The lucky stiffs agreed that they were lucky, but they refrained out of politeness from saying too much about it. Of course, every man hopes to get up into the big show. But the work behind the lines has to be done. That is the spirit of the army, except on occasions when the men have to blow off steam.
Bidding the lucky ones good-by, I expressed a hope that they would be allowed to carry weapons when next they went near a fighting line. They said that they were going to carry side arms, but one man said:
“What’s the matter with a good sharp pick when you meet up with Heinie? He knows what a gun will do to him and he is game. But a Yankee guy with a pick has got him backed off of the map. Jim here killed two and chased two more with nothing in his hands but a shovel. I had a pick and I was better off than him.”
Which was his modest way of telling that he and his pick had accounted for three German soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. Thus had his grandfather fought wolves in some western forest, or killed rattlers in prairie grass. Pioneers! You can’t beat them.
CHAPTER V
WE FINISH WHAT CÆSAR BEGAN
A standard joke, used with several variations in French music-halls, is to the effect that “the English only leased their trenches for three years, but the Americans have bought theirs.” This witticism is a tribute to the amount of solid preparation the Americans have made and are making and to the marvelous feats of engineering which are progressing rapidly from southern and western France clear up to the battle lines.
We own, temporarily at least, seven miles of docks and wharves in one great seaport alone. Most of these we have built, and the work is still going on. For forty miles around this seaport the sound of hammer and ax rings day after day as one after another camp and cantonment is established. Some of these camps are really small cities. In one, for example, a hospital camp will house thirty-five thousand people. Provision for twenty thousand beds is being made. It will be, when completed, the largest hospital in the world.
A few months ago that hospital site was a barren waste of prairie. As for water, there was one solitary well. Sewers there were none, and, of course, no streets. Now there is a model drainage and sewer system. There are a dozen miles of paved streets. There is a good water supply, electric lights and telephones. When I visited this camp some fifty hospital buildings were wholly or partially completed, and since then many more must have been built.
Most of the materials used in this vast piece of construction came overseas from the United States, but no small amount of lumber was purchased in France. Now France is very short of lumber and sells as little of it as she can. I asked the colonel in command of the work where he got his building material, and he replied with a broad smile: “Well, I really stole it. I had to have the lumber, so when I found out where it was, I went over there and just insisted. You see,” he added, “over here no excuses are ever accepted from anybody. You simply have to make good on any job they assign you to. If for any reason you don’t make good, you get sent home.”
If we could make up our minds to apply this inexorable method to some of the people who are doing war work on this side of the water we might get better results. At one of the camps in the neighborhood of this same seaport in France they are building a naval aviation station. When it is complete there will be provision for one thousand to fifteen hundred giant seaplanes, great white birds that can sail three days out to sea, that will possess power to sink more submarines than any armed vessels. The submarine is visible from the air at a much greater depth than it is from a ship’s deck, and the seaplanes will carry plenty of deadly depth bombs. Moreover, they will fly safely. The submarine can not fight back at them.