The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

CHAPTER XI
FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS

WAR seemed less remote in the artillery camp than in any other section of the American training area for the roar of the guns filled the air every morning and they sounded just as ominous as if they were in earnest. They were firing in the direction of Germany at that, but it was a good many score of miles out of range. Just the same the French were particular about the point. "We always point the guns toward Germany even in practice if we can," said a French instructing officer, "it's just as well to start right."

The camp consisted of a number of brick barracks and the soldiers and officers were well housed. It was located in wild country, though, where it was possible to find ranges up to twelve thousand yards. Scrubby woods covered part of the ranges and the observation points towered up a good deal higher than would be safe at the front. We went through the woods the morning after our arrival and heard a perfect bedlam of fire from the guns. There was the sharp decisive note of the seventy-five which speaks quickly and in anger and the more deliberate boom of the one hundred and fifty-five howitzer. This was a colder note but it was none the less ominous. It had an air of premeditated wrath about it. The shell from the seventy-five might get to its destination first but the one hundred and fifty-five would create more havoc upon arrival. A sentry warned us to take the left hand road at a fork in the woods and presently we came upon one of the observation towers. It was crammed with officers armed with field glasses. Every now and then they would write things on paper. They seemed like so many reporters at a baseball game recording hits and errors. When we got to the top of the tower we found that large maps were part of the equipment as well as field glasses. These were wonderfully accurate maps with every prominent tree and church spire and house top indicated. The officers were ranging from the maps. The French theory of artillery work was not new to the American officers, but this was almost the first chance they had ever had to work it out for we have no maps in America suitable for ranging.

According to theory the battery should first fire short and then long and then split the bracket and land upon the target or thereabouts. The men had not been working long and they were still a little more proficient in firing short or long than in splitting the bracket. Later the American artillery gave a very good account of itself at the school. The French instructors told one particular battery that they were able to fire the seventy-five faster than it had ever been fired in France before. Perhaps there was just a shade of the over-statement of French politeness in that, but it was without doubt an excellent battery. In the lulls between fire could be heard the drone of aeroplanes for a number of officers were flying to learn the principles of aerial observation in its uses for fire control. Turning around we could also see a large captive balloon. All the junior officers were allowed to express a preference as to which branch of artillery work they preferred and, although observation is the most dangerous of all, fully seventy-five per cent, of the men indicated it as their choice.

Some American officers in other sections of the training area came to the conclusion in time that we should go to the English for instruction in some of the phases of modern warfare. We did in fact turn to the English finally for bayonet instruction and a certain number of officers thought that the English would also be useful to us in bombing, but I never heard any question raised but that we must continue to go to the French for instruction in field artillery until such time as we had schools of our own.

The difference in language made occasional difficulties of course. "It took us a couple of days to realize that when our instructor spoke of a 'rangerrang' he meant a 'range error,'" said one American officer, "but now we get on famously."

We left the men in the tower with their maps and their glasses and went down to see the guns. Our guide took us straight in front of the one hundred and fifty-fives while they were firing, which was safe enough as they were tossing their shells high in the air. It was better fun, though, to stand behind these big howitzers, for by fixing your eye on a point well up over the horizon it was possible to see the projectile in flight. The shell did not seem to be moving very fast once it was located. It looked for all the world as if the gunners were batting out flies and this was the baseball which was sailing along.

The French officer who was showing us about said that he could see the projectile as it left the mouth of the gun, but though the rest of us tried, we could see nothing but the flash. Later we stood behind the seventy-fives but since their trajectory is so much lower it is not possible to see the shell which they fire. They seemed to make more noise than the bigger guns. Fortunately it is no longer considered bad form to stick your fingers in your ears when a gun goes off. Most of the officers and men in this particular battery were as careful to shut out the sound of the cannon as schoolgirls at a Civil War play. Not only did they stuff their fingers in their ears, but they stood up on their toes to lessen the vibration.

Guns have changed, however, since Civil War days. They are no longer drab. Camouflage has attended to that. The guns we saw were streaked with red and blue and yellow and orange. They were giddy enough to have stood as columns in the Purple Poodle or any of the Greenwich Village restaurants.

Before we left the camp we met Major General Peyton C. March, the new chief of staff, who was then an artillery officer. We agreed that he was an able soldier because he told us that he did not believe in censorship. Regarding one slight phase of the training he bound us to secrecy, but for the rest he said: "You may say anything you like about my camp, good or bad. I believe that free and full reports in the American newspapers are a good thing for our army."

We traveled many miles from the field gun school before we came to the camp of the heavies. This, too, was a French school which had been partially taken over by the Americans. The work was less interesting here, for the men were not firing the guns yet, but studying their mechanism and going through the motions of putting them in action. Many of the officers attached to the heavies were coast artillerymen and there was a liberal sprinkling of young reserve officers who had come over after a little preliminary training at Fortress Monroe. The General in charge of the camp told us that these new officers would soon be as good as the best because the most important requirement was a technical education and these men had all had college scientific training or its equivalent. Just then they were all at school again cramming with all the available textbooks about French big guns. They did not need to depend on textbooks alone, for the camp contained types of most styles of French artillery.

The pride of the contingent was a monster mounted on railroad trucks. It fired a projectile weighing 1800 pounds. After the French custom, the big howitzer had been honored by a name. "Mosquito" was painted on the carriage in huge green letters.

"We call her mosquito," explained a French officer, "because she stings."

"Mosquito" had buzzed no less than three hundred times at Verdun, but she had a number of stings left. The Americans detailed with the gun were loud in its praises and asserted that it was the finest weapon in the world. There were other guns, though, which had their partisans. Some swore by "Petite Lulu," a squat howitzer, which could throw a shell high enough to clear Pike's Peak and still have something to spare. There were champions also of "Gaby," a long nosed creature which outranged all the rest. Marcel could talk a little faster than any gun in camp, but her words carried less weight.

All the menial work about the camp was done by German prisoners. I was walking through the camp one day when I saw a little tow-headed soldier sitting at the doorstep of his barracks watching a file of Germans shuffle by. They were men who had started to war with guns on their shoulders, but now they carried brooms.

"Do you ever speak to the German prisoners?" I asked the soldier.

"Oh, yes," said the youngster; "some of them speak English, and they say 'Hello' to me and I say 'Hello' back to them. I feel sorry for them."

The little soldier looked at the shabby procession again and then he leaned over to me confidentially and said with great earnestness as if he had made up the phrase on the spot: "You know I have no quarrel with the German people."

When we got home after our trips to the artillery camps we found an old man in a French uniform eagerly waiting to see us. He told us that he was an American, and more than that, a Californian. His name was George La Messneger and he was sixty-seven years old. He was French by birth and had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, but the next year he went to California and lived in Los Angeles until the outbreak of the great war. Although more than sixty, La Messneger was accepted by a French recruiting officer and he was in Verdun two weeks after he arrived in France. Three days later he was wounded and when we met him he had added to his adventures by winning a promotion to sous-lieutenant and gaining the croix de guerre and the medaille militaire.

Old George came to be a frequent visitor, but though we urged him on he would never tell us much about the war. He wanted to talk about California.

"I tell the men in my regiment," George would begin, "that out in Los Angeles we cut alfalfa five times a year, but they won't believe me."

Gently we tried to lead George back to the war and his experiences. "How did you get the military medal, lieutenant?" somebody asked.

"Oh, that was at Verdun," replied the old man.

"It must have been pretty hot up there," said another correspondent.

"Yes," said George, and he began to muse. We imagined that he was thinking of those hot days in February when all the guns, big and little, were turned loose.

"Yes," said George, "it was pretty hot," and we drew our chairs closer. "You know," continued the old man, "a lot of people will tell you that Los Angeles is hot. Don't pay any attention to them. I've lived there forty years, and I've slept with a blanket pretty much all the time. The nights are always cool."

I had heard George before and I knew that he was gone for the evening now. As I tiptoed out of the room the old soldier in French horizon blue was just warming up to his favorite topic. "San Francisco's nothing," said George, dismissing the city with as much scorn as if it had been Berlin or Munich. He talked with such vehemence that all his medals rattled.

"We're nearer the Panama Canal," said George, "we're nearer China and Japan, and as for harbors – "

But just then the door closed.

CHAPTER XII
OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS

AT first the ace is low. Our young aviators who will be among the most romantic heroes of them all begin humbly on the ground. The American army now has the largest flying field in France for its very own, but during summer and early autumn many of our men trained in the French schools. There his groundling days try the aviator's dignity. He must hop before he can fly and perhaps "hop" is too dignified a word. When we visited one of the biggest schools, all the new pupils were practicing in a ridiculous clipped wing Bleriot called a penguin. This machine was a groundhog which scurried over the earth at a speed of twenty or thirty miles an hour. It never left the grass tops and yet it provided a certain amount of excitement for its pilot, or maybe rider would be better.

The favorite trick of the penguin is to turn suddenly in a short half circle and collapse on its side. It takes a good deal of skill to keep it straight and when the aviator has learned that much he is allowed to make a trip in a machine which leaps a little in the air every now and then, only to flop to earth again. Then he is ready to fly a Bleriot, though, of course, his first trips are made as a passenger. Very little time is spent in flying. Staying up in the air is no great trick. It's the coming down which gives the trouble. And so the student is eternally trying landings. He smashes a good many machines and here the French show their keen realization of the mental factor in flying.

"I made a bad landing one day," an American student named Billy Parker told me, "and smashed my machine up good and proper. I thought I'd killed myself, but they dragged me out from under the junk, picked the pieces of wood and aluminum out of my head, stuffed some cotton into my nose to check the bleeding and in fifteen minutes they had a new machine out and had me up in the air again."

Parker said he felt a bit queer when he got up in the air again. "I had a sort of feeling that I belonged down on the ground and not up there," he said. "That was peculiar because usually the air feels very stable and friendly. You hate to come down, but this time I was anxious to get back and after circling the field once I came down. My landing was all right, too, and since then I've never had that scared feeling about the air."

The French theory is that the mistake must be corrected immediately. The man who has had a smash-up is apt to get air shy if he has a chance to brood over his mishap for a day or two.

The last test of the preliminary school is a thirty mile flight with three landings. After he has done that the student goes to Pau for his test in acrobatics. The chief stunt set for him here is a vrille. The student is required to put his machine into a spin at a height of about 8500 feet and bring it out again. The trick is not particularly difficult if the man keeps his head, but the tendency is to turn on the power which only accelerates the fall and some are killed at Pau. My friend caught malaria as soon as he got there and was allowed to take things easily for a week. Finally his test was set for Wednesday. On Monday morning the man who slept in the cot to his left went out for his test and was killed and on Tuesday the man from the right hand cot was killed. Death came very close to the young American. He and a French student arrived at the training ground at about the same time. Two machines were ready. The instructor hesitated a second and then assigned the American to the machine at the right. A few minutes later the Frenchman was killed when a wing came off his machine as soon as he began his vrille. Fortunately Parker did not know that until after he had passed his own test. He saw one other man killed before he left Pau and that horrified him more than the accident on the morning of his trial.

"The judge who decided whether you passed your test was a little Frenchman with a monocle," he said. "He sat in a rocking chair at the edge of the field and you had to do the vrille straight in front of him or it didn't count. He simply wouldn't turn to look at a flyer. I was standing beside him when one fellow got rattled in the middle of a vrille and put his power on. Even at that he almost lifted his machine out but she came down too fast for him. There was a big smash-up and people came running out to the wreck. They sent for a doctor and then for a priest, but the terrible little man never moved from his chair. 'You see,' he cried to me, 'he was stupid! stupid!' This flying test had come to seem nothing more than an examination bluebook to him. A fellow passed or he flunked and that was all there was to it."

Luck plays its biggest part in a flier's early days at the front. He has a lot to learn after he gets there, but the French do not nurse him along much. He has to take his chances. It may be that he will get in some very tight place before he has learned the fine points and a future star will be lost at the outset of his career. On the other hand he may come up against German fliers as green as himself and gradually gain a technique before he is called upon to face an enemy ace or a superior combination of planes. At the front as in the schools the French pay keen attention to the mental state of the fliers.

"There was always champagne at mess and they kept the graphophone playing all through dinner any night a man from our squadron didn't come back," an aviator said to me. "One afternoon we lost two men and before dinner they took a leaf out of the table. Our commander didn't want us to notice any empty seats or the extra space."

It is difficult to say which nation has the most daring aviators, but that honor probably belongs to the English. I asked a Frenchman about it and he said: "The English do most of the things you would call stunts. There was one, for instance, that made a landing on a German aviation field and after firing a few rounds at the aerodrome flew away again. That was a stunt. But we think the English are fools with their sportsmanship and all that. It doesn't work now. We look at it a little differently. We cannot take fool chances. If you take a fool chance you are very likely to get killed. That is not nice, of course. We do not like to be killed, but more than that, it is one less man for France. We must wait until there is a fair show."

"And when is that?" I asked.

"When there are not more than four Germans against you," said the careful Frenchman.

The warlike spirit of the French aviators extended even to the servants at the preliminary school which we visited. The Americans there were all quartered in one big room and their general man of all work was a little Annamite from French-Indo-China. Hy seemed the most peaceful member of a peace-loving race as he moved about the barracks just before dawn every morning waking up the students with a smiling "Bon jour" and an equally good-natured "Café." One day he had a holiday and after borrowing a uniform he went to a photographer's in the nearest town. From the photographer he borrowed a rifle, a cutlass and a pistol. He thrust the cutlass into his belt and shouldered the other two weapons. After he had assumed a fighting face the picture was taken.

The next day Hy varied the routine. He began with "Bon jour" as usual, but before he said "Café" he drew from behind his back the photograph, and pointing to it proudly, exclaimed, "brave soldat."

We went from the French school to the big field where the American camp was under construction. The bulk of the work was being done by German prisoners. One of these, a sergeant, had been a well known architect in Munich. The American workers consulted him now and then in regard to some building problem and he always gave them good advice. He took almost a professional pride in the growing buildings even if they were designed to house the men who will one day be the eyes of the American army. We asked another prisoner how he got along with the Americans and he replied: "Oh, some of them aren't half bad." A third spoke to us in meager broken English, although he said that he had lived five years in Buffalo. "Are you going back to Germany after the war?" we asked him. "Nein," he replied decisively, "Chicago."

Most prisoners professed to be confident that Germany would win the war and they all based their faith on the submarine. As we started to go the man from Buffalo suddenly held out his hand and said: "So long." Several of the correspondents shook hands with him much to the horror of a young American in the French flying corps who accompanied us.

"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any Frenchman who saw you do that would be very much shocked."

I remembered then that when I saw German prisoners in any of the large towns the French inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. I never heard French people jeer at their prisoners. Their attitude was one of complete aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big railroad station and the crowds swept by on either side without a glance as if these men from Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or benches.

If the young Americans at the school had not been so busy learning the business of flying they could have formed a cracker jack nine or eight or eleven, as the squad included some of the most famous of our college athletes.

We also visited an English aerodrome which was not far from our headquarters. This was a camp from which planes started for raids into Germany. The men who were carrying on this work were all youngsters. I saw no one who seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the day before we arrived the Germans had discovered their whereabouts and had raided the hangars. One man had been killed and two planes wrecked. Machine gun bullets had left holes in all the buildings about the place. The English officer smiled when we looked about. "Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was over last night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His slang was fluent but puzzling. He was explaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at a certain height on raids. "You see," he said, "the Hun can't get his hate up as far as that."

The bombing machines of the squadron were huge, powerful planes, but they all had pet names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and "Baby" and "Winifred" which had been twice to Stuttgart. These English fliers were a quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully embarrassed if anybody tried to draw them out on the subject of their exploits. One of them went over to an American Red Cross hospital nearby a few days after our visit and played bridge with three American doctors there. He had been a rather frequent visitor and a keen and eager player, so they were somewhat surprised when he told them at nine o'clock that he would have to go. He was three francs behind and started to fumble around in his pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," said one of the doctors. "Some other night will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, I hope."

"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd rather pay up now. Sorry to toddle off so early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've got to go over and bomb Metz to-night."

Much more would be heard of the flying exploits of the English if their individual reticence were not combined with a governmental policy of not announcing the names of the fliers who bring down enemy planes. Unfortunately, the American army seems prepared to follow this example. One of the high officers in the American air service in France said that he did not intend to treat aviators like prima donnas. He added that he thought it was a big mistake to advertise aces. However, the Germans play up their star airmen in the newspapers and on the moving picture screen and it must be admitted that they have not made many mistakes from a purely military point of view.

Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is changing. Nobody regrets this more than the aviators of France. The French army used to have a saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," and nobody believed it so thoroughly as the aviators. They took great pride in being unlike other people in a war which was all cramped up into schedule. An aviator got up when he felt like it and flew when the mood was on. If he felt depressed, or unlucky, or out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep again. Nobody said anything about it. When he fought the battle was a duel with an opponent who was also a knight and sportsman although a Boche.

But there was no keeping efficiency out of the air. The German brought it there. He discovered that two planes were better than one and three even better. He introduced teamwork and the lone French errants of the air began to be picked off by groups of Germans who would send one machine after another diving down on a single foe. The Flying Circus and other aerial teams of the Germans have not only driven chivalry from the air, but they have taken a good deal of the joy out of flying. Very reluctantly the French have adopted squadron flying and the airman now finds himself obeying commands just as if he were an infantryman or an artillerist. Even the civilian population has begun to show that it realized the change in the status of the aviator. There was, for instance, poor Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was sent to prison because he came to Paris on a spree and ran down three gendarmes with his racing auto. French aviators cannot see the sense of punishing Navarre. I only heard one aviator who had any excuse to offer for the civilian authorities.

"After all," he said, "they showed a little judgment. They did not arrest Navarre until he had run down three gendarmes."

Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine. But he hit the blanket and won the bet.

Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air, so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat less dashing knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young American aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with a Frenchman bound for a bombing raid, paid for his passage by crawling out along the fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power, he said, nor would it stand the strain.

"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him, and nobody else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let him know it."