Jim. ——
Honest, but Jim was the sourest man in all o’ Comp’ny G; You could sing and tell stories the whole night long, but never a cuss gave he. You could feed him turkey at Christmastime—and Tony the cook’s no slouch— But Jim wouldn’t join in “Three cheers for the cook!” Gosh, but he had a grouch!
He wouldn’t go up to the hill cafay when our daily hike was done,
And sip his beer, and chin with the lads, the crabby son-of-a-gun;
He’d growl if you asked him to hold the light, he’d snarl if you asked for a butt,
Till at last the gang was ’most ready to put Jim down for a mutt.
About the first time that our mail came in, we all felt as high as a king;
“What luck?” somebody hollers to Jim: he says, “Not a dad-blamed thing.”
And then he goes off in his end o’ the shack, and Tom Breed swears ‘at he cried;
But when somebody went and repeated it, Jim swore, by gad, Tom lied.
We were gettin’ our mail, irregular-like, for about a month or two;
But Jim? He never drew anything, and blooey! but he was blue!
Not only blue, but surly; he was off’n the whole darn shop,
And once he was put onto “heavy” for talkin’ back to the Top.
’Twas a day or two before New Year’s, when the postal truck came in;
The orderly fishes one out for Jim; he takes it, without a grin,
And then, as he opens the envelope—eeyow! How that man did yell:
“A letter from James J., Junior, boys! the youngster has learnt to spell!”
So nothin’ would do but the bunch of us had to read the letter through;
’Twas all writ out by that kid of his, and a mighty smart kid, too,
For it isn’t every six-year-old at school as can take a prize,
(Like the boy wrote Jim as he had done): and you oughter seen Jim’s eyes!
Well, Jim had a mighty good New Year’s; he stood the squad a treat,
And now, ’stead o’ turnin’ out sloppy, he’s always trim and neat;
Fact is, the lieutenant passed the word that if Jim keeps on that way
He’ll be wearing little stripes on his arm and drawin’ a bit more pay.
Don’t it beat hell how a little thing will change a man like that?
Now Jim’s as cheerful as anything instead o’ mum as a bat.
An’ the reason? Why, it’s easy! A guy is bound to fail
Of bein’ a proper soldier if he don’t get no fambly mail!
If all of those post office birds was wise to the change they made in Jim,
They’d hustle a bit on our letters, for they’s lots that’s just like him;
It may be a kid, or it may be a girl; a mother, a pal, a wife,—
And believe me, this hearin’ from ’em—why, it’s half o’ the joy o’ life!
Chartered 1822
The Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company
NEW YORK
PARIS BORDEAUX
41, Boulevard Haussmann 8, Cours du Chapeau-Rouge
AND
TWO ARMY ZONE OFFICES
Specially designated
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LONDON: 26, Old Broad Street, E.C.2 and 16, Pall Mall East. S.W.1.
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act as our correspondents for the cashing of Officers’ cheques & transfer of funds for
MEMBERS of the AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES.
BIG GUNS ON FLAT CARS
TO BATTER HUNS’ LINES.
——
A. E. F. Operates Railroad Artillery that will Hurl
Tons of Steel Twenty Miles into
Enemy’s Territory.
——
LONG-BARRELLED 155s ARE ALSO DEADLY.
——
Fortresses and Mountains Crumble like Sandhills
Before Blasts from the Busters.
——
When Rudyard Kipling paid his famous tribute to the late Rear-Admiral “Fighting Bob” Evans of the United States Navy some years ago, one of his verses ran:
“Zogbaum can handle his shadows,
And I can handle my style;
And you can handle a ten-inch gun
To carry seven mile.”
That was a pretty fair gun for those days. But nowadays, we speak of handling a sixteen-inch gun to carry twenty miles. Not only do we speak of it, but we—we of the A.E.F.—actually do the handling.
The “big boys” are here. They are busters. They have more machinery attached to them than the average small factory. Because of the fact that they are mounted on cars and ride on rails they are known rather as the “railroad artillery” than the heavy artillery. They have been practicing for a long time on a “blasted heath” somewhere in France, where there wasn’t anything within twenty miles of them that would be hurt by their gentle attentions. And, when they do practice Jee-roosh! Hold onto your ear-drums and open your mouth!
Big Fellows Hard to Move
But the actual practice at making perfectly good targets resemble grease-spots on the oil-cloth doesn’t take up but a bit of the time of the men who constitute the crew. They have to know a lot about moving the big fellow, raising him and lowering him, anchoring him so he won’t right-step and left-step when he’s supposed to be firing, cleaning him up for inspection and the like.
About seventy per cent. of them learned a good deal about the firing end back in the Coast Artillery Corps in the States, but this business of riding a big gun on a railroad bed, and so forth, was new to a good many of them until recently. Now, they say, the minute the aero observer up above gives them range and so forth, they are ready to go ahead and batter the eternal daylights out of anything from the Kaiserschloss down to old Hindenburg himself.
Besides the big guns that hurl a whole hardware shop-ful of steel at the enemy, there are long-barreled 155s, and deadly devices they are in their way, too. But it is about the big babies, the instruments which, more than any other save the aeroplanes, typify for most of us the advanced methods of modern warfare, that most of the attention is centered. The 155s and the other smaller bores can be pulled up to within striking distance of the line by trucks and caterpillar tractors, but the heftiest never leave the railroad flat cars on which they are built. In other words, they are rolling stock destined to keep a rolling and a rolling and a rolling until they roll right on into Germany.
Getting One Ready to Fire
It takes several hours to get a big one ready for firing but once its mechanism is started, under the capable handling of a trained crew, it works with the prettiness and precision of an engine. First the gun rolls forward on to an arrangement of curved tracks which are called “epies,” and whose tips point toward the objective. Then, to steady the piece, twelve large wooden feet are dropped by hydraulic jacks against the rails, and the gun is ready to fire.
It fires, all right, sending a good ton of steel in the direction indicated by the aerial observer. When it recoils, the flat car and all slides back a good couple of yards on the rails. Then it is brought back into position again, the barrel is cooled by jets of water, the wooden feet are braced again, and the piece loaded. Even with all those operations, the big fellow can fire a good forty shots a minute.
But, though they can fire those forty per minute, each one takes a lot out of the big fellow’s life. Unlike the guns of smaller calibre, they cannot be used over and over again. They are too powerful to be used in actual trench warfare, but let a fortress, or a mountain that has perversely got in the way of operations, loom up ahead, and down it goes! Also the big shells have been found exceedingly useful in knocking in the roofs of German tunnels underground, even those that are quarried out ninety feet under the surface.
All in all, the big fellow has a short life, but—if he’s directed right—it’s a mighty gay one.