shops and its clubrooms for head and side waiters, on past Columbus Circle into the lighter coloured districts to the eastward; and likewise that since he did have the image in his mind he perhaps grinned his toothful grin to hide a pang of homesickness for the place where he belonged.
I figured that I knew these things, who had journeyed by motor with two more for a hundred and eighty miles across country to pay a visit to the first sector in our front lines that had been taken over by a regiment of negro volunteers—?-now by reason of departmental classifyings known as the Three Hundred and Somethingth of the American Expeditionary Forces. Because New York was where I also belonged, and this genial postilion was of a breed made familiar to me long time ago in surroundings vastly dissimilar to these present ones.
To the three of us word had come, no matter how, that negro troops of ours were in the line. No authoritative announcement to that effect having been forthcoming, we were at the first hearing of the news skeptical. To be sure the big movement overseas was at last definitely and audaciously under way; the current month's programme called for the landing on French soil of two hundred thousand Americans of fighting age and fighting dispositions, which contract, I might add, was carried out so thoroughly that not only the promised two hundred thousand but a good and heaping measure of nearly sixty thousand more on top of that arrived before the thirtieth. It is The Glory of the Coming all right, this great thing that has happened this summer over here, and I am glad that mine eyes have seen it. It is almost the finest thing that the eye of an American of this generation has yet seen or is likely to see before Germany herself is invaded.
But even though the sea lanes were streaky with the wakes of our convoys and the disembarkation ports cluttered with our transports, we doubted that coloured troops were as yet facing the enemy across the barbed-wire boundaries that separate him from us. Possibly this was because we had grown accustomed to thinking of our negroes as members of labour battalions working along the lines of communication—unloading ships and putting up warehouses and building depots and felling trees in the forests of France, which seem doomed to fall either through shelling or by the axes of the timbering crews of the Allies.