All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  At Camp Funston a bulletin was read to all the soldiers of the 92nd Division: “The Division Commander has repeatedly urged that all colored members of his commands, and especially the officers and noncommissioned officers, should refrain from going where their presence will be resented. In spite of this injunction, one of the Sergeants of the Medical Department has recently … entered a theater, as he undoubtedly had a legal right to do, and precipitated trouble by making it possible to allege race discrimination in the seat he was given.… Don’t go where your presence is not desired.”

  This bulletin so stuck in his craw that he managed to get his hands on a copy of it, and it is written out in his diary in full, against some ultimate day of judging.

  Early in June, the order came for the division to proceed to Camp Upton for embarkment overseas. Lieutenant Dyer tried to call his wife, but the troops were denied access to telegraph and telephone lines. The next day, the trains began pulling out of the camp. When his section drew into the railway station in Kansas City, he saw that there was an immense crowd. Without any hope whatever that his wife would be among them or that he would find her if she were, he put his head out of the train window and heard her calling to him.

  The division was hurried from Camp Upton to the embarkation port at Hoboken and onto a magnificent old steamship that until the war had been carrying passengers back and forth across the Atlantic for the Hamburg-American line. It put out to sea with five thousand men on board, and when Lieutenant Dyer went on deck the next morning he saw that they had joined a great convoy of nine transport ships, two battle cruisers, and half a dozen destroyers. His ship was under the command of a colonel of a unit of the National Guard.

  From the diary: “From the very start there was that feeling of prejudice brought up between the white and colored officers, for among the first orders issued were those barring colored officers from the same toilets as the whites, also barring them from the barber shop and denying colored officers the use of the ship’s gymnasium.” The sea was calm. The enlisted men were continually on the lookout for periscopes but saw instead flying fishes and porpoises and a whale that spouted. Lieutenant Dyer was assigned the daily sanitary inspection of certain compartments in the fore part of the ship, and the physical examination of six hundred men. Twice a day he submitted written reports to the ship’s surgeon. On June 21st, shots were fired from all the surrounding ships at what proved to be a floating beer keg. A convoy of British destroyers brought them safely into the harbor at Brest. At nine-fifteen in the evening, when the men of his unit began to go ashore, the sun was still above the horizon. He was struck by the fact that the houses were all of stone and closely jammed together and very old, and by the expression of sadness on the faces of the French people. The women young and old all were in black and seemed to be in the deepest mourning. Four little tykes standing by the roadside sang, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here! What the hell do we care now,” in perfect English. His unit marched three miles through the gathering darkness to a barracks that had been a prison camp during the time of Napoleon (“a terrible and dirty old place”), and stayed there four days awaiting orders. Twice he got a pass into the city. The French people were friendly when he went into a shop or attempted to converse with them. He sat down on a park bench and children congregated around him. Soon they were sitting on his knees and, pointing, told him the French words for his eyes, nose, ears, and neat mustache.

  After three days and nights on a train and a nine-mile hike, his unit ended up in a camp outside a village forty-eight kilometers southeast of Poitiers. It was a beautiful region, untouched by the war. The men pitched their shelter tents in a level field, the officers were billeted in nearby manor houses. They were the first American troops in this region, and the natives fell in love with them and came visiting every day. (“With them there was No Color Line.”) On Bastille Day, before a great crowd, the troops gave a demonstration of American sports — footraces, three-legged races, boxing, wrestling, and baseball.

  On July 22nd, Companies B and C, with Lieutenant Dyer as their medical officer, had orders to proceed to Marseilles, where they were to procure trucks for the 317th Ammunition Train and drive them to the front. The officers rode first class, the enlisted men were crowded in boxcars but happy to be making the trip. It was the height of summer, and everywhere women and old men and children were working in the fields. He saw ox teams but no horses. And no young men. Along the tracks, leaning on their pickaxes and shovels as they waited for the train to pass by, were hundreds of German soldiers with “PG” printed in large white letters on the backs of their green coats. In the railway station of every city they came to he saw trainload after trainload of French soldiers headed for the front, where the last great German offensive was being beaten back in the second Battle of the Marne. His own train went east, through vineyards. At Montluçon there was a stopover of several hours, and an elderly English professor showed Lieutenant Dyer and another officer about the city and then took them to the home of an aristocratic French family to meet a pupil of his, a young lady who was very anxious to hear the English spoken by Americans. After Lyons they turned south, following the Rhône Valley. Every time the train emerged from a tunnel, the men in the boxcars cheered. On the fourth day, after emerging from a tunnel three miles long, he saw the blue water of the Mediterranean.

  The population of Marseilles was so mixed that it seemed as if God had transplanted here a sample of His people from all the kingdoms of the earth. Most of the men were in uniform of some sort. The Algerian soldiers (many of them “black as tar”) with their little red skullcaps and the Hindus in their turbans and loose garments were the strangest. How in such garments could they fight in the trenches? As the men of his company walked through the streets, people exclaimed, “Ah, Americans!” They were welcome in the best hotels, the best theaters, everywhere. But it was a wicked city. Sitting at a table in a sidewalk café, he saw many beautiful women who were clearly prostitutes.

  No ammunition trucks were available, and so they traveled back through the same picturesque scenery until gradually it became less picturesque and the farms less well tended. At Is-sur-Tille, where there was a huge American advance-supply base, they spent the greater part of the day on a siding. That night, no lights were allowed in the railroad cars, and from this they knew they were approaching the front. The 92nd Division headquarters was now at Bourbonne-les-Bains, three hundred kilometers southeast of Paris. As Lieutenant Dyer stepped down onto the station platform, the first officers he saw were from his old Camp Funston unit. He reported to the division surgeon and was put on duty in a camp just outside the city.

  During the week that his unit remained here, their lockers were taken from them, their equipment was reduced to fifty pounds, and they were issued pistols and ammunition. On the twelfth of August they left the camp in a long convoy of motortrucks, which traveled all afternoon and night and stopped the next morning in the pretty little village of Bruyères. Here they were quartered in an old barracks that turned out to be comfortable enough when put in sanitary condition. Bruyères was a railroad terminal where American and French divisions and supplies were unloaded for the front. Aside from some humiliating divisional orders, which the diary does not go into, his stay there was pleasant. In the evening he walked out on the hills beyond the town and watched the anti-aircraft guns firing at German bombers. The distant flashes of cannons were like sheet lightning on the horizon.

  Toward the end of August, on a night of the full moon — though it was almost totally obscured by clouds — he sat in a crowded truck with a rifle between his knees and his eyes focused on the dim road ahead. The convoy drove without lights, and they kept passing Army vehicles that had broken down or had slid off the road into a ditch, and infantrymen who, because of fatigue and the weight of their packs, had fallen out of the line to rest. He gave up counting the houses with their roofs gone or that were completely destroyed. The whole countryside had a look of desolation. At th
ree o’clock in the morning, the convoy arrived at a silent and largely destroyed town. The truck he was riding in drove up an alley and stopped. He and two other officers lay down in front of a building that appeared to be intact and, using the stone doorstep for a pillow, fell asleep from exhaustion. In the morning, the occupants of the building, leaving for work, stepped over them. He got up and asked where they were and was told that it was Raon-l’Étape, in the Vosges.

  For two days the American troops bivouacked in a wood, with German planes lingering high in the air above them in spite of the anti-aircraft guns. Then they were moved back to the town, and that night an enemy bomber dropped four bombs on the place where they had camped, creating terrific explosions. He was billeted at the house of a Mme. Crouvésier, whose two sons were in a prison camp in Germany. Working chiefly at night, because the Germans had occupied this area for three weeks in 1914 and knew the roads perfectly, the 317th moved ammunition of all calibers from the woods where it was hidden to four regiments of American infantry and a French artillery unit that was operating with them. The town was full of graves — in backyards, in gardens, everywhere. While he stood looking at an enemy observation balloon it suddenly went up in a fiery cloud. A German plane was brought down at Raon-l’Étape and the dead aviators were given a military funeral, which he attended.

  After nearly a month here, he again found himself in a convoy, which drove all day and at 11 p.m. stopped along the roadside for the night. The truck he was riding in was so crowded that he got out and slept on the ground, wrapped in his blankets, and was awakened two hours later by a downpour. He moved under the truck, but his blankets became so wet that he gave up and moved back into the truck, and with the rain trickling down the back of his neck finished out the night.

  Two days later, they reached their destination — the Argonne Forest. There were no accommodations for them, not even water to drink or to cook with, and the mud everywhere was over their shoe tops. They pitched their tents under bushes and trees to keep from being observed by the enemy airplanes constantly flying over. The companies of the 317th were detailed to handle supplies at a nearby railhead and deliver hundreds of horses to units at the front. (“While camped in this wet, filthy woods, many of our boys became ill from the dampness, cold, and exposure, thereby causing me much work and worry, caring for them.”) Division headquarters issued a bulletin that Negro soldiers would be used to handle mustard-gas cases, because they were less susceptible than whites. (“Why is the Negro less susceptible to mustard gas than the whites? No one can answer.”) On September 25th, a very heavy bombardment began, and it kept up for thirty-six hours without a stop. (“The old woods … trembled as if by earthquake, the flashes of the cannon lighted up the inside of our tents, and our ears were deafened.”) Lieutenant Dyer went several times to the American evacuation hospital, a quarter of a mile away, and saw a continuous stream of ambulances bringing wounded soldiers to it from the front. The dead were also being brought back, on trucks, piled like cordwood and dripping blood.

  They moved on, to Sainte-Menehould, forty-seven kilometers west of Verdun, and were billeted on the top floor of a French barracks. From their windows they could see the lines. The area was full of American soldiers plodding along under their heavy packs. Standing on the top of a hill, he could make out the Argonne Forest, with smoke hanging over it. Big guns were belching from all the surrounding hills. The 317th worked round the clock. With no tall trees and only one other building near it, the barracks made a fine target. (“All through the night the fighting kept up and though scared stiff and expecting to be blown to atoms at any moment I finally fell asleep.”)

  On the seventh of October, Companies B and C left Sainte-Menehould. The trucks drove south and east all day, in a driving rain, with a cold wind. In many places the road was camouflaged with green burlap supported on wire fences sometimes fifteen feet high and thickly interwoven with bushes and small trees. They passed through towns where not one house was standing whole and there was no longer any civilian population. A ruin next to a graveyard meant that there had been a church on this spot. Even the grass was burned up. (“At 5 p.m. we reached the city of Commercy, where we had orders to spend the night. We were taken to a French barracks where there were fairly good quarters for officers and men. We had just gotten comfortably located in the building, quite glad to get out of the inclement weather, and were preparing to eat, when another order came for the ammunition train to move on.… The rain fell and the wind blew and I sat on an open truck helping the driver watch the road to prevent running over an embankment, which would probably have meant our death.… All night long we traveled on, wondering what our destination would be and why we should be ordered to move on such a night.”) At four in the morning, the convoy stopped in the village of Belleville. Cold, wet, and hungry, he got down and stomped on the ground, hoping to generate a little body heat. At daybreak a feed cart came by and the driver pitched them a few steaks left over from the breakfast of a labor battalion.

  Belleville was so protected by the surrounding hills that the shells from the enemy guns at Metz almost never reached it. Lieutenant Dyer and another lieutenant were billeted in the ancient, dilapidated house of an elderly French couple. The officers’ second-floor room had one small window. On the walls and rafters were a few traces of whitewash. There was a fireplace and two immense wardrobes. Over their heads was a loft full of straw, in which rats, mice, and birds nested. Sometimes their frisking sent chaff down on the faces of the two men. The beds were good. Lying in his, Lieutenant Dyer listened to the sound of the German planes overhead and tried to gauge, by the whine of a falling shell, whether the explosion would be a safe distance away.

  He set up his infirmary in a small electrical plant. Because of the constant cold and rainy weather, there was a great deal of sickness among the colored troops. (Not once does he speak of what in America was called “the Spanish flu,” but it was that, undoubtedly, that the men in his company were coming down with.)

  Companies A, D, E, F, and G and their artillery, in training in the South of France since July, arrived in Belleville. (“Major Howard, my commanding officer from whom I had been separated about four months, called to see me … and complimented me on my good work, saying he had seen the Division Surgeon and not one complaint was made against me. During the whole month of October we labored on, hearing much talk of peace and were very anxious for the final drive, which would end forever Autocracy and give Democracy the right to reign. On the morning of November 8th, however, while we were in the midst of our activities, a terrible thing occurred at Belleville.… A colored boy who had been convicted of rape in August was hanged or lynched in an open field not far from my infirmary. The execution was a military order, but so openly and poorly carried out that it was rightly termed a lynching.”)

  The next day, the drive against Metz began, and two days later, while tremendous barrages were being laid down by the artillery in support of the infantry’s advances, the news reached them that Germany had signed an armistice. As everywhere else in the Western world, bells rang, whistles blew, people shouted for joy.

  On December 6th, he and another officer climbed into a truck and after a two-hour ride through no-man’s-land arrived in Metz. He found it untouched by the fighting and the most beautiful city he had seen in France. The buildings were modern; the streets were wide and well paved and lighted with gas or electricity; there were streetcars riding up and down. But the people were cold and unfriendly to them, and spoke German mostly, and it was clear from the way a pack of children followed them in the street that they had never seen a Negro before.

  On the night of December 15th, he was awakened by the orderly boy. In a heavy fog, a passenger train from Metz had plowed into a troop train full of happy French soldiers returning home from the front. It was a dreadful sight. The cars were telescoped and splintered, and the bodies of the dead and dying were pinned under the wreckage. The rest of the night he dressed wounds and put splin
ts on broken arms and legs.

  Three days later, the 317th began to leave Belleville. Now on foot, now in trucks or trains, they moved westward toward their port of embarkation. Sometimes he slept on straw, in dirty makeshift buildings that had been occupied by other soldiers before them and were infested with lice. For two days and nights he rode in a crowded railway coach with the rain dripping down on him from a leak in the ceiling. On Christmas Eve, in the ancient village of Domfront, in Normandy, the medical unit stood about in the rain and snow until 3 a.m., waiting to be billeted by a captain who, it turned out, had forgotten about them. Shivering in the cold, he remembered the Biblical text: Foxes have holes and the fowls of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.

  The people of Domfront were extremely hospitable, and the colored troops reciprocated by being on their best behavior. He was kept busy inspecting them daily for vermin and acute infections, but he found time to visit the places of historical interest and had his picture taken at the foot of the castle wall. Then he himself came down with influenza and had to be looked after by the men of his medical corps.