It was at Nœux-les-Mines, in the Café Salome, at the bottom of the old slag-heap by the station. After tea, there being no further parade until the working party assembled at ten o'clock that night, I had repaired thither to drink wine and smoke until closing time. As always, the café was crowded with the men of half-a-dozen London regiments, with Scotsmen in stained and muddy kilts, and French artillerymen from the South. Later in the evening they would begin to sing in unison—great roaring choruses swung and tossed from café to café and taken up by the crowded-out groups in the street.
I had managed to secure a chair at a little table in the corner, and for companion saw before me a small, grizzled man, about fifty, whose blue eyes, despite the dark rings underneath them, were yet singularly intelligent, keen, and clear. We exchanged a few remarks whilst taking each other's measure, and then, apropos of my description of a terrible bombardment by the German minenwerfers which we had recently endured, he began to talk, and gave me a rambling impression of his strange and original career, and especially of his adventures in connection with his masterpiece, "Big-Bang"—a device now extinct.
I will call him X——. Before his connection with the British Army I gathered he had wandered widely in an up-and-down, rolling-stone sort of fashion. The Klondike had known his store during the gold rush. He was one of those men who did undefined but profitable things in the Western States before the days of their organized exploitation; made thousands of dollars and spent every cent of them, roving here and there, never staying anywhere for long, as is the way with these pioneers of the human race.
II—THE AMERICAN ADVENTURER TELLS HIS TALE
When the war broke out he was in the West, the manager of an opera company touring the coast towns, and immediately he determined to take a hand. At first he experienced considerable perplexity as to how he was to get "mixed up" in the war. Apart from his nationality, his small stature, a finger missing from his right hand, and a pronounced limp—both legacies from the Spanish-American war in the Philippines—seemed destined to preclude him from serving in the army of any country in any capacity. He was even refused by a party of Americans forming a Red Cross contingent for duty with any of the belligerents willing to accept their service.
However, he remembered an old friend, a major of Engineers in charge of a company at a China station, and he immediately hurried from San Francisco across the Pacific to Hong-Kong, where he found the —th Siege Company, R.E., under orders to move, and cursing destiny, in the shape of the British War Office, which refused to allow them to be in at the fall of Tsing-tau. Forthwith he attached himself to them. His sole qualification consisted of an erratic but handy knowledge of mechanics, picked up here and there—as chauffeur to a Vancouver millionaire, as a greaser, ganger, and a stoker, but principally during eighteen months of desultory employment in the machine-shops of Pittsburg. After much argument concerning the King's Regulations with regard to recruits and the position of a man in the ranks, the major had taken him on the strength as mechanic for the three motor-cycles owned by his command. In September, 1914, he left the Western theatre of war—quietly exultant, as I imagine.
He was curiously frank as to his attitude towards the war.
"I have always liked big things, and I had to get into this somehow," he said, finishing a large cassis. "This war is the biggest thing that ever happened to this old world, and if I were left out of it I should go mad—I should, or commit suicide. That's how I feel about it. Looking on is no good to me; I have to be right in it. But I've no illusions. Neither your cause nor the Germans' nor the newspaper gas of both parties interest me. If the Allies hadn't adopted me I should have squeezed somehow into one of the armies of the Central Powers. Of course, the party I joined, that party I stick to; you can count on me to the last drop of my blood. But you take me—I've no patriotism, as you understand these things."
They landed in France early in October, and within forty-eight hours were with a corps at a point where the British forces lay resting after the Marne and the Aisne. With those battles the operations passed the mobile phase and began to settle down to the stagnation of the trenches.
The novel conditions of warfare in the earth demanded new methods and ingenious adaptations, and soon the Engineers found themselves overwhelmed with orders from corps headquarters and harassed by perplexed divisions and brigades. Bombs and explosive missiles of all sorts were in great demand, but materials other than Tickler's jam-pots were not to be procured. And pumps were wanted; emplacements, redoubts, trenches, field works of all descriptions required overseers from the Engineers to superintend the working-parties, composed of uninitiated infantry.