If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night, which was a night of a splendid, flawless full moon. We stood with the regimental staff on the terraced lawn of the chief house in a half-deserted town five miles back from the trenches, and down below us in the main street the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned dark faces was a ring of white ones where the remaining natives of the place clustered, with their heads wagging in time to the tunes.
And when the band got to Way Down Upon the Swanee River I wanted to cry, and when the drum major, who likewise had a splendid barytone voice, sang, as an interpolated number, Joan of Arc, first in English and then in excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant, heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him. When this type of Frenchman feels emotion he expresses it moistly.
Those two days we heard stories without number, all of them true, I take it, and most of them good ones. We heard of the yellow youth who beseeched his officer to send him with a “dang'ous message” meaning by that that he craved to go on a perilous mission for the greater glory of the A. E. F. and incidentally of himself; and about the jaunty individual who pulled the firing wire of a French grenade and catching the hissing sound of the fulminator working its way toward the charge exclaimed: “That's it—fry, gosh dem you, fry!” before he threw it. And about how a sergeant on an emergency trench-digging job stuck to the task, standing hip-deep in icy water and icy mud, until from chill and exhaustion he dropped unconscious and was like to drown in the muck into which he had collapsed head downward, only his squad discovered him up-ended there and dragged him out; and about many other things small or great, bespeaking fortitude and courage and fidelity and naïve Afric waggery.
Likewise into my possession came copies of two documents, both of which I should say are typical just as each is distinctive of a different phase of the negro temperament. One of them, the first one, was humorous. Indeed to my way of thinking it was as fine an example of unconscious humour as this war is likely to produce. The other was—well, judge for yourself.
Before the regiment moved forward for its dedication to actual warfare it was impressed upon the personnel in the ranks that from now on, more even than before, a soldier in his communications with his superior officer must use the formal and precise language of military propriety. The lesson must have sunk in, because on the thrillsome occasion when a certain private found himself for the first time in a forward rifle pit and for the first time heard German rifle bullets whistling past his ears he called to him a runner and dispatched to the secondary lines this message, now quoted exactly as written except that the proper names have been changed:
“Lieutenant Sidney J. McClelland,
“Commanding Company B,—, A. E. F.,
U. S. A.
“Dear Sir: I am being fired on heavily from the left.
I await your instructions.
“Trusting these few lines will find you the same,
I remain, Yours truly,
“Jefferson Jones.”
The other thing was an extract from a letter written by an eighteen-year-old private to his old mother in New York, with no idea in his head when he wrote it that any eyes other than those of his own people would read it after it had been censored and posted. The officer to whom it came for censoring copied from it one paragraph, and this paragraph ran like this:
“Mammy, these French people don't bother with no colour-line business. They treat us so good that the only time I ever knows I'm coloured is when I looks in the glass.”
Coming away—and we came reluctantly—we skirted the edge of the billeting area where the regiment of Southern negroes was quartered, and again we heard them singing. But this time they sang no plaintive meeting-house air. They sang a ringing, triumphant, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah song. For—so we learned—to them the word had come that they were about to move up and perhaps come to grips with the Bush-Germans. Yes, most assuredly n-i-g-g-e-r is going to have a different meaning when this war ends.