A small, squarely built individual, of the colour of a bottle of good cider-vinegar, who balanced upon his knees a slab of whitish stone—it looked like a scrap of tombstone and I am inclined to think that is what it was—and in his two hands, held by the handle, a bolo with a nine-inch blade. First he would anoint the uppermost surface of the white slab after the ordained fashion of those who use whetstones, then industriously he would hone his blade; then he would try its edge upon his thumb and then anoint and whet some more. And all the while, under his breath, he crooned a little wordless, humming song which had in it some of the menace of a wasp's petulant buzzing. He was making war-medicine. A United States soldier whose remote ancestors by preference fought hand to hand with their enemies, was qualifying to see Henry Johnson and go him one better. The picture was too sweet a one to be spoiled by breaking in on it. We slipped back out of sight so quietly the knife-sharpener could never have suspected that spying eyes had looked in upon him as he engaged in these private devotions of his.
“They're all like that buddy with the bolo, and some of them are even more so,” said the colonel after we had tramped back again to the dugout in a chalk cliff, which he temporarily occupied as a combination parlour, boudoir, office, breakfast room and headquarters. “We were a pretty green outfit when they brought us over here. Why, even after we got over to France some of my boys used to write me letters tendering their resignations, to take effect immediately. They had come into the service of their own free will—as volunteers in the National Guard—so when they got tired of soldiering, as a few of them did at first, they couldn't understand why they shouldn't go out of their own free wills.
“They used us on construction work down near one of the ports for a while after we landed. Then here a couple of weeks ago they sent us up to take over this sector. The men are fond of saying that all they had by way of preparation for the job was four days' drilling and a haircut.
“Did I say just now that we were green? Well, that doesn't half describe it, let me tell you. This sector was calm enough, as frontline sectors go, when we took it over. But the first night my fellows had hardly had time enough to learn to find their way about the trenches when from a forward rifle pit a rocket of a certain colour went up, 'signifying: 'We are being attacked by tanks.'
“It gave me quite a shock, especially as there had been no artillery preparation from Fritz's side of the wire, and besides there is a swamp between the lines right in front of where that rifle pit is, so I didn't exactly see how tanks were going to get across unless the Germans ferried them over in skiffs. So before calling out the regiment I decided to make a personal investigation. But before I had time to start on it two more rockets went up from another rifle pit at the left of the first one, and according to the code these rockets meant: 'Lift your barrage—we are about to attack in force.' Since we hadn't been putting down any barrage and there was no reason for an attack and no order for one this gave me another shock. So I put out hot-foot to find out what was the matter.
“It seemed a raw recruit in the first pit had found a box of rockets. Just for curiosity, I suppose, or possibly because he wished to show the Bush-Germans that he regarded the whole thing as being in the nature of a celebration, or maybe because he just wanted to see what would happen afterward, he touched off one of them. And then a fellow down the line seeing this rocket decided, I guess, that a national holiday of the French was being observed and so he touched off two. But it never will happen again.
“The very next night we had a gas alarm two miles back of here in the next village, where one of my battalions is billeted. It turned out to be a false alarm, but all through the camp the sentries were sounding their automobile horns as a warning for gas masks. But Major Blank's orderly didn't know the meaning of the signals, or if he did know he forgot it in the excitement of the moment. Still he didn't lose his head altogether. As he heard the sound of the tootings coming nearer and nearer he dashed into the major's billet—the major is a very sound sleeper—and grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him right out of his blankets. “'Wake up, major!' he yelled, trying to keep on shaking with one hand and to salute with the other. 'Fur Gawd's sake, suh, wake up. The Germans is comin'—in automobiles!'
“Oh yes, they were green at the start; but they are as game as any men in this man's Army are. You take it from me, because I know. They weren't afraid of the cold and the wet and the terrific labour when they worked last winter down near the coast of France on as mean a job of work as anybody ever tackled. They were up to their waists in cold water part of the time—yes, most of the time they were—but not a one of them flinched. And believe me there's no flinching among them now that we are up against the Huns! You don't need the case of Johnson and Roberts to prove it. It is proved by the attitude of every single man among them. It isn't hard to send them into danger—the hard part is to keep them from going into it on their own accord. They say the dark races can't stand the high explosives—that their nerves go to pieces under the strain of the terrific concussion. If that be so the representatives of the dark races that come from America are the exceptions to the rule. My boys are getting fat and sassy on a fare of bombings and bombardments, and we have to watch them like hawks to keep them from slipping off on little independent raiding parties without telling anybody about it in advance. Their real test hasn't come yet, but when it does come you take a tip from me and string your bets along with this minstrel troupe to win.
“My men have a catch phrase that has come to be their motto and their slogan. Tell any one of them to do a certain thing and as he gets up to go about it he invariably says, 'Let's go!' Tell a hundred of them to do a thing and they'll say the same thing. I hear it a thousand times a day. The mission may involve discomfort or the chance of a sudden and exceedingly violent death. No matter—'Let's go!' that's the invariable answer. Personally I think it makes a pretty good maxim for an outfit of fighting men, and I'll stake my life on it that they'll live up to it when the real trial comes.”
Two days we stayed on there, and they were two days of a superior variety of continuous black-face vaudeville. There was the evening when for our benefit the men organised an impromptu concert featuring a quartet that would succeed on any man's burlesque circuit, and a troupe of buck-and-wing dancers whose equals it would be hard to find on the Big Time. There was the next evening when the band of forty pieces serenaded us. I think surely this must be the best regimental band in our Army. Certainly it is the best one I have heard in Europe during this war. On parade when it played the Memphis Blues the men did not march; the music poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels, and instead of marching they literally danced their way along. As for the dwellers of the French towns in which this regiment has from time to time been quartered, they, I am told, fairly go mad when some alluring, compelling, ragtime tune is played with that richness of syncopated melody in it which only the black man can achieve; and as the regiment has moved on, more than once it has been hard to keep the unattached inhabitants of the village that the band was quitting from moving on with it.