Jimmy May in the fighting line

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. His First Big One 1

II. Not in the I. D. R 11

Chapter I His First Big One

T HE big, gray touring car stopped in the dust of a white road on the chalky hills of the Champagne, and the bearded young French captain got out. After him came the regimental adjutant, and Corporal Jimmy May’s senior company commander, and then Lieutenant Miller of Jimmy’s own platoon.

“And now, Americans,” laughed the young Frenchman in excellent English, “at the top of this hill I will introduce you to the world war! Come!”

The group started up the green slope along a line of poplars which hardly yet had recovered from the devastation, wrought when the gray hordes of the Huns swept down on France, only 1 to be driven back from the Marne in the days of September, 1914, that seemed now so long ago.

Corporal Jimmy May sat with the chauffeur in the front seat of the big car and looked longingly up at his regimental officers. It was the week after the landing of the first contingent of the American Expeditionary force, and he had been taken along as orderly with these few officers who had begun to be sent on up to the front for a preliminary glimpse of the battle before they had to settle down to the long months of training their troops.

“Say,” grumbled Jimmy, “I wish they’d have taken me up that hill ! It’s tough to be probably the first infantry private in all General Pershing’s army who’s been able to get right up to the front as yet, and then not see it! Me — first doughboy in all the bunch — and they let me stick here in this motor car!”

He looked glumly at the driver who didn’t know any English.

“Oui! Mats non — ” put in the driver apologetically.

“Oh, cut it!” said Jimmy, “I’ve been under 2

HIS FIRST BIG ONE fire before — plenty of it in Mexico ; and I’ve seen a bit of rough work besides! I don’t believe Lieutenant Miller intended to leave me behind — yet they didn’t tell me to come on. But they didn’t tell me to stay!”

He watched the group of officers — olive drab, tall Americans, and sturdy bearded Frenchmen in horizon blue, now far up the hill to the north, and then he threw a legging discontentedly over the side of the car. Corporal May had a strict sense of discipline — but wouldn’t it be a bully thing to say he was the first private of the infantry line who’d seen the German foe?

Then Jimmy yelled with sudden delight. In the seat of the tonneau he spied his lieutenant’s field glasses! The officers had been chaffing about one another’s binoculars all the way up from the brigade billets where B Company was in camp.

“Sure he’ll want ’em!” whooped Corporal Jimmy, “and I’m the lucky bucky right on the spot to gallop there with ’em!”

Over he went, the field glasses in hand, and dashed away up the poplar row. He had lost sight of the officers now, and when he got to the 8 top of the first ridge he looked expectantly this way and that. Then he went down across a cabbage field where the round heads were already growing among the grass green shell-holes of the campaigns of last year and before, up the next slope and into a small wood. Still he didn’t see his superiors.

“Must be on that next slope,” muttered Jimmy, “all right, I can go far as they can!”

But he was surprised to look out on a smiling, green and wooded country rolling northwestward, and with no signs of war unless one looked closely here or there, in the immediate foreground, for old shell-holes or riven trees. No trace of the French lines even was visible, though Jimmy’s party had passed many lines of transport, — camions light field batteries, ambulances and companies of poilus on the main traveled roads from the billet villages where the Americans were. But in reaching this ridge of the Champagne they had come up a very rough stretch, so Jimmy concluded that |he transport lines did not pass here. Standing in the little wood, the slope breaking at his feet down to the gentler lands, he took Lieutenant Miller’s field 4

HIS FIRST BIG ONE glasses and searched the innocent-looking country northward.

In the hazy distance he picked up dark lines converging to the left. Presently he thought he saw irregular markings, too, at right angles to these. Then he looked to his left and right along the broken ridges; still no officer party in sight.

“This war,” mused Jimmy, “looks peaceful as nothing! If Perky and Tolliver, and my old bunkies of the Mexican border days were up here, they’d just naturally curl up in this grass and take a snooze. It isn’t as exciting as chasing down spy plots back home on the Intelligence detail, or dodging the U-boats on our pleasing run over to this little old Europe! Hi — what’s that?”

For he heard a distant reverberation somewhere northward. Then another shortly — a low, choky cough, arid after awhile it seemed like muffled thunder. If Corporal May, waiting intently' for his first gun of Armageddon, had closed his eyes to this peaceful, sunny spot in France, he would have sleepily sworn it was a summer storm arising lazily.

“But — first gun!” muttered Corporal May, “fine, — I got that much ahead of the bunch back there drilling away at the bomb and bayonet stuff anyhow! But Lieutenant Miller — I’ll get a call-down if I don’t find those officers soon and hand him these glasses ! Or if they go back to the machine and I’m gone wild-goose chasing off without orders, well — it’ll be the first demerit for Corporal James Edward May since he joined the ^ colors !”

So Corporal May turned back, as his first sight of the world war was so disappointing. He had just got back among the young trees on his way down to the road where the car waited, when he heard a shout somewhere. It seemed to his left, and turning out of the brush, Jimmy glanced up. He saw the young French captain in the grayblue; he saw his own company officers and the regimental adjutant. They all suddenly began to shout at him, and then they turned and dashed back to the ridge. Jimmy saw them stop as suddenly; then he was amazed to see them fade away, one by one, apparently into the ground.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” gasped Jimmy, “where 6

HIS FIRST RIG ONE did they go to — and where’d they come from? Oh ... a hole in the ground — sure!”

But he didn’t know what the matter was. Only, the last man to disappear so mysteriously into the soil of France was that lusty bearded young French captain himself, and he went down still yelling at Corporal May, but so far away that Corporal Jimmy could not tell what it was about. But the French officer waved and pointed as he disappeared.

Jimmy looked up, and around. He seemed to hear some strange, far moaning in the sky; not at all like the joyous bark of the American field guns that he had heard once or twice when he was chasing Villa in Mexico. But he knew what it was all right.

“Hi, a shell somewhere!” he said to himself interestedly, “and it’s for me up the ridge to see this first boy! Chased the officer chaps to shelter all right, but I don’t just see any hole that’s handy for me!”

So he dodged back the way he had come intending to go out through the woods and give that smiling, peaceful enemy country ahead another “once-over.” That whining song in the air was 7 stronger, and seemed to be passing over; and then suddenly a new note blotted this out — something that grew with the roar of an express train dashing over a culvert ; and then there came the most tremendous racket that young Corporal May had ever heard in his life. He went flat on the ground as if something had bumped him from head to foot — which something had.

After a moment he looked up through the young poplars to see a dun, dusty, smoky cloud as big as a city block spreading up and out. It was just over where his officers had dodged into a hole like rabbits, apparently, and Jimmy got up, dusted his clothes and stared incredulously. Gradually he made out the smoking lines of another hole — a bigger one than he had dreamed a shell could make. It just hurt his pride to think that he, a two-years’ service man, could be so completely surprised and rattled by anything. He walked on slowly towards this mass of reddish earth which continued to give off spirals of smoke ; and presently he saw forms on the other side — his beloved company officers and their French guide, hurrying down the other slope towards the road.

HIS FIRST BIG ONE

When they saw him they halted for a second, shouted at him and went on. Jimmy May started to run around that shell crater, and joined them a hundred yards below it. Blithely, to show how unconcerned he was, he began swinging Lieutenant Miller’s field glasses as he came to them.

“Here, sir! You left them in the car, sir, and I ”

“Oh! That’s why you left the car. Corporal, without orders?”

“I — suppose so, sir! And to tell the truth, I wanted to be the first private soldier, if possible, who saw the front lines!”

“Yes, sir — very good, sir!” Lieutenant Miller retorted, “only our French friend here says that the Germans have a habit of poking a duet of twelve-inch shells onto this ridge daily just probably to discourage its use as an observation point back of our line.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you wanted to be the first man in the Army to see anything, eh? You came mighty near being the first man the Army would have to cable home about as among those missing — 9 for you’d have been merely missing. Corporal May, if you’d kept on strolling.”

“Yes, sir,” grinned Jimmy, “but I’m glad — it was a good way to be introduced, sir — I think!”

Chapter II

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

T N a dark, little room of a low-ceilinged stone house, one of a long row straggling along a crooked, cobbled street of a village in France which must be unnamed until Uncle Sam is through with Mr. Bill Hohenzollern, a sunbronzed, lean-bodied, young corporal of the Regulars sat at a table trying to write out a guard roster which he had unwisely volunteered to do to assist his overly busy top sergeant to-day.

Corporal Jimmy May scrawled a bit and then felt of sundry long, unhealed scratches on his hands, on both hands. Then he felt of some other gashes on his elbows. He reached down and felt of one on his stiff left leg.

“Ouch!” he murmured. “Maybe it can’t be done as those two wise old birds bluffed, but I think it can. I’m going to sneak out after retreat when it’s kind of dusk and practice once.

Then I’ll entice Perky and Tolliver into raggin’ me again before the wire detail, next time we’re out there; and then, me, I’ll walk out in front of ’em, chipper as a lark, grab the vaulting pole and show ’em how a track man could hop over a whole wire entanglement of the Boches. Not — ” he murmured again, dubiously, “that it’s of any practical military use, but just to show those croakers.”

Just then a shadow darkened the single door of the orderly room. Jimmy looked up with some irritation. The company clerk was sick and in hospital. The top sergeant had been worried by the company officers, who, in turn, had been worried by the battalion command, as to certain new details and sections which had to be arranged for certain novel methods of trench attack — all theory and training as yet. For though B Company had been quartered these many weeks back of the lines where they could, at times, hear the distant reverberations of the mighty guns, so far they had not fired a shot or had a glimpse of an enemy. So Sergeant Milbank, with his fellow sergeants, had been bothered fair in picking and choosing men for the 12

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

specialized and final training ere the battalion went forward to get its baptism of fire along with the rest of Pershing’s picked front-line troops. Not only every platoon, but every squad was selected and tested as to individuals — rifle grenadiers, light machine gunners, hand bomb throwers and bayonet men — and it was largely up to the noncoms as to who was best for any particular bit of training.

So, as Corporal May was too stiff and cut up from these mysterious scratches to be out training his own “mopping up” squad, he had been asked to get out some of the routine clerical work. Not another soul w T as about the orderly room, and few in the quarters, which quarters were a strange assortment — stone houses of the French peasants along this quaint little deserted street, barns and outbuildings, any place that could hive the hard-working Sammies while at their intensive grind.

“Hello, there!” bawled Jimmy, for he thought it was some one of the decrepit old Frenchies who policed around the quarters while the companies were out at drill, “Francois! No dustin’ in here 13 iMMY MAY IN THE FIGHTING LINE now! Go away! Pcirlez-vows vamoose? Nix. Meaning: beat it!”

“Say,” was the eager response, “I think I know your voice! Must be B Company, all right — and Corporal Jimmy!”

Corporal May sprang erect and stared. He knew that voice too!

Slowly he advanced to the figure in the doorway, a smallish figure garbed in a horizon-blue, ragged coat and a battered American campaign hat, both away too large altogether, as were the canvas leggings on the feet of this nondescript and international soldier of misfortune. Corporal Jimmy, ever the neat a^d trim olivegarbed infantryman, to whom any military disarray was an abomination, looked the newcomer over again, and again he gasped :

“Hi, there, kid! And what are you doing in France?”

He reached to grasp a grimy paw which the boy thrust out from under his poilu’s discarded tunic. Jimmy stared again.

“Warty, it isn’t possible! Didn’t I see you last hanging around the fence outside the transport docks in New Orleans?”

NOT IN THE I. D. E.

“Sure you did! You remember I told you I’d make it! Couldn’t get on your ship though, or you’d have heard of me before this, Corporal.” Warty grinned, much satisfied with himself. “I made up my mind that this Army couldn’t shake me — or B Company, either, but I did have a time of it. They took me on the old Momus finally as mess boy, and I worked over all right. But, gee, getting up here was a job!”

“Well, if you did it without any authority, you’re a wonder, and what’s more they’ll ship you right back to the disembarking port. And lucky if they don’t clap you in jail on top of it!”

Warty laughed. “Not if my luck sticks! I was knocking around with these transport fellows when I ran onto that quartermaster captain that you introduced me to the time we had the scrap with the dynamite spies on the Mississippi levee — remember? Well, this captain certainly treated me fine. Of course he laughed when I told him I wanted to enlist in your bunch. And I reckon I’d have had to go back on the transport with the mess boys again, only she 15 broke down, and had to be docked. That was my piece of luck. I hooked onto this quartermaster captain who was so mighty busy that he had to use me in his clothing depot. Worked there six weeks. Corporal, scheming all the time how to get up to the lines. Then Captain Frazier sent some of us off on a mule convoy to a little burg somewhere back here, and there I hooked up with a newspaper correspondent who gave me a lift in his car here, when I happened to mention your company officers.”

“Deserted your transport and quartermaster’s job, did you? They’ll fix you, Warty, for this.”

“They got no hold on me. I wasn’t even a civilian employee, regular. Just a volunteer, and no pay either — yet !” Warty grinned cheerfully. “What’s more, they can keep the pay if I can stick up here near the fightin’ chaps.”

“Fine chance!” Corporal Jimmy looked over Warty’s comedy clothes, picked up only he knew where. “The Intelligence Office will send you back, unless, perhaps ”

“Say it,” cried Warty, “unless you fix it up!”

“Don’t know as I want to. What business has a kid like you up here where it’s ail work, and

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

after that into the trenches for us? I suppose if I told ’em that you were the kid that kept the dynamiters from blowing out the Mississippi levee, and helped the Regulars to run down the wireless spies, and on top of that were clever enough to beat your way overseas and clean up to the front line, why, I suppose maybe you might interest ’em.” Corporal Jimmy stared sternly at Warty. “Mind you — it wouldn’t save you from being chucked back. But as long as you’re here — take off that idiotic coat of yours, and make a bluff at doing something. If you could run a typewriter ”

“Sure, I can run a typewriter.”

Jimmy was feeling of his stiff fingers. “You little river rat, where did you ever run a typewriter ?”

“Not much. Used to bat away on the purser’s on an Ohio packet, just for fun. Same thing in France, ain’t it. Corporal?”

“You make three copies of these rosters — and make out forms for these requisitions, like these, see? My fingers are all cut up!”

“What’s the matter with ’em?”

“Never mind, son. You sit down and make 17 a noise like you were useful. When the officers see you in this orderly room they’ll make an awful roar. Our company clerk is laid out, and the top sergeant is over his ears in work. So, if you kick in and help out, maybe B Company could board you a few days — until headquarters hears of you and chases you back to your ship.”

Warty looked over his job, rolled up his big sleeves and grumbled away as he worked.

“I could have done this over in that little old U.S.A.,” he said. “Say, is that a gun whoopin’ away off there?”

“It is. A Boche howitzer, forty-two centimeters, maybe. Recollect, please, that they could throw a shell fourteen miles right down on this orderly room, if they felt that way — and hustle with that roster.”

“Gee!” murmured Warty, and his eyes stuck out with fearful joy.

Corporal May limped out and sat down on a stone bench. Down the deserted, sunny street he could see a platoon of his battalion going through their everlasting bayonet fencing with the instructor who tapped them smartly from behind with his ringed pole so that they must turn, 18

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

charge and transfix the rings — high, low thiust, right and left parry, jab and butt strokes. And further out other squads were attacking the dummies, in line and down in the trenches, ripping them up as they leaped, and charging on for the next defenders. Not a lean, brown man of the lot who was not, by now, in the keenest physical condition, alert with the months of training and eager to be put to the test these lusty October days. Already there were rumors flying up and down the line of billeted villages that the American artillerymen were at it with the French 75’s.

“What’s the matter with us?” growled the Infantry. “Fit as fiddles, and hard as nails — that’s how we are! Why don’t they send us in?”

Officers and some picked noncoms had already been in — to the French front-line trenches in this quiet sector, but that was not what the B Company doughboys and the rest of them meant at all. They wanted to go in, and stick in, holding their own line and worming forward in some big drive on the Germans. That was why they “ate up” their work so ravenously, just as they did the hearty, base camp grub to which Jimmy 19 now watched them coming, swinging along in squad column with the day’s grind half done.

When the ranks had been dismissed in the street and the hungry mob had scattered for barracks to divest themselves of rifles and field kits, Jimmy saluted his ranking company officer.

“A new clerk, sir, seems to have arrived. Headquarters doesn’t know anything about it either, but perhaps I could explain. Do you remember, sir, back home — when the regiment was at Jackson Barracks, the boy that I brought in? Special duty, sir, with the Intelligence Department, and I called attention to this youngster’s part in running down the wireless plotters?"

“Oh — Warts?” murmured Lieutenant Miller; “but what the mischief ”

Corporal May explained simply. “I think Captain Wilson of the Q.M.C. would vouch for him, sir. Had him employed down there anyhow.”

“Keep him busy, then, ’til we see,” retorted the hurrying drill officer. “And you, Corporal — able to go out again on the wires?”

“Yes, sir. They patched me up all over, sir. I’m ready!”

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

And the worried company commander laughed.

The whole company had laughed. When Jimmy limped down to his squad’s barracks, Privates Perkins and Tolliver, especially, laughed. Jimmy saw them now out of the corner of his eye. Of all his squad of eight men, Perky and Tolliver were the only members from the old Mexican Border days. Like Jimmy himself — and Jimmy was only twenty this year — they felt like veterans along with the six-months’ drilled rookies who had been mauled into shape behind the lines all this summer. So Perky and Tolliver, because they had soldiered along with Corporal Jimmy in Sonora and had mingled their beans and bully beef with his on many an outpost, could take liberties with a beloved N.C.O.

They began it once more, innocently, when Corporal May slid a sore leg in over the bench at mess. Private Perkins reached for the tea past the Corporal’s ear, but he looked at Tolliver.

“Tell me, bucky,” began he, “what is the record in this highfalutin’ high vault of which col- 21 lege men is so proud? How far could a lad jump now?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Tolliver, “but I know this. Perky: No matter how high he jumped, he’d have to come down. That’s what hurted ’em — this cornin’ down business on a bunch of barbed wire the same which was put up to keep Fritzies oujt and not for college men to jump over.”

And the six-months’ rookies of Squad Twelve laughed guardedly. They had all seen it. Three of them had helped cut, unbutton, dig and lift their corporal out of the mess. Just now their corporal was reaching serenely for the beef stew. He couldn’t deny it. The whole platoon, in one of the rest periods, while drilling over the wire defenses, had heard the argument which Perkins had started. He had opined that what Pershing’s expeditionary force needed right in front was a line of college high jumpers and pole vaulters, so that instead of laboriously pounding up the Boche entanglements with artillery and then sending wire cutters on to clear the way for the charging troops, these star letter men would be over the top in two jumps. He knew that 22

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

Jimmy May had once been a prep school vaulter; and perhaps that was why, after airing all he didn’t know of track athletics, Private Perkins winked at Private Tolliver and declared of course such talk was foolish, because no “college man” could jump the four line “apron and festoon” defense which the wire detail had just completed.

“Might be done all right,” Corporal Jimmy had put in casually. “But what for? The Fritzies would drill ’em full of holes in mid-air !”

“No, they wouldn’t. The Fritzies would be so surprised at a lot of college jumping jacks sailing up over the wires that they’d forget all about shooting. But you couldn’t do it, Corporal — and besides, it ain’t in the Infantry Drill Regulations.”

“We’re doing a barrel of tricks every day,” retorted Jimmy, “that aren’t in the I.D.R. When it comes to getting through the wires you can jump, cut, crawl, hurdle — any old way, long as you do it quick and find cover the other side until the slow ones get to the line.”

“It would be a sight, now wouldn’t it, Perky?” mused Tolliver. “Only it can’t be done. A college man couldn’t clear that mess of wires. I 23 guess we’ll stick to the I.D.R. and the new French stuff.”

“Jump ’em?” retorted Jimmy, interested at last. “If I got the right take-off and gave a shove at the right instant, I could drop clean over. It’s less than eighteen feet broad and not four high. Of course it’s not pole vaulting — it would be jumping with a pole like I’ve seen the kids do.”

“Kids could, all right,” muttered Perkins, complacently, “but these here college men couldn’t — it ’ud be too original for ’em. Also too high, and too broad. They’d have to have yell leaders and referees ”

“Say,” broke in Jimmy, “I’ll bet you a dish of exchange ice cream I can hop that wire stuff the first try. That’s no hard trick. Trying to crawl through is what gets you. I don’t mean with your kit, of course, and gun and all. If I did, there’d be nothing to it but organize some classy first-line pole jumpers and take the wire defenses on a run!”

“What you mean,” said Perky, “is that you can jump ’em — honest?”

NOT IN THE I. D. R.

“Any fool could do it,” retorted Jimmy, unguardedly.

“Well, you didn’t, Corporal. You landed on your back in the third festoon and, I blush to relate, you was stuck.”

“I had a field pack and a pole that was no good. Never mind there, bullies. Fall to that slum and fill up. You’re going to get double drill this afternoon. Next week, maybe, you’ll have something more than sticking straw dummies, too!”

And the mess snickered a bit and mumbled over their chuck.

The Corporal seemed sort of “het up.” He couldn’t endure being laughed at; and besides, the officers and the French instructors also had seen this ridiculous affair and had laughed. Worse than that, Lieutenant Miller had “bawled him out,” the first time in Jimmy’s whole Army life. He went through the afternoon drill and trench instructions with a subdued and curt air, which boded no good for any laggard in his squad. After recall he looked in the orderly room, remembering then that he had totally forgotten Warty Wallace, the stowaway and 25 hanger-on who had actually done the impossible and followed the Army to France.

“Hi, kid!” he yelled, “did the officers scalp you ?”

“They did. They was rough, Corporal. But they don’t know what to do with me, for they can’t let me loose to run around, you see. So they gave me a whole pile of company business to copy, and when the top sergeant got through abusin’ me, he seemed glad to watch me work. I guess he knows more about bawlin’ out rookies than he does typewritin’, doesn’t he?”

“They’ll turn you over to regimental headquarters soon as they get the work out of you. When I’m off after retreat, you come down past the little bridge and I’ll wise you up to some things that’ll help you to stick on and maybe keep out of the guardhouse.”

“Thanks,” said Warty, “and say — is that a German gun boomin’ away off somewhere? Gee whiz! — think o’ me gettin’ to hear ’em!”

Corporal May strode on to his barracks. Down the long stone street the fellows were idling, cleaning rifles, singing and indulging in their usual horseplay bred of high, animal spir- 26

NOT IN THE I. D. ft.

its, good food and the wonderful building up of body and nerve that the intensive drive of the Army game was giving them. It would be another game soon, reflected Jimmy; cold and wet and dark and danger. The scattered billets up and down the sector to be assigned the Sammies were already gossiping of the “Big Day,” when they would go in among their eager F rench compatriots and relieve the heroes of the Marne.

At the end of the street Corporal Jimmy came on Private Perkins indulging himself in an unofficial foot inspection. “Ain’t so fat as you were in Mexico,” commented Jimmy tartly. “Honest, you can count your toes now, can’t you. Perky?”

“Yes, just discovered a funny thing. Got the same number of toes on one foot that I have on the other. That’s because I never got none tore off tryin’ to jump a barbed wire entanglement.”