COLONEL MACARTHUR SHOOK HIS HEAD at the slovenly appearance of the grumbling poilus trampling past him. No wonder the armies of the Allies were in such desperate straits. With their stringy long hair curling under their helmets and their unkempt beards and mustaches caked with bread crumbs and the stew they’d eaten that evening, these French infantrymen moving forward to take the ladder positions for their nightly raid across no man’s land looked more like Slav coal miners than soldiers.
After several weeks of persistent requests to GHQ, he had finally procured an assignment to the Front, ostensibly to observe fighting tactics. He enjoyed an inward chuckle at that conceit; as if the Frogs had anything to teach him about combat. That desk jockey Pershing believed a divisional chief of staff should remain behind the lines, but he would not be holed up in some crumbling château ten miles to the rear, shuffling orders and sending messages by carrier pigeons. He was no George McClellan. His destiny would be found here, amid the whistle of bullets and the taste of fresh blood. He paced the duckboards of this rear supply trench, agitated and anxious to see some action. He had suffered his fill of what the French called “training” in these stinking earthworks. These disease-infested sluice troughs would have made Lee’s defenses at Petersburg seem luxurious.
Right on time, the big German guns in the Luneville sector ahead opened up with their nightly serenade, peppering the moonless agate sky with distant concussions. Seconds later, the French howitzers to his rear retaliated.
Several poilus trying to sleep lurched up from their cubbyholes. But he had not flinched, and they saw it. At the Point, he had taught himself that trick of willful steadiness by having his mother slam pans together behind his ear at unannounced moments. Now, while others ducked under overhanging bluffs, he casually kicked the globs of mud from his right heel and reached his boot up against an embrasure to stretch his aching lower back. The curvature in his spine was acting up, his unerring warning that someone somewhere was stabbing him in the back.
George Marshall and those bastards at headquarters were out to get him again, merely because he had felt duty-bound to make an end run around Pershing when his sycophants threatened to break up the 42nd and disperse its regiments to the French lines like scrap wire to patch holes in an old fence. General Menoher was still officially in command of the Rainbow, but its soldiers knew who really ran the operation. And they would be eternally grateful when they discovered how he had lobbied their congressmen and senators back home. It had been hard work, the hours of writing cables to Washington, but his strategy had paid off. Inundated by newspaper editorials and complaints from the Hill, Pershing had finally backed down on his dispersal plan.
History will remember me as the savior of the best damn division in this war.
Yet because of his defense of his beloved division, he now had two fights on his hands—a frontal attack against the Boche, and a rear guard action against GHQ at Chaumont. He had to do something, and soon, to thwart those conspirators from poisoning his name to get him sent home. He had just the solution: Even Pershing would not think of burying in the Army bureaucracy the first American officer who went over the top.
No, the press would never allow it.
He retreated into the small bunker that served as his quarters and quickly changed into the uniform that he had designed for this long-awaited moment. Instead of a steel helmet and regulation overcoat, he donned his favorite smashed-down cap—which gave him just the air of dash and insouciance he desired—and wrapped his shoulders in a heavy wool cardigan sweater crowned with a turtleneck collar. He pondered wearing his old Army letter sweater instead, but decided the meaning of the large ‘A’ on its breast would be lost on the French. He kept on his jodhpurs and traded his trench boots for a pair of black cavalry boots that had been spit-polished to give off a gleam.
Fully attired now for glory, he took out a small mirror from his toiletry kit and stared at his creation with approval. Something was still missing, though, an accessory to finish the look. He searched his canvas bag, and nodded. He gathered up his silver cigarette holder and thrust it into the side of his mouth, moving it around it until he found the most carefree angle. He glanced at the mirror again and set his chin in defiance.
Yes, this will show the French and Germans how an American goes to war.
He walked out of the bunker and strode with determination down the duckboards. A few steps from the front trench, the thought occurred to him that he would need a witness for the deed. He backtracked, and in the next dugout found Captain Thomas Handy, one of General Menoher’s aides. “Handy, I’m going on the picnic tonight with the Frogs. Care to join me?”
The captain held the look of a man who wanted to say no, but didn’t dare. He stoically stood up and followed his superior out. The sloe-eyed poilus looked up in disbelief at the foppish American colonel and his reluctant captain parading past. The two officers looked like a doughboy version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. MacArthur nodded to them, aware that they had never seen such a dapper presentment. He led Handy past the whispers until he found General Georges de Bazelaire, the brave French field officer in charge of this sector.
Bazelaire blinked, as if not quite understanding what he was staring at.
MacArthur saluted the general. “Bonsoir, General. Captain Handy and I request permission to join your fine troops on their raid this evening.”
Bazelaire smelled MacArthur’s breath to determine if he was drunk. “This is not a sortie for officers who cannot be lost.”
“An officer who cannot be lost is not worth a damn.”
While listening to the exchange, the poilus sat daubing mud on their faces in preparation for the mission. Amused, they watched the two officers continue to argue, wondering if the two Americans were playing one of their infamous betting games, each trying to conquer the other in pointless bravery.
Bazelaire, who spoke fine English, pulled MacArthur aside. “Colonel, I have not received authority from your commander to allow this.”
MacArthur slung his four-foot red muffler across his neck in a gesture of determination. “I cannot fight the Boche, sir, if I cannot see them. If I am to be asked to send my soldiers into those lines in defense of France, I must know what they will face.”
“General Menoher has approved this?”
MacArthur knew there was no time to get permission from his superior, and even if he tried, the answer would likely be no. General Menoher would be watching the raid from the observation post on the next hill. He had to trust that, if spotted, he would not be called back. He qualified his answer, hoping the French general would not detect its nuance in English. “Captain Handy is General Menoher’s aide. He will confirm that the general encourages his officers to be bold and informed when it comes to troop deployments.”
Bazelaire turned to Handy for a confirmation of that claim. Receiving an uncertain nod, he shrugged at the mystery of this American obsession for glory and ordered his officer in charge of the raid: “Give them pistols.”
MacArthur declined the offer. With a dramatic flair, he reached into his thick sweater and pulled out a riding crop. “I have the only weapon I need.”
The poilus, now even more incredulous, grinned through their mustaches.
Handy took MacArthur aside, out of earshot of the others. “Sir, you know as well as I do that General Menoher hasn’t approved this.”
MacArthur stretched his neck in a gesture of insistence. “Handy, it’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.”
Before Handy could press his protest, General Bazelaire beckoned up a pair of wire cutters and a trench knife. He forced the implements on his two American volunteers. “The signal for the attack will be a hand grenade thrown by one of my men. If you do not come back, I know nothing of this conversation.” He looked at his watch. “Five minutes, you shall go.”
Following the example of the experienced poilus, MacArthur rubbed mud on his face, a concession to his initial strategy of forcing the Germans to witness the same American intrepidness demonstrated by Confederate General Patrick Cleburne on the bloody field of Franklin. With his first true battle action now only moments away, a hundred thoughts raced through his mind. Those many nights at his father’s knee listening to stories of the Civil War had been but preparation for this moment, as had his hazing at the Point. He took comfort from the memory of his convulsions in Beast Barracks. After surviving those horrid hours, he had come to accept that he was invulnerable, protected by a mystical force. So long as he kept the faith in his destiny, he would always be safe.
Death was not what frightened him. No, what he prayed for was the strength to look the Elephant straight in the eye, and not waver.
I think the boy may have the makings of a soldier.
Those words, spoken when he was ten, remained seared into his memory. Was Father watching him now, whispering that prediction to his ear again?
He recalled a British veteran of the Somme telling him over tea one afternoon in Chaumont of his first time over the top. The Brit commander, a Captain Nevill, had seen fear in the faces of his 8th East Surreys recruits. So, before the assault, he had brought out four rugby balls and had handed one to each of his platoons. When the whistle for the surge sounded, Neville had offered a prize to the platoon that managed to kick their ball all the way to the German lines. One of the infantrymen had climbed to the top of the parapet and had let fly with a kick that would have made the Preston North Enders proud. And off they all went to die, cheering the progress of those balls as if at a match. Captain Nevill had been killed instantly, but two of the balls eventually found their way back to the British trenches.
The survivor of the Somme kicking competition had written a poem about that day. Now, as MacArthur prepared to go over the top, he whispered it to himself, having memorized it for this moment:
On through the hail of slaughter,
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them
Is but an empty name.
True to the land that bore them—
The Surreys play the game.
He interrupted Handy’s meditation with an elbow to his ribs. “Do you know anyone who brought a football over from the States?”
Handy stared at him, wondering how anyone could think about football at such a moment. Before he could ask the reason for the strange question, the poilus went up the ladders in grim silence.
Handy made a move to follow them, but MacArthur held him back and took the lead. He scrambled to the top of the trench, bracing for the night that would, in the words of his beloved Robert Burns, send him to his gory bed, or to victory.
THE NEXT MORNING, GENERAL BAZELAIRE, standing in the forward trench, looked out across no man’s land through his elevated periscope and saw his raiding party walking back across the open field. With them were Handy, bloodied and bedraggled, and MacArthur, who wielded his riding crop as a prod as he herded up a captured German colonel.
Welcoming them into the trench, the French general chortled with delight. “Well, Colonel MacArthur! How did you find your first taste of war?”
“Success is ours, General. And I have brought you a gift.”
Bazelaire offered a cigarette to MacArthur’s downcast German prisoner. “You must not be ashamed, Herr Colonel. You have been captured by the d’Artagnan of the American Expeditionary Force. You are the first prisoner of the Americans. You will go down in history.”
That news did not brighten the German officer’s mood.
When MacArthur turned to ensure that his fellow raiders were all present and accounted for, the French soldiers around him in the trench burst into good-natured laughter.
Seeing what so amused his men, Bazelaire fluttered his drooping mustache with a mirthful puff. “Colonel MacArthur, it seems you have lost the seat to your riding britches!”
MacArthur looked over his shoulder. His buttocks were exposed. Not one to let a moment of triumph be sullied, he announced to the delight of the poilus, “I can assure you, my friends, that this prisoner will be the only Boche who ever sees my derriere!”
When the laughter finally quieted, Bazelaire stepped forward and braced MacArthur with hands to his shoulders. “And I can assure you, my brave American comrade, that you will win your country’s precious Silver Star for this feat.” He motioned up an aide and took a medal out of a box. “Until then, you will have to be satisfied with this.” The general pinned a Croix de Guerre on MacArthur and kissed him on both cheeks.
Taking his practiced statuary pose, MacArthur raised an acknowledging hand to the applauding poilus. “Lafayette, we have returned!”