§ 34 The Treacherous Warehouse
When the Yanks prepared to make their advance through Belleau Wood there was brought up from the south of France, a negro labor battalion, not a man of which until that time had ever heard a big gun crack in anger, but who, before this, had been employed in building roads and mending bridges and unloading freight cars. This outfit was set to work constructing defences of fallen timbers in the lower fringe of the forest, on the contingency that our troops, after their first onslaught might be driven back and need shelter behind which to fight on the retreat.
On a morning when the enemy, for reasons best known to themselves, were feeling unusually peevish and fretful, one of the correspondents, picking his cautious way through the thickets, came upon a coal black woodchopper in a ragged khaki shirt, who was swinging his ax on a fallen tree and between strokes looking up to where German shells were whistling through the ragged foliage overhead and occasionally exploding in his vicinity with a large, harsh, grating, unpleasant sound.
At each fresh report the darky would say—and even a perfect stranger to him could tell that from the very bottom of his soul he meant it—
“Oh, Lawsy, how I does wish’t I wuz home!”
“Well,” asked the correspondent, “why did you enlist if you didn’t care to face some danger?”
“Huh, man,” he snorted, “I never onlisted!”
“Well, why did you come over here, then?”
“I didn’t exac’ly come.”
“Well, you weren’t born over here, were you?”
“Naw suh, an’ I trusts not to die yere.”
“Well,” said the newspaper man, “you’re evidently past the draft age, and since you did not enlist and didn’t come over here of your own free will and weren’t born here, what I want to know is, how did you get here?”
“Mister,” said the negro, “it meks a kind of a sad story. My reg’lar home is Waycross, Georgia, an’ I suttinly does crave to be there right this minute! Here ’bout a yeah ago a w’ite man come down frum de Nawth, an’ he corralled a whole passel of us together an’ he say to us, he say: ‘Boys, I want you all to go up Nawth wid me an’ wuk fur de gove’mint. Plain niggers is gwine git eight dollars a day; fancy niggers ’at shows speed, is gwine git ten.’ An’ I sez to myse’f, I sez: ‘W’ite man, you don’t know it yit, but you’s lookin’ at one of the ten dollar ones right now!’
“So he loads a whole raft of us on board de steam cyars an’ he totes us plum’ to Noo Yawk city. An’ w’en we gits thar we wuks jest one mawnin’, down by de water. W’en de time come to knock off for dinner de w’ite man gets up on a box an’ meks us a speech. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘I wuz wrong ’bout you—w’y, they ain’t a eight dollar nigger in the lot. Come on wid me to de warehouse an’ sign up for ten!’
“Natchelly I led de parade. Right behind me comes de w’ite man yellin’: ’Dis way to de warehouse!’ An’ right behind him comes all de rest of dem Waycross niggers, jest runnin’.
“So he teks us th’ough a kind of a long shed. An’ he ’scorts us ’crost a lil’ narrow plank. An’ he leads us th’ough a kind of a lil’ round iron do’.
“An’ w’en we wuz all inside, de w’ite man slammed de iron do’—AN’ DE WAREHOUSE SAILED AWAY!”