LA MARSEILLAISE
Allons enfants de la patrie,
(Let’s go children of the fatherland,)
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
(The day of glory has arrived!)
Contre nous de la tyrannie
(Against us tyranny’s)
L’étendard sanglant est levé!
(Bloody flag is raised!)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,
(In the countryside, do you hear)
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
(The roaring of these fierce soldiers?)
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
(They come right to our arms)
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes!
(To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!)
Aux armes, citoyens!
(Grab your weapons, citizens!)
Formez vos bataillons!
(Form your battalions!)
Marchons! Marchons!
(Let us march! Let us march!)
(Let’s go children of the fatherland,)
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
(The day of glory has arrived!)
Contre nous de la tyrannie
(Against us tyranny’s)
L’étendard sanglant est levé!
(Bloody flag is raised!)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,
(In the countryside, do you hear)
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
(The roaring of these fierce soldiers?)
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
(They come right to our arms)
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes!
(To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!)
Aux armes, citoyens!
(Grab your weapons, citizens!)
Formez vos bataillons!
(Form your battalions!)
Marchons! Marchons!
(Let us march! Let us march!)
Qu’un sang impur
(May impure blood)
Abreuve nos sillons!
(Water our fields)
(May impure blood)
Abreuve nos sillons!
(Water our fields)
Col. William Hayward gave an order for the band to play immediately upon arrival in Brest, a way of extending greetings to their new hosts. Jim Europe assembled his men and called for “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France. As part of his preparation for service in France, Jim Europe had learned or obtained the sheet music for popular French songs, perhaps including patriotic anthems like “Chant du Départ” or “Sambre-et-Meuse” (“All these proud children of Gaule . . .”), as well as one by American songwriter Leo Woods called “Joan of Arc” about the mothers of France and their sacrifices. Contrary to the popular notion that colored men were natural rather than trained musicians, the members of the regimental band could both improvise and read scores. As Eubie Blake put it, “If a fly landed on the page, it got played.” Europe had plenty of time, waiting to sail and aboard ship, to create new arrangements, transcribe charts for new instrumentations, and give the music his own personal spin. Customarily, soldiers in uniform snap to attention when their national anthem is played. It took the French soldiers ten bars before they even recognized Europe’s “inspired, rhythmic interpretation,” and, indeed, it was not until the Americans heard a French band play the same song in the more familiar style that they understood the problem. The French had never heard jazz before, and when they did, they were stunned and astonished. It’s unlikely that Europe could have been aware of the extent to which some jaunty French war songs were wearing thin for the French soldiers. One soldier called “La Madelon,” a song telling of happy poilus spending downtime drinking wine and romancing prostitutes, a “stupid refrain, a blatant lie which the infantrymen never sang.” Europe’s interpretations infused old songs with new life, revitalizing both the tunes and the listeners. His version of “La Marseillaise” represented a kind of music France had never experienced, winning audiences whenever he played it.
In the falling snow, the New Yorkers boarded trains for St. Nazaire, a town on the French coast two hundred miles from the action. They packed into livestock cars with nothing but straw to sit on, a new level of discomfort. “All over America,” Noble Sissle wrote, “we had been riding in Pullman cars, or at least first class chair cars and day coaches, and here we are now riding in not even a first class freight car but horse cars. The stern reality of war and the placidity of peaceful America dawned on us.”
Far sterner realities awaited them.
Horace Pippin, who had supplied himself with pencils and paper, kept a journal and wrote of the cold and the snow and of being loaded into boxcars like cattle. As a chronicler of his wartime experiences, Pippin was always ready to note the hardships and the things he wanted but didn’t have, usually food or cigarettes, but it was unusual for him to complain, even when suffering from frost-bite. “The box car were so packed that no one could lay down,” he wrote. “At the time I did not want to for as it were some of them got frost bitten and I also. It were my right hand but it were not so bad off. I were so cold that I were growing stiff. I started to run in that doing it I made out all right by that time were time for mess.”
As they rode the train, the leader of the American Expeditionary Force, Gen. John J. Pershing, headquartered in Chaumont, was considering an urgent request from British prime minister Lloyd George that America send its surplus troops immediately to be incorporated into decimated British and French units. Hostilities had been suspended on the eastern front since December 2, pending peace talks at Brest-Litovsk. Russian losses had surpassed staggering, an estimated 4.67 million dead or wounded, 1 million missing, and more than 2 million taken prisoner by the end of 1916. Once the Bolsheviks gained control of the Russian assembly in the November 1917 elections, they immediately sought a separate peace, which allowed the Germans to transfer troops to reinforce the western front.
Lloyd George warned, accurately, that the Germans intended to launch a major campaign, hoping to decide the issue before the Americans could arrive in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome. American secretary of war Newton D. Baker had long insisted, “No American troops should be sent to the front until they were fully trained.” French prime minister Georges Clemenceau countered that nobody was ever really ready and that despite his promise of la guerre jusqu’au bout (“war until the end”), France would be finished before help arrived. Pershing wired Secretary of War Baker in Washington regarding Lloyd George’s plea: “Do not think emergency now exists that would warrant our putting companies or battalions into British or French divisions, and would not do so except in grave crisis.”
At this time, Pershing did not know what to do with his black troops. It was clear, by the beginning of 1918, that white officers would have difficulty serving under colored superiors; some white officers called the prospect “distasteful,” even “impossible.” If officers felt that way about serving under blacks, how would enlisted men feel? The policy of having colored soldiers serve under white officers was firmly in place, but the question remained as to whether white troops would accept black troops supporting their flanks. Pershing had seen with his own eyes, in Mexico fighting Pancho Villa’s army and elsewhere, that black soldiers could make effective fighters. Yet, his advisers continued to dispute the fighting value of units comprising black draftees, as well as the wisdom of placing them in the trenches. Secretary Baker was advised by Col. E. D. Anderson, chairman of the Operations Branch of the General Staff, who shared some of Gen. Lytle Brown’s concerns and biases:
There remains a large percentage of colored men of the ignorant illiterate day laborer class. These men have not, in a large percentage of cases, the physical stamina to withstand the hardships and exposure of hard field service, especially the damp cold winters of France. The poorer class of backwoods negro has not the mental stamina and moral sturdiness to put him in the line against opposing German troops who consist of men of high average education and thoroughly trained. The enemy is constantly looking for a weak place in the line and if he can find a part of the line held by troops composed of culls of the colored race, all he has to do is concentrate on that.
The War Department’s solution was to press colored troops into the Service of Supply (SOS), making the SOS about 30 percent black. Of the four hundred thousand African Americans who served in the war, only about 10 percent saw combat, while the rest were employed as stevedores, porters, cooks, waiters, and ditch diggers or in the construction and repair of cantonments, roads, and railroads, either abroad or at military facilities back home. The Marines had no colored soldiers. Only 1 percent of navy personnel were black, working as messmen or stewards. Upon their arrival in France, the men of the Fifteenth, at least the realists among them, would have had little reason to expect anything better.
After entraining to St. Nazaire, some men initially thought they were at the front and expected to be attacked momentarily. Instead, the 1,949 men and 51 officers of the Fifteenth New York, having crossed the Atlantic to fight, found themselves assigned to menial duties. They were put to work draining a swamp near Montois, building storage warehouses, and laying railroad tracks at a rate unimaginable to the French, who inspected the tracks to make sure they would hold up and commented, “Magnifique.” The men took pride in their work, though they may have feared that by performing too well, they would be stuck in the SOS for the duration. They felt their morale sinking lower and lower as the days passed, “quite against our thoughts in the matter,” according to Sissle, as their Springfield rifles were taken from them and replaced with picks and shovels, the band playing rag tunes each morning to cheer the boys up.
Hayward wrote a letter to Pershing, begging for frontline duty, with the help of Arthur Little, a former magazine publisher. In his letter, to underscore his men’s combat readiness, Hayward noted that the regiment had not had a new case of venereal disease in three months. Good hygiene was something army headquarters seemed obsessed with. Hayward invited journalists to observe and write about his men, courted celebrities, twisted arms, bent ears, and proved himself a “master fixer,” according to his officers. To curry favor with high command, he also sent Jim Europe and his band to the resort town of Aix-les-Bains, forty miles from Geneva in the French Alps, to entertain American troops on leave. He’d invested too much time and emotional currency to get the unit up and running, called in too many personal favors, solicited donations from members of his Union League Club and from names as well-known as Rockefeller—he’d come too far to let it all amount to nothing more than laboring in the SOS. It was more than ego. Hayward believed sincerely in what he might have characterized as the Negro cause. He wanted his men to do well, not for how it might reflect on him, or not for that reason alone, but for how it reflected on them.
British and French leaders continued to plead with Pershing and with President Woodrow Wilson. Their situation was critical. To the argument that American soldiers would arrive in France unprepared and untrained, they asked, Who better to train them than seasoned British or French officers? France’s Marshall Ferdinand Foch argued that American troops would learn more quickly in France than they would back home.
Pershing replied, “I do not suppose that the American army is to be entirely at the disposal of the French and British commands. We must look forward to the time when we have our own army. . . . Moreover, the time may come when the American army will have to stand the brunt of this war, and it is not wise to fritter away our resources in this manner.” Pershing insisted that American troops be allowed to complete their training in America and that he would not allow American troops to fight under a foreign flag.
At St. Nazaire, the men from New York stayed out of trouble, worked hard, tried to stay warm, bided their time, bore the monotony, and wrote letters home exaggerating the action they were seeing and describing the groans of the wounded. The regiment was understaffed, with only two officers per company (about two hundred men), when six was the norm elsewhere, an officer shortage difficult to correct when white officers were more likely to transfer out of black units than into them. The men of the Fifteenth felt severed, like a lone regiment with no division and no support, disconnected from the fighting forces. They hoped their colonel could pull some strings and get them to the show—how could they distinguish themselves, show the world anything, draining swamps and laying railroad tracks? Pershing was not unaware of the unit, asking Hayward to supply him with orderlies for his private railroad car.
Pvt. John Graham, who’d been a shipping clerk before the war, enlisted on June 2, 1917, trained at Whitman and Wadsworth, then took ill at Camp Merritt while waiting to sail to France; he was in the hospital when the Pocahontas finally left port for good. He left the hospital on December 15 and returned to Camp Merritt, where a Southern officer called the colored soldiers there to attention as they ate their Christmas dinner and announced, in the spirit of the holiday, “There are some packages for you darkies and don’t any niggers touch them until I give the orders.” When Graham maintained to the officer, politely, that there were no niggers in the company, he was penalized with extra work.
He sailed for France on January 13 and caught up to the Fifteenth New York at St. Nazaire, but experienced more prejudice and abuse from “Southern crackers” sharing the facilities. Waiting in line at the canteen to purchase cakes and candy, Graham, with his companion Sergeant White, was ordered by a Southern guard to step aside so that his fellow Southerners could be served first. When Graham objected, the guard drew his gun and said, “You nigger sons-of-bitches move to the rear.” Sergeant White quickly relieved the guard of his gun and, before the hostilities escalated, unloaded it, handed it back to the guard, and departed with Graham, downhearted and disgusted with how they’d been treated. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still believed things were supposed to be different in the army. Graham told his story to a captain named Robinson, who saw to it that the sentry was punished. Nevertheless, cohesion in a military unit customarily derives from a sense of us-versus-them, where “them” is a foreign enemy.
The task of building and maintaining cohesion was further complicated by the fact that the regiments’ units and battalions were seldom in the same place at the same time, often fragmented by varying assignments and duties. The band, for which the regiment became promptly and widely known, found itself at the disposal of army headquarters and sent off independently of the regiment it was supposed to train with.
The band’s public relations mission to Aix-les-Bains, where they played for generals and American troops on leave, went well. Jim Europe, requiring his drum major and principal singer’s services, secured Noble Sissle’s early release from the medical facility where he’d been hospitalized with the flu. The tour opened on February 12 at the Opera House in Nantes, to an integrated, packed house of people in evening dress. “The French people knew no color line,” Arthur Little observed, unlike American theaters where colored members of the audience were restricted to the balcony, dubbed “nigger heaven.” Europe’s reputation as bandmaster for the famous dancing team of Vernon and Irene Castle followed him. When the band arrived at Aix-les-Bains on February 15, they were greeted by a band of French schoolboys who played a barely recognizable version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” whereupon Jim Europe’s band uncorked a jazzed rendition of “La Marseillaise” in response, then set about the business of entertaining the troops.
Aix-les-Bains was deemed, for troops on leave, a safe alternative to Paris, which had too many prostitutes capable of spreading venereal diseases. The army had printed a set of rules given to men on leave in Paris, with number seven being “The Military Police have been ordered to take the names and report all ranks, including Militarized Citizens, who permit themselves to be solicited on the streets.” Racists within the army feared, more than they feared syphilis or gonorrhea, that white French prostitutes would provide services for colored soldiers on leave, thus “ruining” the soldiers, who would then crave white females upon their return home. The song “How You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm after They’ve Seen Paree?” took on political overtones when the “Negro problem” was considered: how were they to be kept down, on the farm or in the cities or anywhere else, after they’d seen “Paree,” where there was a good chance that they would be treated with respect as human beings, as equals and men of worth? There was no telling what sort of “ruined” ideas they might bring home.
“Long previous to the war,” wrote war correspondent E. W. Lightner, “thousands of blacks from various States of Africa were in France, most especially Paris, at the universities, in business and in the better ranges of service. Everywhere and by all sorts and conditions of whites, they were treated as equals. During several visits to the French capital I, an American, knowing full well the prejudices of whites in this country against the race, was amazed to see the cordial mingling of all phases of the cosmopolitan populations of the French capital. Refined white men promenaded the streets with refined black women, and the two races mingled cordially in studies, industries and athletic sports. White and black artists had ateliers in common in the Latin quarter.”
Jim Europe proved an able ambassador, often opening his shows with the familiar “Over There” but playing a broad range of songs, impressing members of both the military leadership and the French community with his musical talents and magnanimity. One night, when a local Frenchman gave Europe a piece of music he’d written and asked if the regiment’s band could perform it, Europe agreed and stayed up the entire night, transcribing the song and writing out the arrangements: “3,000,000 notes,” he said the next day in exaggeration. At another concert, when Europe noticed a French child imitating his conductor’s motions, he ended the song they were playing, gave the child his baton, guided him gently to the podium, and turned the band over to the child, who was thrilled to lead the ensemble (or to believe he was leading the ensemble, which was more likely watching Europe’s eyes for direction) in a simple tune.
“Lieutenant Europe was no longer the Lieutenant Europe of a moment ago,” Noble Sissle wrote of Europe’s conducting style, “but once more Jim Europe, who a few months ago rocked New York with his syncopated baton. His body swayed in willowy motions and his head was bobbing as it did in the days when terpsichorean festivities reigned supreme. He turned to the trombone players, who sat impatiently waiting their cue to have a ‘Jazz spasm,’ and they drew their slides out to the extreme and jerked them back with that characteristic crack. The audience could stand it no longer; the ‘Jazz germ’ hit them, and it seemed to find the vital spot, loosening all muscles. . . . ‘There now,’ I said to myself. ‘Colonel Hayward has brought his band over here and started ragtimitis in France; ain’t this an awful thing to visit upon a nation with so many burdens?”
“You will be going where no American soldiers have been before,” the band had been told by American major general Francis Joseph Kernan after a concert earlier in Tours. “Upon the impression left by you on the minds of the French population will rest the reputation of American soldiers in general. The French recognize no color line—I beg you not to be the cause of the establishment of such a line. You are representatives of the American nation. The eyes of France will be upon you, and through France, the eyes of the world.”
Back in St. Nazaire, the men of the 369th continued to build railroads, drain swamps, and wait in the hope of seeing actual combat. In camp, boxer George Cotton was attached to Headquarters Company, stationed at the Adjutant’s Office as a member of the regimental police. Cotton’s former sparring partner, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, had written a letter from exile to New York congressman E. H. LaGuardia, asking for permission to join the army, saying, “All I ask is a chance to show my sincerity. There is no position I would consider too dangerous. I am willing to fight and die for my own country. I cannot offer any more. Will you kindly make my offer known to the proper authorities?” In the end, Jack Johnson’s contribution to the war effort would be purely nominal: Allied troops called some of the heavy shells used during the war “Jack Johnsons” for the heavy punch they packed.
They saw the toll the war was taking on the besieged population of France. For George Cotton, it made the reason they’d come to France less abstract. Anyone who expected a man of George Cotton’s bulk and occupation to be punch-drunk or simpleminded met instead a sensitive, articulate gentleman who, one evening after darkness had settled in and all was quiet, was moved to speak to his superior.
“Sir—did you ever stop to think about our blessings, over here? In the midst of all the poverty which the French people are suffering? I saw a sight this afternoon which made me think of it. A lot. You know, I was on duty down at the dumping grounds, where the army trucks throw out the waste from the camps up here. There were hundreds of old men. And women. And children, swarming over those fields. To pick food, and fuel, from our refuse. Just think of it, Sir Adjutant, Sir. The stuff we throw away, as waste, supplies all the food and heat that those poor people have to keep themselves from starvation and cold. And some of our fellows kick. It makes me think.”
It spoke highly of Cotton, who was far from home in a strange land and might well have been preoccupied with his own problems and circumstances, to feel such sympathy for those less fortunate. It also spoke highly of the unit that he could share his thoughts with a white superior officer.
“It was awfully cold and windy down there today,” Cotton continued, “and there seemed to be a larger and hungrier crowd than usual. I noticed one young girl, who kind of got on my nerves. She was pretty. And oh so thin. I guess she was about seventeen. That girl didn’t have nothing on, in all that cold wind, but a little calico slip of a dress. She was so eager to get something good to take home that she tried to beat the crowd by running out and climbing up on top of one of those big truck loads. To pick over the stuff before it was dumped out on the fields. And that’s how I found out she was so thinly dressed. That she didn’t have nothing on under that calico slip. When she got up on top of that truck, the wind caught hold of that thin dress and just blew it right up over her head.”
“What did the poor girl do, Cotton?” the adjutant asked.
“Oh, Sir, Adjutant, Sir, the girl didn’t do nothing. She just kept looking for food and wood. Except that she straightened up for a minute, to make a grab for her skirt, and said, in a funny little shrill voice, ‘Ooh-la-la.’”
There was nothing salacious in his words, only compassion for a girl who was small and too thin, desperate, hungry, and cold, without a proper coat.
He was not alone in his empathy for the French people—for anyone fighting subjugation to the Hun. When an enlisted man asked a colored officer why he had joined and what he was fighting for, the officer’s response was succinct, as he later recalled: “I told him I was fighting for what the flag meant to the Negroes in the United States. I told him I was fighting because I wanted other oppressed people to know the meaning of democracy and enjoy it. I told him that millions of Americans fought for four years [in the Civil War] for us Negroes to get it and now it was only right that we should fight for all we were worth to help other people get the same thing. . . . I told him this is our opportunity to prove what we can do. If we can’t fight and die in this war just as bravely as white men, then we don’t deserve an equality with white men, and after the war we had better go back home and forget all about it. But if we can make America really proud . . . then I am sure it will be the biggest possible step towards our equalization as citizens. That is what I told him, and I think he understood me.”
On March 10, the hopes of the men from Harlem were answered. Pershing capitulated, ceding to the wishes of Hayward, or Foch, or both, and issued orders that the regiment join the French army and entrain to the town of Connantre, seventy miles east of Paris. There the men of the Fifteenth discovered they’d been given a new name: the Trois Cent Soixante Neuvième RIUS, now part of the Sixteenth Division of the French Fourth Army.
Colonel Hayward couldn’t keep from crowing in a letter to a fellow colonel back at Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg:
The most wonderful thing in the world has happened. . . . A fairy tale has materialized and a beautiful dream has come true. We are now a combat unit. . . .
It is all so wonderful, especially following the monotonous tour of duty during our first two months in France. . . .
There are no American troops anywhere near us, that I can find out, and we are “les enfants perdu,” [the lost infants] and glad of it. Our greatest American general simply put the black orphan in a basket, set it on the doorstep of the French, pulled the bell and went away. I said this to a French colonel with an “English Spoken here” sign on him, and he said, “Weelcome leelte black babbie.”
Gazing from the train windows as they departed the coast, Henry Johnson, Needham Roberts, William Butler, Spots Poles, Elmer McCowan, and the others would have beheld strange scenery: acres of piled-up munitions, armored trains carrying camouflaged artillery pieces, airfields with great flocks of airplanes waiting to fly, barbed wire entanglements stretching for miles, wrecked homes and buildings, miles of shredded fields and scarred meadows, and vast burial grounds sprouting tens of thousands of small white crosses, some decorated with the tricolored French flag, others marked as German.
Horace Pippin was glad to leave the wet work of St. Nazaire behind. As they neared the front, he was surprised to see all the half-demolished buildings, the houses with big holes in them that let you see clear through to the other side. “The old women and old men came out of their homes to see us and they would cry for joy as we went by,” he wrote. “That were the first town I ever seen to be in so much need. . . . The wind were so cold it would go through anything you could put on, and I felt for the old women and men to think how they had to get along in that friendless and helpless town.”
They made their beds in dirty barracks with mud floors. Pippin remembered only cold and rain dripping through a hole in the roof, so much rain that, he wrote, “I did not know whether they had a sun there or not. I now will say that I have not seen the sun in more than a month.”
Noble Sissle, traveling west on March 20 to Connantre from Aix-les-Bains, may have been the first member of his unit to reach the front itself, purely by accident, when the third-class section of the troop train he was riding in, along with the horn section Jim Europe had recruited from Puerto Rico, became separated from the first-class section, shunted onto a different track entirely in the middle of the night, while everyone aboard was sleeping. Sissle and his companions discovered what had happened the next morning when they stepped off the train at the first station, only to find themselves alone. Sissle’s confusion was compounded by the fact that neither he nor the Puerto Rican horn section with him spoke French.
They got back on the train “very much bewildered” and ended up in Châlons-en-Champagne, a jumping-off town only a few miles from the front where the communication trenches leading to the front began. There, an American MP from the Twenty-seventh New York Division (the same division that sang them off at Spartanburg) told them where they were.
Sissle was unaware of exactly how close he was to the line until he heard “a shriek through the air like the screaming of a pheasant,” followed by a tremendous explosion as a German shell landed nearby. The French soldiers in the area took the shelling in stride. Sissle and the Puerto Ricans considered it a baptism by fire: they had become the first members of the 369th to come under actual attack.
“I never saw such a scamper for cover as that exploding shell caused amongst those musicians,” Sissle wrote. “In fact, they so completely took to cover that it was two days before we located all of them.”
By March 21, the band and the regiment had been reunited. They moved from Connantre to the town of Heirpont, where the men of the newly coined Trois Cent Soixante Neuvième RIUS were met by about fifty French instructors, who gave the regiment its “finishing touches and specialistic training.” Five French instructors were attached to regiment and battalion staffs, the rest to the enlisted men, about five per company or one to each platoon. The New Yorkers were allowed to keep their uniforms but traded their Springfield rifles for the French Lebel, with its longer rapierlike bayonet. They wore French ammunition belts, pouches, and helmets.
They were greeted by General Le Gallais, commander of the Sixteenth Division of France, with whom they were attached. Le Gallais warned Hayward that the enemy might not wait for them to complete their training.
“What would you do if the Germans came piling through here?” the general asked Hayward. Hayward vowed that his men would do their best, but one of his officers, after Le Gallais had left, gave a truer answer.
“If the Germans came piling through here,” the officer said, “in four or five days, the 369th could be counted on to spread the news all through France.”
In Heirpont, the band played and Noble Sissle performed “Joan of Arc” in French for Gen. Henri Gouraud, commander of the French Fourth Army, of which the Sixteenth Division was a part. Gouraud had first served to protect French colonial interests in Sudan, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania before rising to the rank of brigadier general at the age of only thirty-four. A lean man with a pointed beard, a bushy handlebar moustache, and an intense stare beneath the brim of his braided general’s cap, Gouraud had lost his right arm at the Battle of Gallipoli in the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, but he had recovered to lead the French Fourth Army as of July 1917. “He looked weak and frail in his distorted figure, yet when he came close enough so that you could see the flash of fire that sprang from his eyes and that strong confidence and determined look,” Sissle said, “you well realized why he was called ‘The Lion of the Argonne.’”
His nickname was in fact “The Lion of France,” but his den was in the Argonne sector. He was to lead the men from Harlem into battle and, in many cases, make decisions that would determine who lived or died. The men regarded him with instant respect, trusted him, and sought to earn his good opinion.
Training began immediately. Language barriers were not as insurmountable as had been feared. Frequently, a French soldier could demonstrate a task or procedure for the benefit of the American soldiers in pantomime, without having to explain his actions fully. There was much to learn.
They had to know how to read French maps. Each secteur had sous secteurs (“subsectors”) and a centre de résistance (CR) composed of points d’appui, or garrisons, which contained several groupes de combat , comprising grenadiers-voltigeurs, grenadiers, and mitrailleurs. A parallèle was a trench parallel to the front. A boyau was a perpendicular trench. A fighting space was a tranchée, and a wider area was a sape. A parallel, or doublement, ran thirty to forty meters behind the front line.
They learned how to use and maintain the Lebel rifles, which were inaccurate at long range and carried only three bullets in the clip, to the Springfield’s five. They learned how to take the Lebel apart and put it back together, under calm conditions and under fire. They learned how to use a grenade launcher called a trombalian, fitted over the muzzle of the Lebel, capable of throwing grenades as high as 250 feet in the air, the grenade potent enough to kill anyone standing within 30 feet of where it landed.
They learned how to wield the longer bayonet, how to fight from a hole in the ground, and how to use the heavier French weapons, the mortars and grenades. They also learned to use the Chauchat machine gun, with its semicircular magazine, similar to the American tommy gun, with wooden grips and of a contrary design, where the front half of the weapon recoiled against the stock, making the whole thing shake fiercely when fired and difficult to aim.
They learned how to use French radios, how to manage their dogs, and how to use their pigeons to carry messages. One pigeon, sent from Fort Vaux in 1916, had carried a message saying, “We are still holding out . . . relief is imperative . . . this is my last pigeon,” and reached its destination before the gas it had inhaled killed it. The pigeon was subsequently awarded the Légion d’honneur.
They learned how to delouse themselves under trench conditions. The French called lice totoes. Head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis ) bit them on the backs of their necks and behind their ears, fed on their skin and blood, and laid eggs in their hair. They had body lice, or crabs, too. Lice are light-averse and like dark places; are spread by human contact, shared clothing, and shared beds; and thrive in unclean places, making the trenches a perfect environment for them. Battling lice seemed as intractable and unwinnable a struggle as the war itself. If you saw a jacket made of shearling or goat hide that somebody had thrown away, and you thought it would be warm to wear, the poilus may have warned you not to put it on—you couldn’t get the lice out of those things. Sgt. John Jamieson was inspired to write a poem about them:
They ran wild simply wild over me.
They’re as reckless as reckless can be.
No matter where I’m at, when I take off my hat,
There are little ones and big ones, you could pick ’em off like that.
Oh how they bite, oh, how they bite all over me.
They made me just as sore as I could be,
But at night when I lay down, each little coot would seek a crown,
Oh how they crawls, oh how they crawled all over me.
They’re as reckless as reckless can be.
No matter where I’m at, when I take off my hat,
There are little ones and big ones, you could pick ’em off like that.
Oh how they bite, oh, how they bite all over me.
They made me just as sore as I could be,
But at night when I lay down, each little coot would seek a crown,
Oh how they crawls, oh how they crawled all over me.
They learned what the different German shells sounded like—how to tell explosive rounds from gas rounds, which made a soft kerplunk sound, and how to cope with gas attacks, either mustard gas, phosgene, or simple tear gas. If your eyes burned right away, it was tear gas. If the tear gas made you want to sneeze too, leave your mask on because that was likely a gas the Germans fired to make you take your mask off, usually followed by worse gases. Mustard gas, or ypérite, as the French called it, made your skin blister. It didn’t make your eyes hurt right away, but some time later, they’d start to burn. It smelled a bit like garlic in high concentrations, but it was toxic even at low, nearly odorless levels, forming acid when it came in contact with the mucous membranes, the eyes, and lungs. Mustard gas could get into your clothes and hang around a long time, especially in wooded areas. Phosgene didn’t hurt your eyes or skin at all and smelled like fresh-cut hay, or maybe grapes, and it was nasty, because you didn’t really feel anything at first, but it got into your lungs and made acid that broke down the linings and ate away at your capillaries, until you started coughing uncontrollably and eventually drowned from inside out as your chest filled with fluids. You could get a dose without feeling a thing and be dead twenty-four hours later. Tear gas dispersed in the wind, whereas the other gases were heavier than air and sank into the ground or filled shell holes, such that sometimes if you jumped into a hole filled with gas, you were in bigger trouble than if you stayed in the line of fire. Red star. Yellow star. Green star. White star. The Germans marked their shells to know which ones they were loading, but this made them easier to defend yourself against because you could find a piece of shell casing and read the markings. Keep your mask handy, but never panic, because that made you breathe harder, which made you more susceptible.
They ate French rations. Garrison rations were pretty good, prepared in mess facilities in the reserve areas, adjacent to railroad depots, aid stations, or rest areas, with ample portions of vegetables, meat, bread, and wine. French field rations, prepared in portable kitchens closer to the front, were considerably less palatable, hauled to the front by the “soup man,” whose job was considered as dangerous as any, or more so, considering that he was required to traverse perilous territories under fire carrying equipment that made him slower, less mobile, and more exposed. Menus included roasted meats, oversalted fish, pâtés made of meat products one did not want to ask too many questions about, vegetables, rice, and a variety of beans, often hastily prepared. Least palatable of all were the vivres de reserve, carried in the poilus’s packs, including two tins of boiled or corned beef, “Boeuf Bouilli,” which the British dubbed “bully beef” and the French called “monkey meat”; a dozen biscuits carrés, or hard-tack, wrapped in waxed paper; boxes containing blocks of compressed or powdered vegetable, chicken noodle, or beef and rice soup; envelopes containing dehydrated noodle soup or comprimés de bouillon; foil-wrapped portions of coffee stored in refillable tins to prevent crushing (also good for keeping matches and cigarettes dry); two rations of sugar in small paper envelopes; and sometimes crystals of rock candy. The men were also given a daily portion of wine to fill their two-quart canteens, meant to last twenty-four hours, though some of the Americans mistranslated vingt-quatre heures to mean dix minutes.
“After this free indulgence,” Sgt. John Jamieson recalled, “some of our boys thought they saw Germans in the trees, in the trenches, and in fact everywhere. Some of our sentries were firing at the twigs on the trees when they happened to be blown by the wind, and of course, there were numerous things which happened after the boys had drank their wine. So the precious wine had to die a natural death and we had to go without it.”
“There sprung up,” Sissle wrote, “a great comradeship. The French officers had taken our officers and made pals of them. The noncommissioned officers in the French army who held a little more elevated position than the non-commissioned officers in our army by virtue of their long military campaign, treated our boys with all the courtesy and comradeship that could be expected. Cheeriest of all was the good comradeship that existed between our enlisted men and the faithful old French poilu. You could see them strolling down the road, arm in arm, each hardly able to understand the other, as our boys’ French was as bad as their English. In their souls and in their breasts there seemed to beat the same emotion. They were for one cause—liberty and freedom.”
Strolling arm in arm, in broken English, the poilus spoke of the things they knew, practical things that might help.
When the ground was frozen, shell bursts could send splinters of frozen clay, sharp as needles. If you found yourself forced to take refuge in a shell hole, only to find a corpse in the crater, you didn’t want to drink the water in the bottom of the hole, no matter how thirsty you got, because you would die of dysentery—you wouldn’t be able to stop shitting. If you took shelter in a shell crater and men were already there, they would resent you because before they had been safe. Now, thanks to you, they may have been spotted and could draw artillery fire.
Sometimes when the shelling became particularly intense, there would be so much dust and smoke or gas in the air that it could seem like night in the middle of the day, and at night it was worse. It was often impossible to stay in contact with headquarters, and headquarters could not stay in contact with you either. Sometimes you could even lose contact with your own company, and when that happened, you might find yourself wandering, lost, until the next man you ran into in the fog and smoke was the enemy, who was just as lost as you. Then you had to fight him, hand to hand, and kill him before he killed you. Sometimes entire units could wander around lost all night and by dawn’s light find themselves behind enemy lines, surrounded, and then you would be killed. To orient yourself, you needed to look at the stars, if the stars were visible, and if the North Star was in front of you, you had to turn around if you wanted to get back.
Without telephone lines, which were usually cut by the shelling, and without liaison personnel or runners, the regimental commanders often didn’t know where their men were or where the front was. Even in the light of day, you might advance and retreat and advance and retreat so many times over the same repeating landscapes that you wouldn’t know where you had started, where you were going, or where you were, and the maps headquarters used to drawn up battle plans often bore little resemblance to what the soldiers could see in front of them.
You needed to sleep when you had a chance, because at times you would go without sleep for days, and if you saw men stumbling as they marched, weaving and zigzagging from side to side as if drunk, it meant they hadn’t slept, not that they’d had too much wine.
If you saw the entrance to a German latrine during the day, you could fire a few shots to register your rifle to the target, fix your rifle in place with a sandbag or two, then wait until after dark, when the Germans used the latrines. If you took a few shots then, you might get them on the crapper. And if you fought a man with bayonets, you needed to go for his nuts, because he was going to go for yours.
A nice breeze blowing on your face was dangerous because it meant that conditions were favorable for a gas attack. It was much better when the wind was blowing at your back.
The French taught the Americans practical things: to cut the tails off their overcoats, because then there was less material to soak up the mud and rain and weigh a soldier down, and to turn up their coat collars, because sometimes machine gun fire could be so intense that leaves and twigs rained down from the trees above.
You could make a lamp using a can, a sawed-off cartridge, and a strip of cloth as a wick, but you had to borrow a little gasoline from a camion driver. If you put it together right, you had a light that would burn for hours, which was good in a dugout when you wanted to write a letter home. You could also improvise a wall sconce by melting a candle onto the cross section of a bayonet, which could then be thrust into the wall of an abri, but leave any letters you’ve written behind if you’re going over the top, because if you have them on you when you die, they will never be delivered. And don’t go over the top with any money on you either, because the ambulance corps guys will go through your pockets.
They learned how to coil the barbed wire into balls during the day when there was time. At night they could carry the balls and throw them into the wire already set up in front of them for easy reinforcement. They learned how to use a shovel to cut grooves into the trench walls to make climbing out easier, how to use a periscope, and how to hammer a horseshoe into a tree trunk to brace a telescope. They learned that it was unwise to take shelter behind the carcass of a dead horse, mule, or cow, because depending on how long it had been there, the body cavity might be full of big, black, wet, muddy rats, hungry, smart, and bold. The French told the Americans how the rats got into the food supplies and ate everything they could sink their teeth into. One unit had locked a very large cat in a dugout to exterminate the rats, but in the morning, the rats had eaten the cat and dragged its bones back into their lair. “C’est la vérité!”
They learned that sometimes, from inside a dugout, constant shelling made the sound of a whirlpool, of water rushing in and out, and in a real barrage, you could feel the entire earth tremble and shake, the air rushing all around you, explosions crashing and crashing, and then you might start to shake yourself, and your arms and legs would tremble, just like the earth, until you couldn’t tell what was shaking, the earth or you.
The poilus had wilder stories, folklore passed up and down the trenches since the war began and believed to be true: An angel had appeared in the sky at Mons and watched over the troops below. The Germans had a factory where they took corpses from the battlefield and rendered them into candles and boot oils. They notched the edges of their bayonets into saw blades, the Germans did, to rip a man’s guts open. They’d captured a Canadian soldier and crucified him where his mates could view him, pinning him to a cross with bayonets—everybody knew it. And the Germans had women in their dugouts too. Men had found women’s underwear during raids. And some people said there was a ghost in the trenches, a German officer, a captain or a major, wearing a monocle. People had seen him. He would disappear behind his own lines and give enemy gunners your location. That wasn’t the worst of it. A band of deserters lived in no-man’s-land, some said, men of all nationalities, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Brits, Canadians. They’d been living there in caves for years, wild and crazed and mad from the shelling, and they came out at night to rob the dead and feed on their corpses. If you listened carefully enough, sometimes you could hear them. Best if you found yourself out and about in no-man’s-land, not to go alone, or the cannibals would get you. And then, it was time to fight.