Stories from the Trenches: Humorous and Lively Doings of Our 'Boys Over There'
TextSTORIES FROM THE FRONT
INTIMATE stories of life in the trenches “somewhere in France” are told in two letters that describe in man-to-man fashion incidents that present an unusual picture of the battle front, full of color as well as of darkening shadows. The letters were written by Mr. Stevenson P. Lewis, serving with the American Ambulance Corps, to his cousin, Mr. W. O. Curtiss, of Toledo, Ohio. They are dated May 21 and 26, and extracts are printed in the Toledo Blade. Mr. Lewis has no complaint to make of the food. He finds the horse meat “a little tough,” but seemingly palatable. He writes:
We get good food, but miss the extra dishes. We get the famous army bread, rather sour taste, but am used to it now – no butter, of course; oatmeal without milk or sugar, horse meat, potatoes, and various flavors of jam. The horse meat is usually a little tough, but otherwise pretty good. Have biscuits and chocolate at the canteen. A couple of pieces of hardtack, with water and chocolate, do for a dinner very well when away from camp.
We have considerable time just now, with nothing to fill in, and I can’t quite go it, so I hike out for walks and have picked up quite a few good pictures and souvenirs. Picked up an eagle with spread wings – German silver, a decoration worn on a German officer’s helmet, inscribed “Mitt Gott für König und Vaterland.” It is rather a rare find, as the old spiked helmet is not worn any more.
Sunday we had a visit from Germany in the shape of an airplane which dropped five bombs in the next village. Two French machines gave chase and brought him down, but he caused considerable excitement until he reached the ground. They always come over at a high altitude and do not seem in any hurry to leave, regardless of the shrapnel shots placed around the planes. This one, the second we have seen come down, made two complete turns and then dived straight down.
We have had some trouble with some of the men in charge, due to the wandering of one of our men into the first line trenches. The man guilty has acted ever since he arrived as though missing in essential brain cells, but this time he crowned his former efforts – walked up a valley with Boche trenches on one side, French on the other, he down the middle in No Man’s Land. Lucky he came back at all. The French called him over to their trenches, otherwise I suppose he would be walking into Berlin by this time.
We are working with an English ambulance section, taking turns making runs to field stations, where the wounded are sent direct from trenches. We carry them from these first-aid posts back to another post, and the English section, with its large cars, carry them ten or fifteen miles farther back. Then the order is reversed. The English are a mighty interesting lot, and most of them have been in service since 1914, hence have seen action all along this front. The hardest driving is at night running up to the posts just back of the lines, for all the moving is done then. The road is crowded with ammunition trucks, supplies, guns, and troops, and with no lights it is uncertain what is coming or going. Several men have ditched their cars and run by the station, but no serious accidents have occurred. Star shells sent up at intervals give a blinding light and the whole country-side is as light as day for a short time, then suddenly dark. It is this quick change that makes it hard to adjust our vision.
This English section has been through the hottest fighting on this front, having been posted at Verdun last year and running to the most advanced posts, but never lost a man and had only a few slight accidents. A person would think they were playing a safe game, but not so, after hearing of some bombardments they ran through. One man in the British ambulance corps has the Victoria Cross, the hardest war medal of any to get. He drove his car up the lines in plain sight of the Germans. One of the stretcher bearers having been killed, he rushed out on to No Man’s Land with another man and rescued several men, put them into his car, and drove off, all the time being the object of German fire.
The English are world-beaters in the flying game, as I suppose you have heard. The minute a Boche plane appears over their lines, a couple of fast monoplanes are after it and usually bring it down. Heard of one air battle between five English machines and ten Germans; five of the German machines were brought down and the remaining five headed for Berlin with two English planes after them. The English did not lose a machine. Again there were three German “sausages” (observation balloons), and three English aviators, each in a machine, were detailed to bring them down, each aviator to take a balloon. Two of the Englishmen each got their balloon, but the Germans, seeing what had happened, lowered the third balloon. However, the Englishman ordered to get it, being ruffled a bit because he did not get a chance to get his “bag” as the other two did, dived down over the balloon resting in German territory, setting it afire and killing a number of Germans. He was wounded badly, but succeeded in bringing his machine back. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. Many other war medals are given, but a man who gets the Victoria Cross really has done a feat of individual bravery.
FUNNY THEY HADN’T MET
Pretty Lady Visitor (at private hospital) – “Can I see Lieutenant Barker, please?”
Matron – “We do not allow ordinary visiting. May I ask if you’re a relative?”
Visitor (boldly) – “Oh, yes! I’m his sister.”
Matron – “Dear me! I’m very glad to meet you. I’m his mother.”
NO END TO THE GAME
Two American lads were discussing the war.
“It’ll be an awful long job, Sam,” said one.
“It will,” replied the other.
“You see, these Germans is takin’ thousands and thousands of Russian prisoners, and the Russians is takin’ thousands and thousands of German prisoners. If it keeps on, all the Russians will be in Germany and all the Germans in Russia. And then they’ll start all over again, fightin’ to get back their ’omes.”
UNCLE SAM, DETECTIVE
THE detective work accomplished by the United States Government since its entry into the war has been worthy of a Sherlock Holmes, and yet few persons, reading only the results of this remarkably developed system, have realized that a Government heretofore finding it unnecessary to match wits with foreign spy bureaus has suddenly taken a high rank in this unpleasant but absolutely essential branch of war-making – as it has in all others. The public read of the intercepted dispatches from the Argentine to Germany by way of Sweden, and of the Bernstorff messages, but without a realization of the problem that a cipher dispatch presents to one who has not the key. And probably the average reader is unaware that, in both the army and navy, experts have been trained to decipher code messages, with the result that both the making and the reading of such dispatches have been reduced to an almost mathematical science. The Philadelphia Press, in outlining the instruction given in this important work at the Army Service schools, says:
What is taught the military will furnish an idea of the task of the code experts in the State Department, and of the basis of the science that has unmasked the German plans with respect to vessels to be spurlos versenkt and of legislators to be influenced through the power of German gold.
“It may as well be stated,” says Capt. Parker Hitt – that is, he was a captain of infantry when he said it – “that no practicable military cipher is mathematically indecipherable if intercepted; the most that can be expected is to delay for a longer or shorter time the deciphering of the message by the interceptor.”
The young officer is warned that one doesn’t have to rely in these times upon capturing messengers as they speed by horse from post to post. All radio messages may be picked up by every operator within the zone, and the interesting information is given that if one can run a fine wire within one hundred feet of a buzzer line or within thirty feet of a telegraph line, whatever tidings may be going over these mediums may be copied by induction.
In order that the student may not lose heart, it is pointed out in the beginning that many European powers use ciphers that vary from extreme simplicity to “a complexity which is more apparent than real.” And as to amateurs, who make up ciphers for some special purpose, it’s dollars to doughnuts that their messages will be read just as easily as though they had printed them in box-car letters.
At every headquarters of an army the intelligence department of the General Staff stands ready to play checkers with any formidable looking document that comes along in cipher, and there is mighty little matter in code that stands a ghost of a chance of getting by.
The scientific dissection of ciphers starts with the examination of the general system of language communication, which, with everybody excepting friend Chinaman, is an alphabet composed of letters that appear in conventional order.
It was early found by the keen-eyed gentlemen who analyzed ciphers that if one took ten thousand words of any language and counted the letters in them the number of times that any one letter would recur would be found practically identical with their recurrence in any other ten thousand words. From this discovery the experts made frequency tables, which show just how many times one may expect to find a letter e or any other letter in a given number of words or letters. These tables were made for ten thousand letters and for two hundred letters, so that one might get an idea how often to expect to find given letters in both long and short messages or documents.
Thus we find the following result:
It is found that in any text the vowels A E I O U represent 38.37 per cent; that the consonants L N R S T represent 31.86 per cent, and that the consonants J K Q X Z stand for only 1.77 per cent. One doesn’t want to shy away from these figures as being dry and dull, because they form part of a story as interesting as any detective narrative that was ever penned by a Conan Doyle.
For the usual purposes of figuring a cipher the first group is given the value of 40 per cent, the second group 30 per cent, and the last 2 per cent. And then one is introduced to the order of frequency in which letters appear in ordinary text. It is:
E T O A N I R S H D L U C M P F Y W G B V K J X Z Q.
Tables are then made for kinds of matter that is not ordinary, taken from various kinds of telegraphic and other documents, which will alter only slightly the percentage values of the letters as shown in a table from ordinary English.
Having gone along thus far, the expert figures how many times he can expect to find two letters occurring together. These are called digraphs, and one learns that AH will show up once in a thousand letters, while HA will be found twenty-six times. These double-letter combinations form a separate table all of their own, and the common ones are set aside, as TH, ER, ON, OR, etc., so they can be readily guessed or mathematically figured against any text.
Tables of frequency are figured out for the various languages, particularly German, and the ciphers are divided into two chief classes, substitution and transposition. The writer in The Press says:
Now you will remember those percentages of vowels and consonants. Here is where they come in. When a message is picked up the army expert counts the times that the vowels recur, and if they do not check with the 40 per cent for the common vowels, with the consonant figures tallying within 5 per cent of the key, he knows that he is up against a substitution cipher. The transposition kind will check to a gnat’s heel.
When the expert knows exactly what he is up against he is ready to apply the figures and patiently unravel the story. It may take him hours, and maybe days, but sooner or later he will get it to a certainty.
If he has picked up a transposition fellow he proceeds to examine it geometrically, placing the letters so that they form all sorts of squares and rectangles that come under the heads of simple horizontals, simple verticals, alternate horizontals, alternate verticals, simple diagonals, alternate diagonals, spirals reading clockwise, and spirals reading counter-clockwise. Once one gets the arrangement of the letters, the reading is simple.
For instance, ILVGIOIAEITSRNMANHMNG comes along the wire. It doesn’t figure for a substitution cipher and you try the transposition plan. There are twenty-one letters in it, and the number at once suggests seven columns of three letters each. Try it on your piano:
And reading down each column in succession you get “I am leaving this morning.”
After passing over several simple ciphers as not “classy” enough to engage the reader’s attention, the writer takes up one of a much more complicated nature, which, however, did not get by Uncle Sam’s code wizards. Follow the deciphering of this example by Captain Hitt:
He began with an advertisement which appeared in a London newspaper, which read as follows:
“M. B. Will deposit £27 14s. 5d. to-morrow.”
The next day this advertisement in cipher appeared:
“M. B. CT OSB UHGI TP IPEWF H CEWIL NSTTLE FJNVX XTYLS FWKKHI BJLSI SQ VOI BKSM XMKUL SK NVPONPN GSW OL IEAG NPSI HYJISFZ CYY NPUXQG TPRJA VXMXI AP EHVPPR TH WPPNEL. UVZUA MMYVSF KNTS ZSZ UAJPQ DLMMJXL JR RA PORTELOGJ CSULTWNI XMKUHW XGLN ELCPOWY OL. ULJTL BVJ TLBWTPZ XLD K ZISZNK OSY DL RYJUAJSSGK. TLFNS UVD W FQGCYL FJHVSI YJL NEXV PO WTOL PYYYHSH GQBOH AGZTIQ EYFAX YPMP SQA CI XEYVXNPPAII UV TLFTWMC FU WBWXGUHIWU. AIIWG HSI YJVTI BJV XMQN SFX DQB LRTY TZ QTXLNISVZ. GIFT AII UQSJGJ OHZ XFOWFV BXAI CTWY DSWTLTTTPKFRHG IVX QCAFV TP DIIS JBF ESF JSC MCCF HNGK ESBP DJPQ NLU CTW ROSB CSM.”
Now just off-hand, the average man would shy away from this combination as a bit of news that he really did not care to read. But to the cipher fiend it was a thing of joy, and it illustrates one of the many cases that they are called upon to read, and the methods by which they work.
As a starting-point the cipher-man assumed that the text was in English because he got it out of an English newspaper, but he did not stop there. He checked it from a negative view-point by finding the letter w in it, which does not occur in the Latin languages, and by finding that the last fifteen words of the message had from two to four letters each, which would have been impossible in German.
Then he proceeds to analyze. The message has 108 groups that are presumably words, and there are 473 letters in it. This makes an average of 4.4 letters to the group, whereas one versed in the art normally expects about five. There are ninety vowels of the AEIOU group and seventy-eight letters JKQXZ. Harking back to that first statement of percentages, it is certain that this is a substitution cipher because the percentage does not check with the transposition averages.
The canny man with the sharp pencil then looks for recurring groups and similar groups in his message and he finds that they are:
AIIWG AII BKSM BKAI CT CTWY CTW DLMMJXL DL ESF ESBP FJNVX FJHVSI NPSI NPUXQG OSB OSY ROSB OL OL PORTELOGJ PO SQ SQA TP TP TLBWTPZ TLFNS TLFTWMC UVZUA UVD UV SMKUL XMKUHW YJL YJVTI.
Passing along by the elimination route he refers to his frequency tables to see how often the same letters occur, and he finds that they are all out of proportion, and he can proceed to hunt the key for several alphabets.
He factors the recurring groups like a small boy doing a sum in arithmetic when he wants to find out how many numbers multiplied by each other will produce a larger one. The number of letters between recurring groups and words is counted and dissected in this wise:
Now the man who is doing the studying takes a squint at this result and he sees that the dominant factor all through the case is the figure 5, so he is reasonably sure that five alphabets were used, and that the key-word had, therefore, five letters, so he writes the message in lines of five letters each and makes a frequency table for each one of the five columns he has formed, and he gets the following result:
Now, having erected these five enigmatical columns, Captain Hitt juggles them until he uncovers the hidden message, thus:
“In the table for column 1 the letter G occurs 9 times,” he says with an air of a man having found something that is perfectly plain. “Let us consider it tentatively as E.
“Then, if the cipher alphabet runs regularly and in the direction of the regular alphabet, C (7 times) is equal to A, and the cipher alphabet bears a close resemblance to the regular frequency table. Note that TUV (equal to RST) occurring respectively 7, 7, and 5 times and the non-occurrence of B, L, M, R, S, Z (equal to Z, J, K, P, Q, and X, respectively).
“In the next table L occurs 19 times, and taking it for E with the alphabet running the same way, A is equal to H. The first word of our message, CT, thus becomes AM when deciphered with these two alphabets, and the first two letters of the key are CH.
“Similarly in the third table we may take either F or O for E, but a casual examination shows that the former is correct and A is equal to B.
“In the fourth table I is clearly E and A is equal to E.
“The fifth table shows that T is equal to 14 and J is equal to 9. If we take J as equal to E then T is equal to O, and in view of the many Es already accounted for in the other columns this may be all right. It checks as correct if we apply the last three alphabets to the second word of our message, OSB, which deciphers NOW. Using these alphabets to decipher the whole message we find it to read:
“‘M. B. Am now safe on board a barge moored below Tower Bridge, where no one will think of looking for me. Have good friends but little money owing to action of police. Trust, little girl, you still believe in my innocence although things seem against me. There are reasons why I should not be questioned. Shall try to embark before the mast in some outward-bound vessel. Crews will not be scrutinized as sharply as passengers. There are those who will let you know my movements. Fear the police may tamper with your correspondence, but later on, when hue and cry have died down, will let you know all.’”
It all seems simple to the man who follows the idea closely, but Captain Hitt proceeds to make further revelations of the art. He adds:
“The key to this message is CHBEF, which is not intelligible as a word, but if put into figures, indicating that the 2d, 7th, 1st, 4th, and 5th letter beyond the corresponding letter of the message has been used as a key it becomes 27145, and we connect it with the personal which appeared in the same paper the day before reading:
“‘M. B. Will deposit £27 14s. 5d. tomorrow.’”
This is only one of the many methods for getting under the hide of a coded message that our bright men of the Army and their cousins of the State and Navy departments have worked out through years of study and application.
DRIVING IS TOO GOOD FOR THEM
He – “And that night we drove the Germans back two miles.”
She – “Drove them, indeed. I’d have made them walk every step of it.”
NOW THEY DON’T SPEAK
The Host – “I thought of sending some of these cigars out to the Front.”
The Victim – “Good idea! But how can you make certain that the Germans will get them?”
DIDN’T RAISE HIS BOY TO BE A “SLACKER”
THEY don’t raise their boys to be gun-shy down in the mountains of Kentucky, so when John Calhoun Allen, of Clay County, heard that his son had been arrested in New York as a “slacker” he was “plumb mad.”
The young man was rounded up with a bunch of other “conscientious objectors” and taken before Judge Mayer in the Federal Court. John C. junior told the judge that during his boyhood in the Kentucky mountains he had witnessed so much bloodshed that he was now opposed to fighting and had a horror of killing a man or, in fact, of being killed himself. The judge was puzzled. He had never heard before of a Kentuckian with any such complaint, so he packed the young man off to Bellevue for the “once-over” while he communicated the facts to his father down in Clay County, and, says the New York Times:
The answer arrived in the form of the 6 feet 2 inches of John Allen himself. The mountaineer came into court just before the noon hour. He wore the boots and the corduroy trousers of the Kentucky hills. His shirt was blue, collarless, and home-made. His coat was old-fashioned, and in his hand he carried his big black sombrero.
“May it please your honor,” said United States District Attorney Knox, “we have with us the father of John Calhoun Allen.”
The mountaineer looked the Judge squarely in the eye and bowed. Tall and erect, he towered above every other man in the court room and he was not in the least embarrassed.
“Judge,” he said, “I got your letter and I thank you for it, and I started to answer it in writin’, but decided that maybe it was better that I come here myself and see what’s the matter with that boy of mine. It ain’t like our folks to act as that youngster has acted, and I assure you that I am plumb mad about it. I have five boys, and this one who is in trouble here is the oldest. Two of my lads are already in the Army and the two youngest will be there soon as they are old enough.
“And so I have come all the way from Kentucky to get this one who I hear is a backslider. All I ask is for you to let me take my boy back to Kentucky with me, and I will see to it that he comes to time when his country calls. There ain’t going to be no quitters in the Allen family. My boys that are already in the Army ain’t twenty-one yet. This one is my oldest and he’s the first to miss the trail, but he’ll find the trail again or I’ll know the reason why.”
“I have the utmost confidence in you,” said Judge Mayer after the old man finished, “and I shall release your son in your custody, confident that you will see to it that he obeys the law and registers.”
“He’ll register all right, Judge,” replied the old man, “and I tell you that if he don’t, something will happen in the public square back home, and all the folks will have a chance to see with their own eyes that the Allens don’t stand for no quitters at a time when the country needs all the men it can get.”
In the meantime Marshal McCarthy had sent to the Tombs for young Allen, and the young man was waiting in the Marshal’s office when his father arrived. They are self-contained people down in the Kentucky mountains. Their feelings are deep, but well controlled, so that when father and son met there was no show of emotion on the part of either. But the sight of his son softened the father’s anger. He placed his hand gently on the younger man’s shoulder, and this is the way The Times describes the scene that followed:
“Son,” said the father, “don’t you know what it means to do what you tried to do? Don’t you know that you don’t come from no such stock as these slackers and quitters, or whatever else you call such cattle? Don’t you know that, boy? Well, if you don’t, it’s time you started learnin’. Now you ain’t crazy, for our folks don’t go crazy, and you are goin’ to register, and you are goin’ to fight, and fight your darnedest, too, if your country calls you. Now just put that in your head and let it stay there. I don’t want to hurt you, and I ain’t if you do right; but I just want to say that if you don’t do right, when I get you back home I will take you into the public square and shoot you myself in the presence of all the folks.”
The boy, with tears in his eyes, said he would register just as quickly as he could.
“And I’ll fight, too, if they want me,” the boy added.
“Of course you will, for if you didn’t you wouldn’t be my son,” the old man replied.
And that was the end of the Allen incident.
“That old fellow is one of the kind that makes the country great. He is a real American,” said Judge Mayer afterward.
Just before he left the Federal Building, John Allen asked one of the deputy marshals what case was being tried before Judge Mayer. (It was the case of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.)
“I noticed a man and a woman and I wondered who they were. What did they do?” he asked.
“They are anarchists and they are on trial for urging men not to register for the war,” the Marshal replied.
“Those are the kind’er folks who are responsible for boys like this one of mine gettin’ in trouble,” John Allen observed. “We don’t have folks like that down our way.”
CONSOLING INFORMATION
Mrs. S. Kensington – “We have such good news from the front! Dear Charles is safely wounded, at last!”
HE WAS ALL RIGHT
Doctor – “Why were you rejected?”
Applicant (smiling) – “For imbecility.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“Nothing; I have an income of six thousand dollars.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“What does you wife do?”
“Nothing; she is richer than I.”
“You are no imbecile. Passed for general service.”