In another camp I asked the same question. What did the Germans think about us? They say, I was told, that they didn’t mind building railroads in France. The kaiser would be glad to have them when he came. What will happen to the kaiser when the German people learn the truth?
CHAPTER IV
PIONEERS, OH, PIONEERS
The man on sentry duty on that section of the huge unfinished wharf was in a bad humor. He was in a very bad humor. If a stray cat or dog had appeared on the wharf at that moment he would probably have kicked it. As it was a woman in the khaki-colored uniform of a war correspondent, the sentry contented himself with roaring a challenge that brought her up standing. Having produced her pass, he stood aside with a scowl, shouldered the rifle which had been pointed at her most menacingly, and made a gesture with his head which meant, “Well, then, move on.”
But the correspondent—I was the correspondent—did not move on. I stopped and said, mildly: “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself to-day. What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” he repeated furiously. “Every darn thing is the matter. What did I leave my business for, what did I leave my wife and kids for? Why, to come over here and fight the boche. And what am I doing? Roustabout work on a blasted line of docks, miles away from the front. Been here five months in this hole, working like a subway digger.
“Look at the town back there where we go for a bit of amusement when the day’s over. Worse than any slum back home. Talk about the horrors of the trenches. I’d swap the mud we live in for any trench. Talk about Fritz’s poison gas. When the wind’s right the fumes from that picric acid factory up the river blow down and choke the lungs out of us.”
“Do you get these spells often?” I asked. Whereupon he grinned a little and relaxed his scowl. I asked him where he lived and he named a thriving town in western Kansas. He had a real estate business in town, but his folks still lived on the big farm which his father had proved up on forty years ago. It was a fine place, yielding a big income, enough to keep the old people in comfort for the rest of their lives, and to support his young family while he was at the war.
I came from the prairies myself, and I could just see that farm and the old folks who had gone out to Kansas in their lusty youth to take up government land. They had built a sod house, turned up the tough prairie grass, plowed and sowed and cultivated under the burning sun, performed the terrible labor to get their first meager corn crops.
They had fought drought and grasshoppers, lived through blizzards and cyclones, endured poverty and privations untold. They were pioneers. Of such is the greatness and the virtue of our America.
I sat down on a nail keg and talked to that lonely, homesick, aggrieved soldier about the pioneers. From England first, and later from every other country in the world they had come, moved by the divine unrest of ambitious spirits, to the United States.