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OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 FREDERIC COLEMAN 
 
OUR BOYS OVER 
 THERE 
 
 TO THE YOUNG AMERICAN IN 
 KHAKI — WHAT HE WILL FIND 
 WHEN HE GETS TO FRANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC COLEMAN, F.R.G.S. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "FROM MONS TO YPRES WITH GENERAL FRENCH," 
 "WITH CAVALRY IN 1915," Etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
C 6 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 APR 13 1918 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 1LA494572 
 
 ""Vj ^<v t 
 
TO MY DAUGHTER 
 
 RUTH 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I COMMENCED this series of notes shortly after 
 leaving Liverpool and concluded it before reach- 
 ing Sandy Hook. Many of the bits of counsel it con- 
 tains are the fruit of the combined efforts of a num- 
 ber of good friends with whom I have seen active 
 service in France. I prefer to be considered the 
 compiler, rather than the actual source of some of 
 the advice given. For all of it, however, I accept 
 full responsibility. Every statement has been made 
 and every opinion sifted with but one idea — that 
 of being of real service to the soldiers of that 
 New Army which The United States of America will 
 soon send overseas to fight in a truly just cause, 
 for God, Humanity and the Right. From the bot- 
 tom of our hearts my old comrades and I wish them 
 God-speed. 
 
 Frederic Coleman. 
 
 vii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 FIGHTING in France is a very different matter 
 to-day than it was when I went there with 
 General Sir John French's First British Expedition- 
 ary Force, in August, 19 14. Compared with the 
 Germans, we knew but little of the machinery and 
 organisation of modern warfare. 
 
 In those days we fought against all sort of odds. 
 Not only did the Huns have a preponderance of men 
 and guns, aircraft and transport, and the usual im- 
 pedimenta of campaigning, but they developed a 
 habit of introducing new moves into the game with 
 somewhat disconcerting rapidity. Trench bombs 
 and trench mortars, hand and rifle grenades, fresh 
 intricacies of barbed wire, fine night lights, which 
 fortunately illuminated the darkness for us as well 
 as for the enemy, sniping brought to an exact science, 
 gas and gas shells, trench and dugout construction 
 on a business-like basis, and innumerable other at- 
 tributes of trench fighting were practised by the 
 Boches first, to be taken up, well learned, then grad- 
 ually improved upon by us in turn. 
 
 The French helped us in some ways. Their gun- 
 ners were worth their weight in rubies to our gal- 
 lant artillerymen. But most of our lessons came 
 straight from Brother Boche. We paid for them. 
 Like most lessons for which a high price is paid, 
 they were well learned. 
 
 "The only way they will learn is by their own ex- 
 perience" is a hackneyed phrase long since grown fa- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 miliar when one is discussing new arrivals at the 
 front. But words of advice may be spoken to good 
 effect, nevertheless. I can remember with heart- 
 felt gratitude more than one straight tip that saved 
 me from undue exposure to danger and unnecessary 
 hardship. "The cross-roads in a village in this part 
 of the world," said my General to me one day in 
 October, 19 14, when our division was holding the 
 Messines line, "is a good place to avoid when possi- 
 ble: Crossed pave roadways send shell-splinters 
 whirring in all directions. The enemy may chuck 
 shells on such points at any time, at random, on the 
 chance of causing us inconvenience." That seemed 
 reasonable. I arranged my halts so that the cross- 
 roads were at a respectful distance. A couple of 
 days later a new division, fresh from England, came 
 through Neuve Eglise, a Flemish town some miles 
 back from the firing line. A halt was made. The 
 men strolled curiously about the village cross-roads 
 for half an hour. Smash! Bang! came a shell. 
 Crash ! came another. Just two. Two odd ones, 
 apparently. No special reason could be assigned 
 for their coming. Just two shells at random, strik- 
 ing the junction of two roads for general effect. But 
 those two shells caught the new lot, halted at the 
 cross-roads, and killed twenty-two of them and 
 wounded as many more. Had the officer in charge 
 of that company been given the warning my Gen- 
 eral had given me I doubt if he would have failed 
 to have passed it on to his men, and thereby a hand- 
 ful of lives might have been saved. The little obvi- 
 ous things, however, sometimes escape the telling. 
 
 On the other hand, I ran across gratuitous ad- 
 vice, at times. More than once I have had it hurled 
 at me in no uncertain tone. Once I walked upright 
 
INTRODUCTION XI 
 
 toward a machine gun emplacement in a depression 
 in the ground. I did not know of its proximity. 
 Neither did I know I was at that particular point in 
 range of a Hun rifle. I was told to "get down" in 
 a manner and with a sufficiency of trimmings which 
 would have induced haste in any case. As I dropped, 
 a half score of wicked little Mauser bullets sung 
 over my head, and to the accompaniment of the pe- 
 culiar "swish-swish" of an itinerant pellet I was 
 given an opportunity of listening, for some minutes, 
 to a low-voiced but marvellously complete sympo- 
 sium on the subject of foolish folk attached to head- 
 quarters staffs who put more valuable units of the 
 command into needless danger of discovery. I re- 
 membered that tirade, however, for a long time. 
 Out of it I sorted some of the most valuable advice 
 ever proffered me. 
 
 I have had advice from all ranks, too. From 
 generals and from colonels, from non-coms and from 
 "Tommies." Probably the most valuable of all has 
 come to me from time to time from the junior subs. 
 These officers in the British Army correspond in 
 rank with our American second lieutenants. They 
 are mere kids, many of the junior subs at the Front, 
 but their wisdom is frequently as that of Solomon. 
 Few indeed are the better class homes in England, 
 Ireland, Scotland and Wales that have not contribu- 
 ted their quota to the army of junior subs in France 
 and Flanders. Few homes have escaped the loss 
 of one or more of the youngsters, the best of Brit- 
 ain's blood. One had but to know them to love 
 them, these splendid, brave young sportsmen, to 
 whom to "play the game" and fight and die like Eng- 
 lishmen came naturally, as a precious heritage of 
 race. 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 At the commencement of the war the junior sub 
 cut little figure, comparatively. The company com- 
 mander or the squadron leader, and the incompara- 
 ble, sometimes grizzled British non-commissioned 
 officer, were the principal actors. But the war has 
 changed all that. The subalterns have been given 
 added responsibility. In a modern attack the junior 
 sub is a veritable young brigadier, in real earnest. 
 The non-commissioned officer, too, has much more 
 importance in the general scheme of the actual at- 
 tack than he once had. Units are smaller. The 
 work is under more close and efficient organisation. 
 Each little group has its own particular work cut 
 out for it. Each man feels that his own individual 
 conduct may mean much. The success or failure 
 of a mere half dozen men in a line of thousands 
 upon thousands may mean a big factor in the suc- 
 cess or failure of the whole. The rate of individual 
 responsibility has not only risen, but the possibility 
 for individual prowess has increased, or at least the 
 results of such prowess are easier to trace. Small 
 groups are more than ever in the limelight. Their 
 members feel the special responsibility and the rare 
 opportunity that may be theirs, and are rendered 
 more and more keen as they are given a part to play 
 the connection of which with the whole big game is 
 less and less hard to distinguish. 
 
 That is where the American soldier will shine. As 
 I remember the sort of fellows I had for com- 
 rades in the Spanish-American War and the War 
 in the Philippines that followed it, I long to see per- 
 sonally how our boys will cotton to the work when 
 they get into the front trenches in France. Indi- 
 vidual initiative, individual intelligence, adaptabil- 
 ity to strange environments and circumstances, 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 physical capability of a high order, will help make 
 the American soldier in the field one of the finest 
 fighting units the world has ever seen. Since the 
 earliest days in France I felt that the day would 
 come when my own country would be compelled to 
 take a hand. I ever thought that one day the Stars 
 and Stripes would float over American soldiers on 
 European soil. That day has come at last. 
 
 Much that the American soldier in France will 
 have to learn no one can tell him effectively, but 
 from out all the varied bouquets of advice that have 
 been thrown my way I may be able to select a few 
 blooms that may stay some time unwithered, and 
 some that, even though their freshness may be one 
 day gone, may yet remain in a corner of some sol- 
 dier's mind, run across sometimes, perhaps, as one 
 stumbles unthinkingly upon an old pressed posy in 
 the leaves of an old book. 
 
 High privates in the rear rank, as we proudly 
 used to call ourselves in the days when I was carry- 
 ing an American army rifle, can thank their stars 
 that they are going to play a part in a war wherein 
 the man in the ranks is something more than mere 
 cannon-fodder; that they are a part of the scheme 
 of things to which advice is just as necessary and the 
 acting upon it just as important, as in the case of 
 their superiors in rank. 
 
 The lessons I have learned, and which I hope in 
 some measure to be able to pass on, apply as much 
 to the man in the ranks as to the officer, and vice 
 versa. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction ix 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Weather and Women in France .... 17 
 
 II "Poilus" and British "Tommies" ... 25 
 
 III Trench Feet 34 
 
 IV "On the Road" 39 
 
 V Kit, Rest Camps and Tactical Trains . . 45 
 
 VI Life in Billets 51 
 
 VII "Keep Smiling." Young "Non-Coms." . 57 
 
 VIII Trench Reliefs 63 
 
 IX Life in the Trenches 69 
 
 X The Preparation for the Attack .... 77 
 
 XI On Initiative, Common Sense and Gunners . 84 
 
 XII Belgian Peasants — Recollections — On Char- 
 acter 9° 
 
OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Weather and Women in France 
 
 THE strange sights and the unfamiliar scenes 
 that will greet the American soldier when he 
 comes to France will make his initial days on the 
 continent an enviable experience. 
 
 The general geography of France is easy to learn„ 
 and the amount of time required to become reason < 
 ably familiar with the course of the most promi- 
 nent waterways and the location of the most im- 
 portant cities of France will be indeed well spent. 
 The French roadways which have escaped the rav- 
 ages of war are efficiently marked with sign-boards 
 giving the distance in kilometres between small ham- 
 lets as well as important towns. To remember that 
 every eight kilometres means five miles is useful 
 on occasions, though many a kilometre that the sol- 
 dier covers in France he would swear to have been 
 well over a mile in length. A cheerful chap who 
 had made a considerable study of foot-work over 
 French roads told me once, quite seriously, that he 
 had made the discovery that every billet was placed 
 at the farthest possible point between two railway 
 stations. 
 
 Weather in France is like weather everywhere 
 
 17 
 
18 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 else, — it varies. Augusts are hot. I fear no con- 
 tradiction on that head. Septembers are hot, too, 
 if you have hot work to do and the sun is shining. 
 But September nights begin to be cool, and if you 
 are wet and getting wetter, a September night may 
 be uncomfortably chilly. Autumn rains, that might 
 be enjoyable under some circumstances, are not 
 greatly appreciated in the trenches. When October 
 likes, it can be glorious in France. I vote it the 
 best month of the year. Still, mid-October nights 
 in 19 14, enveloped in Flemish fogs, made many 
 a joint stiff among the elder officers. Those who 
 grumbled at the weather in October, if such there 
 were, loved November less. Nights grow really 
 cold then, and mud underfoot seems come to stay 
 for the winter. Fogs are frequent in Northern 
 France and Flanders in November. Most Novem- 
 ber days, even given a sun, make one bless an over- 
 coat. About mid-month comes the snow. Blizzards 
 alternate with days of thawing until the fields are 
 almost impassable with mud. Movements of troops 
 across the open country become impossible. 
 
 Mud in Flanders is awful stuff, but it has its 
 uses. Who that has tramped the three miles or so 
 from the walls of ruined Ypres to the line that 
 stretches from Hooge, in front of Zillebeke, to Hill 
 60 and beyond, has not blessed the mud? All across 
 the muddy fields, slipping, sliding and ploughing 
 along, we were used to follow no pathway, avoiding 
 where possible fields where enemy shells were fall- 
 ing. Then came, sooner or later, the inevitable 
 droning, rushing sound, to grow into a shriek as a 
 big Boche shell came over. 
 
 One was thankful for the mud, then. For the 
 advice I will give to a man under such eircum- 
 
WEATHER AND WOMEN IN FRANCE 19 
 
 stances, unless his job is such that delay must be 
 avoided, is to go down flop! quick! into the mud. 
 The quicker and the more flop and the more mud 
 the better. That is my way of looking at it. Once 
 you are down all your worries are over. Let her 
 come! If the shell lands on you there will not be 
 enough of you left to do any worrying with. If it 
 does not land on you, the odds are overwhelmingly 
 in favour of your escape from all injury. Many a 
 lad has lain flat in the mud when a big "Black Maria" 
 landed near and dug a hole into which you could put 
 a couple of taxi-cabs, and never been a bit the worse 
 for it. Yes, the mud has its uses. That same shell, 
 one of the big H.E.s, as the high explosive shells are 
 called, might land in a town you happened to be 
 passing through, and be a very different matter. 
 Those big 'uns chuck the towns about so — any one is 
 likely to get a good bit of the town on him. And 
 the way they dig around for you, those shells, make 
 cellars themselves useless as protection, sometimes. 
 Even shrapnel is not so uncomfortable as H.E. 
 shell. Shrapnel has hundreds of bullets to the pro- 
 jectile, but all of us who have been at the front 
 have seen, more than once, Hun shrapnel burst in 
 what looked like a fatal spot for a group of men, 
 and see very few drop. You will become impressed 
 with the great fundamental fact about shell-fire. 
 That is that you occupy a comparatively small space 
 out there in France. There is a lot more space all 
 round you. It is marvellous how many bullets can 
 go into that space. The percentage, too, of shells 
 of all kinds that come over from Brother Boche 
 and hit no-one, go no-where, except plump into the 
 mud, would cheer up the most pessimistic mathe- 
 matician that ever sat in a trench. 
 
20 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 By December winter has the Western Front in 
 his grip. The damp cold of the lower levels and 
 the dry cold of the higher parts of the country 
 is real cold. January is cold and wet too. Further 
 south, below Soissons, it is less wet than to the north. 
 February brings snow, which seldom stays long, but 
 is soon absorbed by the coverlet of black mud. 
 March, too, is trying. On most March days I have 
 seen in France it rained and blustered, while at night 
 snow fell, and the wind howled unceasingly. This 
 alternated with hard frosts. Toward the end of the 
 month, bright sunshine and spring zephyrs one day, 
 and snow the next, and more than once snow and 
 sunshine alternating throughout the span of a day, 
 mark its passing. In April the days grow warmer, 
 though rain falls with sufficient frequency to keep the 
 fields deep with mud. Trenches are still cold and 
 damp at night, though morning suns are divinely 
 warm. May is fascinating with her bright sunshine 
 and blue, cloudless sky, though both May and June 
 can produce plentiful showers. June warms things 
 sufficiently to prepare one for July heat, which is 
 much the same as July heat in temperate zones the 
 world over. 
 
 Taken by and large, a healthy specimen of Ameri- 
 can youth need fear no particular hardship from the 
 weather in France. 
 
 The countryside delights the eye, well back of 
 the line. The horrors of war are very real. Those 
 who see smashed France will not quickly forget the 
 sight. But such of France as has not seen the Hun 
 is a fair land, save for its black country, and even 
 that is not ugly. Some of Flanders is not beautiful. 
 Roadways near the sea coast run between sluggish, 
 morbid-looking canals and flat, dispirited fields — a 
 
WEATHER AND WOMEN IN FRANCE 21 
 
 sad, soggy, flabby land, in very truth. But that is 
 Belgium, not France. 
 
 The people of France, that the American soldier 
 will see and quickly grow to like immensely, are 
 simple folk for the most part. Like simple folk the 
 world over they are mostly God-fearing. Those 
 who have not seen France since pre-war days would 
 not know her now. France has undergone a change 
 indeed as regards her attitude toward religious mat- 
 ters. France, fire-tried, knows God to-day as she 
 never knew Him before her day of tribulation. 
 France has passed through the Valley of the Shadow, 
 and it has made her faith sure. 
 
 Save for those in the Army, the American soldier 
 will meet few French men, except very old ones. 
 The women, he will find, have taken the places of 
 the men to an astonishing extent. The women of 
 France become mother, sister or sweetheart to the 
 Allied soldier as though he was French born and 
 bred. It will not take the American soldier long to 
 learn the worth of French womenkind. What he 
 will see of women in France will make him more 
 proud than ever that he was born of woman. 
 
 To some folk France, home of fashion and smart 
 dress in ante-bellum days, might give promise of 
 femininity attractive to the eye, gowned fetchingly, 
 smiling bewitchingly, truly entrancing. Such French 
 women there are still, perhaps, in the large cities, 
 but the sombre colours and severe simplicity of their 
 frocks is their chief characteristic to-day. Years 
 may still press lightly on many pretty French lasses, 
 but though the Hun cannot altogether blight the 
 high spirit of healthy youth in France, the war has 
 made a difference that none may miss. 
 
 It is the bent, seamed, weather and storm beaten 
 
22 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 women of France that the American will remember 
 long. No man can go through France to-day and 
 not marvel at the spirit of the women and their un- 
 tiring energy They are keeping France together 
 while the blue wings of her armies are protecting 
 her from the further ravages of the Hun invader. 
 No work is too hard for these magnificent mothers 
 and daughters of France. Many who never knew 
 what labour meant have become toilers. Just as the 
 hospitals see blessed nurses who lived lives of gaiety 
 and frivolity one day in the past that seems so far 
 back of us, so village belles and the girls of the 
 prosperous French of the Provinces have taken up 
 what burden they can carry, gladly, cheerfully, but 
 with sober faces, nevertheless. 
 
 I was billeted in the home of a charming French- 
 woman, a fine musician, who would not open her 
 piano. "My husband, thank God, is yet alive," she 
 said, "but many a neighbour within hearing has lost 
 some one from the home. The battalion from this 
 town has been completely wiped out three times 
 and filled again, until the homes that have not lost 
 dear ones can be numbered on your fingers. No, it 
 will be long, I fear, before we will play and sing 
 again." 
 
 Then, too, I saw in June, 19 15, the "seventeen 
 class," as they were called, leave their homes in 
 Northern France. They were the lads of 17, who 
 would be 19 years old in 19 17. They were called 
 to the training camps two years ago. That wrung 
 the hearts of French women, while the bravery with 
 which they met the call was the admiration of every 
 man who saw them. 
 
 The American soldier, when he comes to France, 
 will see all this, and learn to be patient with some- 
 
WEATHER AND WOMEN IN FRANCE 23 
 
 what amateur girls in little shops, with something 
 a bit less well done than they might think it could 
 be done. Their hearts are big, French hearts, and 
 they will always be thinking that the American boys 
 have come from mothers and dear ones left at home 
 — come to fight for France. Treat them well, boys. 
 Be kind and patient with them. Your coming means 
 more than all the world to them. They will do for 
 you what they can. Sometimes it is pitifully little, 
 but the will to do is great. You are going across the 
 water to save France her flag and her freedom. Do 
 not forget to always have a cheery word and a bright 
 smile for the splendid women of France. They 
 need it, for they have suffered as we may well and 
 earnestly pray that our own mothers and sisters 
 may never be called upon to suffer. 
 
 The division to which I was attached was the 
 first to occupy an unhealthy locality called Ploeg- 
 steert. It deserves its name. Our trench line runs 
 through the edge of it to-day. I called there many 
 months after our original occupation of the town. 
 At luncheon the mess-president of the brigade hold- 
 ing that part of the line was cursed for the poor 
 quality of the bread. I volunteered the information 
 that the bread of Ploegsteert in my day was excel- 
 lent. I purchased bread for my mess, and knew. 
 That brought still more curses, loud and deep, on 
 the poor captain who catered for the brigade mess, 
 who swore in reply that he would change his baker, 
 if possible. 
 
 After lunch he and I walked through the town, 
 which was partly in ruins. I questioned an old 
 French lady who was standing in a doorway. "We 
 have been here through it all," she said. "We go 
 into the cellars when the bombardments begin, and 
 
24 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 when they end we come out and go about our work. 
 What else could we do?" Some townsfolk had 
 been hit, but few killed, she continued. The merry- 
 baker, whose brown bread I remembered so well, 
 had been hit by a shrapnel bullet but a few weeks 
 before and killed. "His wife is running the bakery 
 still, though in but a small way," and the old lady 
 shook her head sadly. I looked at the mess-presi- 
 dent. "Glad I heard that," he said. "Wait till I 
 tell those grumbling beggars. That will be the last 
 kick that will be heard about that bread." His 
 baker was the poor little widow. If that brigade 
 is still in Ploegsteert, she does not lack for custom. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 "Poilus" and British "Tommies" 
 
 THE French soldier will at first amaze his 
 American comrade. Seen in their trenches 
 or in billets not far "back" they are frequently 
 a tough-looking lot of customers. A bit nondescript 
 as to uniform, and universally campaign worn, un- 
 shaven and perhaps mud-plastered, they always look 
 stout and fit for anything. 
 
 It must be remembered that all the manhood of 
 France is in her armies, men drawn from every class 
 of the community. A more friendly lot of men one 
 would never wish to meet. They are universally re- 
 spectful to officers, either of their own army or of 
 the Allied forces, a fact that speaks not only of 
 good discipline, but of fine French traditions of 
 politeness. 
 
 French soldiers as a class do not pay the same 
 attention to cleanliness of uniform and kit that is 
 given to such details in the British and American 
 Armies. An English battalion, relieved from muddy 
 trenches, at once smartens its external appearance to 
 a degree that must be seen to be believed. 
 
 Another thing that will surprise the American 
 soldier is the amount of equipment, and its variety, 
 that the average French foot-soldier straps upon his 
 back. I saw a black-bearded "poilu," with a typi- 
 cal load, start off with his company for a long, long 
 march, with literally as much as he could pack about 
 
 25 
 
26 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 him, fastened securely by ingenious means. Over 
 either shoulder was a strap supporting two good- 
 sized canvas haversacks, one on each hip, both bulg- 
 ing with food. To his belt were attached two ample 
 cartridge-pouches, one in front and one behind. A 
 water-bottle dangled against a haversack. His prin- 
 cipal pack, hung at the shoulder, was, he told me, 
 full of spare clothing. A blanket, rolled in a sheep- 
 skin jacket, surmounted this and towered above his 
 cap. A cooking-pot adorned the back of his pack, 
 while to one side of it was strapped a tin cup of am- 
 ple dimensions, and to the other a loaf of bread. A 
 bundle of firewood at his side, and a roll of cloth- 
 ing, holding an extra shirt or two, at the other, 
 flanked him. 
 
 My examination of his equipment concluded, he 
 said he must be off, and picked up his rifle with a 
 cheery smile. A comrade rushed up and handed 
 him a sort of leather portmanteau. He grabbed it 
 without a word, threw the strap over his head, set- 
 tled his various pieces of baggage into place with a 
 strenuous shake, and stamped away sturdily, with 
 a firm step and head held high. 
 
 With all that, boys, the French infantry soldier 
 can make marching time of which any army in the 
 world would be proud. 
 
 For the most part the French soldier is just a hard 
 fighter and a good fellow, unusually hospitable and 
 generous. I found an evening spent among them 
 when off duty was sometimes great fun. They sung 
 songs from Chansons d' amour to grand opera, from 
 popular ditties from the Paris halls to swinging 
 marching airs of older wars. Many of the French 
 troopers possess a suspicion of the grand air when 
 drinking a toast, carolling a love-ditty, or roaring 
 
"POILUS" AND BRITISH "TOMMIES" 27 
 
 out a rousing chorus. Once in a while you may meet 
 a veteran that might have stepped from a volume of 
 Dumas. I remember three — an elder one who was 
 a bachelor of arts and science, a man of studious and 
 thoughtful mien, another a true Gascon, and the 
 third a fellow blessed with powers of mimicry that 
 made us laugh long and loud before the night was 
 over. 
 
 Some of the French soldiers are very keen to learn 
 to speak English. "Conversation books" were often 
 hard to get in the early part of the war, though now 
 they abound in France, and the United States wilj 
 no doubt be soon flooded with them. Good ones 
 are "helpful." An improvised one made by an Eng- 
 lish Tommy for a French "poilu" caused a brain- 
 storm. The poor Frenchman had a fair start until 
 he was presented with that booklet. Then he began 
 to progress backward. Examination of a sentence 
 that seemed wrong, somehow, showed that the vol- 
 untary teacher, in a spirit of devilment, had pro- 
 duced the following: 
 
 "Q. Where is the cat of my mother's aunt?" 
 "A. No, but the kittens are drowned." 
 Other sentences were in the same vein. 
 Never forget that every French soldier is to-day 
 a veteran, and that he has forgotten more about ac- 
 tual war than any one coming fresh to France will 
 know for the first few months, at least. He will 
 appreciate the respect that such knowledge will en- 
 gender, and the American boys will ever find him 
 quick to help them in any way that lies in his power. 
 He is without vain-glory, and is not puffed up, 
 though he knows himself to be a sound fighting ma- 
 chine. 
 
 He could, though he never will, take lessons from 
 
28 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 his Anglo-Saxon comrades as to outward appearance. 
 His uniform and kit, however, do not encourage him 
 in that regard. He is brave as a lion, and takes 
 fighting somewhat seriously. That is, perhaps, the 
 greatest point of difference between the "poilu" and 
 the British Tommy. 
 
 Tommy Atkins needs no praise of mine to tell 
 the American soldier how good he is. Most people 
 who speak English have heard of his prowess. The 
 men in the First Expeditionary Force, that went to 
 France in August, 19 14, under Sir John French, 
 were among the very finest soldiers that the world 
 has ever seen. In numbers that small contingent 
 might well be referred to by the Kaiser as "French's 
 contemptible little army," but it held on against five 
 Germans and more, sometimes, to one Briton. Fur- 
 ther, the Germans were the pick of the Hun horde. 
 
 What the American will notice first and like best 
 about the English soldier is his ever-present, saving 
 sense of humour. When things are so bad that the 
 ordinary mortal might be thinking of desertion or 
 suicide, Tommy Atkins comes into his own. Given 
 nothing to worry him, he is a chronic kicker. Real 
 worries dissolve his complaints into thin air. He 
 can see something funny in everything with which 
 he comes in contact. 
 
 On May 13, 19 15, dawn was the signal for a 
 Boche howitzer bombardment of the Ypres salient 
 which surpassed in intensity and duration any pre- 
 vious gun-fire during the war. From four o'clock in 
 the morning until five o'clock in the afternoon it 
 drifted from one section to another, without respite. 
 I was one thousand yards behind the trench line, 
 which all forenoon was covered continuously with a 
 heavy pall of smoke, as if a well-fed conflagration 
 
"POILUS" AND BRITISH "TOMMIES" 29 
 
 was raging beneath. The flashing of bursting shells 
 in that smoke-cloud were so numerous that no hu- 
 man eye could follow or count them, even in a most 
 restricted range of vision. The sound was one 
 grand, incessant roar. All the thunderstorms of 
 time, crashing in splendid unison, would not have 
 made a more magnificent din. The ear could not in- 
 telligently record so tempestuous a maelstrom of 
 sound-waves, and the brains of those in the midst of 
 its wildest fury became numb and indifferent to the 
 saturnalia of explosion. For our part, at head- 
 quarters in the support dug-outs, we could not dis- 
 tinguish the separate detonations of the shells for 
 the greater part of the morning. One regiment, the 
 Queen's Bays, held a bit of shattered front line 
 trench magnificently. Its right and left were in the 
 air, once, but it held on like grim death. It suf- 
 fered heavily. German attacks swept up to that 
 little band on several occasions, only to be hurled 
 back with heavy losses. 
 
 I talked that night to one of the troopers who had 
 been through that Hell. His only impression was 
 the recollection of a fat German observation officer 
 who obtained a place of vantage in a shattered farm- 
 house near the Bay's line. No amount of sniping 
 could dislodge him. Up came an armoured car. 
 The Hun officer in the farm noted its approach and 
 fled up the road as fast as he could run. "I had to 
 laugh so much at the funny figure the little fat 
 chap cut, with the tails of his long grey coat flap- 
 ping straight out behind him as he ran," said the 
 trooper, "I swear it did in any chance I had of hit- 
 ting him. He got to his own lot safe, I think, but 
 he did make a holy show of himself doing it." That 
 
30 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 was the one thing that trooper remembered of that 
 awful day. 
 
 That was the same sort of man that had come 
 out with the First Infantry Division under Sir Doug- 
 las Haig, now Commander-in-Chief. In August, 
 19 14, the First Division was 14,000 odd strong. 
 In six months its casualties — total lists of killed, 
 wounded and missing of all ranks — had reached 
 34,000. Filled up more than twice with reserves. 
 After twenty-eight days of continuous fighting such 
 of its regiments as the Queen's (West Surreys) 
 came out of the firing line with but fifteen men and 
 no officers left out of the battalion. The Black 
 Watch only mustered 60 men and one officer, and 
 the Loyal North Lancashires but 150 men and two 
 officers. Such battalions as the First Coldstreams, 
 the First Cameronians, the Second Wiltshires and 
 the Second Royal Scots were wiped out to a man — 
 no one left to make a report. Those are only sam- 
 ples of the sort of casualties the British soldiers have 
 gone through, and won through, in this war. I tell 
 you, it takes real pluck to keep good spirits through- 
 out, when suffering punishment, but that is just what 
 Tommy Atkins has done. 
 
 The more amateur soldiers of England were 
 good, too. Once I gave a lift to an Essex Yeomanry 
 trooper. His regiment had been in a hot charge 
 the day before and had been almost wiped out. 
 During the charge he had badly sprained his knee. 
 By morning it had become so swollen and painful 
 that he could only hobble along toward the rear. 
 No thought of coming back the day before, after 
 the charge, to have it attended to, had entered his 
 mind. "We were told to hang on till dark," he 
 explained to me, "and it took all of us that were 
 
"POILUS" AND BRITISH "TOMMIES" 31 
 
 left to hang on. I couldn't have come back very 
 well, could I?" 
 
 Coming through Ypres during hot fighting I 
 passed a friend. "You have a fine bruise on your 
 forehead," said I, pointing to a nasty, raw bump 
 the size of a goose-egg. "How did you get it?" 
 "I haven't an idea," he answered; "unless a shell 
 bounced off it. Some of 'em have come close 
 enough, so one might have done so." 
 
 That young sportsman, I learned later, had been 
 insensible from gas, then delirious, that morning, 
 yet he could pass a joke on his way back to the 
 dressing station, sick as he was. 
 
 Hundreds of incidents might be told to illustrate 
 the splendid discipline of the British Tommy. In 
 March, 19 15, the Huns took the town of St. Eloi 
 from us. We won it back, all save one point. Dur- 
 ing that fighting, the 4th Battalion Rifle Brigade was 
 sent up to take a trench. Another battalion had 
 tried the job, but failed. The Rifle Brigade set its 
 teeth and started for the hottest corner of the fray. 
 "You must cross that road," its commander was 
 told, "though Heaven only knows how any one can 
 get across it alive." Sixteen Hun machine-guns 
 were playing on the open space over which the bat- 
 talion must pass. It looked impossible, but over it 
 they went. In less than 60 seconds 1 1 officers and 
 250 men were down, but the rest pushed on. They 
 reached the trench, some of them, cleared out the 
 Huns with the cold steel, and consolidated the posi- 
 tion — a fair sample of British Army discipline and 
 valour. 
 
 The American soldier must bear in mind that the 
 British Tommy will know as little, or less, of Amer- 
 ica than the American knows of England and Great 
 
32 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 Britain. It is wise to remember that Welshmen 
 love Wales and are proud of it; that a Scot comes 
 from a land of which he is fiercely fond; that Irish- 
 men, whether they be from Ulster or the South Coun- 
 ties, will fight as to the merits of their own home; that 
 a Lancashire lad or a Yorkshireman differs from an 
 East Anglian as much as a Devonian or Somerset 
 man from he of Northumberland; and that the 
 London cockney is of radically different mould from 
 them all. 
 
 Almost every man in this world loves his home. 
 Few men know that theirs is not the best home of 
 all, and that few are seldom wise men, for all their 
 knowledge. As the American expects to be allowed 
 to love his own fair land, so let him tolerate in 
 his comrade overseas such comrade's love of his 
 home in turn. Of all the Allies, Australians are 
 the most provincial as yet. They are less tolerant 
 of any place on earth except Australia. New Zea- 
 landers are much more broad-minded in this particu- 
 lar, and Canadians are so much like our own good 
 selves that we will hardly know them from our own 
 blood. 
 
 As to the Canadians in France, they have indeed 
 done nobly. One night, at the time of the first Hun 
 gas attack, 200 Canadians were surrounded by Ger- 
 mans in the town of St. Julian. All night they fought 
 on. Some of our men had gotten up sufficiently 
 close to hear Huns call out to the gallant Canadians 
 in a lull in the firing: "Surrender, Canadians! We 
 are around you ! You have no chance !" 
 
 "See you damned first! Come and get us," was 
 the answer sent back in the night by a clear young 
 Canadian voice, and Bedlam was again let loose. 
 All our attacks of the next day failed to get to St. 
 
"POILUS" AND BRITISH "TOMMIES" 33 
 
 Julian. One came close, but all sounds of firing from 
 the town had ceased. The last of the heroic 200 had 
 fallen. Weeks and months afterwards anxious ones 
 waited for word from German hospital or prison 
 camp, but none came. The Canadians had fought 
 on to the last man, to the bitter end! 
 
 American soldiers will be very close and good 
 friends with the Anglo-Saxon troops in France, from 
 whatever part of the British Empire they may come. 
 They will find so many common interests and so 
 many points of general agreement that they will be 
 surprised. Then, the fact that the Hun is the com- 
 mon enemy, and no enemy to be despised, at that, 
 will be a bond between every Allied soldier. 
 
 The closer the bond the harder it will be for the 
 Boche. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 Trench Feet 
 
 ONE of the most brilliant British commanders 
 in the field, a man who had been through such 
 early experiences as the terrible first battle of Ypres, 
 where he earned considerable official commendation, 
 was chatting to me recently about the prospective 
 American Army. 
 
 "The success of the new American Army that 
 is now in the making," said the General, "will de- 
 pend primarily upon its spirit and discipline. To be 
 quick to follow the lessons learned by actual experi- 
 ence is, we have found, a characteristic of the splen- 
 did Canadian troops we have seen here, and there 
 should be equal keenness along this line among the 
 American contingents. That quickness is one of 
 the most valuable assets a fighting unit can possess. 
 Without it a heavy price may be paid for that which, 
 given real quickness of perception and accurate 
 grasp, may be had at little or no cost. 
 
 "Too great emphasis cannot be laid on the neces- 
 sity of taking every minute precaution for sanita- 
 tion and health. Continual vigilance must be em- 
 ployed in insisting that precautions against 'trench 
 feet' are carefully and systematically carried out." 
 Trench feet! One who has seen a regiment suffer- 
 ing from trench feet is not likely to soon forget it. 
 
 I remember the first time such an experience came 
 my way. We had found it necessary to pay a call 
 
 34 
 
TRENCH FEET 35 
 
 to the headquarters of a division that had newly 
 come into the firing line, but very few days after its 
 arrival in France. They do such things differently 
 now, of course. In those days we were very short 
 of troops in Flanders, and there was no time to place 
 them back of the front a bit for some final touches 
 of training, as is the custom to-day. The division 
 was composed of troops of the British Regular 
 Army, many of whom had seen no little campaign- 
 ing in other parts of the world. They were fit 
 enough, but had had no time to become aclimatised 
 to the weather of an early spring in damp, sodden 
 Flanders. I was standing in the village street in 
 front of Division Headquarters. The actual firing 
 line was quite three to four miles distant, at its near- 
 est point. Up the roadway from the direction of the 
 trenches came a slowly moving procession through 
 the cold dusk of the approaching night. As they 
 drew near they looked like casualties, and so they 
 proved to be, almost to a man, though they had 
 escaped projectile, bullet, and all other common 
 dangers of that unhealthy locality from which they 
 had just come. They were casualties, more surely 
 so than any of us at that time realised. Limping 
 haltingly, dragging throbbing, aching feet step by 
 step, they were a sad lot. Some had wrapped their 
 feet in sacking after discarding boots acute swelling 
 had rendered useless. 
 
 When they reached me I questioned them closely. 
 They had been in apparently very good shape the day 
 before. They had been marched unusually hard in 
 order to reach the position in such time as to render 
 a night relief possible. They were tired, but the 
 taking over of the front line from the French troops 
 that they had found holding it proceeded without a 
 
36 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 hitch and with very few untoward incidents. The 
 trenches were wet, but gossip as to trenches in France 
 and Belgium had led them to expect that. The night 
 was cold, bitterly cold toward morning. They had 
 suffered somewhat from the cold and the wet, but 
 standing in almost icy water all night could hardly 
 produce comfort. They had been cold all day fol- 
 lowing that night of cold. As the day wore on spe- 
 cific complaints as to swollen feet, become so tender 
 the men could hardly bear weight upon them, be- 
 came frequent. A sullen drizzle, half rain, half 
 mist, set in. The commander of the company to 
 which the score or more I met were attached wisely 
 sorted out the worst cases and sent them back to 
 billets. But the way to billets was long and over 
 an unfamiliar road. They lost their way once, they 
 said. They were uncomplaining, but each man was 
 obviously suffering acutely. 
 
 That division was not in the trenches many days 
 before its casualties from "trench feet" reached sev- 
 eral thousands. Later, at one of the base hospitals, 
 I encountered some of them. Few that had so suf- 
 fered would be fit for soldiering again for many long 
 weeks. The majority would require months of 
 rest, care and recuperation. All too many would 
 never again be of use as infantrymen. It was really 
 appalling. I studied the matter all the more closely 
 for the reason that my own division was due in the 
 trenches not long after. When we did go in we had 
 learned our lesson, however, as to "trench feet." 
 Our divisional chief medical officer was a genuine 
 hustler. He arranged points for foot-baths and 
 foot inspection, relays of dry socks, and a supply of 
 a solution we knew as "anti-frost bite." We had 
 a bad ten days in a part of the line that was plenti- 
 
TRENCH FEET 37 
 
 fully blessed with water, but our foot-casualties 
 from frost bite and exposure were less than half a 
 score, and some of those were chaps who had gone 
 out at dead of night, over the top into "no man's 
 land," on reconnaissance. Now and again these brave 
 boys would be all but discovered in the glare of a 
 trench light or Verey pistol, and thereafter have 
 to lie doggo for hours before they dared attempt to 
 wriggle back home. One night the ground froze 
 solid and with it the feet of one of our best stalkers. 
 He returned safely so far as perforation was con- 
 cerned, but for one long, tense hour he had laid mo- 
 tionless close to the Boche wire, hoping to be mis- 
 taken for a German corpse. His poor, wet feet 
 could not withstand that icy vigil. He lost most of 
 one of them, and though the surgeons saved the 
 other, the gallant lad came through pitifully crip- 
 pled for life. But what was most important to 
 him, he gathered some very useful information on 
 that stalk, and splendidly got back to his own lines 
 with it after the odds had become a thousand to 
 one that he would never do so. 
 
 To return to my friend the General, he was most 
 interested to hear how well the American soldier 
 handled his rifle. "No one who has not been through 
 it out here can realise the importance," he said, "of 
 training the men to use their rifles, — to shoot and 
 to be handy with their bayonets." Many observers 
 go astray on this point. The overwhelming posi- 
 tion in the picture occupied by the big guns, the ma- 
 chine guns and the Lewis guns, the importance of 
 trench mortars, hand grenades, bombs, rifle gren- 
 ades, and other accessories of trench warfare, make 
 some men think that the day of the rifle as an im- 
 portant adjunct to success in battle is well-nigh past. 
 
38 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 Such is not the case. Those of us who can remem- 
 ber the brave advances of the Prussian Guard at 
 Ypres, when they marched in battalion formation 
 right up the Menin Road, straight at our trenches, 
 on one occasion, if not more, marching to almost 
 sure death at the goose-step, know the value of ac- 
 curate, rapid rifle-fire. So do those Prussian Guards- 
 men, if any of them are still alive. Not many of 
 them were left when the broken waves of grey were 
 swept back as leaves by an autumn wind. The rifles 
 did most of it. Machine-guns we had, to be sure, but 
 wofully few of them. Those that we had were 
 over-worked to a point that made us wonder, not 
 when they jammed, but when they worked long with- 
 out jamming. The rifle, in the hands of a man who 
 can shoot straight and shoot with great rapidity, 
 is a wicked weapon still, and the value of the cold 
 steel, while it is not a subject on which men who 
 have seen it used love to dwell, has not, so far as I 
 can see, changed greatly, if at all, in the three and a 
 half years of grim war in Europe. 
 
 One bit of advice that my friend the General 
 tendered, indirectly, to the new American armies 
 was easier to give than to act upon. "Get rid of 
 incompetent leaders," he said, "before they come 
 over to France and make mistakes." 
 
 We can all say amen to that. We can all be sure, 
 too, that our High Command will, so far as in them 
 lies, see to it that nothing but competency counts. 
 Care in that direction means the saving of more 
 lives than a few. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 "On the Road" 
 
 LARRY is a cheery bird. In years he is a babe, 
 in war-wisdom a patriarch. He has seen 
 enough of horror and sudden death to have made 
 the average man quiet and sober, if not misan- 
 thropic. But Larry is never quiet, and the glint of 
 fun ever in his blue eyes gives piquant turns to his 
 conversation. 
 
 Larry is now a junior subaltern. He came to 
 France as a private in a special battalion which was 
 composed of splendid young officer material, of 
 which he is a good type. 
 
 We were cuddling in a front line dugout. All was 
 quiet except Larry. We had been talking of 
 "trench feet." From that subject the conversation 
 had drifted to route marching, its value and its ef- 
 fects. Then Larry obtained possession of the floor, 
 if one may use so imaginative a term concerning a 
 pow-wow in a dug-out, and held forth at length. 
 I wish, for the benefit of the American soldier-to- 
 be, I could reproduce his argument verbatim, quaint 
 phraseology and all. I will do my best to do so, 
 for through the spontaneous fun that always is part 
 and parcel of Larry's doings, shone many a gem of 
 sound common sense, born of actual experience as a 
 man in the ranks. 
 
 "Civilians walk — soldiers march," he began. 
 "That is why trains were invented. For a soldier 
 
 39 
 
40 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 can do without them, and he is not a soldier until 
 he can. What then is the difference between walking 
 and marching which makes of trains, trams and 
 traction engines almost a superfluity? It is sim- 
 ply this, mes amis. A platoon, a company, a bat- 
 talion on the road is not merely a collection of men. 
 It is more to be compared with an eight-oared boat 
 with each man swinging in time and rhythm. When 
 you have this feeling of combined action about a 
 unit on the march, you have something which will 
 make a cemetery of milestones and will not find 
 its own cemetery in the doing of it. 
 
 "Learning to march is less important than learn- 
 ing how to get ready to march. The back of all 
 marching can be broken in the platoon hut before 
 one sees the road. It is a question of socks and 
 boots. No boot is fit to join in a march which is not 
 a familiar comrade. The soldier's foot must know 
 it as if it had been born in it. New brooms sweep 
 clean. So do new boots. They will sweep the road 
 clean of your platoon in under five miles. Good 
 boots, sound boots, well-fitting boots, that is the first 
 secret of marching, but be sure and get to know them 
 well before you make a test of them over ten or 
 fifteen miles of road. Socks are hardly less impor- 
 tant. A hole in a sock means a hole in your com- 
 pany. Only 'thick' men wear thin socks on the 
 march. Wise men soap their socks at heel and the 
 tops of the toes. Wise men, too, first soap and 
 water their feet before they start their journey. A 
 wash in hand is worth a score that you may never 
 get once you have started. 
 
 "In the early stages of this bally war the British 
 soldier on the line of march looked like a parcels- 
 post man. Later he developed into a sort of pro- 
 
"ON THE ROAD" 41 
 
 totype of Father Christmas. It was only when the 
 authorities tried to hang around his neck the un- 
 expired portion of the next five years' rations in ad- 
 dition, that it was found that he could no longer 
 move without either horse or motor traction. And 
 so he now marches as a soldier should march, with 
 his equipment, his rifle and his fifty rounds of am- 
 munition. And in his haversack he carries such toi- 
 let accessories as will last him over a night or two. 
 Rolled overcoats do not add to his comfort on the 
 march, but they are mighty useful at night or if the 
 weather is bad. In summer, overcoats may safely 
 accompany his pack by motor transport. In winter, 
 it is foolish not to carry them." 
 
 I might mention in passing that it is never safe for 
 the foot-soldier to depend on having his pack car- 
 ried for him by motor transport. It is frequently im- 
 possible. At such times the weight and character of 
 his equipment means much to him, but of that more 
 anon. 
 
 "On the road itself," Larry continued, as he 
 warmed to his subject, "there are three golden rules 
 which make of a body of men a picture instead of 
 a rabble. These are, first, march in step. Second, 
 hold to the right of the road. Third, keep covered 
 off from the front. A battalion on the march is 
 a fine sight, but it Is not the only pebble on the 
 beach, nor is it likely to be the only unit on the pave 
 road. Other departments of the service have their 
 rights either in passing or overtaking. It is well to 
 remember this. A good battalion does not need to 
 side-step to allow a mounted orderly, a car, or even 
 a lorry to go by. Further, it is easier to march in 
 step than to march out of it, just as it is easier to 
 ride a horse than merely to sit on one. 
 
'42 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 "Pave roads were not invented by the French 
 for the discomfort of the infantry. Without them 
 the transport problems of the British Army in 
 France would have been multiplied by ten. They are 
 a blessing in disguise, even if that disguise cannot 
 be penetrated by the all-suffering foot-slogger. The 
 paved roads do slow up the infantry, however. Two 
 and one-half miles an hour is the only safe rate to 
 reckon upon. Files should be changed at halts so 
 that the same men do not always 'strike it unlucky' 
 on the cobbles. Trained men, not overloaded, will 
 do their fifteen miles a day without discomfort, pro- 
 viding their feet are watched at the end of each day, 
 that boots and puttees are removed at the earliest 
 possible moment, incipient blisters nipped in the bud, 
 and the soothing charm of soap and water applied 
 with regularity. A good officer always has his eye 
 on the men's feet, while he trains them to keep their 
 eyes off the ground. 
 
 "It is customary in France for all units to halt 
 at ten minutes to every hour, when they are on the 
 road, and to remain halted till the hour. Resting 
 troops should remove all their equipment and lie 
 down with their feet raised, if possible. They 
 should also keep the road absolutely clear. Only 
 officers should rest on the left side of the road. 
 Even they should remember that the road was not 
 made for them alone. Horses should be kept in the 
 column, their heads turned toward the traffic and 
 their business ends in a direction where they can do 
 no one harm. 
 
 "A band is the greatest aid to good marching, but 
 its position in the column should be frequently 
 changed so that all companies may have the advan- 
 tage of it. Failing a band, mouth organs and penny 
 
'ON THE ROAD" 
 
 whistles help the journey on. Singing troops will 
 always march further and better than silent ones. 
 Smoking on the line of march adds greatly to men's 
 comfort and happiness. I question if it decreases 
 their efficiency and it undoubtedly increases their 
 morale. 
 
 "After a halt, troops should fall in, standing prop- 
 erly at ease. They should slope arms by order of 
 the company commander and march off at atten- 
 tion, the command to "march at ease" being given 
 by platoons soon after starting, after a sign from 
 the battalion, commander. Each platoon should 
 comply with this order as it passes the spot where 
 the leading platoon came to attention. Good 
 troops come quickly to attention in like manner from 
 the march-at-ease. They should tighten their rifle 
 slings before they come to the slope, press on the 
 butts, look straight to the front, throw their chests 
 out, and swing their disengaged arms. In a word, 
 they should remember they are soldiers, a fact which 
 they will soon forget on long marches if allowed to 
 do so. 
 
 "A really long march loses most of its terrors if 
 it is split in two by a meal in the middle of the day 
 and a rest of an hour or two. Constant and unau- 
 thorised eating and drinking on the road leads to 
 inevitable inefficiency. 'Water, water everywhere 
 and not a drop to drink' should be the motto of a 
 good battalion on the march. Bottles should all be 
 full, but they should not be touched to the lips until 
 an officer gives the word, which he should do very 
 sparingly. Water is much more easily carried ex- 
 ternally than internally. Even temperance reform- 
 ers would stand aghast if they could see the effect 
 
44 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 of cold water on a man's inside when he is on the 
 road. 
 
 "Though marching appears to be the simplest 
 thing a man can do and his natural method of prog- 
 ress, it is a department of military training which 
 gives opportunity for much thought, much care, 
 much instruction and much foresight. A battalion 
 which cannot march cannot fight. Even a civilian 
 can tell a good, sound unit on the road from an in- 
 different one." 
 
 How much longer Larry would have continued 
 no man may know. The trench relief from another 
 battalion arrived at this point in his discourse, which 
 effectually "broke up the party," so far as that night 
 was concerned. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 Kit, Rest Camps and Tactical Trains 
 
 WHEN Mr. Punch gave his famous advice to 
 those about to be married I suppose he never 
 expected that his "Don't" would be taken seriously. 
 But I once heard a very well-known general, who 
 has been continually fighting on one front or another 
 for three and a half years, and who has commanded 
 many, many thousands of men, say that he was very 
 firmly of the opinion that young soldiers should 
 avoid getting married on the eve of their departure 
 for the fields of Mars. 
 
 "I notice many young fellows," he said, "who get 
 carried away by the exciting influence of war and in- 
 cur responsibilities beyond their years. Having mar- 
 ried before starting for the front, and no doubt hav- 
 ing promised to run no unnecessary danger, they do 
 not show any eagerness for enterprise and some- 
 times arouse the suspicion of cold feet in conse- 
 quence." That sounds a bit hard, but there is a lot 
 of truth in it, nevertheless. We all want to come 
 back home safe and sound, but the soldier with 
 whom that desire is the predominating thought is 
 unlikely to be the most valuable unit in his command. 
 
 Advice as to kit is easy to give. It, too, consists 
 chiefly of "don'ts." With the ingenuity that lies at 
 the beck and call of the big American department 
 stores well at work, femininity will, of course, pur- 
 chase war equipment for its dear ones to its heart's 
 
 45 
 
46 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 content. Some articles rendered thus available may 
 prove of value to the officer, but few indeed to the 
 soldier. In spite of the many presents the embryo 
 fighting man will no doubt receive from friends 
 and relatives, presents which range from cooking 
 pots to bullet-proof chest protectors, the personal ar- 
 ticles he takes with him to war should be limited by 
 what he is prepared to carry on a fifteen-mile march. 
 The arms and necessary equipment of the British 
 foot-soldier total a weight of 60 pounds, and the 
 American soldier's equipment when on the road in 
 France will probably weigh about the same. Every 
 ounce over that weight that a man attempts to 
 carry will drag like so many pounds after the first 
 hour's march. Many men think their extras will 
 surely be carried for them, but I can assure them 
 this will seldom be the case. Time after time it has 
 been proven by new contingents that all extras to 
 absolute necessities are invariably cast into the near- 
 est ditch after the first lap. It is wise, therefore, to 
 leave such extras at home in the first place. 
 
 I remember the advice of my own general on this 
 head. He had worked his way from subaltern to 
 colonel of a famous British infantry regiment before 
 the South African War, had commanded Austra- 
 lians in that campaign, and cavalry in the present 
 war. He is now commanding an infantry divi- 
 sion that has gained an immortal name, not only for 
 its work at the landing at Gallipoli, but its conduct 
 on the Somme and at Arras as well. 
 
 "There are two articles and only two in the way 
 of a soldier's extra equipment that I Would recom- 
 mend," he said to me one day. "First, a good watch, 
 a wrist watch, with a luminous face that screws into 
 the case. The works of a screw-faced watch are 
 
KIT, REST CAMPS AND TACTICAL TRAINS 47 
 
 protected from damp and dust and should last for 
 years without requiring attention. Avoid cheap 
 watches and insist on an hermetically sealed case. 
 Secondly, a luminous compass. The best one I have 
 ever seen is one in which the dial floats in oil. It is 
 known in England as the Cavalry School Compass. 
 Not only a commissioned officer, but a non-commis- 
 sioned officer, however small the unit he commands, 
 is responsible for his men. Loss of direction at night 
 is an occurrence by no means uncommon and some- 
 times has fatal results. A compass prevents such 
 incidents. Its weight is small compared with its 
 value. I have carried mine in my breeches pocket 
 for more than two years, and I would as soon leave 
 my watch behind as this trusted companion, my 
 compass." 
 
 Arrived in France, on leaving the transport the 
 American soldier's natural eagerness to get to the 
 front may suffer a rude shock, and he may be disap- 
 pointed to find himself sent to some place well out 
 of the sound of the guns for further preliminary 
 training. Such places are often called Rest Camps. 
 "Rest," once said a verdant army youth in my hear- 
 ing, "is a comparative term in army circles. I have 
 always found it to imply supreme discomfort and 
 a much greater labour than that which one has just 
 left. On disembarkation in France I found myself 
 under orders to proceed to a Rest Camp. There 
 is every appearance of an almost superhuman con- 
 sideration for individual welfare in military orders. 
 On carrying them out one is apt to be disappointed. 
 My Rest Camp lay at the end of a march of five 
 miles up a dusty pave road, where we found a col- 
 lection of boarded tents. We reached the camp in 
 the late afternoon. We left it before dawn the next 
 
48 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 morning for more marching on more pave roads in 
 search of a railway station which proved to be an- 
 other five miles away." 
 
 "Rats," ejaculated another youth who held a very 
 junior commission in the same battalion. "Rest 
 Camps have their points when considered side by 
 side with Tactical Trains. There is the limit for 
 you, my son. A Tactical Train is a collection of cat- 
 tle-trucks drawn by an alleged engine starting at 
 an unknown time for an unknown destination. 
 There is an air of secrecy about all movement in 
 France which is penetrated only by the German." 
 
 That is a standing joke in France, which is not 
 all a joke. It is astonishing how far the Hun secret 
 service penetrates. Every man in the Allied ar- 
 mies, whatever his job, should never forget that 
 German spies are everywhere. Much knowledge is 
 undoubtedly collected by these worthies from gos- 
 sip. These Boche agents are quite clever enough, 
 and gain quite sufficient information of use to the 
 enemy, without having placed at their disposal the 
 assistance of those who are fighting the Boche. 
 Moral, shun gossip of military matters wherever 
 you are. Then you cannot be unwittingly helping 
 the Hun. 
 
 "Tactical Trains have one very real danger," con- 
 cluded the youngster. "The men love to sit with 
 their legs dangling from the trucks, That's the 
 danger. Passing trains and tunnels may remove 
 more than one pedal extremity or at least render its 
 owner unfit for further military service. The loss 
 of a man who has survived even a short period in 
 a Tactical Train is a serious matter." 
 
 Cheery lads. They never saw the dark side of 
 things, really. Their air of mock pessimism was 
 
KIT, REST CAMPS AND TACTICAL TRAINS 49 
 
 always punctuated with jokes and laughter. Like all 
 good soldiers, they were prone to "grouch" when 
 there was little or nothing about which to complain, 
 and merry as crickets when facing actual hardship. 
 Mere boys, but splendid soldiers. Gone, both of 
 them, now. One, the victim of a German sniper's 
 bullet. The other went "over the top" at the head 
 of his men, gallantly, gaily, with a jest and a quip, 
 but when the ground was gained and the Hun 
 trench won, they found him, lying still and white, 
 a smile on his brave, handsome face, and his clean, 
 young soul gone on beyond, to the reward waiting 
 for heroes like him, who have "died to make men 
 free," in very truth. 
 
 Those who do not understand the necessity of the 
 final training camps in France too often resent the 
 delay of the day when they can feel they are in the 
 game, and some, in consequence, do not benefit from 
 this period as much as they should do. 
 
 The preliminary training of the American soldier 
 before he leaves the United States, excellent as it 
 will no doubt be, will be different in some points 
 from the training in France, though such training 
 may bear a strong resemblance to what the new sol- 
 dier has gone through at home. The points of dif- 
 ference will be very essential points. The soldier 
 will be put through the whole course of training that 
 has occupied six months in as many days. It will 
 be hard physical work, but nothing to the next six 
 days, which will be harder still. Unless the soldier 
 is physically fit enough for all this he could not pos- 
 sibly stand the strain of fighting, which is more se- 
 vere than anything he has ever been called upon to 
 stand in all his life. 
 
 No doubt, before he goes to France, the new 
 
50 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 American soldier will have learned some drill and 
 discipline ; to use his rifle on the range, and to march 
 with or without a light pack. His course of train- 
 ing may be more complete. In France, before he 
 is sent to the fighting line, however, he must learn 
 to be a bomber, a rifle bomber, and a Lewis gunner; 
 how to fight with the bayonet; to dig and to wire, 
 both of these to time; and to march with a heavy 
 pack containing all his worldly goods. All this 
 means a very severe trial and if carried out with 
 interest goes far toward turning the recruit into a 
 trained soldier. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Life in Billets 
 
 LIFE in billets in France may briefly be de- 
 scribed as one long struggle for cleanliness 
 against insanitary conditions. Each company must 
 make its own little military world. 
 
 No one who is not a trained soldier can possibly 
 appreciate the value of discipline in the everyday 
 life of an army, both when it is moving and when 
 it is stationary. Even the entraining of a battalion 
 is by no means an easy matter. Business like plan- 
 ning must precede every movement. 
 
 For instance, the battalion transport requires a 
 full three hours' start of the men. Loading parties 
 from the men must be carefully detailed under the 
 command of an officer. Imagine a long line of cat- 
 tle-trucks standing empty. Up comes a battalion of 
 soldiers. A well-disciplined battalion, exclusive of 
 its transport, should entrain, 30 to 40 men to each 
 truck as per the specific orders of the R.T.O., as the 
 railway transport officer is called, in ten minutes' 
 time. The men must be supplied with the day's ra- 
 tions, which are carried with them. Rations for 
 succeeding days must be arranged to be served out 
 at various stopping places. Opportunities must be 
 planned at some stopping places for watering horses 
 and men. Endless detail ever demands considera- 
 tion. Non-commissioned officers who can understand 
 and obey orders smooth the paths of their superiors 
 
 51 
 
52 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 under such circumstances, and contribute immeasur- 
 ably to the comfort of their fellows. 
 
 A billeting party, consisting of an officer from 
 each battalion and a non-commissioned officer (pref- 
 erably the quartermaster-sergeant) from each 
 company, will have preceded the train. The billet- 
 ing officer meets the train at the detraining station 
 with a sketch to show companies whither to pro- 
 ceed and where to meet their own familiar N.C.O. 
 as guide. This billeting work is another matter 
 that is less simple than it would seem to the uniniti- 
 ated. Accommodation must be found in a given 
 area for four companies, for headquarters and its 
 various details, for the transport and for a quarter- 
 master's stores. Billeting officers expect to be and 
 generally are subject to much calumny and abuse. 
 
 A billet in France differs from a chateau to a 
 cellar. Hardened billeting officers declare that an 
 ideal billet for a company is one which supplies a bed 
 for every officer, the company sergeant major and 
 company quartermaster sergeant, and a plentiful sup- 
 ply of nice, clean straw whereon the men, not too 
 closely packed, can sleep. As some of the straw in 
 France has been in use since August, 19 14, it invari- 
 ably requires inspection, — an inspection, I might 
 add, to be made with discrimination, disinfectants 
 and care. When in doubt it is better to burn the 
 suspected straw and buy more from the farmer. 
 Diplomacy dictates against taking straw without 
 payment, especially if the company's stay might 
 prove a long one. 
 
 In billets in France a little knowledge of the lan- 
 guage of the country is of the utmost value. It is 
 to-day always supplemented by a little knowledge of 
 English on the part of one's hosts. The latter al- 
 
LIFE IN BILLETS 53 
 
 most without exception are courteous and kind, pro- 
 viding the men extend a little friendliness to them. 
 Providing, too, that they have not suffered from 
 previous occupants who have committed depreda- 
 tions in the form of careless and thoughtless raids 
 on chicken roosts or orchards. One Tommy in- 
 formed me that he could always gauge the friendli- 
 ness of the inhabitants of a billet by their dogs. 
 "A good billet," he said, "has a contented dog that 
 wags his tail at the sight of khaki." 
 
 The moment the company gets into billets work in 
 real earnest begins. Latrines must be dug and 
 screened with the utmost care of the sanitary men. 
 The cookhouse must have its grease pit and be 
 made a marvel of neatness and cleanliness. A com- 
 pany orderly room, even though it be no more than 
 a farm-house kitchen, shared with the farmer's fam- 
 ily, has undeniable advantages, while communica- 
 tion by runner with battalion headquarters is as nec- 
 essary as it may at some times appear to some of 
 the company officers to be wholly undesirable. 
 Bounds for the men must be fixed; the custom of 
 the British officers is to allot certain estaminets, or 
 inns, to the men and make clearly known to the 
 whole command at just what hours the men will be 
 allowed to visit them. A guard for gas or possible 
 shelling at night is essential, as is a fire picket in 
 constant readiness by night and day. To avoid 
 fire the most stringent orders against lights or smok- 
 ing in barns are the most efficient antidotes. Finally, 
 the company must have its alarm post and be pre- 
 pared to stand to at any moment ready to fight, leav- 
 ing behind it its blankets rolled in tens, its officer's 
 valises packed, its latrines filled in, and its billets 
 scrupulously clean. When an alarm is received, 
 
54 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 the company marches at once to its alarm post, 
 where it receives its ultimate orders. 
 
 A new unit naturally requires much practice in 
 making quick preparation to move. I made that 
 remark to a captain of my acquaintance recently, 
 when discussing surprise alarms. "Yes," he agreed, 
 "that is a fact which strikes most people. It is 
 unfortunate for the new unit when it strikes several 
 people at approximately the same time. I was a 
 subaltern in a company once which was ordered hy 
 its company commander to practice a stand-to at 8 
 p. m. At 9.30 p. m. the battalion commander was 
 seized with a like inspiration. At 11 p. m. the 
 Brigadier wondered, over the telephone, how long 
 it would take his brigade to get ready to march. 
 Just as the men were tucking up for what was left 
 of the night, the Divisional General ordered 'gas 
 alert' Otherwise, so far as I recollect, the night 
 was calm." 
 
 Gas, Hun gas, is a thing against which one must 
 be constantly on the watch in billets, just as in the 
 line proper. No battalion may be sure that its bil- 
 lets, if "close up," will not be visited by the grey- 
 green poison-clouds. No battalion is a good one 
 which cannot be ready to march off, with its trans- 
 port, in an hour, at the outside, from the time the 
 gas alarm is given. Practice alone can insure this 
 with partially trained organisations. 
 
 Further, no battalion is a good one which does not 
 leave its billets scrupulously clean, however it may 
 have to leave them, at leisure or in haste. No tins, 
 no paper, no matches, no cigarette ends, no signs of 
 previous occupation should remain. Latrines should 
 not only be filled in, but their situation marked as 
 
LIFE IN BILLETS 55 
 
 foul ground. Ponds should be clean, for no wash- 
 ing should be allowed in them. Washing should 
 be done in tins filled from the ponds or water sup- 
 ply allocated for the purpose, and the tins carried 
 several yards away to avoid all chance of pollu- 
 tion of such supply. As to drinking water in France, 
 there are many farm wells, but the British troops 
 are not allowed to touch the water in them until a 
 medical officer has tested and decided what action 
 should be taken against its ever-present contamina- 
 tion. 
 
 Life in billets is perhaps the easiest part of a sol- 
 dier's life in war-time. Training should occupy all 
 the morning and a short portion of the afternoon. 
 During the remainder of the day the soldier is usual- 
 ly given his time to himself. A genial Major was 
 once asked if he thought the men of the battalion 
 would get into mischief if "turned loose" over the 
 countryside. The Major drew up his rather stout 
 figure in surprise, his eyes wide as he said explosive- 
 ly, "Certainly not! Let 'em roam. Let 'em wan- 
 der. Let 'em drink in moderation of the beer of the 
 country, if they like. Let 'em make love, in still 
 greater moderation, to the lasses that happen to 
 catch their eye, if the lasses like. I can trust my 
 men. They have been billeted in this locality be- 
 fore, and they may be again. They have just as 
 much pride in the good name of the regiment as I 
 have. They have never been in a village in France 
 that would not be glad to see them again." 
 
 Aye, a good battalion leaves its mark on billets, 
 leaves it in the friendliness of the inhabitants and 
 in the fact that it has left no other mark at all. A 
 bad battalion can be traced in a moment by the filth 
 
56 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 and litter it leaves behind it and by the sour expres- 
 sion on the faces of its former hosts which greets 
 those unfortunate enough to follow in the bad bat- 
 talion's wake. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "Keep Smiling." Young "Non-Coms" 
 
 IN due course of time a new command is moved 
 toward the front and at last the day will arrive 
 for it to go into the trenches. This is the critical 
 time, on which the fighting value of a unit so much 
 depends. 
 
 Experience has taught in France that if a new 
 lot is ordered to take over a sector of the line with- 
 out first being attached to an experienced unit the 
 newly arrived troops have to buy their knowledge 
 and the cost is paid in blood. So many factors con- 
 tinually intrude at unexpected moments in the war- 
 game, that carefully laid plans sometimes must be 
 abandoned. If matters do not materially change, 
 however, it will probably be possible for the units 
 of each new division that arrives at the firing line to 
 be attached to some old division for ten days. The 
 newcomers will thus have the advantage of the ex- 
 periences of well-tried troops, first being disposed 
 in platoons, then as companies, and last, taking over 
 a battalion sector. 
 
 One who has been long at the front will know of 
 more than one new formation, after an attachment 
 such as I have suggested, which has quickly devel- 
 oped its best fighting qualities. Many of us have, 
 unfortunately, seen the reverse, owing to the abso- 
 lute necessity of using new troops to fill a gap before 
 they had had any experience of trench warfare. 
 
 57 
 
58 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 I remember one instance distinctly in which a bat- 
 talion which to-day has a splendid reputation let us 
 down badly and was responsible for the loss of a 
 section of line which it cost hundreds of valuable 
 lives to regain, all because the senior officers of the 
 command had but a very hazy idea of the exact lo- 
 cation of the twisting trench line into which the bat- 
 talion had been rushed. But those were days when 
 we were deplorably short of men. Our needs of 
 those days are unlikely to recur, thank God. 
 
 I want to particularly impress the young Ameri- 
 can soldier with the fact that he will gain much in- 
 formation from the war veterans he will meet. 
 Their accounts will vary with the sector and the 
 period, for he must bear in mind that conditions in 
 the mud flats of Belgium are very different from 
 those on the chalk downs of Artois. Still more di- 
 verse will be the experience of those who "stuck it 
 out" and kept smiling during the punishing times of 
 the Great Retreat of 19 14, and of those who took 
 part in the successful Allied advances on the Somme, 
 at Arras and at Messines. 
 
 Do not forget that the British soldiers, some of 
 them, are men who did "stick it out" with a ven- 
 geance, under conditions more disheartening than 
 will ever surround Allied soldiers again in this war. 
 Do not forget that they kept smiling. They are 
 smiling still, bless them. You may kill the Brit- 
 ish Tommy, but you cannot, unless you kill him, take 
 away his stout heart and his effervescent cheerful- 
 ness. He has proven himself, the Tommy. He 
 will make a firm friend and a fine comrade, and the 
 boys from America will have his whole heart when 
 they come in contact with him. He may see things 
 from a different light. He may express himself 
 
"KEEP SMILING." YOUNG "NON-COMS" 59 
 
 differently. But he is a fine fighting man, and, best 
 of all, he has "kept smiling." 
 
 Keep smiling, too, boys. It is worth so much to 
 just keep smiling. And it may be harder, some- 
 times, than one might think. 
 
 Let the man who is not a professional soldier, 
 who has come forward in this war to help make 
 greater, newer armies to fight against the inhuman 
 cruelty, oppression and lawlessness of the German, 
 the Bulgar and the Turk, remember that without 
 the nucleus of our trained army we would be help- 
 less. The new soldier is prone to forget the value, 
 if he ever fully realises it, of a sound military train- 
 ing that has been systematically spread over a num- 
 ber of years. When the officer or man who is not 
 a professional soldier meets with the man, whatever 
 his rank, who has given his life, long since, to the 
 profession of arms, let the newcomer to the tents 
 of Mars bear well in mind the fact that the pro- 
 fessional soldier's military knowledge has been built 
 on a ground-work that gives him considerable ad- 
 vantage over the soldier that has had a short and 
 necessarily superficial training. 
 
 The new soldier can always learn some things 
 about soldiering from the old soldier. 
 
 The great test of a new soldier sometimes comes 
 with promotion to non-commissioned rank. Recent- 
 ly the son of a very great friend of mine, a colonel 
 in the British Army, became of the necessary age 
 and popped off into the army as a private soldier. 
 This pleased his father in one way, and worried him 
 somewhat in another. The Colonel was proud of 
 the boy for taking his place in the ranks instead of 
 waiting for the commission which he knew would be 
 his for the waiting. At the same time, the Colonel 
 
60 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 naturally wished that his son could be spared the 
 hardships that must be the part of the lower ranks 
 in a war like this. He resolved, however, for the 
 boy's own good, to let matters run their course and 
 let the lad work out his own salvation. The youngster 
 took to soldiering like a duck takes to water. His 
 father was a disciplinarian, in the army and out of it. 
 To have known what discipline really means is of 
 more use to the prospective soldier than much gold. 
 The boy's natural bent was not to be denied, and he 
 was chosen, eventually, for the rank of sergeant. 
 Naturally, his father's joy was great. 
 
 The boy came to dinner at my home one Sunday 
 not long after, and showed me a letter from the 
 Colonel. I took a copy of that letter and obtained 
 the Colonel's permission to publish it, and here it is : 
 
 "My dear Boy: — 
 
 "Your last letter gave me the greatest pleasure, 
 the more so as you tell me that your company com- 
 mander assured you that your promotion to ser- 
 geant, in spite of your youth, is in no way due to 
 the fact that you are my son. I fully appreciate 
 your views, and agree that it would be intolerable 
 for you to be placed in command of better men 
 except on your merits. Promotion for political or 
 social reasons is very much to be deprecated, as it 
 is the ruin of all discipline. In peace time there is 
 always a suspicion of this in the ranks, and it is al- 
 ways much resented. In war time the feeling is 
 much stronger, as men know they have to trust their 
 lives to their platoon and section commanders, and 
 unless these are carefully selected for manliness and 
 ability the men naturally feel anxious in action. 
 
 "You tell me your men are fine fellows and des- 
 
"KEEP SMILING." YOUNG "NON-COMS" 61 
 
 * - ■- ...... 
 
 perately keen to do their duty, as well as to show that 
 they have been well trained. This is satisfactory 
 as far as it goes, and it is up to you to see that they 
 keep this fine spirit when in the line ; I must even add 
 when going up to and returning from the line. Noth- 
 ing reflects the spirit of the men than the mainte- 
 nance of training and discipline under unusual cir- 
 cumstances. A platoon marching up to the line, 
 for instance, is of necessity much overladen with all 
 the various articles required; extra ammunition of 
 all kinds; in cold weather, a blanket, waterproof 
 sheet, trench boots, etc.; and the average weight 
 carried is nearer 75 pounds than 60. The pace 
 must be slow, about two miles an hour, but there 
 is no reason for breaking ranks 5 straggling or drop- 
 ping loads in convenient ditches. Inclination and 
 discipline pull in opposite directions, and the pic- 
 ture of a platoon on arrival is no bad indication of 
 its fighting value, and is certainly a true reflection 
 of its commander. Never forget this. If you ever 
 get a swelled head, cast your eye over your platoon 
 in billets, on the march, and in the trenches. If 
 they are insanitary, slovenly or slack, you will see 
 a true picture of yourself. In fact, any want of 
 discipline means you are slack yourself, or unable 
 to maintain discipline. This test is unfailing, and all 
 the best excuses in the world will not alter facts." 
 
 When the young sergeant read that letter over to 
 me, he said soberly, "The Governor does not in- 
 tend I shall fail to recognise my responsibilities, 
 does he ? Just wait till I get out there. If we ever 
 get near him I will show him a platoon that comes 
 a mighty long way from being slovenly, insanitary or 
 slack." 
 
62 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 And I will guarantee that he will, too. But his 
 father's words and others to the same point, would 
 have played their part. My experience is that the 
 young non-commissioned officer cannot strive too 
 hard for the perfection of his platoon. The results, 
 too, will be worth all the effort. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Trench Reliefs 
 
 TAKING over a trench," said the Sage Youth, 
 "is, I find, very like moving one's residence 
 in private life. There is the same house-hunting (for 
 though the map reference may be found the trench 
 itself may not), the same transference of personal 
 property, the same discomfort in new quarters and 
 the same ultimate settling down." 
 
 Thereupon, with a solemn wink, he tramped off 
 trench-wards. 
 
 In the early days of the war, trench relief was 
 much less of a business than it is now, and was, 
 in consequence, much more dangerous. Much de- 
 pended upon the character of the terrain immediate- 
 ly back of the firing line. I have seen trenches in 
 such water-logged ground that the construction of 
 approach trenches was impossible. When the water 
 lies a few inches from the surface, digging communi- 
 cation trenches is futile. In such sectors, we had 
 to send the men up over the open at night, let them 
 He down behind the trench parados, and stay there 
 until the incumbent garrison was ready to move 
 out. When the exchange took place under such 
 circumstances it was done with celerity and despatch, 
 usually to the accompaniment of sundry hits by en- 
 emy snipers. Five seconds was time enough for 
 that sort of relief. Organised trench warfare and an 
 
 63 
 
64 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 ever-watchful enemy have made such methods of 
 trench relief costly and impracticable. 
 
 Nowadays the relief of a sector of the line be- 
 gins with what is officially styled "reconnaissance." 
 Unofficially the boys refer to it as "the Cook's tour." 
 Everything is most businesslike. A party of officers 
 and senior non-commissioned officers from the new 
 unit is taken by motor 'bus to the vicinity of the 
 trench system to be studied. Guides meet the 'bus. 
 The party is taken forward to the adjutant of the 
 battalion holding the line, who sends the company 
 officers still further forward with their respective 
 guides and himself pays attention to the needs of 
 the officers who will later take over the battalion 
 headquarters. When the "Cook's tour party" 
 reaches the front trench line proper it is again sub- 
 divided and each little group of platoon representa- 
 tives finds itself attached to a platoon in the line. 
 Here they live for a couple of days or more gleaning 
 all available information. 
 
 I can give no better advice to a non-commissioned 
 officer who might be selected for a reconnaissance 
 party than to tell him to endeavour to obtain on 
 loan a general map of the position, and commit to 
 memory the commanding features, ridges, valleys 
 and any tactical points. On arrival in the trench 
 zone, by means of his compass, he will then be able 
 to locate various points as landmarks. 
 
 It is not often that reliefs can be carried out by 
 day, for troops, if detected on the move, attract shell 
 fire in a most unpleasant way. Consequently a gen- 
 eral knowledge of the lie of the surrounding ground 
 may prove of inestimable value. 
 
 Let me advise the man who may be selected for 
 the important duty of visiting the front line, be his 
 
TRENCH RELIEFS 65 
 
 stay there long or short, against trusting to his mem- 
 ory. He should jot down in his note book every- 
 thing he can learn of the position, such as ( i ) The 
 number of men holding the part of the line his com- 
 pany will take over; (2) The Lewis gun and bomb- 
 ing posts; (3) The state of the defences, wire ob- 
 stacles, fire parapets, communications and dangerous 
 spots; (4) The shelter accommodation in the sup- 
 port line; (5) Cooking, sleeping, washing and san- 
 itary arrangements; (6) Information about the en- 
 emy, his habits, machine gun and trench mortar 
 positions, his usual hours of activity, etc. 
 
 No trench near the line should ever be entered 
 without the permission of the officer commanding 
 it. Company headquarters in the line may or may 
 not be a desirable residence. The signallers should 
 have the best dug-out and the company commander 
 the next best. If the two can be combined, so much 
 the better, but it is imperative that the signallers 
 should be in a good place because in time of trouble 
 it is the company commander's duty to be on the end 
 of the phone wire. 
 
 It may be useful to note how a first trench system 
 is arranged. A well-organised system consists of a 
 first or firing line, a support line, and a reserve line. 
 The first line should be used entirely for defence 
 and should be well wired, 40 to 50 yards in front. 
 The garrison should act as if on outpost, ready at 
 all times, properly dressed, with belts on and with 
 rifles ready in hand. Cooking, washing and sleep- 
 ing should not be permitted in the first line pro- 
 vided the support line is close up, say within 100 
 yards, and the communication back to it is practicable 
 by day. 
 
 The reserve line is intended for the companies in 
 
66 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 battalion reserve. In short, the system of trenches 
 should not change the recognised outpost organisa- 
 tion of piquets, supports and reserves, but should 
 simplify the defence of the position and decrease 
 the casualties of a more primitive arrangement by 
 quite 90 per cent. 
 
 It is usual in France in later days for battalions 
 to be responsible for an area of this front system 
 of trenches, including the three lines, on a certain 
 front. Companies occupy a section of the firing 
 line and that part of the support line immediately 
 behind it. This enables the relief of the troops in 
 the firing line to be carried out at regular intervals 
 to prevent troops being worn out. An 8 hour tour 
 of duty in the firing line is perhaps the best arrange- 
 ment for a platoon. This allows 8 hours each day 
 for rest and a large margin for the work necessary 
 to maintain the trenches in good order. 
 
 In one of the best divisions in France, when the 
 battalions are ordered to take over a section of line 
 it is done in two stages. First the incoming troops 
 occupy billets or camps close to the line, and second 
 comes the actual trench relief. The occupation of 
 billets close to the firing line is in nowise different 
 in practice from the taking over of billets in any 
 other place, except that usually more stringent regu- 
 lations are issued regarding fires and lights. In that 
 division, officers and senior non-commissioned offi- 
 cers are encouraged to go up again, subsequent to 
 the first "Cook's tour," visit the trenches, learn the 
 latest news, and see that any items of importance are 
 disseminated to the men. 
 
 This division has another rule that might well be 
 made universal. It would prevent many misunder- 
 standings. During the day prior to the relief each 
 
TRENCH RELIEFS 67 
 
 battalion adjutant and company commander pays 
 a last preliminary visit to the trenches and care- 
 fully arranges, for each company, the exact time, 
 method and route of relief. That is thoroughness 
 carried to a fine point, but it pays. 
 
 My friend Larry, the Junior Sub par excellence, 
 said he would write me a valuable essay on trench 
 relief, if I would print it. Like most of Larry's 
 cheerful effusions, it contained, when produced, some 
 real information and sound common sense. It is 
 unnecessary to translate it. Here it is in the original : 
 
 "On the occasion of a proper trench relief com- 
 pany commanders and company sergeant majors in 
 our lot go up at least one hour in advance of the 
 troops. The popular idea is that they do this in 
 order to miss the strafe put on communication 
 trenches by the Hun if he spots the relief taking 
 place. This is untrue. Their object is to be al- 
 lowed as much time as possible for taking over a 
 varied collection of ironmongery known vaguely as 
 trench stores, which includes practically everything 
 in the trench, from rat-traps to latrine pails, by way 
 of rockets and bafflers. I once had three tins of 
 strawberry jam and fifteen Kirchner drawings sol- 
 emnly listed and signed for with the rest of the 
 stores. Handed over also are maps, aeroplane pho- 
 tographs, any important correspondence or instruc- 
 tions, plans for work, and a large book bound in 
 dark red cloth called a log book. This last pur- 
 ports to be a complete record of the life and works 
 of that particular section of trench. Were it kept 
 up to date it might be useful, but one cannot help 
 feeling ruffled when, in search of knowledge, one 
 
68 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 turns to the section headed 'Enemy Trenches,* and 
 finds that the only entry for two months is the laconic 
 remark, 'Not visited.' Systematic pruning of trench 
 store lists is helpful, but must not be attempted by the 
 novice, because only experience can teach what may 
 with advantage be deleted. Defective pumps, broken 
 gas horns, wet rocks and the like should, however, 
 be sent down to battalion headquarters at once and 
 replacement requested. 
 
 "The men having been duly impressed with the 
 necessity of keeping behind cover and quiet during 
 relief, guides having been met and assurance been ob- 
 tained that the N.C.O.s already know the route, re- 
 lief of the trench should offer no great difficulty. 
 Success comes to the officer who foresees where trou- 
 ble will arise and takes steps to thwart it. A 'good' 
 relief is one which goes off without a hitch in the 
 minimum of time. The method of one platoon or 
 company pushing its opposite number out at the op- 
 posite end of the trench is not recommended, for 
 should Fritz open up while all the men in the trench 
 are on the move, the resultant confusion is too aw- 
 ful to describe. The better way is for the old pla- 
 toon to keep its position and sentries until the new 
 platoon has actually occupied the trench and mounted 
 its own sentries. Then the relieved platoon can 
 file quickly and quietly out. 
 
 "Finally, when all is quiet again and the new oc- 
 cupants have asked all their questions and got every- 
 thing square, the old company commander reports 
 relief complete in prearranged code over the 'phone 
 and departs down the trench, mopping his brow and 
 exclaiming, 'Gee! What a relief!' The full 
 meaning of the expression the reader will only fully 
 understand when he has been there." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Life in the Trenches 
 
 IT has become rather a habit with me to scribble 
 notes on things when I have nothing else to do. I 
 confess there were times at the front when I sat 
 and wrote to keep my mind off possibilities not alto- 
 gether unconnected with enemy shells. This habit 
 became noticed sufficiently often to rouse the suspi- 
 cion that I was engaged in writing a book. 
 
 "What is it about to-day?" asked Tommy Dodd 
 one sullen morning. 
 
 "What could it be about, written here," I par- 
 ried, "except the doings of all of us? Life, my son. 
 Life in the blessed trenches!" 
 
 "I could give an oration on trench life," asserted 
 Tommy Dodd. "Put this in your bally old book, 
 you sorrowful blighter." 
 
 He rose till the top of his head threatened to hit 
 the roof of the dug-out, and declaimed sententiously: 
 "A trench is a rectangular ditch for troops to live 
 in, so that enemy bullets go over our heads instead 
 of into them. Trenches are joined together at the 
 end so that journalists can refer to them as 'our 
 far-flung battle line,' and in order to allow news- 
 papers to print pretty but usually incorrect maps 
 with even prettier and more incorrect 'front lines' 
 running diagonally across them. I believe we have 
 to thank the American Civil War for the introduc- 
 tion of trenches, but the desire to preserve friend- 
 
 69 
 
70 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 ship with our brothers across the pond prevents us 
 from often mentioning the fact. Trench work is 
 never, never done. Only Lewis Carroll could do 
 justice to the condition of a trench blown in or col- 
 lapsed. 
 
 " 'If seven men with seven spades should work 
 for half a year — 
 
 " 'Do you suppose,' the Captain said, 'that they 
 could get it clear?' 
 
 " 'I doubt it,' said the Subaltern, and shed a bit- 
 ter tear." 
 
 That proved too much for two other young 
 irrepressibles close at hand, who charged the glow- 
 ing orator, downed him and soon had choked all the 
 eloquence out of him with a neatness and despatch 
 that promised no good times for any Hun officer 
 whom either of the merry stalwarts might meet hand 
 to hand in a trench raid. 
 
 But Tommy Dodd was right. Trench life does 
 mean work in plenty. 
 
 Life in the trenches divides itself automatically 
 into two parts — the day and the night. Modern in- 
 vention has endeavoured, with considerable success, 
 to bridge the hours of darkness by means of such 
 artificial illumination as Verey lights, parachute lights 
 and searchlights. The use of the first two is practi- 
 cally universal. Searchlights possess one great draw- 
 back, lack of mobility. The Hun usually mounts his 
 searchlights on a sort of tram track, thereby exhib- 
 iting a moving target which proves to be annoying- 
 ly difficult to knock out. 
 
 A day in the trenches opens with the "morning 
 stand-to." This extends from about half an hour 
 before dawn to about half an hour after it. Every 
 man in the trench is awake and ready for action and 
 
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES 71 
 
 is inspected in that condition by his platoon com- 
 mander. Every man's rifle must be in perfect order; 
 he must have his own special place on the firestep 
 from whence he can fire, at the foot of the wire en- 
 tanglements which have been placed in front of his 
 own trenches; if there is any doubt about this he 
 should be made to fire "five rounds rapid" so that, 
 he can see the error of his ways — and shots ; his gas 
 helmet must be in good condition and ready; he 
 must know the position of bombs and extra ammuni- 
 tion, the immediate attitude of the enemy and the di- 
 rection of the wind. 
 
 In parenthesis, the man must be trained so that 
 he does not become jumpy. The practice that some 
 young officers may have adopted, perhaps uncon- 
 sciously, of creeping stealthily behind a sentry and 
 unnecessarily surprising him, should be condemned. 
 Such things always result in dividing the man's at- 
 tention. I have been told of a case in which a man, 
 on being told by his non-commissioned officer for the 
 tenth time from which direction the enemy was ex- 
 pected to come, replied cannily, "Yus! but the 'or- 
 ficer, 'e comes that way," pointing to the rear. 
 
 As the platoon commander inspects the men at 
 "morning stand-to" he must note their physical con- 
 dition, their spirits and cleanliness, the reserve stores, 
 latrines, and cook-houses, and the thousand and one 
 things that are to be found about and are integral 
 parts of a trench system. The morning inspection 
 and its results should not be a matter of decen- 
 tralised, subordinate responsibility. The man on the 
 spot must remedy defects at once, unasked, unaided, 
 and Larry would have added, unhonoured and un- 
 sung. Once the man on the spot "lets the thing 
 
72 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 slide" or "leaves it to the other fellow" chaos is 
 come to the trench. 
 
 The "morning stand-to" frequently goes far to- 
 ward taking away what little of the romance of war 
 may have been left to the waking dreams of the pla- 
 toon commander. Given new men, a cold, wet morn- 
 ing and a bad trench, a thoroughly-made inspection 
 will involve no light task. The inspection con- 
 cluded, "stand down" is ordered by the company 
 commander, and the day's work goes on. 
 
 Then it is that the men learn the value of the 
 phrase, "It's got to be done." This phrase, the 
 Sage Youth says, together with "Carry on, sergeant," 
 is believed by many men to be the real cause of Brit- 
 ain's greatness. Certain it is that a hundred times 
 a day, in the trenches, one finds it fits the needs 
 that continually arise. 
 
 Working parties are put at all sorts of jobs. Ra- 
 tions must be fetched from the cook-house, if the 
 command has a cook-house in or near the front line. 
 Above all, the question of the defence of the line 
 must not be forgotten. Sentry-groups with peri- 
 scopes must be posted at intervals and it is vitally 
 necessary to impress the men at the periscope that 
 the safety of the platoon is in their keeping and 
 theirs alone. 
 
 The war in Europe, as well as former wars, has 
 shown that the Anglo-Saxon has splendid fighting 
 qualities, but he is naturally careless and over-confi- 
 dent. Nowhere is this characteristic more noticeable 
 than in the matter of sentries. Some of the men of 
 the best of regiments will require constant supervi- 
 sion. During the time a platoon is in the front line 
 trenches its commander will have no rest if he does 
 his full duty. I once overheard one of the most expe- 
 
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES 73 
 
 rienced generals of the British Army strongly recom- 
 mend that the platoon leaders or senior non-com- 
 missioned officers post each of the sentries in each 
 section of the line. "Too often this duty is rele- 
 gated," he said, "to a junior non-commissioned offi- 
 cer, and general slackness often results. Personally 
 I would never allow single sentries at night. In 
 former wars double sentries have been found advis- 
 able and I see no reason to alter this excellent rule) 
 because the troops are sheltered in trenches. Too 
 much importance cannot be laid on the continual 
 cautioning which is required to encourage vigilance. 
 It is the only price at which success in trench war- 
 fare can be secured." 
 
 Afternoons in the front line trenches are usually, 
 when possible, devoted to rest. If special work en- 
 tails the employment of men in shifts rest should be 
 arranged for them in their time off. Generally, the 
 best plan is for every available man to work for a 
 definite period and rest for a definite period. Here 
 lies ample opportunity for the good organiser. He 
 can so order events that every man in his platoon is 
 content and the maximum amount of work is accom- 
 plished, or his men may be disgruntled for the rea- 
 son that they never know what time they can call 
 their own. In such cases the work suffers. 
 
 As to mealtime in the trenches, a noon dinner is 
 preferable. After an early supper, or tea, as the 
 British call it, comes the "evening stand-to," which 
 entails an identical inspection with that made at 
 "morning stand-to." After "stand-down," night 
 work is told off and once again the trench settles 
 down to work, but with a difference, for the dark- 
 ness lends confidence and permits of greater freedom 
 of action. The thought of the commander of a sec- 
 
74 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 tion is "What can I do now that cannot be done in 
 daylight?" The answer fixes the tasks of the work- 
 ing parties. 
 
 "One thing looms conspicuously at night, par- 
 ticularly. That is wire. Is it still there, out in front, 
 or has the Boche high explosive thinned or removed 
 it? The only way in which an answer to such ques- 
 tions can be obtained is by going out and seeing for 
 one's self. Personal reconnaissance is far the best 
 road to knowledge along that line. If more wire is 
 needed, it must be put out at once. As every coil 
 of wire has to be carried up from the back areas, 
 training in the best way to put out wire is absolutely 
 essential. The untrained man can easily put out 50 
 coils of wire and wonder next morning when he looks 
 through a periscope "what on earth he did with the 
 stuff." 
 
 Patrols should go out at night to ensure that "no 
 man's land" does not become German land, to cover 
 working parties in front of their own trenches, to 
 catch enemy working parties, and to scupper any 
 enemy patrols with which they may come in con- 
 tact. Patrolling is nerve-testing work at first, but 
 many adventurous souls develop a real taste for it. 
 The platoon commander must see that such men are 
 not sent out each night, as that sort of men are of 
 the highest possible value, and experience has shown 
 only too plainly that men on patrol have, as it is put 
 at the front, "only a certain number of chances." In 
 other words, patrolling is work that asks a high sac- 
 rifice, the highest sacrifice that the soldier can make, 
 if it is continued sufficiently long. A Lewis gun is 
 frequently sent out with the patrol. If the patrol 
 has no Lewis gun and discovers an exposed enemy 
 working party, it is advisable to return to the home 
 
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES 75 
 
 trench and turn loose the machine guns in the trench. 
 The Hun has developed a dislike for the Lewis gun 
 akin to his aversion for the Mills bomb and the 
 Stokes mortar. 
 
 The man who counts most in a trench from the 
 administrative point of view is the platoon com- 
 mander. He is, under normal circumstances, a junior 
 officer — '"junior subs" the British Army terms them. 
 It is the platoon commander in France to-day who 
 is winning this war, as much as any one class of 
 officer or man can be said to be winning it. No 
 amount of good staff work or generalship can suc- 
 ceed without him. His work ranges from accepting 
 the confidences of Private Jones, whose wife has 
 sold up the home, to the taking over of the whole 
 scheme of operations in a tight corner, when the 
 senior officers are out of action. 
 
 My friend Larry is a platoon commander. He 
 once told me, in most serious mood, that "the men 
 will follow a good officer anywhere. They fervently 
 remark, at times, that they have no desire whatever 
 to accompany a bad officer to the particular locality 
 to which, soldier-like, they do not hesitate to verbally 
 consign him." 
 
 Larry's men followed him, at Vimy Ridge, on an 
 occasion when he deemed it necessary to work right 
 through our barrage (curtain of shell-fire). They 
 got through with marvellously few casualties, "did 
 in the bloomin' Boche," who had a machine gun post 
 that was proving very nasty, and then took such 
 shelter as they could get while the terrible shell- 
 curtain moved over them, on to the front. Again 
 they seemed to bear charmed lives, for they had but 
 one or two hit. 
 
 Larry's worshippers, for no other term would de- 
 
76 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 scribe the relation in which they stand toward him, 
 out-boast all-comers after that escapade. 
 
 It is such boys as Larry that are beating the Boche 
 in France and Flanders. As America completes 
 the training of the boys now in school in camp, and 
 sends her swelling quota to the work in hand, an in- 
 creasing number of young officers of our new army 
 will be doing that sort of service. They are proud, 
 in England, of their wonderful young Larrys. We 
 are not a whit less proud of our boys, and I, for 
 one, would stake my life that they will give us all 
 and more than we could ask of them. 
 
 God bless them. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 The Preparation for the Attack 
 
 TO write intelligently and intelligibly of the 
 preparation for an attack, and not convey 
 useful information to the enemy, requires care. 
 
 The actual scheme of operations so far as the at- 
 tack proper is concerned has continually been under- 
 going change in this war. We have by no means 
 reached finality in that matter yet. The instruc- 
 tions given the men who "went over the top" on the 
 Somme were different to those given the men at Vimy 
 Ridge and in front of Arras. Still other changes 
 were introduced at Messines and later in front of 
 Passchendaele, Becelaere and Ghelavelt. The Cam- 
 brai fight was different from them all. Before these 
 words are in print still further alterations in detail 
 may have been put into practice. 
 
 The Hun drive which seems so imminent this 
 spring may teach us lessons in the detail of opera- 
 tions which will prove invaluable to our next 
 "push." 
 
 But the general scheme is much the same, and 
 has been since the "creeping barrage" was instituted. 
 The first necessity in the inauguration of the "creep- 
 ing barrage" was that the gunners should be able to 
 register and shoot with almost superhuman perfec- 
 tion. On the Somme some of the newer British bat- 
 teries fell short of General Sir Douglas Haig's ideals 
 on this score. The marked improvement of the 
 
 77 
 
78 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 marksmanship of the British guns at Arras and at 
 Messines was easily discernible by every one in that 
 sector. That was one of the greatest factors at 
 Vimy Ridge, which was an almost perfect "push." 
 Messines, too, was wonderfully successful. Every 
 item in the British programme was carried out like 
 clockwork. The same remark applies to many of 
 the minor tactical operations last autumn that gave 
 the British back the command of the high ground 
 in front of the Ypres salient. 
 
 The explanation of the "creeping barrage" is 
 hardly necessary. Simply, it is this. At zero time, 
 known to all units, whose watches are carefully syn- 
 cronised, the guns pour a heavy fire at a given line of 
 front. The attacking troops approach so close to 
 this barrage that they can almost reach out and 
 touch the maelstrom in front of them. At, say, 
 two minutes past the zero hour, the barrage moves 
 exactly 25 yards ahead. The men follow. At three 
 minutes past zero the inferno of shot and shell takes 
 another 25 yard step forward. So the attack pro- 
 ceeds, the men in the attacking line following the 
 barrage in always dangerous and sometimes unavoid- 
 ably painful proximity to it. The lifting of the bar- 
 rage from the actual enemy trench and dugout area 
 meant in the old days, when the curtain of fire moved 
 with less uncanny precision, and the infantry fol- 
 lowed less closely on its heels, that the Hun ma- 
 chine gunners would come out of their underground 
 shelters and open on the advancing troops. Drum- 
 fire is growing increasingly more terrible. The days 
 of strain which usually precede an attack leave their 
 mark on the stoutest Boche. Even should a couple 
 of Huns survive the tornado of high explosive and 
 come into the air with their quick-firer as the barrage 
 
THE PREPARATION FOR THE ATTACK 79 
 
 passes toward their rear, the attacking platoons, 
 under the new regime, are upon the Boches before 
 they can take breath. Many of the Huns at Vimy, 
 at Messines and at Becelaere peeked over the top of 
 their ruined hiding places as the barrage lifted, only 
 to find that Mills bombs were descending there- 
 abouts like rain, that a fine big Canadian or British 
 Tommy or kilted Scot or yelling Irishman was 
 standing close at hand, with a Lewis gun slung to 
 his hip, spraying bullets about as a gardener might 
 spray a lawn with a garden hose. Bayonets are 
 there, too, in plenty, and the Hun has shown an un- 
 usual amount of respect for the British cold steel 
 since the beginning of the war. In this he is wise, 
 for bayonet work seems to come naturally to the 
 English soldier. 
 
 Of the work through which the new American 
 soldier will have to go before he can take part in 
 an actual charge, I can speak more freely, though 
 I might say in passing that the following advice has 
 been most carefully compiled at a divisional head- 
 quarters in France, and subjected to the scrutiny of 
 the censor before it crossed the Channel. No cen- 
 sorship can be too strict. 
 
 To the uninitiated it would perhaps appear that 
 no preparation is really necessary for an attack. 
 That the .men after living for months in trenches 
 would be so glad to get out of them that one would 
 only have to fire a pistol or say "Go!" That is 
 where the uninitiated would be hopelessly wrong. 
 Experience has proved that the more used a man 
 gets to trenches the less inclination he has to leave 
 them and go over the open. In addition, trench 
 life makes men totally unfit for active operations. 
 In a trench a man gets no exercise. His condition 
 
80 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 after a fortnight's tour of duty is frequently ap- 
 palling. Consequently he must be taken out and 
 allowed to stretch himsejf, to play active games and 
 to generally get the stiffness out of his joints, and 
 all this quite apart from the actual martial train- 
 ing for operations of a kind he has forgotten all 
 about. 
 
 With absolutely new troops this training is 
 equally necessary, but new troops start with the 
 great advantage that the "trench idea" has not be- 
 come fixed in their minds. 
 
 The attack preparations start way back in the 
 dim distance at the strategical fountain-head and 
 filter through all the various headquarters down to 
 the private soldier. They take cognisance of not 
 only infantry, but artillery, engineers, medical corps, 
 aircraft, and every branch of the army, including, in 
 a big show, the cavalry. Of all these the infantry 
 plays a not-to-be-despised part in the finished pro- 
 duction. Guns and mortars may smash a position, 
 machine guns splash lead all over it, planes circle 
 above it and drop bombs, but it is the humble "foot- 
 slogger" who actually takes the place by going over 
 and sitting on it. 
 
 The composition of a platoon comprises every 
 infantry weapon. There is one section each of 
 Lewis gunners, bombers, rifle grenadiers and rifle- 
 men (whose proficiency with the bayonet may have 
 opportunity of demonstration). The platoon, 
 therefore, is a self-contained unit, and the training 
 of a battalion, in the British formation, becomes 
 simply the training of sixteen platoons. 
 
 At least a fortnight is the minimum time neces- 
 sary for the training of a normal battalion for an 
 attack. For the first three days little is done but 
 
THE PREPARATION FOR THE ATTACK 81 
 
 encourage the men to shake off trench stiffness. 
 The work consists chiefly of physical training, bay- 
 onet fighting, active games and recreation, with now 
 and then a brief, bright and brotherly lecture to 
 impress the men with the fact that "war" is not 
 necessarily the same thing as "trenches." This 
 part of the training is most essential, for the at- 
 tainment or non-attainment of good feeling and 
 camaraderie may make or mar the whole of the sub- 
 sequent work. 
 
 Given a feeling of well-being, health and fitness, 
 training proper commences on the fourth day. This 
 consists of the instruction of each specialist section 
 in the use of its own arm. What is wanted, not 
 only in the section but equally in the company and 
 battalion, is plentiful instruction in tactical handling 
 and little in mechanism. If a man can throw a 
 bomb accurately for 35 yards, he need not know 
 much about the size and shape of the striker. A 
 Lewis gunner who can bring up and fire his gun 
 without being seen is of infinitely more use in a 
 "schemozzle" than one who can accurately repeat 
 the famous details regarding the peculiar orbit of 
 the boss on the feed-arm-actuating-stud. When 
 trenches become untenable, Lewis gunners nowa- 
 days have an added responsibility. They are sup- 
 posed to conserve their weapon and themselves, 
 which sometimes means exercising considerable in- 
 genuity in the discovery and selection of a shelter- 
 ing shell-hole well to the front — in fact, further for- 
 ward than most folk would imagine. Each platoon 
 must be taken out into the country and shown that 
 ground is not merely "country," but a marvellous 
 combination of contours, the knowledge and use of 
 
82 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 which means success or failure according to the use 
 made of it. 
 
 If there is time each section should know some- 
 thing of the weapons of the other sections, but a 
 specialist must always be most special with his own 
 arm and not be converted into "a giddy harum- 
 frodite." When the sections are able to manage 
 their arms without their arms managing them, the 
 platoon is reassembled and the sections shown how 
 to combine their efforts. This is where the platoon 
 commander really comes into his own, or he can 
 feel that his platoon is truly his, ready to carry out 
 his wishes, a complete unit able to tackle almost 
 anything, and it rests with him whether the platoon 
 is to prove valuable or useless. The men are the 
 best judges. They seldom make mistakes in their 
 estimate. In training, their supreme denunciation 
 is expressed in the exasperated "He dunno what 
 he wants, himself !" and their highest compliment is 
 a satisfied and weary "He's all right!" 
 
 All training, but especially platoon training, has 
 to be "swotted up." Disaster lies in front of the 
 officer who goes out in the morning with the idea 
 of "doing something with the men out there." He 
 must know exactly what, where and when his train- 
 ing is going to be and not forget the fact that the 
 men possess healthy appetites to be satisfied some- 
 where about midday. He must not coddle the men. 
 He must not undeservedly damn them. Success lies 
 between the two, and has to be discovered, not 
 taught. 
 
 After about four days' platoon training the com- 
 pany is re-assembled and the platoon commander 
 finds himself in receipt of orders, frequently brief 
 and vague, and called upon to use his platoon to 
 
THE PREPARATION FOR THE ATTACK 83 
 
 carry them out. This is good for the platoon and 
 excellent for the junior officer. In three or four 
 days the company commander finds that he can issue 
 orders with full knowledge of the manner in which 
 each platoon will act upon them. 
 
 Battalion training follows that of the company 
 and the attack begins to take visible shape. Strange 
 creatures known as "moppers-up" appear, followed 
 by "Vickers" (machine gun sections) and "Stokes" 
 (trench mortar units). The battalion is intro- 
 duced to a line of flags which represent the artillery 
 barrage, which must be closely followed, but treated 
 with the greatest respect. The man who was in 
 danger of becoming bored with the whole thing finds 
 a new interest in the proceedings and decides that 
 "this is some show, sure enough," takes imaginary 
 hostile trenches with a rush and a yell and returns 
 to his barn at night, feeling as though he had, him- 
 self, unaided, won the war. 
 
 It is usual in France now to practice the attack 
 of a whole brigade combined, if time permits. This 
 undoubtedly helps to weld the attack together. 
 
 Finally the fed-up, tired individual who left the 
 trenches a fortnight before, returns wearing his cap 
 in a more jaunty manner, singing, full of beans and 
 of offensive spirit, confident in himself and his lead- 
 ers, ready to "go over the top" at any time and do 
 with a will anything he may be called upon to do. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 On Initiative, Common Sense and Gunners 
 
 HAT most Englishmen expected to find in the 
 new American soldier, to judge from fre- 
 quent conversations with British officers, is initia- 
 tive and sound common sense. They will watch 
 closely for evidences of good discipline. They have 
 seen Canadian troops absorb discipline and become 
 well-trained units in a comparatively short time, and 
 know something of the sort of fighting man the 
 American is likely to make. 
 
 The First Canadian Division won laurels one 
 morning in April, 19 15, by an action which showed 
 clearly the great military value of individual initia- 
 tive in the private soldier. That is the quality 
 which was one of the predominant factors in mak- 
 ing British generals think the Australian and New 
 Zealand soldiers who were under their commands 
 (and lost) at the Dardanelles the finest fighting 
 men that had at that time been produced in the 
 great world-war. Part of the Canadian Division 
 was in dug-outs in front of Wieltje and west of St. 
 Julian, in the Ypres salient. Some of the Canadi- 
 ans were unaware of the gas attack the Hun had 
 launched against the French line and their own, the 
 first gas attack of the war, until the Germans had 
 driven the French well back and come on after them 
 to such close quarters that the grey lines were clearly 
 visible to the surprised Canadian eyes. 
 
 84 
 
ON INITIATIVE AND COMMON SENSE 85 
 
 Grabbing rifles and ammunition pouches, with no 
 time for company or battalion formation, officers 
 and men of the reserve units rushed toward the ad- 
 vancing lines of Huns, and seeking such cover as 
 could be found, opened a fierce fire at short range. 
 The natural, inborn individual fighting spirit of 
 men raised in the open — men to whose hands the 
 rifle was no stranger — met the situation with such 
 instinctive cohesion of action that the Huns were 
 driven back and the line held until it could be re- 
 constructed. 
 
 Many of the lessons of the war may be so clearly 
 stated that a man of common sense can grasp them 
 at once. For instance, before the war, a trench 
 line was sought in a position that commanded a 
 good "field of fire," i. e., that had in front of it 
 as much open ground as possible. 
 
 This war soon taught that the most important 
 item in the selection of a trench position was the 
 extent to which the line could be hidden from the 
 enemy gunners. The space commanded by the oc- 
 cupants of the trench and the nature of the terrain 
 were secondary to the cardinal point of keeping the 
 trenches well out of sight of enemy observers. 
 
 Thus engineers might, years ago, select a hill- 
 top as a trench position, the line commanding the 
 receding slope to the valley below. After the ex- 
 perience of the greatest of all wars, they would 
 preferably place it fifty yards behind the summit. 
 More than 50 yards of "field of fire" is desirable, 
 but not absolutely necessary. A 50 yard space can 
 be so covered with wire entanglements as suf- 
 ficiently to delay an attacking enemy. Deep, nar- 
 row trenches with traverses to restrict the area of 
 damage from shells bursting in the actual trench, 
 
86 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 and to protect from enfilade fire, are demanded by 
 the newer conditions, but great care has to be taken 
 that they should not be constructed in ground of 
 so soft a nature that howitzer fire can too easily de- 
 molish them. We found it possible, on occasions, 
 to select a trench -line that could be well concealed, 
 which, if taken by the enemy, would be under perfect 
 observation from our own gunners and by them 
 easily rendered untenable for the Huns. 
 
 Discipline, the capacity to go forward in pursu- 
 ance of an order, in spite of the fact that doing so 
 seems utterly futile, is possessed by the British 
 troops to a remarkable degree. 
 
 Mock pessimism at the front is always in evi- 
 dence. A subaltern of an infantry battalion, which 
 had long occupied the Ploegsteert trenches, paid a 
 visit to a brother officer in another division, which 
 had been marooned in the Kemmel trenches for 
 what had seemed an interminable period. 
 
 "You will notice," said the Kemmel man, "my 
 men are planting daffodils on the parapets to hide 
 'em. We hope to have the line quite invisible in 
 the course of time." 
 
 "Humph," replied he of Ploegsteert, "you are 
 a lot of blooming optimists. My men have planted 
 acorns in front of our ditch." 
 
 The boys in the aircraft lot have the most spec- 
 tacular jobs at the front. It is work for young- 
 sters, but it requires great stamina. . Few are fitted 
 for it. What one brave young lad will do for 
 months some equally brave comrade cannot stick 
 for long. The heads that guide the flying men must 
 be good judges of the human element, and I have 
 known good flying men broken and their nerve lost 
 
ON INITIATIVE AND COMMON SENSE 87 
 
 forever by being "kept at it" a shade too long at a 
 stretch. 
 
 To my mind the hardest work at the front is done 
 by the man who "goes up in a push" inside of a 
 tank. The instability; the slipping, sliding voyage 
 in which the men are thrown about in maddening 
 fashion; the great heat and the intolerable choking 
 sensation that accompanies work in a temperature 
 above 120 degrees; the incessant din which renders 
 some men deaf for days thereafter; and the nerve- 
 exhausting excitement of such close proximity to the 
 human prey of these leviathans of steel and iron is 
 a huge strain on the man inside the tanks. Added 
 to all this, of late, is the danger of the new Hun 
 trench-field-gun planned to render the tank hors de 
 combat. 
 
 An experienced officer of the British artillery sent 
 me a few lines not long ago which may interest the 
 American gunners-to-be. 
 
 "You have asked me to give you some notes from 
 the gunner's point of view," he wrote, "which may 
 be of use and interest to American gunners when 
 entering on their first experience of trench war- 
 fare. 
 
 "I suspect that the first shock which awaits the 
 American gunner is the discovery of how small a 
 part shooting plays in his daily life. On an aver- 
 age day the personnel of a battery (199 in all), is 
 employed roughly as follows : — 40 men on the guns 
 and telephones (four per gun detachment is fairly 
 generous) : 57 men in the horse lines: say another 
 30 to include officers and their servants, cooks, sad- 
 dlers and other employed men: and the remaining 
 72 are in all probability digging. They may be dig- 
 ging gun pits or potato patches, but it is not long 
 
88 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 before the gunner finds that the spade is mightier 
 than the gun. At all events, it bulks larger in his 
 daily life. 
 
 "I am under the impression that the troops from 
 Overseas have not accepted this prosaic point of 
 view, and still cling to the outworn creed that the 
 soldier's duty is to kill his enemy, and to devote his 
 periods of leisure from his legitimate occupation 
 to such amusement as his fancy bids. He certainly 
 excels in either role. But they are red letter days 
 on which Huns are killed in bulk. 
 
 "Of course the gunner grumbles. But he learns 
 the necessity for his labours. He digs not only for 
 his safety, but for his comfort. The winter in Bel- 
 gium is very wet. The battery which has taken life 
 easily during the summer and finds itself in No- 
 vember with no horse standings, no drains, no huts, 
 in a waggon line far from a road, is not to be en- 
 vied. It is not always possible to hand over the 
 camp to another unit before the day of reckoning 
 comes. The battery which does so may court itself 
 lucky — unless it meets its successor again. 
 
 "From some standpoints it is impossible to ad- 
 vise the newcomer to trench warfare. Along some 
 lines he must buy his experience like everybody else. 
 A volume of morals and maxims might be written. 
 I suggest two. 'The reward for misplaced hero- 
 ism is a court-martial.' That should be written up 
 in every O.P. (observation post) and gun pit. It 
 is misplaced heroism to show yourself in your O.P. 
 or when approaching it. The loss of your own un- 
 worthy person matters little. The loss of your 
 O.P. matters much. It is always misplaced hero- 
 ism to expose yourself when you can do your work 
 equally well under cover. The aspirant for hon- 
 
ON INITIATIVE AND COMMON SENSE 89 
 
 ours will get his chances without making them. 
 
 "Again, 'The Hun is not the fool you think him.' 
 Well-trodden tracks leading to six rectangles, with 
 defined shadows, will suggest to a hostile airman 
 an occupied battery position. Slope the walls of 
 your gun pits and carry the tracks well past the po- 
 sition and you may live happily and undisturbed for 
 months. 
 
 "Exercise of the imagination will save from the 
 greater follies of trench warfare. A well-devel- 
 oped sense of humour will relieve its greater tedium. 
 The American soldier will arrive in France well 
 equipped with both, and may create a new school 
 on the Western Front. If he will combine with all 
 this the accumulated experience of those who have 
 fought here for long months and the discipline of 
 the old army, he will be a valued Ally and a wel- 
 come friend." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 Belgian Peasants — Recollections — On 
 Character 
 
 SOME American soldiers who go to France may 
 come in contact with the Belgian peasantry. 
 They are markedly different folk from the French. 
 Before the war they lacked the vivacity of the 
 French, were slower of thought and of action, and 
 their heart-breaking experiences during the last 
 three and a half years seem to have deadened many 
 of them to all feeling. 
 
 In most sections of the line nowadays the custom 
 is to remove the countryfolk and villagers to places 
 of safety, whether they will or no. Of all the at- 
 tributes of the Belgian people, their persistence in 
 making back to their homes in a shelled area, as 
 soon as the shells cease falling, is the most promi- 
 nent. Many of the peasants pursue their daily 
 round of labour under shell-fire. Many others 
 leave the bombarded fields or villages, albeit reluc- 
 tantly, only to return as soon as the shell splinters 
 have ceased to spatter about. 
 
 Hard-worked toilers, whose lives have been one 
 continual round of labour, are, more often than 
 not, fatalists. Such lives produce men and women 
 who accept conditions blindly and uncomplainingly. 
 A peculiar love of the soil which they have tilled, 
 and from which they have sprung, seems to take the 
 place in many Flemish peasants of the more defi- 
 
 90 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 91 
 
 nite and definable Anglo-Saxon or Gallic spirit of 
 intense patriotism. Many poor Belgians seem pos- 
 sessed of a blind instinct that "home" is safest, and 
 once "home" is lost, nothing worthy of preserva- 
 tion remains. Their attitude toward death bor- 
 ders on indifference. 
 
 I remember a group of Belgian children I saw 
 at play at the roadside. A dozen boys were en- 
 gaged in a mock bombardment. A bottle served 
 as the hostile town. Stones made good shells. All 
 waited for the order, "Fire !" and then rained shots 
 at the target with a will. Now and then one of the 
 children would say, "Rumph! Rumph!" mockingly, 
 as a "Black Maria" fell near enough to jar them, 
 but for the most part they paid scant attention to 
 the fierce cannonade in progress all about. In a 
 field by the road a man was ploughing stolidly. A 
 woman was hanging her washing on the line, sing- 
 ing as she worked. A 13-pounder anti-aircraft shell 
 buried itself a few yards away, but she evinced no 
 interest in it, and did not even allow its coming to 
 interrupt her song. 
 
 Yet, along that same road, not many days be- 
 fore, I had seen Belgian refugees pour back, forced 
 off the road by the lorries, ambulances and guns. 
 Slight mothers with numerous progeny, one, or 
 sometimes two, of the lesser units in arms, toiled 
 by. Each Belgian, young or old, capable of carry- 
 ing a load bore heavy burdens. Bicycles with huge 
 bundles balanced on the saddle, were pushed along 
 haltingly, as road-space permitted. One lad passed 
 on crutches, flanked by two grand-dames carrying 
 blue buckets crammed tight with portions of the 
 family wardrobe. The strong wind tossed their un- 
 wieldy bundles, and they stumbled awkwardly out 
 
92 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 of the path of hurrying traffic, their feet bruised 
 against the stones that edged the pave. Tired, 
 dirty, buffeted by the gale, with strained and aching 
 muscles and broken feet, fleeing from death or 
 worse, in their flight they were abandoning their 
 worldly all. 
 
 In spite of all that they came back again, to go 
 through it all one day again, for aught they knew. 
 Peculiar people, the Belgians. The plight of the 
 vast majority of them will excite great sympathy in 
 the heart of the American soldier, if he comes their 
 way. 
 
 An American soldier asked me recently what 
 branch of the service was the most interesting to 
 watch in action. That is a poser. The fliers make 
 a wonderful show. The tanks are screamingly 
 funny. Infantry in action is, perhaps, the most 
 wonderful game of all, but if you are close enough 
 to see it you are too busy to do much observing, 
 particularly when a forward movement is on. Cav- 
 alry work is spectacular to a degree, but the same 
 difficulty applies. The observation balloon chaps 
 put up a show that cannot be beaten when some- 
 thing untoward happens. I know one balloon man 
 who made two parachute descents, both enforced, 
 in one day. Perhaps the most interesting part of 
 the show that one can see comfortably and safely, 
 comparatively, at times, is that played by the big 
 guns. 
 
 More than once, when the second battle of Ypres 
 was on, I walked from our headquarters to a 
 "Mother" gun, concealed under a screen of dry 
 branches in a near-by farmyard. The big 9.2 
 howitzer was throwing its 290-pound projectiles, 
 filled with lyddite, into the Hun trenches nearly 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 93 
 
 9000 yards distant. The five-mile journey was ac- 
 complished by each shell in 35 seconds, a rate of 
 more than 500 miles per hour. Standing directly 
 behind the breech, I could distinctly see the 9.2 
 shell as it left the muzzle and started on its sinister 
 errand. 
 
 For so huge an engine of war its paraphernalia 
 was simple. The howitzer stood on a platform 
 built into the farmyard. Rows of shells, each a 
 load for four men, lay in a ditch behind it. On a 
 log, under a tall tree, sat the captain gunner, by his 
 side a non-com busy figuring out mathematical equa- 
 tions, and another pouring over a large-scale map. 
 With his back to the tree crouched a Royal Flying 
 Corps man, his receiver to his ear, and an elaborate 
 box of wireless telegraphic tricks beside him. Across 
 the road a slender pole, a score of feet in height, 
 completed his wireless installation. 
 
 "Fire!" said the captain, sharply. 
 
 Flash! bang! "Mother" recoiled with a shock 
 and returned leisurely. Not a big noise or a very 
 trying one on the ears of those near by, unless in 
 front of the "business end." The crew stood close 
 at hand as each round was fired. Before the un- 
 sophisticated onlooker would imagine the great 
 shell had reached its destination, the wireless man, 
 listening attentively to the message from an aero- 
 plane observer high over the Huns, and out of our 
 sight, sang out "150 yards over." 
 
 A cabalistic sequence of numbers was shouted in 
 staccato tones by one of the non-coms, repeated by 
 a man at the breech, and flash! bang! went 
 "Mother" again. 
 
 "Well placed. Right into them," said the wire- 
 
94 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 less operator, as the approving message was ticked 
 from his fellow in the 'plane. 
 
 Flash! bang! the work went on, harrying the 
 Huns. 
 
 "Had nine direct hits on the Boche trenches yes- 
 terday," said the captain gunner, "and have got the 
 range pretty well to-day. Managed to get a couple 
 into one of the German batteries this morning, too." 
 And he grinned. 
 
 Very interesting to watch, indirect fire. It 
 brings home the value of the aeroplanes — those 
 wonderful eyes without which the army would in- 
 deed be blind. 
 
 The effect of the big shells is a terrible thing to 
 see. An ammunition limber went up the Menin 
 Road toward our front line, just then very hard 
 pressed. The horses were at full gallop. At a 
 railway crossing the limber jumped up into the air 
 as it struck the rails. The horses seemed to be 
 skimming the ground, they were going at such a 
 pace. Just as the limber bumped up, a flash came, 
 right over it, and when the smoke rolled away the 
 road led clean on beyond, absolutely empty. Not 
 a sign of horse, man or limber remained. A big 
 Hun howitzer shell must have lit squarely on the 
 outfit, and swept it into the ditch like the wind would 
 sweep away a leaf — just a shapeless mass, every- 
 thing jumbled together. 
 
 For few things at the front is one more thankful 
 than for the innoculation against epidemic. It has 
 saved thousands upon thousands of lives. The con- 
 ditions which surround one in the trenches are sep- 
 tic to a degree, in spite of all precautions. It could 
 not be otherwise in country where so many dead are 
 buried, some near the surface. Smells are truly 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 95 
 
 fierce in their intensity and persistence at the front. 
 We used them, sometimes. At one point orders 
 for dark night journeys across a certain field were 
 as follows: "Go down the hedge till you reach 
 the ditch, turn right, and go toward the big pile of 
 dead horses until you come to the gap in the next 
 hedge." Those instructions could be easily fol- 
 lowed on the blackest night, if one's olfactory nerves 
 were in working order. 
 
 All sorts of pictures come to my mind as those 
 which will be most typical of what the American 
 soldier in France will see and longest remember. 
 A town on fire, the conflagration raging all night, 
 a red splash on the inky black of the horizon. 
 Bursting shells and the flash of your own guns never 
 ceasing. Bright stars dotting the dark canopy over- 
 head, and brilliant trench-flares rising and falling 
 in graceful arcs. The wonderful, ever-changing 
 sight and the continual accompanying diapason of 
 the high explosives is awe-inspiring. 
 
 A cellar, low roofed and filled with foul air, un- 
 der a house badly scarred and knocked about. A 
 close-up headquarters. In the underground sanc- 
 tuary the flickering light of a dozen candles falling 
 on crowded tables for signallers, round which the 
 men not busy with 'phone and ticker are asleep, 
 heads resting on their crossed arms. Officers pour- 
 ing over maps spread on other tables, or engaged in 
 close attention to the receipt or despatch of innu- 
 merable orders. Against one wall are three or four 
 bedsteads, covered with mattresses that have borne 
 the wearied forms of a long succession of fighting 
 men, from general officers to privates, and bear am- 
 ple evidences of having done so. A battery of our 
 own guns firing from a position near by, and Boche 
 
96 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 shells bursting close enough to cause interruptions 
 to conversation by their constant crashes. All this 
 the very brain and heart of a whole section of front 
 line on the possession of which rests the fate of an 
 army, perhaps of a nation, possibly, even, of all 
 Christendom. 
 
 A yellow-green haze that drifts slowly on the 
 light breezes that herald the coming of the dawn. 
 The Hun gas that is actually upon you before you 
 can distinguish the poison-clouds from the early 
 morning mist that frequently hangs low over the 
 ground in front. The peculiar chlorine taste, the 
 smarting of the eyes and nostrils, the strange catch 
 in the throat that makes you want to tear away the 
 gas-mask and get more air, though your better sense 
 tells you that would be the sure road to torture and 
 death. All that accompanies the coming of the 
 gas to those who have yet to go through that phase 
 of modern warfare for the first time. After the 
 initial experience it is less terrible. 
 
 But longest remembered of all, perhaps, are those 
 strange, inexplicable incidents where stern war 
 gives way for one brief moment to such an episode 
 as occurred in our line in 19 15. The men of the 
 opposing armies were in trenches not many yards 
 apart. Calling across the intervening ground, each 
 side boasted of its food supply. Huns who speak 
 English are legion. A British Tommy held an 
 empty sardine tin on the point of a bayonet in proof 
 of extra rations. 
 
 "That's a sardine tin," yelled a Hun. "No sar- 
 dines in it." 
 
 Not long after, a tin of sardines, unopened, was 
 thrown from the English trench. It landed just 
 short of the Hun parapet. Over vaulted a big 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 97 
 
 Saxon and dashed at the tin with outstretched hand. 
 As his fingers closed over it, it jumped from his 
 grasp. Tommy had tied a thin, stout line to it, and 
 drew it quickly home, while the Boche jumped back 
 into his trench amid the shouts and laughter of 
 friends and foes. 
 
 Needless to remark, such antics meet with prompt 
 discouragement. 
 
 Every one who comes home from France will 
 bring his own recollections. God grant that the 
 best-remembered may prove to be the least sinister. 
 
 The degree to which the present-day soldier be- 
 comes acclimatised to shell- and rifle-fire is remark- 
 able. Those who have come into constant touch 
 with the wounded or have seen much of the British 
 soldier on leave in England, have all noticed an at- 
 titude on the part of Tommy when he speaks of 
 front line dangers that would lead the average 
 hearer to think Tommy was assuming a nonchalance 
 at home that he would hardly feel when in the 
 trenches. That is not so. The careless attitude 
 toward the menace of shells, bombs, Mauser pellets 
 or what not is not assumed for the benefit of the 
 folks at home. It is real. It is acclimatisation to 
 fire. 
 
 It does not come to all. It comes to some 
 quicker than to others. Personally, I was cursed 
 with an utter inability to attain it, so, perhaps, I 
 can the better appreciate it. "Pip-squeaks," "Ma- 
 rias," "Johnsons," "Whizz-bangs," or just a sim- 
 ple little "Blighty" one, — all were the same to me. 
 I was born nervous of all projectiles. I might ex- 
 plain in passing that Tommy has adopted the term 
 "Blighty" as meaning England, home and beauty. 
 Therefore, a "Blighty" one, is one that means the 
 
98 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 victim will be sent across the Channel in consequence 
 thereof. 
 
 I could not tell you how much scorn a soldier put 
 into a remark concerning a pal whose wound had 
 been slight, but who had been "sent back" on ac- 
 count of it. " 'E stopped one. But not proper — 
 only with his 'and." 
 
 The "game" is so big, so terribly fraught with 
 consequences if an imaginative man lets his mind 
 dwell on the possibilities, that it is nothing short of a 
 blessing that the average human being is so con- 
 structed that he ponders little over what may hap- 
 pen, but rather engrosses himself in more useful oc- 
 cupation. Just what it is that makes Tommy so 
 really thoughtless about the dangers of the firing 
 line it is difficult to say. Doubtless his lack of 
 worry comes from his good common sense, for of 
 all the futile things a man can do when in the firing 
 line or near it, nothing can be more utterly without 
 comfort or other blessed effect than to continually 
 anticipate the worst. 
 
 True it is that humanity becomes used to any 
 environments, any peculiar conditions which are im- 
 posed upon it. Acclimatisation to Hun efforts at 
 his individual and collective destruction does un- 
 doubtedly come to the man who experiences much 
 of that sort of thing, whatever form the devilment 
 may take. 
 
 That very "getting used to things" is a very real 
 danger to every man in the line. No generalisa- 
 tion as to the sort of individual action that may be 
 brave, or foolhardy, as the case may be, can be 
 made. Circumstances may change the viewpoint 
 from which such incidents should be judged. But 
 every man should bear continually in mind that long 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 99 
 
 immunity from accident is more than likely to in- 
 duce carelessness. 
 
 I knew a lad, an officer in a very famous regi- 
 ment of Hussars, who seemed to bear a charmed 
 life. From Mons on he had held a staff position 
 that was no sinecure. Time and again he came 
 through a fight in a way that seemed little short of 
 miraculous. He was a very gallant officer. He 
 did not seem to me to be in the least foolhardy. He 
 did not go out of his way to look for trouble. Time 
 passed, and he went to the Dardanelles. He was 
 given a very dangerous billet. He distinguished 
 himself. Many of his companions fell, day after 
 day, but he still seemed unusually fortunate. He 
 came back to France in due course, and went 
 through the Battle of the Somme. His command 
 lost heavily. He was in the forefront of the fight- 
 ing, but his luck held, and he came out unscathed. 
 On May 23, 19 17, that boy was killed. In a little 
 further time he would have been through three 
 years' fighting, bravely, unshirkingly, continuously. 
 I sought news of the manner of his death. I found 
 that he had taken a sniping shot at a Hun sharp- 
 shooter from the front-line parapet. His shot 
 seemed to have reached its mark. Grabbing a pair 
 of field glasses, the boy raised his head over the 
 trench top for an instant to see if his bullet had 
 done the work required. At that moment a Mauser 
 bullet from a Hun rifle tore its way straight through 
 the lad's forehead, and he fell back dead. 
 
 "He was looking for it, and he got it," said an 
 old hand at the game who knew the details. No, 
 he was wrong. That boy was no dare-devil in that 
 sense. He had merely been at the game so long, 
 and for so many months had seemed immune from 
 
100 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 hurt, that a moment came when his watchfulness 
 took precedence no longer over his curiosity— and 
 he paid the extreme penalty for that momentary 
 lapse. 
 
 America wants live, virile soldiers. Some must 
 pay the great price. All of us know that. But I 
 always felt that there was one epitaph no one would 
 write over my grave. That was, "He looked for 
 it." That never means "He chose a task which 
 led to sure death." No, that peculiar "He looked 
 for it" is never used at the Front in that connection. 
 It implies carelessness, and is always accompanied 
 with just a little note of criticism, along with the 
 regret. 
 
 Carelessness is a bad trait in any walk in life. 
 In warfare, it may be one of the least forgivable 
 errors — regardless of its consequences to him who 
 allows himself to be accused of it. Risks may be 
 quite justifiable. Be sure they are before you take 
 them. Do not let it be said of you, when you "stop 
 one," that you "looked for it." Remember that 
 bravery and foolhardiness, courage and recklessness, 
 have a very different meaning when applied to a 
 unit in an army. 
 
 Courage, that animal instinct of collected human- 
 ity, humanity in groups, is more of a universal hu- 
 man attribute than most people think. 
 
 The courage of the rush forward, the courage 
 of a moment full of high purpose, high resolve, born 
 of sudden unaccountable impulse, an exact intro- 
 spection of which no man who has experienced it 
 would care to attempt, that is one sort of courage. 
 Another sort is "stick to it" courage. Of great 
 value, that. Still another is the pure, simple reso- 
 lution to do the obviously right and undeniably best 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 101 
 
 thing at the moment, unhesitatingly, without demur 
 or timid delay for cogitation. That is the most 
 important of all. 
 
 Life is made up of one long facing of decisions 
 — of deciding promptly or letting the opportunity 
 pass. Doing or failing to do may equally affect us 
 for good or ill. Character is built up, according 
 to our present-day psychologists, by the influence on 
 us of the endless chain of decisions we are called 
 upon to make, so long as life is in us. The char- 
 acter of the individual may to a great extent influ- 
 ence his decision, but, thank God, the decisions he 
 makes have an even greater power toward mould- 
 ing, or perhaps remoulding his character. Were 
 it otherwise human progress would be in hopeless 
 case. 
 
 As with a man in ordinary spheres of existence, 
 so with the soldier: with the soldier in ever increas- 
 ing ratio as his duty calls for decisions of greater 
 moment to the cause for which he is fighting. Some 
 soldiers go through much fighting with but little op- 
 portunity for the exercise of important individual 
 initiative. Nevertheless, any day it may come. 
 Any day or any night the least important fighting 
 unit of any command, the humblest soldier in the 
 ranks, may find himself confronted with a choice of 
 paths, one leading straight to the hard, perhaps 
 hopeless task, one to an easier way out. If that 
 soldier's character be founded on a series of bold, 
 brave, flint-like decisions, if his habit has been to 
 decide not only with firmness but with rapidity when 
 a clear way opened ahead — no matter how hard the 
 road — his character will show like a beacon of light 
 in his big hour. 
 
 The men who have counted all down the ages are 
 
102 OUR BOYS OVER THERE 
 
 the men who have not only willingly accepted but 
 have eagerly sought the big task, the hard struggle. 
 
 An army of soldiers fighting for God and the 
 Right who are to a man seeking keenly after the 
 hardest work which can be given them is more than 
 invincible. 
 
 One of the greatest puzzles I encountered on 
 the Western Front was the tendency of certain units 
 to lose sections of front with which they might be 
 entrusted, and the even more clearly marked ten- 
 dency of other units to hold on to practically un- 
 tenable positions, regardless of results, until defi- 
 nitely ordered to retire by the Higher Command. 
 Many times such orders, seemingly inevitable, 
 never came. Many times the bulldog grip on a 
 trench could not be shaken loose by all the deluges 
 of Hun shells and all the waves upon waves of Hun 
 battalions in stubborn charge after charge. 
 
 Long study, probing deep beneath the surface, 
 was needed to show why one battalion always 
 seemed to hold on while another more than once 
 gave ground — though the severity of the storm of 
 projectile and the density and persistency of the at- 
 tacking forces in each case gave no choice as to 
 which conflict might have been the fiercer. The 
 fact that few units in our line had not been forced 
 back or ordered to retire from some postion at one 
 time or another complicated the matter. 
 
 In the end, however, after careful study, I came 
 to the unshakable conclusion that the individual 
 character of the men in some groups was of higher 
 calibre than in others. The most valuable forma- 
 tions of all were those in which there was the great- 
 est percentage of men of sterling personal charac- 
 ter; clean, strong, high-minded Christian soldiers. 
 
BELGIAN PEASANTS— RECOLLECTIONS 103 
 
 That men of real character count most in stress of 
 battle there is no shadow of doubt. 
 
 Every American soldier has in his heart a love of 
 his flag, his homeland, and all that his country 
 stands for. That love will go far toward replac- 
 ing the esprit-de-corps of the members of some regi- 
 ment whose history has been handed down as a 
 glorious memory for generation after generation. 
 Inherent American good temper will immeasurably 
 aid the boys from the U. S. A. to become not only 
 good soldiers, but good regiments of soldiers. 
 
 Chief of all, boys, remember that character 
 counts most. 
 
 Seek the hard task. 
 
 Build steadily for the day the big strain will come. 
 
 Constant effort will bear sure fruit. 
 
 Then, when the great moment of your life comes, 
 that character you have so painstakingly builded will 
 indeed be your crown — a crown of certain victory. 
 
 THE END 
 
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