INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The writer of these letters and maker of these drawings went overseas with the first Technology unit; landed in France on the Fourth of July, 1917; began his service as a member of the Reserve Mallet, and was mustered into the American Army on October 1, 1917. In preparing the letters and cartoons for the press, it was thought best to begin where rumors of impending German surrender first appear in the correspondence, thus confining the humorously illustrated story to the last weeks of the war. Mr. Day wrote his letters with no intention or expectation of having them published; that is entirely the work of his friends, who believe thathis impromptu sketches will be found to furnish ample justification for the existence of this book.
Mr. Day served in the Reserve Mallet, a camion unit to whose spirit and efficiencyStars and Stripeshas paid the following unaffected and authentic tribute:
“In a summer when again and again the historic phrase ‘Franco-American troops’ makes its appearance in the communiqués, the distinction of being the complete amalgam of the two armies belongs to the flying squadron of emergency transportation, that trundling troop of trucks, that charging company of camions, the Mallet Reserve.
“This organization consists of 700 five-ton trucks—American trucks driven over French roads, driven now by French now by American drivers, officered by French and Americanofficers, carrying French and American troops, French and American ammunition.
“The Mallet Reserve is so named because its commanding officer is Major Mallet of the French Cavalry, and is called a Reserve because it is attached to no Army Corps, but rather is held in reserve for emergency duty whenever a crisis in the war brings a crisis in transportation.
“This means that the interminable line of camions bearing the Mallet mark will invariably appear wherever things are hottest, that the trucks and their drivers know no rest from one year’s end to the other.
“Thus you saw them along the roads up Cambrai way last fall. When French troops were rushed into the gap that opened during the German drive of March, Mallet trucks carried them, and they were Mallet trucks which bore northward the French soldiers whomade their sudden and startling appearance among the British in Flanders during the April fighting. The American troops and ammunition that were moved with a rush to the lines of the Chateau-Thierry front were transported, many of them, in the home grown camions of the Mallet Reserve.
“The trucks themselves, if you examine them, tell many a story of transport under shell-fire, tell of machine gunners borne to the very rim of the battle so that gunners need only drop from the camion, run down a field and start firing.”
When this book went to press, Mr. Day was still in service, with the American Army of Occupation.