Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1918 — U. S. Soldiers Confident They Can Whip Boche [ARTICLE]

U. S. Soldiers Confident They Can Whip Boche

Troops in France Are Training to the Highest Point of Efficiency. KNOW NO FEAR OF FRITZ Soldier Writes of Work and Experiences With Army at the Front— Old Regulars to Be Used as Crack Units of the United States Forces. Dear : This is the first time I have had —or have taken —for letter writing in some days. I wrote home, and will devote the rest of the minutes between now and bedtime to a longdelayed letter to you. I only just returned to my company after being away for a month —in a blamed sight colder place. I had a long and wonderful trip, the details of which I can’t, of course, recount. Let it be mentioned, however, that among other things I did was sleep in a real steamheated room, with sheets, five electric lights, all going at once, and a bathroom. I was a next-door neighbor of Hank Wales, of the I. N. S., who, I discovered, worked in Sacramento, taking the job I left when I went to Panama. He knows you, and I mentioned that I did, but didn’t go into any details. My trip, my one pight of luxury and My reversion to the life of the army have brought a realization of one thing, though: To pervert the title and main strain of the latest Broadway and first-line treach hit, the fun is over, over here. From now on it’s business.

Prance, to the American soldier, .never again will be what it has been. This thought began to formulate itself in the minds of the lucky Americans who came over here in the late summer of 1917, about the time the snow began to fall and the fog to come in from the coast. Now it has crystalized. The grave, whole-souled, sincere sixmonths’ welcome of France is over. It was a welcome not so much regal as it was genuine—not one such as is spoken at a banquet when* the mayor turns the hypothetical keys of the city over, but of the man who opens his home and his all and says, not in words, but in deeds, “You are one with us; what we have is yours.” And fortunate were the Americans who were present at this welcome. The army that comes this year will be welcomed, but not as we were. No Longer a Novelty. Not that France has intentionally moderated her tone. There has been a merely natural relaxation, of course, and the “soldat Americaine” now is accepted more as a matter of course than as a novelty. But the big factors are that the United States is getting into the war—and it is winter. There is less liberty now than there was—no all-night passes, and frequently Sunday is broken by Inspection and drills. There is no military permission to visit nearby cities except qn business. Visiting of the cases is permitted only between noon and 2 p. m. and 6 p. m. and B:3Q for officers and enlisted men. Winter has brought long nights and cold days, its Red Cross sweaters and the 17 pairs of socks from home, and, incidentally, the keenest appreciation of three fruits of civilization which “back home” are such common-places . that - their existence creates no more thought than the flea on Hector’s back. These are light, heat and water. War, and its concomitant economies, cause a step backward in evolution and human progress—superficially, at least —and luxuries vanish, one by one, while what, the American of today sub- ; consciously considers as necessities are stinted... An aeon or so ago water and artificial heat and light might have been considered a luxury, or a dissipation by our developing ancestors. But now they are normally In the class of things we must have. There is, of i course, no alarming scarcity of any of these things. Merely a conservation. Over here we hear that the lights are going out on Broadway, and Dearborn street, and Canal street, and Mar-

ket street; that they are mixing soft coal with hard to conserve, but at the same time give the flat dweller a warm radiator to get up by. And then we figure that the scintillating, on-and-off cigarette sign, at the corner of Broadway and Sixth avenue, for instance, would supply enough light for a whole division; that just one of those restless snakes pursuing each other around the edges of that sign would Illuminate the whole of this Grand Hotel du France, in which we now are billeted, and be a distinct betterment on our present two-candle power (actual) lighting plant. Every Town Has One. I am divulging no “outstanding physical characteristics which might betray locality” when I mention the Grand Hotel du France. They are as common as Maxim’s restaurants in the United States. Every town has one, and they generally are august, aged hostel ries, living, like the Mississippi river steamboats, on their reputation. This one is a comparative juvenile. It is only one hundred and one years old, according to a corner stone we discovered the other day. But at that it hasn’t got electric wiring and plumbing and a furnace in the basement, and if we only had just the rattle on the end of that snake’s tail hanging on a cord in room No. 12 there would be four jubilant soldiers in that “petit chambre.” When the United States took over the Grand Hotel du France it got it unfurnished, of course. It immediately refurnished it with two double-decker bunks of the latest type—nothing more. We sleep two in a corner, and I have one of the lowers. We have discovered, by the way, a virtue in this arrangement. The beds are sturdy, but can be jarred by a jiggling* of the body, and in the event that your bedmate, above or below, is addicted to snoring (and you would be surprised how many soldiers are) you can always stop him by “rocking the cradle’’ until he turns over. This is very handy. It saves looking all over the room for a shoe when you get up in the morning. There are four of us in this room. The most optimistic of the succeeding landlords of this hostelry must have

had trouble In recommending It to the four generations of transients who have abided here and gone. But all the soldiers do not fare so. We are lucky 1 A relative of a soldier “billeted out” was looking for him recently. The headquarters of thX company were in a former private dwelling house. “Take a look upstairs,” said a brother soldier. “If you don’t find him there look out in the carriage house and in the barn loft. If he’s hot there he’ll be In the chicken house.” Our room doesn’t afford even that relic of the castle and pride of the bungalow, a fireplace. But our nextdoor neighbor’s does, and we are officially assigned to hang out around his grate. That solves the heat problem, and also the bathing question. Bathing facilities are limited in France —at least that. In all of France, for example, there is probably not one of those boors who bothers you about statistics on his daily matutinal inundation. I. do not know the favorite Saturday night pastime of the people, either, but I can say that if there is a modern bathtub in this particular town the Americans have not yet found it. So we merely heat a kerosene canful of water —at our neighbor’s fireplace — and take a “bird bath.” As there are eight men who must perform this ablution about one fireplace, and a good soldier takes a bath twice a week, and there are only seven nights in the week, this grate is a busy place. Drinking water is obtained only after difficulties sometimes. The American doctors are taking no one’s word about the supply but their own, and we are allowed to partake only after samples have been tested. Frequently, when in a town, the municipal supply is avoided and the supply is brought in in trucks from distant points. But lam not so skeptical of water as I was. Our last station was near a hospital. In front of this hospital always hung a big canvas bag full of invitingly cool water. I cannot speak for the whole company, but my squad I know used always to drink thereof. We had kept it up for something near a month when one day a doctor in tortoise-shell glasses and a white apron espied a soldier partaking at the bag. He became Immediately very vociferously apprehensive and expostulatory. “For the great jumped-up Holy Moses, man,” said he, “don’t drink that. That’s where we keep all the samples of contaminated water from this part of France.” Find Disease Germs.

In the last 17 days we’ve found germs of 13 deadly diseases right in that container. There are nine million bacteria to the square inch in that — enough germs in that bag to kill the whole German army. I should say that my squad consumed several cubic feet .of that water, and I don’t know enough “about mathematics to compute the number of germs. But we’re all alive, and thirl was two months ago.

But enough of this gassing. I resolved to be brief in my letters, and here I’ve brimmed over onto the third page. It has been cold where I am, but the last few days have been like springtime. Where I was last was up in the snow belt, where it gets on the ground and stays there, the only hopeful word the natives can give being that “it goes off the ground in April.” Without going into details, though, I learned one hopeful thing. While away I had an opportunity of talking with a lot of Americans who have been in the trenches. They were from different groups of troops and had been “in” at different times. And they all were confident that the Americans can whip the Germans at every stage of the game. This isfn’t the boast of a few, but the consensus of the calm opinion of about '4O, I guess, that I talked to. It was very encouraging, coming from men who have had a mouthful of the front. Most of the fellows were from the old American regular army—from the units over here, which are the only ones still intact, I believe. They are being trained to the highest point of military efficiency possible, and, they say, are to be used as the crack units of the United States forces, corresponding with the famous “shock” units of the German and other armies. I guess the same is true of the Rainbow division of the National Guard, which got such a send-off in the States. Regulars Fare Worse.

The old regular army fellows seemed to have fared worse than the rest of us. They -came over early in the game, most of them straight from the border with only a few days in the East, and went into training immediately. They were quartered ug where the war has left an obvious mark and taken most of the superficialties. They’ve been going hard ever since, learning everything of the latest weapons, maneuvers, signals and military science that the French, British and Americans hid to teach them. They’re probably the soundest bunch of men, physically, in the world. And yet they’re greatly neglected. This is because they come from the United States in general and no place in particular. Most of the regiments here come from a distant locality, and the folks back home organize welfare societies and send ’em tobacco and sweaters, but the regulars don’t get in on this. I had a few letters from the coast and probably will get more when the Christmas mail, which is still coming in, catches up. Till la Guerre is Finis, ROSS. P. s.—The army censor who O-K’d the above letter added in his own handwriting the following wail: «p. s.—Above statements regarding the regular forces being more or less forgotten are true, too true. I, too, am from the regular service and I happen to know we were overlooked only too well." "A" ■