CONFINED TO A CRUMBLING CHATEAU a few kilometers east of Nancy, Floyd Gibbons was indulging one of his favorite pastimes, entertaining his fellow war correspondents who for weeks had been caged together like a pack of rabid skunks. He leaned over the shoulder of an imaginary telegraph operator and impersonated Damon Runyon dictating a cable back home. “Now most any doughboy will be thrilled to fight aside the ever-in-the-future-tense Runyon! And any French doll will be begging him to give her a tumble when the fighting is finished!”
Runyon, a sports hack and wannabe poet on assignment for the New York American, paced the room, annoyed. “Give it a rest, Gibbons!”
“Yeah, Bad News,” said Heywood Broun of the New York Tribune. “Lay off little Alfred here before he pulls out his shiv and carves your snoot no little and quite some.”
As the reporters began pulling out their well-honed Runyonisms, Gibbons lit a cigar. He reveled in his new nickname of Bad News, awarded to him because the worst of times always seemed await his byline wherever he landed.
Westbrook Pegler of the United Press piped out another of their Runyon favorites: “And don’t forget the one and all!”
“Go to hell, you overpaid boiler-room ink monkeys!” the thin-skinned Runyon snarled, incensed at being mocked. “I will come over there and kick every one of your mustard-gas spewing asses!”
Gibbons slipped a hundred bucks off his money clip and waved the stash like a red flag in front of the snorting bulls. “Ten to one says I see the first American shot fired in this war.”
Runyon, an incurable gambler, went bug-eyed. “Easy money. I am in.”
Pegler snorted. “‘I am in?’ Don’t you ever talk in contractions like sane people, Runyon? Come on, let’s hear just one ‘y’all’ or ‘don’tcha.’”
“Pegler is begging for the old roscoe!” Broun warned. “Here comes the old equalizer! The old snub-nosed Gatling! The old heater! The old flame rod!”
Gibbons poured more flammable on the fire with another of his favorite Runyon idioms. “Loathe and despise! Despise and loathe!”
Assaulted from all sides, Runyon spun on Broun. “To mention your rod and contraction in the same sentence, Mr. Hale, would be redundant.”
Broun suddenly lost his smirk. “You leave my wife out of this!”
Runyon curled a dime-novel gangster’s grin. “I am sorry, did I get it wrong? I always forget. Was it your ever-loving feminist doll that kept her last name? Or did you take hers?”
As fisticuffs erupted around him, Gibbons took a step back to enjoy the fruits of his mischief. Again he was reminded—as Runyon himself might have written—that there is always that brief but liminal moment when the flickering match will hit the kerosene, and everybody will be watching and waiting and wondering if the spark will find enough hydrocarbons to do its job.
He and the boys had been edgy for weeks, elbowing each other and gnawing at the Army’s leash, desperate to know which American unit would be the first to go into battle. The first to file the story back to the States would be immortalized—which was why he had tried to get the jump across the Channel in the cargo bay of a captured Zeppelin. At the time, he had figured it at fifty-fifty that he’d make it to Rouen before freezing. Unfortunately, the Brits discovered him in mid-flight and hauled him back to London. It would have been a hell of a story; he had even cabled his final report ahead with orders to run it if he fell into the Atlantic: American Correspondent Dies Invading France By Air.
No, even better: Icarus Of Ink Defies Gravity For War News.
He took a load off in a dusty old chair while his competitors threw more pulled punches and launched stinging verbal incendiaries. Amid the mayhem, he lifted the journal from his hip pocket and began jotting down every delectable detail of the scene he had just fathered.
Since landing here with the first elements of the American Expeditionary Force, he had been taking notes for a humorous exposé on the drunkards, racetrack tip-sheeters, and purple-prosed sports columnists that the world’s greatest newspapers had sent over to cover the bloodiest war in history. The quickest way to get good copy, he had found, was to mimic aloud the irascible Runyon’s writing style, avoiding the past tense and throwing in the absurd slang that only imaginary gangsters and lowlifes would speak. If that didn’t light the fuse, which was rarely, he could always stir up Broun by claiming that left-wing European syndicalists had started the war, or that the Brooklyn Dodgers were baseball’s equivalent of Belgium, just standing in the way of the Yankees and Giants and never hitting anything thrown at them. And Pegler, the youngest of the bunch, was too easy a mark to parody; the pompous scribe was forever portraying himself as a crusading muckraker, so they all took turns leaving steaming piles of horse manure under his bed at night.
The door slammed open, and a miasma of expensive cologne wafted in.
Junius Wood of the Chicago Daily News, the short, bow-tied elder statesman of the news pool, was followed by his usual entourage, Irvin Cobb of the Saturday Evening Post and Raymond Carroll of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, a loner who had earned the nickname “Hermit Crab.” Wood took one look at the scattered furniture and shook his head at their juvenile regression. He retreated to the door with a huff of disdain, making it known that such crass violence was beneath his presence.
“Junie!” Runyon stopped his brawling long enough to wipe a trickle of blood from his mouth. “Any word when we are heading out of this dump?”
The elegant Wood turned back with his chin held high. As always, he stood at attention, as if addressing an august gathering of the National Press Club. “The Army is not giving us any information on troop movements.”
“Pershing’s lips are puckered tighter than Patton’s ass,” griped Cobb, a crusty Kentucky blueblood who paraded around with a walking cane, as if he were overlording the plantation once owned by his Confederate ancestors. “That old warhorse is playing us for fools. Feeding us finger food whenever he wants some good press.”
“Then what the hell are we all doing over here, anyway?” Pegler demanded. “Every time I file a story, the damn Army censors cut half my copy, the French cut another half, and the British cut another half. And that’s just from interviews with that sonofabitch Palmer.”
“I say we do something about this outrage!” Broun demanded. “We’ll have more clout if we all go to Pershing and complain together.”
Wood tugged at his expensive cuffs. “And just how will your superiors feel about forfeiting those ten thousand dollar bonds that we all had to post to insure our good behavior?”
“The First Amendment is being trampled upon by hobnailed fools!” Runyon insisted. “I say we write up a letter of protest to be printed in all of our papers and sign it. It is about time the public knows they are not getting the full broadside on this war.”
“I’m all for it!” Pegler said.
Wood pondered the proposed tactic. “The vote must be unanimous.”
“Let’s let Gib write the manifesto,” Cobb said. “If anyone can shine shit into brass, it’s the Bard of Old Mexico.”
Broun agreed. “Yeah, besides, Black Jack owes him a favor. Hell, Gib was the entire intelligence operation on that Punitive Expedition joy ride.”
Wood tapped his fist against his palm to bang an imaginary gavel. “All right, then, it’s settled. Floyd will be our Thomas Jefferson.”
With vaudevillian flair, Runyon fell to his knees in front of Cobb as if begging for his freedom. “Hey, Massa Cobb. Best hide your slave women.”
Affronted by the dig at the founding father’s horn-dogging ways with the plantation help, Cobb was about to lay into his Yankee target with his cane when Runyon turned toward the shadowy corner. The chair where Gibbons had been sitting was empty. The reporters slowly realized that Bad News had disappeared while they were caucusing.
Runyon catapulted to his feet. “Where is that Irish bastard?”
Broun ran upstairs. Seconds later, he returned looking like a man who had just seen a ghost. He shook his head, unable to utter what he had discovered.
Wood was furious. “Damn it, Runyon! I told you not to let Gibbons out of your sight!”
“Junie, I got distracted. He was here just a second ago.”
Pegler kicked a milk can across the room. “He’s probably off filing another cable at the double urgent rate, getting the jump on us.”
“Woowee!” exclaimed the Hermit Crab in one of his rare utterances. “That’s seventy-five cents a minute!”
“You brain-dead numbskull!” Runyon snapped at the introverted Carroll. “We all know what the double-urgent rate is! You do not have to tell us! We have one hand tied behind our backs trying to beat that scofflaw Gibbons! He just files stories whenever he wants and lets the green eyeshades scream in Chicago! He knows Bertie McCormick and Joe Patterson are not going to fire the gringo who licked the balls of Pancho Villa and lived to lie about—”
A distant tune came from outside, and the correspondents perked their ears. The music was accompanied by a rumbling of wheels. They shoved in a scramble through the door and found a procession of caissons and 75mm French field guns hurrying down the lone cobblestone street. The newsmen huddled like schoolboys watching a parade. They all squinted, trying to make out the insignias on the passing uniforms.
“What unit is that?” Wood asked.
“The Sixth Field Artillery,” Pegler said.
Runyon snorted. “That is the first scoop you have had in France.”
“They’re probably just on practice maneuvers,” Broun said.
Wood gave a doubtful nod. “Strange that they’d be heading east, though.”
As the correspondents herded back to their assigned prison, Runyon spotted an extra soldier on the last caisson passing through the town. That man wasn’t wearing a uniform—and he was waving at them with a shit-eating grin.
“Son of a bitch!”
Hearing Runyon’s curse, the other correspondents turned. Two French sentries who had been posted outside the château restrained the reporters from running after the battery.
“That’s Gibbons!” Runyon shouted. “That’s goddam Gibbons!”
The sentries merely shrugged.
The other correspondents stood frozen with their jaws slacked, not knowing what shocked them more: That Gibbons had snookered them again with another daring escape—or that their slippery competitor had finally caused Runyon to utter a contraction.
AN OLD BUT FAMILIAR TINGLE crawled up Gibbons’s neck as he thudded across the rolling Lorraine countryside with his adopted gunnery company. He hadn’t felt such an unerring warning of imminent action since he rode into battle with Pancho Villa. Unbeknownst to those suckers back at the château, he had spent the last month secretly training with the 6th Field Artillery. While Broun and Pegler had been off sampling every bottle of French wine they could scavenge within a hundred miles of Paris, he had been learning how to load high-explosive shells into a 75mm French canon. In the process, he had formed a close bond with these doughboys, and they had returned the trust by giving him a heads-up that orders had been issued to move out to the Front.
This time, he knew it was going to be the real deal.
Two miles from the old French-German border, the artillery unit reached the churned approach to the trenches near a village called Bathelémont. The roar of the German guns became more distinct, and the three American batteries, each with six guns, began splitting off and fanning out to prepare for forward deployment under fire.
As the crews flushed with the anticipation of at last getting into a real fight, Gibbons knew the most important decision of his life was now at hand: Which battery would gain the honor of the first shot? He couldn’t follow all three batteries. He had to rely on his intuition, place a gamble on which one would reach its range line first. He scanned the gunners as they unhitched their pieces and began rolling them toward the near ridge.
It was a three-way race for fame. Battery A took the early lead, so he went with them. He ran toward its lead gun and began helping the crew push it up the gentle ascent. As he heaved, he looked across the field and saw Company C become mired knee-deep in mud. Poor bastards. Once again, his instincts had been right. His new mates reached the ridge and staked the tail into the ground to prevent it from rolling back down the ridge. The German shelling was getting hotter. But instead of bringing up the shell that would win him fame, the doughboys picked up shovels and began digging.
“What the hell are you boys doing?” he cried.
“Orders,” huffed one of the gunners. “Gotta dig a pit first.”
“Just put a damn shell in the gun and fire it, for God’s sake!”
“Can’t do it, sir.”
So close to immortality, Gibbons looked to his right and saw that Battery C had extricated its lead gun from the morass. That crew now seemed possessed by the devil as it rolled its field gun up the hill. Those boys were heading toward old French gun pits. They wouldn’t have to pull their trench shovels and dig redoubts first. He waved goodbye to the burrowing fellows in Company A and began running across the field. “Good luck, lads! I’ll see you in Germany!”
“Where you going, Gib?”
“To the victor go the spoils!” he shouted over his shoulder. He ducked explosions as he slogged toward Battery C. Those fellas had already staked their gun into the first pit. Before he could reach them, one of the battery’s doughboys, a little fellow named Alex Arch from Indiana, carried up a shell and slammed it into the rear of the barrel.
The Hoosier soldier grinned over at him—and pulled the lanyard.
As the casing ricocheted to the rear, Gibbons stopped in his muddy tracks and watched the projectile arc toward the German lines. For a split second, he considered making a mad dash into this no-man’s land in the Lunéville sector of old Germany to retrieve what remained of the first shell. But as more concussions pinged all around him, he quickly thought better of that idea.
The American officers were yelling at him to go back, but he knew he had to find something, anything, that he could take back as a souvenir to prove that he had witnessed the first shot. As the crew reloaded the gun, he staggered toward the spent casing, several feet behind them. He fell to his knees and covered it. Cradling the smoking relic to his chest like a newborn babe, he felt cooled by a shadow, and looked up.
An Army major—accompanied by five military policemen—stood over him. “Mr. Gibbons, you are under arrest.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, GIBBONS CHUGGED across the Vosges in the secondhand taxi that he had rented in Nancy. It was Christmas Eve, and he felt confident that the armies on both sides of the trenches would hold their fire for the next forty-eight hours to honor of the birth of that two-thousand-year-old Levantine pacifist who would have been horrified by all of the bloodshed being inflicted in His Name. Dead tired, he decided to look for a quiet little spot here in the rear of the Front and catch up on his sleep.
As he drove, he grinned at the thought of his fellow hacks stuck back in Paris. After his little AWOL escapade at the château, he had spent two days under detention for flagrantly violating the Army’s rules for the news pool. But a telegram from one of the Tribune’s owners—who may or may not have possessed some salacious information about General Pershing’s dalliances in the City of Light—had gained his release, just in time for him to rejoin his artillery buddies for the big push that might end the war.
And even better, to the acclaim of the nation back home, the Tribune had run his thrilling eyewitness account of the first American shot, showering him with more accolades and making a hero of Sgt. Alex Arch—whose family, it turned out, had decided to do the very American deed of shortening its name from Archkiewicx. To add a sweet twist to the coup, Broun and Pegler, hounded by their editors to learn the identity of the first shooter, had demanded that the Army press office reveal the hero’s name. A shrugging flack, not knowing the answer, had quipped that it was undoubtedly some Irishman. Left with the embarrassing alternative of having no story to file, Broun and Pegler had conspired to send puffed dispatches about the “red-headed Irishman” who had loaded the gun and pulled the lanyard.
He laughed at the marvelous devilry he had spawned. When his story revealed the true identity of the now-famous artilleryman, Broun and Pegler had been forced to scramble to clean up their embarrassing journalistic mess. He made a mental note to send those two blowhards a bottle of wine with a note congratulating them on their retraction. Now, as he approached a small village, he noticed several American soldiers sneaking into a barn on the snow-dusted outskirts. Were they planning a nocturnal assault on this holiest of nights?
He stopped the car, got out, and slithered from tree to tree toward the barn. Under the loft, he inched his eyes over the sill and saw some of the doughboys busy cooking over portable stoves. Others were stuffing boots and gunnysacks with candy and trinkets. Into the middle of this bizarre workshop stood a stumpish soldier being helped into a red Santa Claus suit.
He shook his head in admiration. Dressed as St. Nick and his elves, these clever doughboys were planning to walk right into that German village across the lines. Then, in a sled-and-reindeer version of the Trojan-Horse caper, they would open fire on the unsuspecting Boche, spreading good cheer all around.
He licked his lips, eager for another scoop. This would make his story of the first shot look like rookie crime-blotter copy. Seeing a spare elf costume hanging on a peg near the window, he stealthily reached for it, pulled it through the window, and disguised himself as one of the elf raiders. As the armed munchkins followed their Santa out the barn and down the deserted street toward the distant trenches, he fell in with them, unnoticed.
Launched on their dangerous mission, the death-dispensing elves were laughing and trading Christmas stories with so much élan that their courage brought tears to his eyes. As they passed the square, the merry line of disguised doughboys suddenly made a left turn and burst into the maison. Were the Germans hiding in this village? He felt for the pistol at his belt under his costume, making sure it was loosened from its holster. He followed the breach-breakers into the conflagration, expecting to hear the screams of attack and crack of bullets any moment.
Seventy French children, sitting on their haunches, stared up at him.
After finding his breath again, he laughed at himself. Instead of his pistol, he pulled out his notebook and wrote a description of the remarkable scene that now played out before him:
The real daddies and big brothers and uncles of those seventy youngsters have been away from Saint-Thiebault for a long time now—yes, this is the fourth Christmas that the urgent business in northern France has kept them from home. They may never return but that is unknown to the seventy young hopefuls.
An American regimental band marched in from the back door and struck up a rousing rendition of Dixie. The rotund doughboy playing Santa Claus—Père Noël to the French—walked around the circle of raptured faces, handing out gifts of hair ribbons, toy cannons, wool capes, paper airplanes, mittens, and miniature warships carved with American flags, all purchased with donations collected by the Americans. A quartet of doughboys sang Down in the Coal Hole, and the regimental band led the children outside. Moments later, the sky lit up with a barrage of fireworks arranged by the American artillery battery on the ridge above the village.
When the holiday show was finally over, the village priest came forward and, first in French and then in flawless English for the benefit of the soldiers, explained to the children: “These Americans have come to our country to fight side by side with your fathers and your big brothers and your uncles. These Americans want to take their places today. In doing these things for you, they are thinking of their own little girls and little boys back across the ocean.” At the priest’s signal to rise, the children rushed into the arms of the doughboys and hugged the surrogates for the fathers and brothers that they would likely never see again.
Gibbons was now finding it difficult to scribble down his thoughts, and not because of the dim light from the lampposts outside. Finally, when his eyes cleared, he managed to put together the final graf of the Christmas report that he would file to the Tribune that night:
The red glare illuminated the upturned happy faces of American and French together. Our men learned to love the French people. The French people learned to love us.