Fix bayonets! — Reading Notes

said the platoon sergeant dreamily. “I remember just what the cuts of beef are. There’d be fine sirloin on that cow-critter, now.... Mr. Ashby (another flight of 77s burst in the wood), if we was to take that cow over an’ tie her in that brush—she oughten to be out here in the open, anyway—might draw fire ... shell’s liable to hit anything, you know, sir——”

“Sergeant, you heard what the colonel said. But if you think she’d be safer—I’d suggest volunteers. And by the way, sergeant, I want a piece of tenderloin—the T-bone part——”

The cow was duly secured in the wood, men risking their lives thereby. The Boche shelled methodically for two hours, and the Marines were reduced to a fearful state of nerves—“Is that dam’ heifer gonna live forever?—” Two or three kilometres away fighting was going on. The lieutenant, with his glass, picked up far, running figures on the slope of a hill. You caught a flicker, points of light on the gray-green fields—bayonets. Occasional wounded Frenchmen wandered back, weary, bearded men, very dirty. They looked with dull eyes at the Americans—“_Très mauvais, là-bas! Beaucoup Boche, là_—” The Marines were not especially interested. Their regiment had been a year in France, training. Now they, too, were dirty and tired and very hungry. The war would get along ... it always had.

A week ago, Memorial Day, there had been no drills. The 2d Division, up from a tour in the quiet Verdun trenches, rested pleasantly around Bourmont. Rumors of an attack by the 1st Division, at Cantigny, filtered in. Cantigny was a town up toward Montdidier. Notions of geography were the vaguest—but it was in the north, where all the heavy fighting was. It appeared that the 2d was going up to relieve the 1st.... “Sure! we’ll relieve ’em. But if they wanted a fight, why didn’t they let us know in the first place?—We’d a-showed ’em what shock troops can do!”

The division set out in camions; in the neighborhood of Meaux they were turned around and sent out the Paris-Metz road, along which the civilian population from the country between the Chemin des Dames and the Marne, together with the débris of a French army, was coming back. No man who saw that road those first days of June ever forgot it. A stream of old men and children and old and young women turned out of their homes between two sunrises, with what they could carry in their hands. You saw an ancient in a linen smock and sabots, trundling a wheelbarrow, whereon rode a woman as old as himself, with a feather-bed and a selection of copper pots and a string of garlic. There were families in amazing horse-drawn vehicles, models of the Third Empire, and horses about as old, clutching unreasonable selections of household effects—onyx clocks and bird-cages and rabbits—what you like. Women carrying babies. Children—solemn little boys in black pinafores, and curly-headed, high-nosed little girls, trudging hand-in-hand. People of elegance and refinement on inadequate shoes. Broad-faced peasants. Inhabitants of a thousand peaceful little villages and farms, untouched by the war since 1914. Now the Boche was out again, and those quiet places, that had drowsed in obscurity while generations lived and worked and died, were presently to be known to all the world—names like Bouresches, and Belleau, and Fismes, and Vierzy, and Fismettes. They walked with their faces much on their shoulders, these people, and there was horror in their eyes. The Marines took notice of another side of war.... “Hard on poor folks, war is.” “You said it!”—“Say—think about my folks, an’ your folks, out on the road like that!...” “Yeh. I’m thinkin’ about it. An’ when we meet that Boche, I’m gonna do something about it—Look—right nice-lookin’ girl, yonder!”