And then, had not the mud been so vexingly deep, there would have been a quarrel.
That night we halted in a downpour of rain in a small village, wet, tired and hungry, our packs and feet increased in weight by mud and water.
But our hunger was soon satisfied by a plentiful supply of steaming hot stew with coffee and bread from our kitchen on wheels. Men sing of sparkling wine; but I have never tasted anything that equalled good army chow and fragrant coffee for comfort, after a long march.
Most of our men smoked, as soldiers generally do; but Lieutenant Nickerson and I, and strange to say, Quinn, were exceptions to this general rule, and did not use tobacco or whiskey. An Irishman who neither smokes nor drinks, as Peter Beaudett said, “Was de queer bug, begar!”
Pat’s explanation of this was, “Me mither tould me I had better not get the habit of smoking or drinking, or I might get where I could not get either whiskey or tobacco.”
Those soldiers who do smoke say there is great solace in a pipe, but to my mind a soldier with the fewest artificial wants, is, on the whole, the most easily comforted.
We soon began to see some of the destruction that grim-visaged war had dealt out to battle-scarred France.
We had halted in a litter of shattered stone and plastered houses which was once a village. The walls were in unpicturesque ruin. Very few houses had roofs, and but few walls were standing. Yet we found several families still clinging to what had once been their homes, reluctant to leave the ground whereon had stood their dwellings, and which had sheltered, no doubt, several generations of their kind. These homes, and even the gardens, trees and vines were torn from the soil. Orchards and vineyards that had borne fruit for them and their children were cut down by shot and shell or, with German thoroughness, had been sawed down so that they would never again bring sustaining comforts to them.
At the place where my platoon was quartered was a black eyed, sad-faced little woman, with a family of small children, living in a cellar. Her mournful face lit up and her eyes sparkled, at the sight of our friendly faces and uniforms—and for one day, at least, neither she nor her little ones were hungry. For we shared our rations with them and gave to them all that we could spare when we resumed our march in the morning.
This first glimpse of a ruined village left a deep impression on us. The surpassing brutality of it all! The homes, the factories and churches, the gardens and orchards and vineyards to which so much loving care had been given, can never be replaced to those whose loving work and sacrifice created them. The needless cruelty of it seemed to us, so recently from the safe shelter of American homes, almost beyond belief.