"Where are they?" I asked again, startled by this news.
He pointed up the road.
"Just there.... Inside Gouzeaucourt."
The situation was extremely unpleasant. The enemy had brought up some field-guns and was scattering his fire. It was in a field close by that I met the American engineers.
"I guess this is not in the contract," said one of them, grinning. "All the same, if I find any Britisher to lend me a rifle I'll get a knock at those fellers who spoiled my breakfast."
One man stooped for a petrol tin and put it on his head as a shell came howling over us.
"I guess this makes me look more like you other guys," he said, with a glance at our steel helmets.
One tall, loose-limbed, swarthy fellow, who looked like a Mexican, but came from Texas, as he told me, was spoiling for a fight, and with many strange oaths declared his intention of going into Gouzeaucourt with the first batch of English who would go that way with him. They were the Grenadier Guards who came up to the counter-attack, munching apples, as I remember, when they marched toward the enemy. Some of the American engineers joined them and with borrowed rifles helped to clear out the enemy's machine-gun nests and recapture the ruins of the village. I met some of them the following day again, and they told me it was a "darned good scrap." They were "darned" good men, hard, tough, humorous, and full of individual character.
The general type of young Americans was not, however, like these hard-grained men of middle age who had led an adventurous life before they came to see what war was like in Europe. We watched them curiously as the first battalions came streaming along the old roads of France and Picardy, and we were conscious that they were different from all the men and all the races behind our battle-front. Physically they were splendid—those boys of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions whom we saw first of all. They were taller than any of our regiments, apart from the Guards, and they had a fine, easy swing of body as they came marching along. They were better dressed than our Tommies, whose rough khaki was rather shapeless. There was a dandy cut about this American uniform and the cloth was of good quality, so that, arriving fresh, they looked wonderfully spruce and neat compared with our weatherworn, battle-battered lads who had been fighting through some hard and dreadful days. But those accidental differences did not matter. What was more interesting was the physiognomy and character of these young men who, by a strange chapter of history, had come across the wide Atlantic to prove the mettle of their race and the power of their nation in this world struggle. It came to me, and to many other Englishmen, as a revelation that there was an American type, distinctive, clearly marked off from our own, utterly different from the Canadians, Australians, and New-Zealanders, as strongly racial as the French or Italians. In whatever uniform those men had been marching one would have known them as Americans. Looking down a marching column, we saw that it was something in the set of the eyes, in the character of the cheek-bones, and in the facial expression that made them distinctive. They had a look of independence and self-reliance, and it was as visible as the sun that these were men with a sort of national pride and personal pride, conscious that behind them was a civilization and a power which would give them victory though they in the vanguard might die. Those words express feebly and foolishly the first impression that came to us when the "Yanks" came marching up the roads of war, but that in a broad way was the truth of what we thought. I remember one officer of ours summed up these ideas as he stood on the edge of the road, watching one of those battalions passing with their transport.