The Glory of The Coming

nded of the rains of heaven and the alluvials of France. His face was incredibly dirty, and the same might have been said for his hands. He had big buck teeth and sandy hair and a nice round inquisit

stuttering accents. At more frequent intervals from somewhere up or down the line a rifle whanged where an ambitious amateu

Western state-to wit, the sovereign state of Ohio. He belonged to a volunteer regiment, and in a larger sense to the Rainbow Division. This was his first day in the front-line trenches and already he was as much at home th

s the prescribed and conventional conversational tone

ten feet away, blowing little smoke wisps up toward the

l, w

liable to buy Ty Cobb off of Detroit. Say, what'll them Detroits

hey'll get for that g

red yards off furnished a vocal exclama

what primitive, highly elemental creature, adaptable and simple-minded; appallingly green yet at this present trade, capable though of becoming amazingly competent at it if given experience and

of our own people were quite different from those of 1914. French minds had devised them, with their queer twists, and windings, which seem so crazy and yet are so sanely ordained; and French hands had dug them out of the chalky soil and shored them up with timbers, but now Americans had taken them over and, in common with all things that Americans take over, they had become as

away, or by the tiled roofs which were roofs no longer but sieves and colanders, its altered character was set forth and proved by the absence of any manure heaps against the house fronts. In this part of the world communal prosperity is measured, I think, by the size and richness of the manure heap. It is kept alongside the homes and daily it is tu

urned by wheels and hoofs and feet into a fine white silt like powdered pumice, coating everything and everybo

ont wall still stood and the doorway was unscarred, but both were like parts of stage settings, for beyond them was nothing at all save nothingness-messed-about heaps of crumbled masonry and broken shards of tiling. From the inner side on

say that spring no longer was coming but had actually come. The rushes which grew in low places were showing green near their roots and the switchy limbs of the pollard willows bore successions of tiny green buds along their lengths. Also many birds were about. There were flocks of big corbie crows in their prim notarial black. Piebald French magpies were flickering along ahead of us, always i

nd of all the manifold gifts of Nature. The constant sound of guns on ahead of us somewhere made one think of a half-dormant giant grunting as he roused. Indeed it was what it seemed-War emerging from his hibernation and waking up to kill again. But little more than a year b

, and part of the time upon the backbone of this Vosges foothill. These latter places were shielded on their dangerous side by screens of marsh grasses woven in huge sheets ten feet high and swinging betwe

ormous burdens draped upon them, back, flank and front; and under the dirt and dust their faces wore weary drawn lines. Laden like sumpter mules, they went by us at the heavy plodding gait of their kind, which is so di

e like a nipple, and from this rose one of those stone shrines so common in this corner of Europe-a stone base with a ruste

ot us through certain front-line defences, which our people only two days before had taken over from the French. But before we started each of us put on his iron helmet, which, next only to the derby hat of commerce, is

ome places for two men to pass each other by scrouging, and in other places so narrow that a full-sized man bearing his accoutrements could barely wriggle his way through. Its sides were formed sometimes of shored planking set on end, but more often of withes cunningly wattled together

. Sometimes we trod on "duck boards" as the Americans call them, or "bath mats" in the Britisher's vernacular, laid end to end. A duck board is fabricated by putting down two scantlings parallel and eighteen inches apart and effecting a permanent union between them by means of many cross strips of wood securely nailed

ear end, of rising up and grievously smiting you as you pitch forward on your face. Likewise when you are in a hurry it dearly loves to teeter and slip and slosh round. However, to date no substitute for it has been found. Proba

is muck, along the narrow twistywise passage, that food and munitions must be carried up to the front lines and the wounded must be carried back. Traversing it, men, as we saw, speedily became mired to the hair roots, and wearied beyond description. Now then, magnify and multiply by ten

board, as much as the rifle and the big gun, which enabled the Canadians to win at Passchendaele last November. With its aid they laid a wooden pathway to victory acr

necks. Almost above us a boche a?roplane was circling about droning like all the bees in the world. As we looked the antiaircraft guns,

ight from just such a vantage place. But then the scene had been the plateau before Laon in the fall of 1914, and then the sky sp

ng. Half a dozen times a day or oftener merely by turning their faces upward they might see the hostile raider being harried back to its hangar by defending cannon or by French planes or by both at once. Later that same day we were to see a German plane stricken in its flight by a

rman name, born in Cologne and brought to America as a child, who at the age of forty-three had given up a paying business and left a family to volunteer for this business, and who in all

he tiny rifle pits, each harbouring a couple of youngsters; the gun steps, or scarps, on which men squatted to do sniper work and to try for hostile snipers across the way; the niches in the trench sides, where hand grenades-French and British models-lay in handy reach in case of a surprise attack; the stacks of rifle and machine-gun cartridges in their appointed places all along the inner sides of the low dirt parapets; the burrows, like the overgrown nests of bank martins, into which tired m

roundings; facing greater responsibilities than any of them perhaps had ever faced before in his days, amid an environment fraught with

a shell had dropped there, killing one American and wounding four others. It was the fumes of the explosive which had corroded the earth to make it bear so curious a tint. This company then had had

captain was constantly chiding them for poking their tin-hatted heads over the top, in the hope of spying out the German sharpshooters who continually

rs, "but the man who gets himself killed in this war without a reason

d service, had then promptly secured a tranfer to the flying corps, where, as he innocently put it, "there was a chance o' having a bit of real fun," and who now wore the single wing of an observer upon the left breast of his tunic. I had

bang and burst. It killed one of my chaps dead, and half a minute later another shell dropped in the same place and covered him under tons and tons of earth, all except his right hand, which stuck out of the dirt. Quite a decent sort he was too-a good fighter and cheerful and all that sort of thing; very well liked, he was. There was no time to dig him out even if we had been able to carry his body

into soiled eager hands. Each man, taking over what was given him, would promptly hunker down in some convenient cranny to read the news from home; news which was months old already. I

the ground in Eastern France, where a machine gun stammered round the corner and the snipers sniped away to the right of him and the left of him, seemed a perfectly natural place for the discussion of great t

lves in a blind ending. Here was a tiny ambuscade roofed over with sod and camouflaged on its one side with dead herbage, wherein two soldiers crouched. By a husky whisper floating back to us over the shoulder of the captain we learned that this wa

it through a tiny peephole in the screening of dead bough a

ond it, perhaps a hundred and sixty feet distant, where the rise began, was a second line of wire, and that was German wire, as I guessed without being told. In between, the soil was all harrowed and upturned into great cusps as though many sw

e one of those yellow-breasted starling birds

n the softest possible of whispers of

sight-but there's times, 'specially toward night, when we kin hear 'em plain enough talking amongst themselves and movin' round over there. It's

into my shoulders. The youth alo

ve suspected that this here lump of dirt was a shelter for our folks because twicet this mornin' he took a shot this way. One of hi

m's reach of me, where a willow sprout had been shorn away. The sap was

im and either he got him or else the Heinie found things gettin' too warm for him and pulled hi

he burrow, filling it unt

o Man's Land?" he inquired in as small

d answer the

but frum now on it's goin' to be all Amurik

makes a very good title, too. I only wish I had the power to put as much of the manifest spiri

line trench on our way back. In order to avoid a particularly nasty bit of footing in the nearermost end of the communication work we climbed out of the trench and

safe; anyway the firing that was going on seemed very far away. We slowed up our gait. From dragging our feet through the mire we were dripping wet with sweat, so I hauled off my coat. This necessitated a readjus

ise like the end of everything-a nasty, whiplike crash-sounded at the right of us, and simultaneously a German shell struck within a hundred feet of us, right on

for the time lost the desire for tobacco. There are times when one cares to smoke and times when one does not care to smoke. As we scuttled for the shelter of the trench four more shells fell in rapid succession and burst within a

k at battalion headquarters, we learned that the enemy dropped seventy shells-five-inch shells-in the area that we had traversed. But unl

er the top at the very point we had visited, and next morning, true enough, and for quit