At this point Lt. Gibbs reappeared, with the cheerful order that life preservers would be donned at once, and kept on for the rest of the voyage. For the next ten days all waddled about feeling like motherly hens. The apparatus I drew seemed particularly dirty, and most unbecoming to my figure, which is built close to the ground anyway.
Breakfast had been nothing more than a cracker and bully beef, snatched at odd moments. The good ship hadn’t started to roll much yet, so all looked forward to dinner with a robust interest. Then it evolved that this was an Australian transport, the “Nestor;” and as such, sailed under the British flag; and hence and therefore, the next meal would be tea at 5 o’clock. Eternity passed, and about half an hour thereafter the steward came around, and in queer, clipped cockney English introduced us to “dixies” and “flats.” Another half hour, and the first messes to be served saw their hash-grabbing detail returning, bearing through aisles of famished Yanks—bread and cheese and tea! A planked steak would have been more to the point, we felt, and a towering, raw-boned countryman in a corner,—Lory Price, I imagine—opined dismally that we were being mistaken for an orphan asylum. However, what there was aroused the boys sufficiently to take a less morbid view of life, and as the officers departed to the cabin, cards and books appeared, and the mystic words were softly chanted: “Natural, bones”—“Read ’em and weep.”
But there was not what you might call a festive air to that first evening; nor to many thereafter. Of course, for some fellows who had no one dependent on them, who were setting out foot loose for a great adventure, there was nothing to interfere with the thrill of the unknown before them. But the majority of these men had been taken out of their civilian life but two or three weeks before; they were among strangers, and in an absolutely foreign environment; their new uniforms still uncomfortable and scratchy, and army regulations and discipline an incomprehensible set of shibboleths. Far down in each heart the love of their country burned, steadily enough for the most part; white hot in some; in others, but recently kindled. All hid it diligently, of course, from the general view. They had been so fed up with windy orators, with politicians waving the flag with one hand and keeping the other on exemption certificates, that the real thing was jealously concealed.
As I made my final inspection that night, looking out from the companion-way over the rows of close slung hammocks, I wondered what their occupants were thinking; what forms of dear ones were present to their minds; to what homes their thoughts went back—a Harlem flat, a Jersey farmhouse, a great hotel, a tiny pair of rooms in Jersey City; comfortable, well-off American homes; tenements in the foreign districts—each one dear for its memories, each one the home to fight for. Would we have time to train these men into a fighting machine, or would we be thrown in at once to stop the great Hun drive in Flanders, then at its height? How many of us would see these homes, these dear ones again?—But a company commander has little time to indulge in reflections; and thoughts of the morning report, and how to distribute the chow more evenly, and a large budget of orders I had to read, soon chased away everything else.
The NESTOR carried the 1st and 2d Bns. and Headquarters Co. of the 311th Inf., a Machine Gun battalion, and Brig. Gen. Dean, our brigade commander, and his staff. Our colonel was in command of the troops on board, such things being below the dignity of general officers. He was in his element; he had an officers’ meeting the first thing, and dished out about 4 square acres of orders to be read and put into effect at once.
1st Platoon, Flavigny, France, 1919.
Now no one knows better than I how many orders you men received, and how it was often beyond human power to obey all of them. But I call any company commander to witness that we got them coming and going. The Co. Cmdr. is the one man who can’t pass the buck on responsibility. We had to take the bushels of orders we received, eliminate those utterly impossible, select from those remaining what seemed essential and what we thought the Major and Colonel would deem essential, and then get those things done by the company—that is, issue orders to the 1st Sgt. for details, Supply Sgt. for supplies, Mess Sgt. for mess, officers for drill and instruction, company clerk for paper work, and then see to it that the whole is carried out. And then one usually amasses a balling out for something or other that he has left out.
One of these orders was the censorship order, of which we had heard so much. Instead of having all letters censored at post offices by clerks, some genius had decided to follow the British plan of having officers censor their own men’s mail. Thus at one brilliant stroke a situation was created which embarrassed men and officers alike, imposed an irksome and continual task on over-burdened officers, delayed the mail, and was in every way sweet incense in the nostrils of the little tin gods of the red tape; the exponents of the theory of How Not to Do It.
The principal morning sport on the trip was the ship’s inspection. The holds of that old tub received such a scrubbing and cleaning as they had never had before. In spite of the close quarters, everything was kept quite fresh and clean. It gave me a vast respect for the women who do such work all day for paltry wages. At 10:00 A. M. the call would be sounded, and all except the day’s orderlies would be massed on decks in their boat drill stations, and a merry little crush it was. Then the lords of the earth would solemnly parade along in single file, preceded by a bugler, who blew a seasick “Attention” at each deck. Everybody would then step on everyone else’s feet, and make a little lane for the procession. The adjutant, the ship’s captain, the colonel, the ship supply officer—poor old Gibbs was the goat for that job—would play “follow my leader,” and look into corners, and sniff importantly, and everything would be very formal and terrible, and grand.