“You must be wrong,” we said to him who brought us the report. “You must have seen an unusually big lot of negroes going up to work in the lumber camps in the woods at the north.”
“No such thing,” he said. “I tell you that we've got black soldiers on the job—at least two regiments of them. There's a draft regiment from somewhere down South, and another regiment from one of the Eastern States—one of the old National Guard outfits I think it is—about fifteen miles to the east of the first lot. Here, I can show you about where they are—if anybody's got a map handy.”
Everybody had a map handy. A correspondent no more thinks of moving about without a map than he thinks of moving about without a gas mask and a white paper, which is a pass. He wouldn't dare move without the mask; he couldn't move far without the pass, and the next to these two the map is the most needful part of his travelling equipment.
So that was how the quest started. As we came nearer to the somewhat indefinitely located spot for which we sought, the signs that we were on a true trail multiplied, in bits of evidence offered by supply-train drivers who told us they lately had met negro troopers on the march in considerable number. As a matter of fact there were then four black regiments instead of two taking up sector positions in our plan of defence. However, that fact was to develop later through a statement put forth with the approval of the censor at General Headquarters.
After some seven hours of reasonably swift travel in a high-powered car we had left behind the more peaceful districts back of the debatable areas and were entering into the edges of a village that had been shot to bits in the great offensive of 1914, which afterward had been partially rebuilt and which lately had been abandoned again, after the great offensive of 1918 started.
Right here from somewhere in the impending clutter of nondescript ruination we heard many voices singing all together. The song was a strange enough song for these surroundings. Once before in my life and only once I have heard it, and that was five years ago on an island off the coast of Georgia. I don't think it ever had a name and the author of it had somehow got the Crucifixion and the Discovery of America confused in his mind.
We halted the car behind the damaged wall of an abandoned garden, not wishing to come upon the unseen choristers until they had finished. Their voices rose with the true camp-meeting quaver, giving reverence to the lines:
In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-one
'Tuna den my Saviour's work begun.
And next the chorus, long-drawn-out and mournful:
Oh, dey nailed my Saviour 'pen de cross,
But he never spoke a mumblin' word.