I was explaining to my companions, both of them Northern-born, that mumbling in the language of the tidewater darky means complaining and not what it means with us, but they bade me hush while we hearkened to the next two verses, each of two lines, with the chorus repeated after the second line:
In Fo'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-two
My Lawd begin his work to do!
In F o'teen Hunnerd an' Ninety-three
Dey nailed my Saviour on de gallows tree.
And back to the first verse—there were only three verses, it seemed—and through to the third, over and over again.
An invisible choir leader broke in with a different song and the others caught it up. But this one we all knew—My Soul Bears Witness to de Lawd—so we started the machine and rode round from back of the wall. The singers, twenty or more of them, were lying at ease on the earth alongside a house in the bright, baking sunshine of a still young but very ardent summer. On beyond them everywhere the place swarmed with their fellows in khaki, some doing nothing at all and some doing the things that an American soldier, be he black or white, is apt to do when off duty in billets. Almost without exception they were big men, with broad shoulders and necks like bullocks, and their muscles bulged their sleeves almost to bursting. From the fact that nine out of ten were coal-black and from a certain intonation in their voices never found among up-country negroes, a man familiar with the dialects and the types of the Far South might know them for natives of the rice fields and the palmetto barrens of the coast. Lower Georgia and South Carolina—there was where they had come from plainly enough, with perhaps a sprinkling among them of Florida negroes. Our course, steered as it was by chance reckoning, had nevertheless been a true one.
We had found the draft outfit first. By the same token, if our original informant had been right, another negro regiment—of volunteers this time—would be found some fifteen miles to the eastward and northward of where we were; and this latter unit was the one whose whereabouts we mainly desired to discover, since, if it turned out to be the regiment we thought it must be, its colonel would be a personal friend of all three of us and his adjutant would be a former copy reader who had served on the staff of the same evening newspaper years before, with two of us.
We halted a while to pay our respects to the commander of these strapping big black men—a West Pointer, still in his thirties and inordinately proud of the outfit that was under him. He had cause to be. I used to think that sitting down was the natural gait of the tidewater darky; but here, as any one who looked might see, were soldiers who bore themselves as smartly, who were as snappy at the salute and as sharp set at the drill as any of their lighter-skinned fellow Americans in service anywhere. Most of the officers were Southern-born men, they having been purposely picked because of a belief that they would understand the negro temperament. That the choosing of Southern officers had been a sane choosing was proved already, I think, by what we saw as well as by things we heard that day. For example, one of the majors—a young Tennesseean—told us this tale, laughing while he told us:
“We've abolished two of our sentry posts in this town. Right over yonder, beyond what's left of the village church, is what's left of the village cemetery. I'll take you to see it if you care to go, though it's not a very pleasant sight. For a year or more back in 1914 and 1915 shells used to fall in it pretty regularly and rip open the graves and scatter the bones of those poor folks who were buried there—you know the sort of thing you're likely to find in any of these little places that have been under heavy bombardment. Well, when we moved here a week and a half ago and got settled a delegation from the ranks waited on the C. O. They told him that they had come over here to fight the Germans and that they were willing to fight the Germans and anxious to start the job right away, but that, discipline or no discipline, war or no war, orders or no orders, they just naturally couldn't be made to hang round a cemetery after dark.
“'Kernul, suh,' the spokesman said, 'ef you posts any of us cullud boys 'longside dat air buryin' ground, w'y long about midnight somethin'll happen an' you's sartain shore to be shy a couple of niggers when de mawnin' comes. Kernul, suh, we don't none of us wanter be shot fur runnin' 'way, but dat's perzactly whut's gwine happen ef ary one of us has to march back an' fo'th by dat place w'en de darkness of de night sets in.' And the colonel understood, and he took mercy on 'em, so that's why if the Germans should happen to arrive at night by way of the graveyard they could march right among us, probably without having a shot fired at them.
“But don't think our boys are afraid,” the young major added with pride in his voice. “I'd take a chance on going anywhere with these black soldiers at my back. So would any of the rest of the officers. We haven't had any actual fighting experience yet—that'll come in a week or two when we relieve a French regiment that's just here in front of us holding the front lines—but we are not worrying about what'll happen when we get our baptism of fire. Only I'm afraid we're going to have a mighty disappointed regiment on our hands in about two months from now, when these black boys of ours find out that even in the middle of August watermelons don't grow in Northern France.”
As we left the regimental headquarters, which was a half-shattered wine shop with breaches in the wall and less than half a roof to its top floor, the young major went along with us to our car to give our chauffeur better directions touching on a maze of cross roads along the last lap of the run.