Chapter TEN: S.o.s. to Dillpickle

To most of us hitherto the letters _S.O.S._ have signified calamity of some kind—appeals for succour from sinking liners, and the like. Our British liaison officers, too, tell us that S.O.S. is the epithet applied to the rockets which are always kept in position in British front-line trenches, to be discharged as an urgent intimation to the gunners behind that the enemy are attacking in mass.

But in the American Army S.O.S. means “Service of Supply.” It denotes, not panic, but order, and control, and abundance. It covers the whole chainwork of activity known in most armies as the “Lines of Communication.” The town where we find ourselves to-day is a great S.O.S. centre. On its outskirts lie mushroom cities of huts and sheds. Here is a great cold-storage depot: there are eight thousand tons of frozen beef in this single building. Here is a big station for assembling aeroplanes, where de Haviland planes of British design are being fitted with Liberty engines. Through the town itself there flows by night and by day a never-failing stream of food and munitions and replacement troops. Needless to say the town lies upon one of the main roads along which the Race to Berlin is being run.

Back along that road, alas! streams another current—a counter-current—of wastage, material and human. Upon its surface is borne all the dreadful litter of the battlefield—rusty rifles, damaged equipment, blood-soaked uniforms. Here is a mighty depot, which handles and repairs such wreckage. These buildings have all been constructed within the past few months. It would take you half a day to walk through them. In at one end of the establishment goes a squalid torrent of torn clothing, unmated shoes, leaky rubber trench boots, odds and ends of equipment. In due course, after a drastic series of laundering, sorting, patching, stitching, or vulcanizing experiences—mainly at the hands of a twittering army corps of Frenchwomen—each item in this melancholy jumble finds itself reincarnated in various storehouses in the form of properly assorted pairs of boots and shoes, neat second-hand uniforms, and complete sets of equipment. Nothing is wasted. Stetson hats damaged beyond repair are cut up into soles for hospital slippers. Uniforms too badly ripped for decent renovation are patched, dyed grass-green, and issued to German prisoners.

There are some thousands of these prisoners, with more coming. When they arrive, their prevailing tint is grey. Their uniforms are grey, by nature; their knee-high boots are grey, with dust; their faces are grey, with exhaustion and grime. These human derelicts are submitted to very much the same process of restoration as the damaged uniforms and equipment. They are paraded, stripped, and marched into the first of a series of renovation chambers. They pass under hot showers; they spend a salutary period in what is delicately described as the “delousing chamber”; they are then provided, first with underwear, then with shoes, then with one of the grass-green uniforms aforesaid, and finally with a cooking and toilet outfit. They are shaved and their hair is cut; they are medically examined; they are card-indexed; a register is made of their trades; they are housed in comfortable wooden huts within a great barbed-wire enclosure; and within a few days they are at work upon whatever tasks they happen to be best qualified for, earning twenty centimes a day. They are fed upon the rations of American and British soldiers, including white bread—the only white bread in Europe.

Perhaps some of them, before they came here, saw the Allied prisoners in Germany—starved, robbed, beaten, and forced to work in salt-mines or shell-areas until death made an end of their afflictions. These languishing grass-green captives must bless the Geneva Convention, and marvel at the uncultured folk who still stand by its provisions.

A camp of German prisoners practically runs itself. Fritz knows when he is well off. There is no insubordination. Men come rigidly to attention when an officer passes. The routine work is supervised by German sergeants. In this particular camp you may enter one large hut and behold some fifty German prisoners engaged upon clerical work connected with camp administration—ration indents, card-indexes, and the like. It is a task after the German heart. Each prisoner is absorbed in his occupation. He can hardly bring himself to rise to his feet when the door is thrown open for the Officer of the Day, and _Achtung!_ is called. His pig’s eyes gleam contentedly behind his spectacles. And well they may! A German delivered from the German Army and permitted to sit all day and make a card index of himself may be excused for imagining that he has got as near Heaven as a German is ever likely to get.

“When this War is over,” observes Mr. Joe McCarthy, gazing meditatively through the barbed wire, “I guess someb’dy will have to chase these ducks back to Germany with a gun!”

* * * * *

Frenchwomen are not the only representatives of their sex in the American Expeditionary Force. There are hundreds of American women too, from every walk of American life. There are the hospital nurses, the stenographers, the telephone operators, the motor-drivers—all duly enrolled members of the Regular Service. Then there are the women of the Auxiliary Forces—the Red Cross, and its sister organizations—all doing a man’s share, and something over. Their work is not supposed, of course, to take them up into the battle zone. They serve at the Base, or on Lines of Communication. But in these days of Big Berthas and promiscuous bombing raids, no one is safe. The battle zone is the extent of ground which an aeroplane can cover, as the inhabitants of London know to their cost. Some of the worst devastation in France may be witnessed at certain British hospital bases on the French coast, miles from any battle-line.

Still, women have been known to find their way into the Line. As some student of nature has told us, “It is hard to keep a squirrel off the ground.”

One summer morning an old acquaintance of ours, Miss Frances Lane, and her crony, or accomplice, Miss Helen Ryker, came off night duty at their hospital and sniffed the fresh air luxuriously. They had twelve hours of complete freedom from responsibility before them—a circumstance not in itself calculated to correct Miss Lane’s natural lightness of ballast.

In most hospitals nurses coming off night duty are not unreasonably expected to spend at least some portion of the following day in bed. But youthful vitality, abetted by summer sunshine and a martial atmosphere, make a formidable combination against the forces of common sense. This particular hospital was only thirty miles from the Line. On still days the turmoil of the guns could be heard quite plainly.

After breakfasting, Miss Lane took her friend by the elbow and led her to the great military map on the wall, with the position of the battle-line clearly defined upon it by an irregular frontier of red worsted, and said:

“Helen, listen! Just where are we on this little old map?”

Miss Ryker, who possessed the unusual feminine accomplishment of being able to read maps and railroad time-tables, laid a slender finger-tip upon the blue chalk-mark which designated the geographical position of the hospital.

“There,” she said.

“And,” pursued Miss Lane, in a low voice, “_where do we go from here_?”

Miss Ryker, who was a girl of few words, began to measure out distances with her finger and thumb.

“The nearest point to us,” she announced at last, “is a place called Delficelles.”

“Delficelles? Our boys captured it not long ago,” said Frances in confirmation. “I guess the trenches must lie just beyond.”

On one point she was right: Delficelles had been captured by an American Division a fortnight previously. On the other she was wrong, for a reason which will presently appear.

“We are going to visit them,” continued Miss Lane.

“How do we get there?” enquired her practical friend.

Miss Lane looked stealthily round, as a precaution against eavesdroppers. Then she smiled seraphically.

“I guess we can do it on our faces,” she remarked.

* * * * *

To get up into the Line—that tortured strip of territory, some five miles wide, which winds from the North Sea to the Alps, and within which two solid walls of men have faced one another for nearly four years—there are two recognized courses of procedure. One is to be a member of an armed party—an Infantry Battalion, say, going up to take over a sector of trenches. There is no doubting the _bona fides_ of such an excursion.

The other course is incumbent upon solitary individuals like despatch-riders and unchaperoned civilians. These must have a much-signed and countersigned pass. Even Staff Officers are not exempt from this law. That lesson was learned as far back as nineteen fourteen, when German officers, arrayed in the uniform of the British General Staff, kindly accompanied the British Army during the retreat from Mons and added to the already considerable difficulties of a hectic situation by directing troops down wrong roads and issuing orders of a demoralizing nature.

So now it is almost as difficult for an unauthorized person to get into the fighting area as into the Royal Yacht Squadron, or the New York Subway at 6 P.M. Mesdames Lane and Ryker were obviously neither an armed party nor chaperoned civilians. But young and attractive females have means of attaining their ends which are denied to the rest of creation. Ask not how the feat was achieved. Enquire not the names of the susceptible lorry-drivers who succumbed, nor of the tall young military policeman at Dead Dog Corner who melted incontinently beneath the appeal of Miss Lane’s blue eyes. Let it suffice that by early afternoon our two runagates found themselves safely deposited in what was left of the village of Delficelles. (By the way, the local soldiery pronounced it “Dillpickle,” so we will let it go at that.)

Having reached the haven of their desire, they found, to their extreme satisfaction and relief, that it seemed to be no part of any one’s duty to turn them out. Indeed, such officers as they encountered punctiliously saluted their uniform, while the rank and file addressed friendly and appreciative greetings to them. One enthusiast produced a pocket camera, and insisted upon performing a ceremony which he described as “spoiling a film” upon the precious pair.

The village itself lay in a hollow behind a low ridge, and was in what may be described as moderate ruins. One learns to make these distinctions in the shell-area. Roughly, there are three grades. Villages whose roofs are riddled by shrapnel and whose windows have ceased to exist, but whose walls are still standing, may be regarded as practically intact, and are much sought after as places of residence. At the other end of the scale come the villages which were deliberately obliterated by Brother Boche during one of his great retreats. There are many such in the neighbourhood of Bapaume and Péronne. To-day not one stone of these remains upon another. Not a tree is to be seen. It is only by accepting the evidence of the map that you are able to realize that you are in a village at all. The main street runs between high banks, overgrown by weeds and nettles. If you part these and look underneath, you will find a subsoil of brick rubble.

At the cross-roads in the centre, where once the church stood, you will find a military sign-board giving the map-reference of the village, followed perhaps by a postscript, thus:

+-------------------+
| Z.17.c.25. |
| |
| THIS WAS |
| |
| VILLERS CARBONNEL |
+-------------------+

_Fuit!_

The village of Dillpickle occupied an intermediate position between these two extremes. Some of the houses were standing; others were merely a pile of disintegrated bricks and mortar. Where one of these ruins had overflowed into the street and obstructed the fairway, the _débris_ had been cleared away and built up into a neat wall, guarding the sidewalk from further irruption. Such houses as still stood were inhabited, chiefly in the lower regions, by American artillerymen and the Infantry Brigade in reserve. The village was rich in German notice-boards—black stencilling on plain wood—announcing that here was the residence of the _Kommandant_, or here a shelter from bombardment for so many _Männer_, or that here it was _Verboten_ for the common herd to go. Most of these were now pasted over with notices and orders in a different, and healthier, language.

Our friends collected a German notice-board apiece as a souvenir, and proceeded to ransack the village for further booty. Miss Ryker, who was domestically minded, gleaned two forks, a spoon, and some cups and saucers. Miss Lane, caring for none of these things, appropriated a small mirror. Presently she announced:

“I guess we’ll go up to the trenches now, Helen. They must be just over the hill, beyond that wood on the sky-line.”

But Miss Lane, as already noted, was wrong. The trenches did not lie just over the hill, for the very good reason that there were no trenches. We have grown so accustomed during this War to employing “trenches” as a synonym for “battle-line” that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is possible to fight upon the surface of the earth. For a long time both the Allies and the Hun suffered from a disease called “Trenchitis,” induced by an intensive experience of high explosive and machine-gun bullets. If a force wished to defend itself, it produced picks and shovels and dug itself in. If it wished to attack, it dug an advanced “jumping-off” trench in the dead of night, approached by saps and tunnels, and so made the open space to be covered in the assault as narrow as possible. This is a useful and economical way of fighting, especially when your troops are not sufficiently numerous to warrant prodigality. But it wastes much valuable time; and since the day when the entire American Nation was placed at the disposal of the Allies as a reinforcement, it has been found possible to employ other methods. Down South, on the Alsace-Lorraine front, where a lightly held outpost line runs for more than a hundred miles toward Belfort, trench warfare is still fashionable. But in the Argonne, where most of the fighting takes place in closely wooded country, we remain more or less above ground, maintaining touch with one another as best we can by means of an irregular chain of grass-pits or fortified shell-craters.

So when our pair of truants reached the wood on the sky-line, and penetrated cautiously to the other side, they beheld no trenches.

At their feet the road dropped steeply into a little valley, filled with woods which ran right up the slope beyond and disappeared into a smoky mist on the opposite crest. The sun had not fulfilled its early promise, and had disappeared by noon. A small drizzling rain was beginning to fall.

Helen Ryker, who loved her personal comforts, drew her blue cloak more closely round her, and shivered.

“They don’t have any trenches _here_,” she announced, in aggrieved tones.

“They are in the woods down in the valley,” Miss Lane assured her. “You can hear the firing.”

You certainly could. Up to their ears from the undergrowth on every side rose the mutterings of warfare—solitary rifle-shots, and the intermittent pup-pupping of machine guns. Down in the valley, at the foot of the road, they could see a stream. The road had once crossed it by a bridge; but the bridge was now a ruin, and the road had been diverted so as to cross higher up, by some sort of pontoon.

Not a human being was in sight. One of the strangest characteristics of modern warfare—warfare in which millions of men are employed where formerly hundreds sufficed—is the entire invisibility of the combatants. In these days of aeroplanes and magnifying periscopes no man ever makes himself more conspicuous than need be. A hundred years ago soldiers went into action in brightly coloured coats and flashing accoutrements. Now their uniforms imitate the colours of nature—the colours of grass and earth. Guns are painted to look like logs of wood. If a sniper wishes to do a little business from a tree-top or a thicket, he not infrequently paints himself green as a preliminary.

“It’s lonesome here!” continued Miss Ryker.

“I expect we shall find the boys presently,” replied the undefeated Frances. “My gracious, Helen, what was that?”

Over their heads—quite close, it seemed—sailed something invisible, with a weary sigh. It was a howitzer shell fired from an American battery five miles behind them. The sound of its passage ceased, but almost directly afterward a column of greenish-grey smoke spouted up from the wooded hillside opposite, followed a few seconds later by a heavy detonation.

Helen and Frances found themselves unaffectedly gripping hands.

“What is it?” asked Helen tremulously.

One of Miss Lane’s most compelling characteristics was that she was never at a loss for an answer.

“That? That’s artillery fire, I guess. That over there is the smoke of a big gun.”

As usual, she was partially correct. What they saw and heard was, indeed, artillery fire, but it was not the smoke of the gun, but the smoke of the shell bursting among the German machine-gun nests.

“German or American?” asked Helen.

“American, sure. Let’s go on down this road, and see some more. It’s a nice quiet road. There can’t be any danger.”

In the shell-area on the Western Front the fact that a road is quiet does not by any means guarantee that it is “nice.” But the people who really enjoy war are those who have not been there before. The pair of adventurers set boldly off down the hill. As they started, a second contribution from the howitzer battery passed over their heads, with the lazy rustle which characterizes the descent of high-angle shells, and burst in the woods opposite, fifty yards to the right of the first.

“There’s another gun firing!” exclaimed Miss Lane, clasping her hands rapturously. “My, but I’m excited! C’m along, Helen!”

They hurried down the road, observing with a pleasant thrill that the surface thereof was pitted with shell-holes. More experienced fire-eaters would have noted that some of these holes were of extremely recent origin—a few hours old, in fact. Once or twice they paused to collect more souvenirs—shell-fuses and empty cartridge-cases.

Distances viewed across a valley are deceptive, and their stroll down the road took longer than they expected. The rain was coming down harder than ever.

“We ought to hit those trenches soon,” said Miss Lane.

“What are trenches like, anyway?” enquired Miss Ryker, a little peevishly. She was beginning to make heavy weather of the expedition under her cargo of crockery and expended ammunition.

Miss Lane, whose acquaintance with trench warfare had been derived mainly from the Movies, made no reply. She had stopped by the roadside to read a notice-board, nailed to what was left of a tree. It said:

_This road must NOT be used by troops during daylight._

She nodded her head sagely.

“That’s why there is no one around,” she remarked. “What were you saying just now, Helen?”

Miss Ryker had discovered a fresh grievance.

“It seems to me that some of the firing has gotten _behind_ us!” she said.

The girls stood still, and listened. A third American shell swung over their heads and burst in the woods opposite. Simultaneously came a sharp outburst of machine-gun fire from the right—the right rear, in fact.

“Maybe we have walked into a sort of bend in the line,” suggested Frances. “They call it a salient,” she added professionally. “Why, if there aren’t some of our boys at last! There … crossing that bridge!”

She was right. As she spoke, two khaki-clad figures emerged from the woods upon the opposite side of the stream below them and trotted briskly across the pontoon bridge, in single file a few yards apart. Once across, they joined forces, and began to climb the hill in a more leisurely fashion. But it was noticeable that instead of coming up the road they kept a course roughly parallel to its direction—perhaps a hundred yards away.

“Why should they go hiking through that mushy long grass, wetting themselves, when there is a good road right here? Aren’t men just _children_?” observed Miss Ryker.

“Perhaps they don’t know about the road,” said Miss Lane charitably, “We’ll call them. Oh—Boys!”

Her syren call had the desired effect—as well it might. The gentlemen addressed, both of whom were labouring up the slippery slope with bent heads, stopped suddenly, and looked about them. Next moment they were doubling heavily through the long grass in the direction of the road, making signals as they ran. They appeared agitated about something.

“Come off that road!” shouted one of them, who was leading by ten yards, to the two female figures in the mist. “_Quittez le chemin! C’est dangereux!_ Beat it for here! _Dépêchez-vous!_ As hard as you—well—I’ll—be—” he swallowed something—“_Frances Lane?_”

With a final bound, Boone Cruttenden, with a steel helmet on his head, a gas apparatus slung on his chest, and acute fear in his eyes, landed squarely in the ditch; then scrambled out upon the road.

“Why—Boone?” began Frances affably. But, a grasp of iron fastened on her arm just above the elbow, and a badly frightened young man proceeded to propel her, without ceremony, across the ditch and away from the road.

“You fetch the other one, Major!” he called over his shoulder.

“I shall be charmed,” replied an unmistakable English drawl.

“Boone, listen!” protested Miss Lane breathlessly, as she was towed sideways across the hillside. “What are you—?”

But her escort merely muttered to himself, as they ran:

“Can you beat it? Can you _beat_ it?”

Presently, having placed a distance of more than a hundred yards between itself and the road, the panting convoy was permitted to halt.

“We will now continue our excursion up the hill,” announced the English Major. “But we will keep off the road, if you ladies don’t object. It is registered from top to bottom, you know.”

“Just what does that mean?” enquired Miss Lane, whose natural curiosity was coming back with her breath.

“It means,” replied the Major, removing a shining monocle from his right eye and wiping it with a khaki handkerchief, “that the Boche has the range to every yard of it. As he usually searches it with H.E. and shrapnel every few hours, it is healthier to keep on the grass when going up and down this hill. Are we far enough away now, do you think, Cruttenden?”

“Ye-es. But it would be better to split into two parties, I should say. Less conspicuous—eh?”

The Major readjusted his monocle, and replied solemnly:

“By all means. This young lady and I will extend another hundred yards to the left. Cruttenden, considering your tender years, you display a promising acquaintance with tactics. Also diplomacy. So long!”

So by force of tactical exigency, Frances Lane and Boone Cruttenden walked up the hillside in the rain together. Major Floyd and Miss Ryker were discernible in the failing daylight, keeping station on the left flank.

“Now, tell me!” Boone and Frances began together. Then they stopped. Boone smiled.

“Ladies first!” he said.

But for once Frances preferred to be a listener.

“No, Boone Cruttenden—you!” she said. “Tell me what you are doing here, anyway.”

“I got a chance,” explained Boone, “to come here with Major Floyd—he’s our liaison officer with the British Mission back of the line—and have a look at this sector. The regiment may take it over next month. The Major knows the ground, and he took me down there”—he pointed backwards over his shoulder—“to see our advanced posts.”

“Where are the trenches?”

“Trenches? There are none. This is open warfare. The Yanks and the Huns are mixed up together in those woods, watching one another like cat and dog. We hold the stream, and some of the ground beyond. That pontoon bridge is covered by a concealed machine-gun post of ours, in case the Hun tries to rush it. It’s probable he had direct observation on it: that is why the Major and I did not linger much as we came across. We’re in a sort of pocket here. The German line bends around us. Some of their posts up in the woods have a clear view of the road, all the way up. Luckily visibility is bad to-day, or you might have been spotted. Now tell me what _you_ are doing here!”

Frances told him—as much as she thought he need know.

“And where is your hospital located?” demanded Boone.

Miss Lane informed him.

“That is more than thirty miles back!” cried Boone.

“About that,” agreed Miss Lane meekly.

“Does any one know you are here?”

“I hope not! I mean, no one—except you, Boone,” replied Frances softly.

The conscientious Boone made a last effort to maintain a judicial attitude.

“Do you know you have committed a serious military offence?” he demanded fiercely. “Trying to get past sentries, and traffic police! Did you know that no women are allowed anywhere in the battle zone?”

“Yes,” said Miss Lane demurely. “That was why we came—to break a record!”

“And do you know that all this valley is liable to be searched with gas, and you have no gas-mask?”

“I didn’t know that,” confessed the delinquent, “but I might have guessed it, I suppose. But I was dead tired of that old hospital, Boone, and I was just crazy to see the fighting!”

“Crazy? That’s just the word. You crazy, crazy child!” said Boone affectionately. “Didn’t you know the chances you were taking?”

“Yes,” said Frances Lane. “But”—her eyes were raised to his for one devastating moment—“I knew I was safe the moment I saw _you_, Boone!”

“Oh, _Francie_!” murmured that utterly demoralized youth.

* * * * *

“And where are your headquarters located, Major?” enquired Miss Ryker brightly. The conversation had harped so far upon her own misdemeanours, and she was anxious to introduce a fresh topic.

“I live chiefly with the Division holding this sector,” replied Major Floyd. “I am liaison officer.”

“Don’t drop those cups. Just what does a liaison officer do?”

“I act as bell-hop between the local British Mission and the Americans. I go around paging Generals and Staff Officers—and everything,” replied the Major.

“There are no Generals here,” Miss Ryker pointed out.

“No. To-day I am having a vacation. Boone Cruttenden’s Division are in Corps Reserve near by, so I undertook to bring him up here and give him his first view of the Line.”

“How did you get here?” enquired Miss Ryker, who had not initiated the present conversation for nothing.

“On a Staff car.”

“An automobile?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Behind that wood at the top of the hill.”

“Then,” announced Miss Ryker, coming to the point, “you will be able to give us two poor girls a ride home.”

“It’s—it’s twenty-five miles out of our way,” said Floyd feebly. “Besides, Boone and I have our reputations to consider. He is young, and might live it down, but think of me! People would say I was old enough to know better.”

“Think of _us_!” countered Miss Ryker; “if we can’t get back, and the Matron finds that Frances and I have been playing hookey!” She followed up her appeal by a faint sob.

Major Floyd dropped the teacups and raised his hands above his head.

“Kamerad!” he groaned.

_Whoo-oo-oo-oo-UMP!_

A long overdue shell from a German field battery came shrieking over the tree-tops behind them and landed squarely in the road, two hundred yards to their right.

“You’re quite safe,” announced the Major, patting four fingers which he had suddenly discovered on the sleeve of his Burberry. “That one is too far away to hurt us. There will probably be more, but Fritz won’t shell away from the road. His imagination is not elastic.”

“What about Frances and Captain Cruttenden?” said Helen. “They are nearer the road than we are. Would that shell be able—?”

Major Floyd rubbed his misty monocle and examined the two figures to his right.

“They don’t appear to have heard it,” he announced, and shook his head mournfully.