Captain! My Captain!

Wherein an Old Sergeant (Retired) Muses on Some of His Exceedingly Superior Officers

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

TEN years ago, a good many Americans used to drift off to sleep in tent or boxcar or barrack, each luxuriously cradled in the blessed thought of what he would do to bis Captain when the war was over. As a rule, it was the plan to approach him boldly and, with simple earnestness, give him a sock in the nose. The excellent chance that the Captain might make repayment in kind was never for a moment considered. For, after all, these were day-dreams and each man could write his own scenario.

During demobilization, Sergeant Irving Berlin wrote a ditty which made Mr. Eddie Cantor jump for joy as be sang it. Like many another of the Sergeant's songs, it was a good one because in it a universal dream came true. The refrain, sung with a gleeful clapping of the Cantor hands, reached its climax in the line: "I've got my Captain working for me now!"

Dear, dear, what threats of dark and personal vengeance used to be muttered under the enlisted breath in those haze-hung days! Now, looking back after ten years, I wonder how many of those threats ever were carried out. To be sure, I know one aggrieved private of Marines who, when in his cups, will still occasionally call bis erstwhile commanding-officer's home on the telephone at three or four in the morning. When the once authoritative voice makes drowsy reply, my friend merely says: "You------!" and hangs up the receiver.

BUT have chanced upon no other instance of reprisal and, for my own part, I find myself looking back with much affection on the lieutenants, captains and majors whom the fortunes of war placed over me. I feel sure that no soldier, in what (for reasons which still escape me) used to be known as This Man's Army, had more genuinely entertaining officers than I did. Even at the time and in the very crisis of exasperation, the rank and file used often to shake with inward laughter over their engaging foolishness. Their child like faith in the magic of a military command was always disarming. So many of them were like the captain who sent word to the bugler that thereafter he was to play Over There instead of the routine notes of reveille. When summoned to explain why this order was not immediately carried out, the embarrassed soldier pointed out with apologetic deference that the bugle was a wretchedly limited instrument without a scale that would permit of so elaborate a melody.

The Captain was but momentarily baffled.

"Well," he said, sternly, "keep on trying."

Or there was that Lieutenant of ours—he had been a dentist back in the states—who took a platoon of us out into a Brittany meadow to put us through the dreary intricacies of close-order drill. He, at least, enjoyed the experience no end. For it was all new to him and, after reading a command out of the drill manual, he would look up with unaffected curiosity to see what manoeuvres it produced. But it was rather hard on us and even harder on the really distressed cow whose personal meadow this happened to be, and into whom we were continually marching four abreast, because the embattled dentist did not know what command would swerve us out of her way. At that, it was the only time I ever laughed while being drilled by a dentist.

Among the more entertaining captains under whom I helped to make the world safe for democracy, was that latter-day Samuel Pepys, who is best known by the initials which he signs to his daily column in the New York IF or Id. Capt. F. P. A. arrived in France for temporary duty on The Stars and Stripes in March, 1918. And when, in these piping times of peace, an occasional ballade or rondeau of his is submitted to The New Yorker, I wonder if, in perusing it, the glowering editor of that spry young weekly ever recalls the day when, as Private H. W. Ross, Company C, 18th Engineers (Ry.), it was his duty to escort Capt. Adams across war-time Paris and, in doing so, to pick up that officer's suitcase, which was packed to the brim with cigars and nightgowns, and carry it every step of the way.

CAPT. Adams was an extraordinary demoralizing officer with simply no sense of rank or discipline, and we who served under him were worn to shadows in our efforts to keep the fellow in his place. It had to be patiently explained to him again and again that he really must not mingle socially with the enlisted personnel. I remember his forcing his way into a crap game that was wearing out the rug in the Yale Room at the University Union. 1 have only to close my eyes to see that game now. Lee Wilson Dodd, as I remember, was losing his shirt (that white one with the blue stripe). And one slightly detached onlooker was John Erskine, who had come to France to lecture on belles-lettres in the Y. M. C. A. huts, which gives you just enough of his life to explain his reputation. An air raid interrupted the game by extinguishing every light in the city and before we could find an electric flash by which to see the dice, a good many francs had impulsively disappeared from the contested pile on the rug. I hasten to add that no suspicion was attached to my Captain. For at the first signal that the German planes were overhead, he had clapped on his helmet and hopped out onto the balcony to whisper, "Kamerad, kamerad!" to the unresponsive skies. You can imagine how difficult it must have been to maintain order under an officer so elfin.

Except for the air raids and the fact you had to know a bootlegger in order to get any butter or sugar, Paris was a cushy spot in 19x8, and an officer stationed there was hard put to it to impress the folks back home that lie was suffering all the rigours of war. I remember one major in the American Field Service who tried subtly to offset this state of affairs by heading all his letters, "The Entrenched Camp of Paris." And I knew an artillery captain from a National Guard outfit out Chicago way, who, at the desk in his room at the Hotel Continental, used to write home that his boots were splattered with the blood of wounded Germans. The chief hardship I suffered when I was on duty in Paris was the necessity of going three times in one week to see the current installment of the Pearl White movie serial. Each night, we would just get that cruelly exposed lady to some point of extreme danger—suspended over an abyss, say, by a thin and breaking strand of rope—when the seconde alerte would sound across the city. The sirens would shrill their deafening warning, the lights would go out, the orchestra would play the Marseillaise, and we would find ourselves out on the side-walk wondering whatever became of poor imperiled Pearl.

It was on such a night in the spring of 1918 that Captain Adams and I were entrusted with the final make-up and supervision of that week's issue of The Stars and Stripes. We repaired at once to the composing-room of the Daily Mail where, under Cornish and Cockney foremen of Lord Northcliffe's staff, the A. E. F. weekly was put to bed. Those helpful but always somewhat puzzled gentlemen never did understand the argot of the strangers thus infiltrating their plant. And it suddenly occurred to us that, by telling them that "stiff" was Yankee slang for "hero", we could probably insert a seven column streamer right across the front page, reading:

PERSHING IS A BIG STIFF!

What newspaperman would not willingly have run the considerable risk of being shot at sunrise for the sweet sake of the sensation so surprising a headline would have caused when printed in the official organ of the A. E. F.? My captain gravely yielded to me on this point.

"BUT Sergeant," he said, "do you feel that we are justified in giving so much prominence to a statement so lacking in news value?"

"Well, Captain," I replied earnestly, "you know—"

But then another air raid came along and by the time the wild sweet April music of the berlocque sounded once more through the Paris night, it was too late. Probably the whole notion was impractical, anyway.

But of course the more entertaining officers were those who did not mean to be. Certainly the most amusing command I ever received was an entirely serious one which enlivened a day in the spring or summer of 1918. One of our captains, his eyes agleam with mischief and acting in obedience to some whispered suggestion from Chaumont or all on his own initiative (I did not know which then and do not know which now), summoned four of us into secret conference. Shutting the door stealthily and gathering us around him in the manner of a huddle on a football field, he told 11s that there had just come to Paris a gabby, trouble-making Congressman who was a dirty pacifist and that, though it was morally certain that this treacherous fellow had crossed the seas only to gather an earful of misleading information wherewith to malign the A. E. F. in Washington, such was the unfortunate power of the effeminate civil government over the sturdy-hearted army that it would not be possible for the High Command to treat this wretch as lie deserved.

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But it would be comparatively easy, said the captain, drawing us even closer that we might hear his conspiratorial whisper, for four big-hearted enlisted men, acting on their own hook and out of sheer patriotism, to drop over and call on this Congressman, lure him into some pacifistic utterances and then beat him np. This would not only be a virile gesture on our part but he could assure us secretly that we would be protected from any unpleasant consequences.

We were so perfectly trained that I only paled slightly when one buck private sitting next to me scribbled on a scrap of paper a hurried note, which read: "I've seen that Congressman. He's six feet tall." And our guffaws of laughter at the whole scheme were postponed until after we had withdrawn to a safe distance. We then went into a conference of the enlisted personnel and it was decided that we should actually call on this imperiled law-maker, get a free dinner out of him if possible, show him the sights of Paris, and then, no matter what he said, solemnly report back that he had uttered only sentences of impeachable Americanism.

So, looking as threatening as possible, we charged out of the office, pausing only for apéritif's before going over the top. We arrived in time to find that the enemy had gone on to pursue his deadly work in some such remote spot as Tours or St. Nazaire. So we reported next day that he had flown and the project was forgotten.

Indeed, I never thought of him again until I ran upon some reference to his son in the newspapers last Spring. His name was Lindbergh.