En route he enriched my notebook with a lovely story, having the merit moreover—a merit that not all lovely stories have—of being true.
“Day before yesterday,” so his narrative ran, “we began drilling the squads in grenade throwing—with live grenades. Up until then we'd exercised them only on dummy grenades, but now they were going to try out the real thing. We had batches of the new grenades—the kind that are exploded by striking the cap at the lower end upon something hard. You probably know how the drill is carried on: At the call of 'One' from the squad commander the men strike the cap ends against a stone or something; at 'Two' they draw back the thing full arm length, and at 'Three' they toss it with a stiff overhand swing. There's plenty of time of course for all this if nobody fumbles, because the way the fuses are timed five seconds elapse between the striking of the cap and the explosion. If you fling your grenade too soon a Heinie is liable to pick it up and throw it back at you before it goes off. If you hold it too long you're apt to lose an arm or your life. That's why we are so particular about timing the movements.
“Well, one squad lined up out here in a field with their eyes bulging out like china door knobs. They were game enough but they weren't very happy. The moment the word 'One' was given a little stumpy darky in my battalion that we call Sugar Foot flung his grenade as far as he could.
“When the rest of the grenades had been thrown the platoon commander jumped all over Sugar Foot. He said to him: 'Look here, what did you mean by throwing that grenade before these other boys threw theirs? Don't you know enough to wait for “Three” before you turn loose?'
“'Yas, suh, lieutenant,' says Sugar Foot; 'but I jes' natchelly had to th'ow it. W'y, lieutenant, I could feel dat thing a-swellin' in my hand.'”
It may have been the same Sugar Foot—assuredly it was the likes of him—who gave us the salute so briskly as we sped out of the village on the far side from the side on which we entered it. Followed then a swift coursing through a French-held sector wherein at each unfolding furlong of chalky-white highway we beheld sights which, being totted up, would have made enough to write a book about, say three years back. But three years back is ancient history in this war, and what once would have run into chapters is now worth no more than a paragraph, if that much.
At the end of this leg of the journey we were well out of the static zone and well into the active one. And so, after going near where sundry French batteries ding-donged away with six-inch shells—shrapnel, high explosives and gas in equal doses—at a German position five miles away, we emerged from the protecting screenage of forest after the fashion stated in the opening sentences of this chapter, and learned that we had landed where we had counted on landing when we started out.
It was the regiment we were looking for, sure enough. Its colonel, our friend, having been apprised by telephone from two miles rearward at one of his battalion headquarters that we were approaching, had sent word per runner that he waited to welcome us down at his present station just behind the forward observation posts.
So we climbed aboard the one piece of rolling stock that was left astride the metals of a road over which, until August of 1914, transcontinental trains had whizzed, and the ginger-colored humourist slapped the sloping withers of his steed and that patient brute flinched a protesting flinch that ran through his frame from neck to flanks, and we were off for the front trenches by way of the Fifty-ninth Street cross-town line on as unusual a journey as I, for one, have taken since coming over here to this war-worn country, where the unusual thing is the common thing these days. Off with an ex-apartment-house doorman from San Juan Hill, New York City, for our steersman; a creaking small flat car for a chariot; a homegrown mule for motive power; a Yankee second lieutenant and a French liaison officer for added passengers; and for special scenic touches alongside the bramble-grown cut through which we jogged, machine guns so mounted as to command aisles chopped through the thickets, and three-inch guns plying busily at an unseen objective. To this add the whewful remarks let fall in passing by the big ones from farther back as they conversed among themselves on their way over to annoy the Him, and at intervals aërial skirmishes occurring away up overhead—'twas a braw and a bonny day for aërial fighting, as a stage Scotchman might say—and you will have a fairly complete picture of the ensemble in your own mind, I trust. But don't forget to stir in the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects.
The negro troopers we encountered now, here in the copses, sometimes singly or oftener still in squads and details, were dissimilar physically as well as in certain temperamental respects to their fellows of the draft regiment we had seen a little while before. They were apt to be mulattoes or to have light-brown complexions instead of clear black; they were sophisticated and town wise in their bearing; their idioms differed from those others, and their accents too; for almost without exception they were city dwellers and many of them had been born North, whereas the negroes from Dixie were rural products drawn out of the heart of the Farther South. But for all of them might be said these things: They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed, as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere and heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible delay. I am of the opinion personally—and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all of the Southerner's inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.