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John J. Coincidence
by
To stopper the holes made by the wear and tear of intensive training, the attritions of sickness and of transfers, the losses by death and by wounding as suffered in the first small spells of campaigning, replacements came up from the depots, enriching the local colour of the division with new types and strange accents. Southern mountaineers, Western ranch hands and farm boys from the Middle States came along to find mates among Syrians, Jews, Italians, Armenians and Greeks. Cotton Belt, Corn Belt, Wheat Belt and Timber Belt contributed. Born feudists became snipers, counter jumpers became fencibles, yokels became drillmasters, sweat-shop hands became sharpshooters, aliens became Americans, an ex-janitor–Austrian-born–became a captain, a rabble became an organised unit; the division became a tempered mettlesome lance–springy, sharp and dependable.
This miracle so often repeated itself in our new army that it ceased to be miraculous and became commonplace. During its enactment we as a nation accepted it with calmness, almost with indifference. I expect our grandchildren will marvel at it and among them will be some who will write large, fat books about it.
On that great day when a new definition for the German equivalent of the English word “impregnable” was furnished by men who went up to battle swearfully or prayerfully, as the case might be, a-swearing and a-praying as they went in more tongues than were babbled at Babel Tower; in other words, on the day when the never-to-be-broken Hindenburg line was broken through and through, a battalion of one of the infantry regiments of this same polyglot division formed a little individual ground swell in the first wave of attack.
That chill and gloomy hour when condemned men and milkmen rise up from where they lie, when sick folk die in their beds and the drowsy birds begin to chirp themselves awake found the men of this particular battalion in shallow front-line trenches on the farther edge of a birch thicket. There they crouched, awaiting the word. The flat cold taste of before sunup was clammy in their throats; the smell of the fading nighttime was in their nostrils.
And in the heart of every man of them that man over and over again asked himself a question. He asked himself whether his will power–which meant his soul–was going to be strong enough to drag his reluctant body along with it into what impended. You see, with a very few exceptions none of this outfit had been beyond the wires before. They had been under fire, some of them–fire of gas shells and of shrapnel and of high explosives in dugouts or in rear positions or as they passed along roads lying under gun range of the enemy. But this matter would be different; this experience would widely differ from any they had undergone. This meant going out into the open to walk up against machine-gun fire and small-arm fire. So each one asked himself the question.
Take a thousand fighting men. For purposes of argument let us say that when the test of fighting comes five men out of that thousand cannot readjust their nerves to the prospect of a violent end by powder and ball from unseen sources. Under other circumstances any one of the five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him. Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger’s pet tabby cat. But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until his flesh revolts to the point where it refuses the dare. It is such a man that courts-martial and the world at large miscall by the hateful name of coward.
Out of the remaining nine hundred and ninety-five are five more–as we allow–who have so little of perception, who are so stolid, so dull of wit and apprehension that they go into battle unmoved, unshaken, unthinking. This leaves nine hundred and ninety who are afraid–sorely and terribly afraid. They are afraid of being killed, afraid of being crippled, afraid of venturing out where killings and cripplings are carried on as branches of a highly specialised business.