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by William Allen White

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Title: The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

Author: William Allen White

Release Date: May, 2004  [EBook #5633]
[This file was first posted on January 17, 2004]
[Most recently updated: January 17, 2004]

Edition: 11

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME ***




Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME

BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

Author of "A Certain Rich Man," etc.



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY TONY SARG




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

   I   IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  II   IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"

 III   IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER "BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR"

  IV   WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

   V   IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS "BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT"

  VI   WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY

 VII   WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION

VIII   IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"

  IX   IN WHICH WE RETURN TO "THE LAND OF THE FREE"




ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be
worn at most only two months

"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir"

She often paced the rounds of the deck between us

"Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?"

So we waved back at them so long as they were in sight

"Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame toot sweet about
it!"

Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe

One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout

"Come on! Let's go to the abri!"

So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force
of will and both hands!

He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for
a second at his inconvenience

"Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs.
Chessman--this is practically her hospital"

He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water

Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the lady from Oklahoma
City to me

And he sat cross-legged

As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum

They were standing on the running board all this time with the
train going forty miles an hour

"What part of the States do you Canadians come from?"

He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening to
another man's story in his own mouth

A fat man can't wear the modern American army uniform without
looking like a sack of meal

He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cutaway coat
of glaring scarlet broadcloth

We thought he might be testing us out as potential spies

And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party
and dropped into a grand ball

"Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord
Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?"




THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY


By rights Henry, being the hero of this story, should be introduced
in the first line. But really there isn't so much to say about
Henry--Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas--Henry J. Allen,
editor and owner of the Wichita Beacon. And to make the dramatis
personae complete, we may consider me as the editor of the Emporia
Gazette, and the two of us as short, fat, bald, middle-aged, inland
Americans, from fresh water colleges in our youth and arrived at
New York by way of an often devious, yet altogether happy route,
leading through politics where it was rough going and unprofitable
for years; through business where we still find it easy to sign,
possible to float and hard to pay a ninety-day note, and through
two country towns; one somewhat less than one hundred thousand
population, and Emporia slightly above ten thousand.

We are discovered in the prologue to the play in New York City wearing
our new silk suits to give New York a treat on a hot August day.
Not that we or any one else ever wears silk suits in any Wichita
or Emporia; silk suits are bought by Wichita people and Emporians
all over the earth to paralyse the natives of the various New Yorks.

In our pockets we hold commissions from the American Red Cross.
These commissions are sending us to Europe as inspectors with a
view to publicity later, one to speak for the Red Cross, the other
to write for it in America. We have been told by the Red Cross
authorities in Washington that we shall go immediately to the front
in France and that it will be necessary to have the protective
colouring of some kind of an army uniform. The curtain rises on a
store in 43rd Street in New York--perhaps the "Palace" or the "Hub"
or the "Model" or the "Army and Navy," where a young man is trying
to sell us a khaki coat, and shirt and trousers for $17.48. And
at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig which can be worn
at most only two months. But we compromise by making him throw in
another shirt and a service hat and we take the lot for $17.93 and
go away holding in low esteem the "pride, pomp and circumstance of
glorious war" as exemplified by these military duds. In our hearts
as we go off at R. U. E. will be seen a hatred for uniforms as
such, and particularly for phoney uniforms that mean nothing and
cost $18.00 in particular.

[Illustration with caption: And at that it seems a lot of money to
pay for a rig which can be worn at most only two months]

And then, with a quick curtain, the good ship Espagne, a French
liner, is discovered in New York harbour the next day with Henry
and me aboard her, trying to distinguish as she crawfishes out of
the dock, the faces of our waving friends from the group upon the
pier.

The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and scooting through the
night, with two or three hundred others of the cast of characters
aboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters,
and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity of
evil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act,
splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for three
thousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicas
of Wichita and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and the man
that this story is written, nor of Henry and me, and the war; but
it is the eternal Wichita and Emporia in the American heart that
we shall celebrate hereinafter as we unfold our tale. Of course,
that makes it provincial. And people living in New York or Boston,
or Philadelphia (but not Chicago, for half of the people there have
just come to town and the other half is just ready to leave town)
may not understand this story. For in some respects New York is
larger than Wichita and Emporia; but not so much larger; for mere
numbers of population amount to little. There is always an angle of
the particular from which one can see it as a part of the universal;
and seen properly the finite is always infinite. And that brings
us back naturally to Henry and me, looking out at the scurrying
stars in the ocean as we hurried through the black night on the
good ship Espagne. We had just folded away a fine Sunday dinner, a
French Sunday dinner, beginning with onion soup which was strange;
and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blast
of trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup
was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner that
night ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboard
the boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the value
of food as a two-way commodity--going down and coming up--but
later in the dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one-way
luxury, with small thought as to its other uses. So we leaned against
the rail in the night and thought large thoughts about Wichita and
Emporia.

Here we were, two middle-aged men, nearing fifty years, going out
to a ruthless war without our wives. We had packed our own valises
at the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. We realized
that probably we were leaving half our things in closets and
drawers and were taking the wrong things with us, and checking the
right things in our trunks at our hotels in New York. We had some
discussion about our evening clothes, and on a toss-up had decided
to take our tails and leave our dinner coats in the trunks. But
we didn't know why we had abandoned our dinner coats. We had no
accurate social knowledge of those things. Henry boasted that his
wife had taught him a formula that would work in the matter of white
or black ties with evening clothes. But it was all complicated with
white vests and black vests and sounded like a corn remedy; yet it
was the only sartorial foundation we had. And there we were with
land out of sight, without a light visible on the boat, standing
in the black of night leaning over the rail, looking at the stars
in the water, and wondering silently whether we had packed our best
cuff buttons, "with which to harry our foes," or whether we might
have to win the war in our $17.93 uniforms, and we both thought
and admitted our shame, that our wives would think we had "been
extravagant in putting so much money into those uniforms. The admirable
French dinner which we had just enveloped, seemed a thousand miles
away. It was a sad moment and our thoughts turned naturally to
home.

"Fried chicken, don't you suppose?" sighed Henry.

"And mashed potatoes, and lots of thick cream gravy!" came from
the gloom beside him.

"And maybe lima beans," he speculated.

"And a lettuce salad with thousand island dressing, I presume!"
came out of the darkness.

"And apple dumpling--green apple dumpling with hard sauce," welled
up from Henry's heavy heart. It was a critical moment. If it had
kept on that way we would have got off the boat, and trudged back
home through a sloppy ocean, and let the war take care of itself.
Then Henry's genius rose. Henry is the world's greatest kidder.
Give him six days' immunity in Germany, and let him speak in Berlin,
Munich, Dresden, Leipsic and Cologne and he would kid the divine
right of kings out of Germany and the kaiser on to the Chautauqua
circuit, reciting his wrongs and his reminiscences!

Henry, you may remember, delivered the Roosevelt valedictory at the
Chicago Republican convention in 1912, when he kidded the standpat
crowd out of every Republican state in the union but two at the
election. Possibly you don't like that word kid. But it's in the
dictionary, and there's no other word to describe Henry's talent.
He is always jamming the allegro into the adagio. And that night
in the encircling gloom on the boat as we started on our martial
adventures he began kidding the ocean. His idea was that he would
get Wichita to vote bonds for one that would bring tide water to
Main Street. He didn't want a big ocean--just a kind of an oceanette
with a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea,
and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps that
rose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken and
mashed potatoes of our dream, had vanished.

And so we fell to talking about our towns. It seems that we had
each had the same experience. Henry declared that, from the day it
was known he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the town had
set him apart; he was somewhat like the doomed man in a hanging and
people were always treating him with distinguished consideration.
He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the town boomer, had the memorial
services all worked out--who would sing "How Sleep the Brave,"
who would play Chopin's funeral march on the pipe organ, who would
deliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would send
around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocks
to print the eulogy in full and on the first page! Henry employs
an alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whether
he had decided to use "Wichita Weeps," or "State Stands Sorrowing."
If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that would
require a deck head. We could not decide, so we began talking of
serious things.

How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn days
when the man who went to France was a hero in his town's eyes.
Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passed
down America's main streets, all headed for France. And what proud
pageants they were! Walking at the head of the line were the little
limping handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came the
middle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so
boyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--the
volunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half
accoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly
young. There had been banquets the week before, and speeches and
flag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tears
and good-byes across the land. And all this in a few weeks; indeed
it began during the long days in which we two sailed through the
gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such
a bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town upon
an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred
leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger in
some way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers
often multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and me
on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and
ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers. No particular advantage
would come to the German arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne,
carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on merciful
errands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon,
we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an interned
leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had been told of how cunningly the
Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric
wires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source,
how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship,
how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts and
rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they had
scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make
steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a
floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize
she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those
handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country
as they went to their training camps. Even to consider these things
gave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat
in the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had
come before. And then our first real martial adventure happened,
thus:

As we leaned over the rail that first night talking of many things,
in the blackness, without a glimmer from any porthole, with the
decks as dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots an
hour. In peace times it would be regarded as a crazy man's deed,
to go whizzing along at full speed without lights. Henry had taken
two long puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind us came
a hand that tapped his shoulder, and then a voice spoke:

"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A submarine could see that
five miles on a night like this!"

So Henry doused his light, and the war came right home to us.

The next day was uniform day on the boat, and the war came a bit
nearer to us than ever. Scores of good people who had come on the
boat in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day;
mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. or American ambulance or Field Service
uniforms. We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed that
we should at least have a dress rehearsal. The only regular uniforms
on board were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, straggling
home from a French political mission to America, and these French
soldiers were the only passengers on the boat who had errands
to France connected with the destructive side of the war. So not
until the uniforms blazed out gorgeously did we realize what an
elaborate and important business had sprung up in the reconstructive
side of war. Here we saw a whole ship's company--hundreds of busy
and successful men and women, one of scores and scores of ship's
companies like it, that had been hurrying across the ocean every
few days for three years, devoted not to trading upon the war, not
to exploiting the war, not even to expediting the business of "the
gentle art of murdering," but devoted to saving the waste of war!

As the days passed, and "we sailed and we sailed," a sort of
denatured pirate craft armed to the teeth with healing lotions to
massage the wrinkled front of war, Henry kept picking at the ocean.
It was his first transatlantic voyage; for like most American men,
he kept his European experiences in his wife's name. So the ocean
bothered him. He understood a desert or a drouth, but here was a
tremendous amount of unnecessary and unaccountable water. It was
a calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at it for a long
time one day, Henry remarked wearily: "The town boosters who secured
this ocean for this part of the country rather overdid the job!"

One evening, looking back at the level floor of the ocean stretching
illimitably into the golden sunset, he mused: "They have a fine
country here. You kind of like the lay of it, and there is plenty
of nice sightly real estate about--it's a gently rolling country,
uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there's
got to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that at
a glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his proposition!"

[Illustration with caption: "You'll have to put out that cigar,
sir."]

A time always comes in a voyage, when men and women begin to step
out as individuals from the mass. With us it was the Red Cross
stenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased being
ladyships and lordships and took their proper places in the cosmos.
They were a gay lot--and young. And human nature is human nature.
So the decks began to clutter up with boys and girls intensely
interested in exploring each other's lives. It is after all the
most wonderful game in the world. And while the chaperon fluttered
about more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks at
night, and while public opinion on the boat made eminently proper
rules against young women in the smoking room, still young blood did
have its way, which really is a good way; better than we think,
perhaps, who look back in cold blood and old blood. And by the token
of our years it was brought to us that war is the game of youth.
We were two middle-aged old coots--though still in our forties and
not altogether blind to a pretty face--and yet the oldest people
on the boat. Even the altruistic side of war is the game of youth.

Perhaps it is the other way around, and maybe youth is the only game
in the world worth playing and that the gains of youth, service and
success and follies and failures, are only the chips and counters.
We were brought to these conclusions more or less by a young person,
a certain Miss Ingersoll, or perhaps her name only sounded like
that; for we called her the Eager Soul. And she was a pretty girl,
too--American pretty: Red hair--lots of blowy, crinkly red hair
that was always threatening to souse her face and ears; blue eyes
of the serious kind and a colour that gave us the impression that
she did exercises and could jab a punching bag. Indeed before we
met her, we began betting on the number of hours it would take her
to tell us that she took a cold plunge every morning. Henry expected
the statement on the second day; as a matter of fact it came late
on the first day! She was that kind. But there was no foolishness
about her. She was a nurse--a Red Cross nurse, and she made it
clear that she had no illusions about men; we suspected that she
had seen them cut up and knew their innermost secrets! Nevertheless
she was tremendously interesting, and because she, too, was from
the middle west, and possibly because she realized that we accepted
her for what she was, she often paced the rounds of the deck between
us. We teased her more or less about a young doctor of the Johns
Hopkins unit who sometimes hovered over her deck chair and a certain
Gilded Youth--every boat-load has its Gilded Youth--whose father
was president of so many industrial concerns, and the vice-president
of so many banks and trust companies that it was hard to look at
the boy without blinking at his gilding. Henry was betting on the
Gilded Youth; so the young doctor fell to me. For the first three
or four days during which we kept fairly close tab on their time,
the Doctor had the Gilded Youth beaten two hours to one. Henry
bought enough lemonade for me and smoking room swill of one sort
and another to start his little old Wichita ocean But it was plain
that the Gilded Youth interested her. And in a confidential moment
filled with laughter and chaff and chatter she told us why: "He's
patronizing me. I mean he doesn't know it, and he thinks I don't
know it; but that's what he's doing. I interest him as a social
specimen. I mean--I'm a bug and he likes to take me up and examine
me. I think I'm the first 'Co-ed' he ever has seen; the first
girl who voted and didn't let her skirts sag and still loved good
candy! I mean that when he found in one half hour that I knew he wore
nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearly
expired; he was that puzzled! I'm not quite the type of working
girl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but--I mean I think he is
wondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind! When he
decides," she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking
away her overflowing red hair, "I may have to slap him--I mean
don't you know--"

And we did know. And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizing
me with odds on the Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautiful
boy--tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming. He
played Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano in
the women's lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud poker
with the San Francisco boys in the smoking room. And it was clear
that he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat
higher than his mother's social secretary--but of the same class.
He was returning from a furlough, to drive his ambulance in France,
and the Doctor was going out to join his unit somewhere in France
down near the Joan of Arc country. He told us shyly one day, as we
watched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationed
at an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, "I serve
because I am served!" When he did not repeat the motto we knew that
it had caught him. He had been at home working on a germ problem
connected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence of
Mrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficulties
with the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the two
at their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge and
gasped, "My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a jumped off the
boat!"

[Illustration with caption: She often paced the rounds of the deck
between us]

As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar faces
and figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair of
eyes--a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. Speaking broadly
and allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes were
no treat to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes. Henry
said if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captain
should make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. We
were not always sure she was a Princess. At times she seemed more
like a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes. We never
had seen such clothes! And millinery! We were used to Broadway;
Michigan Avenue did not make us shy, and Henry had been in the South.
But these clothes and the hats and the eyes--all full dress--were
too many for us. And we fell to speculating upon exactly what would
happen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporia
if the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's place
at table was where he got the full voltage of the eyes every time
the Princess switched them on. And whenever he reached for the
water and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behind
his ordinary resisting power. And he drank enough to float a ship!
As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonely
hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes and
we concluded that they were Latin--Latin chiefly engaged in the
business of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wives
and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and
had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their
husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast,
and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of
their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these
female eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decided
to investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid off
from our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Our
closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably
was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her
when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing
her eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for
ever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have been
the hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deck
with the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes. He
was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of
the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score
on the Emporia Country Club links--anyway something of broad,
universal human interest. But those things seemed to pall on her.
So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women at
home--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and
the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These things
left her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered,
slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on
her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim
lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she was
at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. She
managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan
the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansas
partner suggested that life would be broader and better for women
after the war, because they would have so much more important a
part to do than before in the useful work of the world. "Ah, yes,"
she said, "perhaps so. But with the men all gone what shall we do
when we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllables
of petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you know
women were made to be pet-ted." There was a bewildered second under
the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered
seriously her theory. He had never cherished such a theory before.
But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the
pleasant new things in it--this theory of the woman requiring to
be pet-ted!

Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said: "Oh, yes--come
on, Col-o-nel"--making three unaccented syllables of the word--"and
we shall have une femme sandweech." She gave the Colonel her arm.
The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy with
the Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia Country
Club, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes
to the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyous
incandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchman
but gazing sweetly at the American, "Col-o-nel, will you please
carry my books?" They must have weighed six or eight ounces! And
she shifted them to the Col-o-nel as though they weighed a ton!

So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking room to find his mate.
They two then and there discussed the woman proposition in detail
and drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporia
type, the American type that carries its own books and burdens and
does not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry and
does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex! Men may die
for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death. We were willing that
they should. We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others.
But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry
and me! So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the
Armenians drill. A great company of them was crowded in the steerage
and all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the
drill. They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army
and avenge the wrongs of their people. When they tired of drilling,
they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang. It was
queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. It
was written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and broken
time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird. It had the
charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the
strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.

"What is that music?" asked the Kansans of a New England boy in
khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano.
"That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. "Oh, that--why that's
the 'Old Oaken Bucket!'" His face did not relax and he went away
whistling! So there we were. The Col-o-nel and the lady with their
idea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music,
the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins
from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their
striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across
the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its
essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each
cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind.
And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love
one's own kind of women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind
of humour, one's own kind of philosophy; knowing that they are not
perfect and understanding their limitations; trusting to time and
circumstance to bring out the fast colours of life in the eternal
wash. Thinking thoughts like these that night, Henry's bunk-mate
could not sleep. So he slipped on a grey overcoat over his pajamas
and put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, and went out on
deck into the hot night that falls in the gulf stream in summer.
It was the murky hour before dawn and around and around the deck he
paced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt spectre in the night.
The deck chairs were filled with sleepers from the berths below
decks. At last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped to gaze
over the rail at the water and the stars when he heard this from
a deck chair behind him, "Wake up, Net--for God's sake wake up!"
whispered a frightened woman's voice. "There's that awful thing
again that scared me so awhile ago!"

[Illustration with caption: "Col-o-nel, will you please carry my
books?"]

Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean interested us. An
ocean always seems so unreasonable to inlanders. And that morning
when there was "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn
breaking," Henry came alongside and looked at the seascape, all
twisting and writhing and tossing and billowing, up and down and
sideways. He also looked at his partner who was gradually growing
pale and wan and weary. And Henry heard this: "She's on a bender;
she's riz about ten feet during the night. I guess there's been
rain somewhere up near the headwaters or else the fellow took his
finger out of the hole in the dyke. Anyway, she'll be out of her
banks before breakfast. I don't want any breakfast; I'm going to
bed for the day." And he went.

During the day Henry brought the cheerful information that the Doctor
was down and that the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearing
out the deck. Henry also added that her slapping was scheduled for
that night.

"Has her hair slopped over yet?" This from me.

"No," answered Henry, "but it's getting crinklier and crinklier
and she looks pinker and pinker, and prettier and prettier, and
you ought to see her in her new purple sweater. She sprang that on
the boat this afternoon! It's laying 'em out in swaths!" Henry's
affinity was afraid to turn off his back. But he turned a pale
face toward his side-kick and whispered: "Henry, you tell her,"
he gulped before going on, "that if she can't find anyone else to
slap, there's a man down here who can't fight back!"

A sense of security comes to one who churns along seven days on
a calm sea on an eventless voyage. And the French, by easy-going
ways, stimulate that sense of security; we had heard weird stories
of boat-drills at daybreak, of midnight alarms and of passengers
sleeping on deck in their life preservers, and we were prepared
for the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have. They
never came. One afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had notice
at noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon.
The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and at
three o'clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned
to him, donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffed
appearance, answered to a roll-call, guyed those about him after
the manner of old friends, and waited for something else. It never
came. The ship's officers gradually faded from the decks and the
passengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared
one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their
life-belts moulted! That was the last we heard of the boat-drill
or the life-belts. The French are just that casual.

But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grisly
incident that brought us close up to the war. We were gathered in
the dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south--a mere
speck on the horizon's edge. Signals began to twinkle from her and
we felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at full
speed. The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, but
we sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for,
though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have been
a U-boat lure. Often the Germans have used the lure of distress
signals on a sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the U-boat
has sent to death the Good Samaritan of the sea! It is awful. But
the German has put mercy off the sea!

Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for his
moral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke
out with this: "I've been thinking about this U-boat business;
how it would be if we had the German's job. I have been trying to
think if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run a
U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I've been trying to
imagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or down
at the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captain
of a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinking
ship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to figure
out how the fellows sitting around him would take it. They'd get
up and leave. He would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag or
bluff or blare of victory would gloss over his act. We simply don't
think the German way. We have a loyalty to humanity deeper than
our patriotism. There are certain things self-respecting men can't
do and live in Wichita. But there seem to be no restrictions in
Germany. The U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lure
probably holds about such a place in his home town as Charley Carey,
our banker, or Walter Innes, our dry goods man. He is doubtless
a leading citizen of some German town; doubtless a kind father, a
good husband and maybe a pillar of the church. And I suppose town
and home and church will applaud him when he goes back to Germany
to brag about his treachery. In Wichita, town and home and church
would be ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if they came back
to brag about killing men who were lured to death by responding to
the call of distress."

And so, having disposed of the psychology of the enemy, we turned
in for the night. We were entering the danger zone and the night was
hot. A few passengers slept on deck; but most of the ship's company
went to their cabins. We didn't seem to be afraid. We presumed
that our convoy would appear in the morning. But when it failed
to appear we assumed that there was no danger. No large French
passenger boat had been sunk by the Germans; this fact we heard a
dozen times that day. It soothed us. The day passed without bringing
our convoy. Again we went to bed, realizing rather clearly that
the French do take things casually; and believing firmly that the
convoys would come with the dawn. But dawn came and brought no
convoy. We seemed to be nearing land. The horizon was rarely without
a boat. The day grew bright. We were almost through the danger zone.
We went to lunch a gay lot, all of us; but we hurried back to the
deck; not uneasily, not in fear, understand, but just to be on
deck, looking landward. And then at two o'clock it appeared. Far
off in the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. It looked
like a seabird; but it grew. In ten minutes the whole deck was
excited. Every glass was focused on the growing black spot. And
then it loomed up the size of a baseball; it showed colour, a dull
yellow in the distance and then it swelled and took form and glowed
brighter and came rushing toward us, as large as a moon, as large
as a barrel, and then we saw its outlines, and it came swooping
over us, a great beautiful golden thing and the whole deck burst
into cheers. It was our convoy, a dirigible balloon--vivid golden
yellow, trimmed with blue! How fair it seemed. How graceful and how
surely and how powerfully it circled about the ship like a great
hovering bird, and how safe we felt; and as we cheered and cheered
the swirling, glowing, beautiful thing, we knew how badly frightened
we really had been. With danger gone, the tension lifted and we
read the fear in our hearts. A torpedo boat destroyer came lumbering
across the sky line. It also was to convoy us, but it had a most
undramatic entrance; and besides we had sighted land. The deck cheered
easily, so we cheered the land. And everyone ran about exclaiming
to everyone else about the wonder and splendour of the balloon,
and everyone took pictures of everyone else and promised to send
prints, and the land waxed fat and loomed large and hospitable
while Henry paced the deck with his hands clasped reflectively
behind him. He was deeply moved and language didn't satisfy him
much. Finally he took his fellow Kansan by the arm and pointed to
the magnificence of the hovering spectre in yellow and blue that
circled about the ship:

"Bill," he said, solemnly, "isn't she a peach!" He paused, then
from his heart he burst out: "'How beautiful upon the mountain are
the feet of them that bring glad tidings!' I wish the fellows in
Wichita could get this thing for the wheat show!"

And thus we came to the shores of sunny France, a land that was to
remind us over and over again of our own sunny land of Kansas.

We landed after dark. Every one was going about vowing deathless
friendship to every one else, and so far as the stenographers and
the ambulance boys were concerned, it came to Henry and me that we
meant it; for they were a fine lot, just joyous, honest, brave young
Americans going out to do their little part in a big enterprise.
While we were bidding good-bye to our boys and girls, we kept
a weather eye on the Eager Soul. She had hooked the Gilded Youth
fairly deeply. He saw that her trunk came up from the hold, but we
noticed that while he was gone, the Doctor showed up and went with
her to sort out her hand-baggage from the pile on the deck. The
gang plank was let down under a pair of smoky torches. And the
Gilded Youth had paid a fine tip some place to be permitted to be
the first passenger off the boat that he might get one of the two
taxis in sight for the Eager Soul. She followed him, but she made
him let the Doctor come along. And so the drinks--lemon squash and
buttermilk--were equally on Henry and me. We hurried down the gang
plank after the happy trio. They were young--so infinitely and
ineffably young, it seemed to us. And the girl's face was flushed
and joyous, and her hair--why it didn't shake out and drown her we
never knew; certainly it surged out from under her hat like ripples
of youth incarnate. We saw them stacking their valises in the taxi
and over the taxi and around the taxi and the last we saw of her
was when she bent out of the cab window and waved and smiled at us,
two sedate old parties alone there in the crowd, with the French
language rising to our ears as we teetered unsteadily into it.

What an adventure they were going into--what a new adventure, the
new and beautiful adventure of youth, the old and inexplicable
adventure of life! So we waved back at them so long as they were
in sight, and the white handkerchief of the Eager Soul fluttered
back from the disappearing cab. When it was gone, Henry turned to
a sad-looking cabman with a sway-backed carriage and explained with
much eloquence that we wanted him to haul us a la hotel France--toot
sweet!

[Illustration with caption: So we waved back at them so long as
they were in sight]




CHAPTER II

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE "ROCKET'S RED GLARE"


Bordeaux is the "Somewhere in France" from which cablegrams from
passengers on the French liners usually are sent. This will be no
news to the Germans, nor to Americans who read the advertisements
of the French liners, but it may be news to Americans who receive
the mysterious cablegrams "from a French port," after their friends
have landed. It is a dear old town, mouldy, and weather-beaten,
and mediaeval, this Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along the
street's over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneaking
mischievously out of bounds. A woe-begone trolley creaks through the
narrow streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over the mistakes
of misspent lives, larrup disconsolate horses over stony streets
as they creak and jog and wheeze ahead of the invisible crows
that seem always to be hovering above ready to batten upon their
rightful provender. For an hour in the morning before our train left
for Paris we chartered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town and
took in Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita,
or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as that
goes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide and
beautiful world. "All this needs," said Henry, as he lolled back
upon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims
on the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth,
"all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a good
film!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group
of firemen in front of the engine house playing checkers or chess
or something. But the town had an historic interest for us as the
home of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so we looked up
their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate
idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we
thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we
could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band
wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew;
indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own
politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what
seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered
heads for a second before we took the train for Paris.

All day long we rode through the only peaceful part of France
we were to see in our martial adventures. It was fair and fat and
smiling--that France that lay between the river Gironde and Paris,
and all day we rode through its beauty and its richness. The thing
which we missed most from the landscape, being used to the American
landscape, was the automobile. We did not see one in the day's
journey. In Kansas alone there are 190,000 continually pervading
the landscape. We had yet to learn that there are no private
automobiles in France, that the government had commandeered all
automobiles and that even the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons
of gasoline a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at the
two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong white oxen, the ribbons
of roads, hard-surfaced and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills,
and longed for a car to make the journey past the fine old chateaux
that flashed in and out of our vision behind the hills. War was a
million miles away from the pastoral France that we saw coming up
from Bordeaux.

But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a
great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and
sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play
with us like big sportive birds. The train was filled with our
shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows
to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered
above us. Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her
crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough
from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor "for to admire and for
to see," the airplanes.

But the airplanes gave us the day's first opportunity to talk to
the Eager Soul. Until dusk the Gilded Youth had kept her in his
donjon--a first class compartment jammed with hand-baggage, and
where she had insisted that the Young Doctor should come also. We
knew that without being told; also it was evident as we passed up
and down the car aisle during the day that she was acting as a sort
of human Baedeker to the Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, to
whom chateaux and French countryside were an old, old story, sat
by and hooted. But the airplanes pulled him out of his donjon keep
and the Young Doctor with him. He wasn't above showing the Young
Doctor how much a Gilded Youth really knows about mechanics and
airplanes, and we slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul. We
had a human interest in the contest between the Gilded Youth and
the Young Doctor, and a sporting interest which centered in the
daily score. And we gathered this: That it was the Young Doctor's
day. For he was in France to help the greatest cause in the world;
and the Gilded Youth affected to be in France--to enjoy the greatest
outdoor game in the world. But he had made it plain that day to
the Eager Soul that working eighteen hours a day under shell fire,
driving an ambulance, was growing tame. He was going back, of course,
but he was thinking seriously of the air service. The Doctor wanted
no thrills. He was willing to boil surgical instruments or squirt
disinfectant around kitchens to serve. And the Eager Soul liked
that attitude, though it was obvious to us, that she was in the
war game as a bit of a sport and because it was too dull in her
Old Home Town, "somewhere in the United States." And we knew also
what she did not admit, even if she recognized it, that in the
Old Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of her spirit and
intelligence were scarce--and she was out looking for her own Sir
Galahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the Holy
Grail. The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoy
the new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe
free air as an achieving human creature--but, alas! one's forties
are too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eager
as her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world ideals
into which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden away
deeply in the secret places of her heart, were a man and a home
and children.

We whizzed through the dusk in the suburbs of Paris that night,
seeing the gathering implements of war coming into the landscape
for the first time--the army trucks, the horizon blue of the French
uniform, the great training camps, the Red Cross store houses,
the scores and scores of hospitals that might be seen in the public
buildings with Red Cross flags on them, the munition plants pouring
out their streams of women workers in their jumpers and overalls.

The girl porters came through and turned on the lights in the
train. No lights outside told us that we were hurrying through a
great city. Paris was dark. We went through the underground where
there was more light than there was above ground. The streets seemed
like tunnels and the tunnels like streets. We came into the dingy
station and a score of women porters and red capped girls came for
our baggage. They ran the trucks, they moved the express; they
took care of the mail, and through them we edged up the stairway
into the half-lighted station and looked out into the night--black,
lampless, engulfing--and it was Paris!

It was nine o'clock as we stood on the threshold of the station
peering into the murk. Not a taxi was in the stand waiting; but
from afar we could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that sounded
like the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city. The
air was vibrant with these wild calls. We were an hour waiting there
in the gloom for a conveyance. But when we left the wide square
about the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understood
why the auto horns were bellowing so. For the automobiles were
running lickety-split through the darkness without lights and
the howls of their horns pierced the night. The few street lights
burning a low candle power at the intersections of the great
boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements.
And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and the
Rue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings of
the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to mark
our way. Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait,
and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the
darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of
another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus
as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street.
The din was nerve racking--but highly Parisian. One fancied that
Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation by
multiplying its sound!

We went to the Ritz--now smile; the others did! Not that the Ritz
is an inferior hotel. We went there because it was really the
grandee among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in Paris when
we told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled. The human mind
doesn't seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz
without the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawed
and catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia
are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is
the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for
our rusticity--the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in
us! We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as a
leading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminal
facilities. And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting for
an international figure. There, it seemed to me, the rich and the
great would congregate to invite him to dinners, and to me, at
least, who had imagination, there seemed something rather splendid
in fancying the gentry saying, "Ah, yes--Henry J. Allen, of
Wichita--the next governor of Kansas, I understand!" Henry indicated
his feeling about the Ritz thus: The night we arrived he failed,
for the first time in two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal in
our $17.93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York. The gold braided
uniforms that we saw in the corridors of the Ritz that night made
us pause and consider many things. When we unpacked our valises,
there were the little bundles just as they had come from 43rd
Street. Henry tucked his away with a sigh, and just before he went
to sleep he called across the widening spaces between sleep and
wakening: "I suppose we might have bought that $23.78 outfit, easy
enough!"

It was in the morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wear
off for Henry. He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they were
conserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels of
Paris excepting Friday and Saturday nights. The English, who are
naturally mean, declare that the French save seventy-five per cent
of the use of their hot water by putting the two hot water nights
together, as no living Frenchman ever took a bath two consecutive
days. But it did not seem that way to Henry and me. And anyway we
heard these theories later. But that morning Henry, who doesn't
really mind a cold bath, was ready for it when he happened to look
around the bathroom and found there wasn't a scrap of soap. There
he was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better--if one
should include the dripping from his first plunge--one might say
he was au jus! And what is more, he was au mad. He jabbed the bell
button that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry had
his speech ready for him. "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!" The valet explained that soap was
not furnished with the room. It took some time to get that across
in broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly and
in his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo,
cried: "Say! We are paying," at the dazed look in the valet's
face Henry repeated slower and louder, "We are paying, I say,
fifteen-dollars--fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms. You go
ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?" And he waved
the valet grandly out.

[Illustration with caption: "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!"]

An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in war time. Our way
lay through the lonely Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione,
down the Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beautiful Place
de la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was. Now
and then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances,
or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of the
place. But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marble
and cement only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of the
French provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and save
for the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heaped
upon the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place might have been
an excavation rather than the heart of a great world metropolis.
Before the war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go into the
Champs Elysees was an adventure of a life time. One took one's
chances. One survived, but he had his thrills. But that morning we
might have walked safely with bowed head and hands clasped behind
us through the Place, across the Elysian fields; there we sat for
a moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw nothing more shocking
than the beautiful women of France gathering in the abandoned
cafes and music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the French
wounded.

In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, we
came to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place de
la Concorde. The five floors of a building once used for a man's club
are now filled with bustling, hustling Americans. Those delicately
tinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find it
in the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lower
Broadway, not the place of the bright lights. The click and clatter
of typewriters punctuate the air. Natty stenographers, prim office
women, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants from
perhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department,
the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly through
the corridors. In the reception rooms are men from the ends of the
earth--Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians,
Japs--every nation at peace with America has some business sometime
in that Paris office of the American Red Cross. For there abides
the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he
was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,--Major Grayson M.
P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after
service in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddling
insurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largest
trust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed,
but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He was
so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great
heart to keep it from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp in
his speech which might fool strangers who do not know about the
steel of his nerves and the keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomy
office with a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made quick,
sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant voice that never backed
track nor weakened before a disagreeable situation. He is the man
who more than anyone else has laid out the spending of the major
part of the first one hundred millions gathered in America by the
Red Cross drive last summer. He held his rank as Major in the United
States army, and wore his uniform as though it were his skin, clean,
unwrinkled and handsome, with that gorgeous quality of unconscious
pride that is, after all, the West Pointer's real grace.

As we sat in that noble room, looking out across the Place de
la Concorde, past the Obelisk to the House of Deputies beyond the
Seine, it was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The spectacle
of Major Murphy's young men in their habiliments of service, Red
Cross military uniforms that made them look like lilies of the
valley and bright and morning stars, gave us both something to
think about. The recollection of those $17.93 uniforms of ours in
the rooms at the Ritz was disquieting. We had service hats; these
young gods wore brown caps with leather visors and enameled Red
Crosses above the leather. We had cotton khaki tunics unadorned,
and of a vintage ten years old. They had khaki worsted of a cut
to conform to the newest general order. They had Sam Browne belts
of high potency, and we had no substitute even for that insignia
of power. They had shiny leather puttees. We had tapes. They had
brown shoes--we had not given a fleeting thought to shoes. We might
as well have had congress gaiters! So when the conversation with
Major Murphy turned to a point where he said that he expected us to
go with him to the French front immediately he took a look at our
Sunday best Emporia and Wichita civilian clothes and asked casually,
"Have you gentlemen uniforms?" For me right there the cock crowed
three times. Henry heard it also, and answered slowly, "Well,
no--not exactly."

"Mr. Hoppen," said the Major, "take these gentlemen down the street
and show them where to get uniforms!" Which Mr. Hoppen went and
did. Now Mr. Hoppen is related to the Morgans--the J. Pierpont
Morgans--and he has small notion of Emporia and Wichita. So he took
us to a tailorshop after his own heart. We chose a modest outfit,
with no frills. We ordered one pair of riding breeches each, and
one tunic each, and one American army cap each. The tunic was to
conform to the recent Army regulation for Red Cross tunics, and the
trousers were to match; Henry looked at me and received a distress
signal, but he ignored it and said nonchalantly, "When can we have
them?" The tailor told us to call for a fitting in two weeks, but
we were going to the front before that. That made no difference;
and then Henry came to the real point. "How much," he asked, "will
these be?" The tailor answered in francs and we quickly divided the
sum into dollars. It made $100. "For both?" asked Henry hopefully.
"For each," answered the tailor firmly. There stood Mr. Hoppen, of
Morgans. There also stood Wichita and Emporia. Henry's eyes did not
bat; Mr. Hoppen wore a shimmering Sam Browne belt. Looking casually
at it Henry asked:

"Shall we require one of those?"

"Gentlemen are all wearing them, sir," answered the tailor.

"How much?" queried Henry.

"Well, you gentlemen are a trifle thick, sir, and we'll have to
have them specially made, but I presume we may safely say $14 each,
sir!"

Henry did not even look at me, but lifted the wormwood to his lips
and quaffed it. "Make two," he answered.

The world should not be unsafe for democracy if Wichita and Emporia
could help it!

We went to a show that night with the feeling of guilt and shame
one has who has betrayed his family. That $114 with ten more to
come for brown shoes, flickered in the spot light and babbled on
the lips of the singers. They danced it in the ballet. Each of us
was thinking with guilty horror of how he would break the news of
that uniform bargain to his wife. So we went home tired that first
night, through the grim dark streets of Paris and to our rooms.
And there were those 43rd street uniforms still unwrapped in the
bureau drawer. Henry again demanded a dress rehearsal. He insisted
that as we were going to have to wear them to the front we ought to
know how we looked inside of them. But we were weary and again put
off the dread hour. The next morning we bought our ten dollar brown
shoes, and concluded that there was a vast amount of foolishness
connected with this war.

During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to take
us to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and spluttering
through the French language. Henry never was sure of anything
but toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever sticking
sophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen. The
German never actually broke out. If it had, we should have been shot
as spies. But it was so close that it always seemed to be snooping
around ready to jump out. That made it hard for me to shine in
French.

These adventures with the French language were not exactly the
martial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren
Finney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, when
they trundled us out to win the war. Yet these adventures were
serious. They were adventures in lonesomeness. We could imagine
how the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say when
this language began to wash about his ears and submerge him in
its depths. We could fancy American soldiers wandering through
the French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn't
understand the prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak,
isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of
foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the
everlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesickness
that hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a strange land!"

So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to dine with us, and we
let her order a dinner so complicated that it tasted like a lexicon!
We learned much about the Eager Soul that night. She told us of
her two college degrees, her year's teaching experience, her four
years' nursing, and her people in the old home town. Bit by bit,
we picked out her status from the things she dropped inadvertently.
And that night in our rooms we assembled the parts of the puzzle
thus; one rambling Bedford limestone American castle in the Country
Club district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, a
lamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some of
it was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love for
Henry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen,
Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, and
Bernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record
as organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state three
years ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by the dozen and candy
in five pound boxes! We could not prove it, but we agreed that she
probably bossed her mother and that the brothers' wives hated her
and the sister's husband loved her to death! She was one of those
socially assured persons in the Old Home Town who are never afraid
of themselves out of it! She confessed that she had seen more
or less of the Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in a
pyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted that she had gone to
the station to bid the Young Doctor good-bye. She had been assigned
to a hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going out the following
day. When we left her at the door of the Hotel Vouillemont, we
plunged back into the encircling gloom of the French language with
real regret.

As we went further into the life about us, we felt that all the men
were in uniform and all the women in mourning. The French mourn
beautifully. France today is the world's tragedy queen whose
suffering is all genuine, but all magnificently done. In the shop
windows of the Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera are
no bright colours--excepting for men's uniforms. In the windows
of the millinery shops, purple is the gayest colour--purple and
lavender and black prevail. On every street are blind windows of
departed shops. Some bear signs notifying customers that they are
closed for the duration of the war; others simply stare blankly
and piteously at passersby who know the story without words.

Yet if it is not a gay Paris, it is anything but a sad Paris. Rather
it is a busy Paris; a Paris that stays indoors and works. For an
hour or two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday also they
throng the boulevards. And the theatres are always well filled;
and there the bright dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombre
gowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies and foyers are not far
from brilliant. Bands and orchestras play in the theatres, but the
music lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically
executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most part of men
past the military age. We heard "La Tosca" one afternoon and in
the orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and the tenor was fat!
As the season grew old, we heard "Louise," "Carmen," "Aphrodite,"
"Butterfly" (in London), and "Aida" (in Milan), and always the
musical accompaniment to the social vagaries of these ladies who
are no better than they should be, was music from old heads and
old hearts. The "other lips and other hearts whose tales of love"
should have been told ardently through fiddle and clarinet are
toying with the great harp of a thousand strings that plays the dance
of death. That is the music the young men are playing in Europe
today. But in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the music
that should be made from the soul of youth, crying into reeds
and strings and brass is an echo, an echo altogether lovely but
passionless!

Finally our season of waiting ended. We came home to the Ritz
at midnight from a dinner with Major Murphy, where we had been
notified that we were to start for the front the next morning. We
told him that the new uniforms were not yet ready and confessed
to him that we had the cheap uniforms; he looked resigned. He
had been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade of Red Cross
commissioners from America, and he probably felt that he had seen
the worst and that this was just another cross. But when we reached
our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his voice, not in pleading,
but in command. For we were to start at seven the next morning,
and it was orders. So each went to his bedroom and began unwrapping
his bundles. In ten minutes Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate
divinity! With me there was trouble. Someone had blundered. The shirt
went on easily; the tunic went on cosily, but the trousers--someone
had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe spoon and foots-case
wouldn't get them to rise to their necessary height. Inspection
proved that they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good as a waist
line! There is a net deficit of eight tragic inches, and eight
inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe. Yet there we were.
It was half past twelve. In six hours more we must be on our way
to the front--to the great adventure. Uniforms were imperative.
And there was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He rang for the
valet; no response. He rang for the tailor; he was in bed. He rang
for the waiter; he was off duty. There was just one name left on
the call card; so Henry hustled me into an overcoat and rang for
the chambermaid! And she appeared as innocent of English as we were
of French. It was an awful moment! But Henry slowly began making
gestures and talking in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures
were the well-known gestures of his valedictory to the Republican
party at the Chicago Auditorium in 1912--beautiful gestures
and impressive. The maid became interested. Then he took the
recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently but firmly against his
friend's heart--or such a matter, showing how far from the ideal
they came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen shirt, and in
the tail of it marked out dramatically a "V" slice about the shape
of an old-fashioned slice of pumpkin pie--a segment ten or a dozen
inches wide that would require two hands in feeding. Then he pointed
from the shirt to the trousers and then to the ample bosom of his
friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie-slice was to
go into the rear corsage of the breeches. It was wonderful to see
intelligence dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The gestures of
that Bull Moose speech had touched her heart. Suddenly she knew the
truth, and it made her free, so she cried, "Wee wee!" And oratory
had again risen to its proper place in our midst! At two o'clock
she returned with the pumpkin pie slice from the tail of the brown
shirt, neatly, but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist line
of the riding trousers, and we lay down to pleasant dreams; for we
found that by standing stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulled
down, and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it was possible
to conceal the facts of one's double life. So we went forth with
Major Murphy the next morning as care-free as "Eden's garden birds."
We looked like birds, too--scarecrows!

[Illustration: Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe]

Our business took us to the American Ambulance men who were with the
French army. Generally when they were at work they were quartered
near a big base hospital; and their work took them from the large
hospital to the first aid stations near the front line trenches.
Our way from Paris to these men led across the devastated area of
France. As the chief activity of the French at the time of our
visit was in the Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week
at the front near Verdun. And one evening at twilight we walked
through the ruined city. The Germans had just finished their
evening strafe; two hundred big shells had been thrown over from
their field guns into the ruins. After the two hundredth shell
had dropped it was as safe in Verdun as in Emporia until the next
day. For the Germans are methodical in all things, and they spend
just so many shells on each enemy point, and no more. The German
work of destruction is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains intact
upon its walls; not a wall remains uncracked; not a soul lives in
the town; now and then a sentinel may be met patrolling the wagon
road that winds through the streets. This wagon road, by the way,
is the object of the German artillery's attention. Upon this road
they think the revitalment trains pass up to the front. But the
sentinels come and go. The only living inhabitants we saw in the
place were two black cats. It must have been a beautiful city before
the war--a town of sixty thousand and more. It contained some old
and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings--a cloister, a
bishop's residence, a school--or what not--that, even crumbled and
shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm and
dignity. And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous
that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping
of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the
broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of
their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling
it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about
these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops
and stores--places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling
wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and
risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries
to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts,
pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly
groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little
round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a
table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris
and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it--a thousand little
details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town,
leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was
the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished
their evening strafe.

From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined
villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before
moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously
flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in
a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner
worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots,
some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet
soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and
coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five
minutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men
were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman
of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully,
played host graciously and told us many interesting things about
the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal
so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after
we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French
lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But
this one was different. He was so gentle and so serious without
being at all solemn. He had been in the war for three years, and
said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time
was long past due and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem to
bother him. He passed the rum omelet with a steady hand. But his
serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of
his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk,
"Defense absolutement de rire!" "It's absolutely forbidden to
laugh." Evidently American humour got on his nerves. As we dined
in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs
with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.

So we ate and listened to the singing, while the moon rose, and
with it came a fog--more than a fog--a cloud of heavy mist that
hid the moon. We moved our baggage from the tent to a vacant room
in a vacant ward in the big hospital. We saw in the misty moonlight
a great brick structure running around a compound. The compound was
over 200 feet square, and in the centre of the compound was a big
Red Cross made of canvas, painted red, on a background of whitewashed
stones. It was 100 feet square. On each side of the compound a
Red Cross blazed from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva
lights--lights which the Germans had agreed should mark our hospitals
and protect them from air raids.

At midnight we left the hospital to visit those ambulance men who
were stationed at the first aid posts, up near the battle line.
It was an eery sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without
lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle front of Verdun.
The white clay of the road was sloppy and the car wobbled and
skidded along and we passed scores of other vehicles going up and
coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red
Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but
ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment
time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions,
food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army
going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we
reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been
climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at
a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could
see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards
into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the
dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged
before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital,
and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing
inside out of the misty rain.

As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the
big guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon.
But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and a
roar which told us that German shells were coming in near us. As
we stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us,
over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up
the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the
white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of
the dugout passed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment
train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist
came a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then,
creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again.
Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the German
shells crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But
the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, passing
us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the
ghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be
spectral--like a line of passing souls. A doctor came out of the
dugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist.
Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans were
landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than
a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the
Germans were shelling a cross-road. They shelled it every night at
midnight to smash the revitalment train. The shells were landing
right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were
passing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an
ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five
wounded. A shell had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even
hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the
road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the
mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared
the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the
ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more
wounded.

After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was
taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little
cemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!
no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us.
And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist
up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim
horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It
fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling
together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another
whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship--the
Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not
shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field service
man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked
music--music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst
of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to
forget death for something more real than death. And so it came
about that the crescendo of our talk ran thus:

And courage--that thing which the Germans thought was their special
gift from Heaven, bred of military discipline, rising out of German
kultur--we know now is the commonest heritage of men. It is the
divine fire burning in the souls of us that proves the case for
democracy. For at base and underneath we are all equals. In crises
the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, the preacher,
the teacher, the labourer, the ignorant, the wise, all go to death
for something that defies death, something immortal in the human
heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whackers, those common
soldiers, that doctor, these college men on the ambulances are
brothers tonight in the democracy of courage. Upon that democracy
is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a wider and deeper kinship
of men.

So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth was
fine gold. He was called for a wounded man. As he cranked up his
car he asked rather too casually, "Have you seen our friend from
the boat--the pretty nurse?" We started to answer; the stretcher
bearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and we
returned to the hospital.

We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousand
men had passed through that hospital--some upon the long journey,
so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and me
there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.

In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the
dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as
they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and
orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head
toward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed,
"a dearth of woman's nursing and a lack of woman's tears." No one
knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about
him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was
an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside
the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely,
heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had
been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept
uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one
poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed
the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his
tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever
had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and
gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in
St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English
on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have
you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then
he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the
hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs--incendiary
bombs. An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.
They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft
guns near by--the allies until those August and September German
raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided--they came
again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors
and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of
the burning building. Then toward morning they came and dropped
handbills which declared, "If you don't want your hospitals bombed,
move them back further from the front!"

The Germans were not acting in the heat of passion. They were fighting
scientifically, even if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is
moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene
in the wounded. And by checking gangrene we are saving a great
majority of our wounded to return to battle.

Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that
night at Vlaincourt. "And the French officer de liason between the
French army and the American ambulance, what of him?" we asked.

"He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb," answered the
Frenchman.

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why "It
is absolutely forbidden to laugh" in war!




CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR


There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said for
war as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares that
it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills men
and nations and races; it is stagnation. But war shakes up society,
puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions,
new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of war that came to
Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals
and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was
a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that
really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching
ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange
land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to
the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in
our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers,
wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our
miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was
a trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread
before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or
talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with
the local statesmen. At five o'clock Henry should be on his way to
the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar
of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that
we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the
sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid
sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my
figure.

But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, through
underbrush, across shell holes to a hidden trench choked with
telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation
post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking
the battle of the Champagne. As we puffed and huffed up the hill,
we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but a
few weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought us
the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208. Among other things
the report had declared "a number of French soldiers were ordered
into their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go
into action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through a
peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half way
up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded
and pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hills
perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened
or narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under shell fire
glimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds. It was hard to
realize that three years before the valley before us had been one
of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey
towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be
"that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There
it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped
off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope
of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in
leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked
kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Roland
crossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines--two white
gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratched
between them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wire
entanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a few
hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.
At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the
gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused to
rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communication
trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were
brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had
been converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher
bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the little
shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the
scene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distant
boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the
trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death
agony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party
climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses
toward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grew
alive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about
excitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Army
major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared
with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar
outfit. The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant,
who had no right to boss a Major! But something had to be done.
So the second lieutenant did it. He called down the Major; showed
him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it
clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted
against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German
hardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trenches
were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.
Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the
hill.

[Illustration: One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout
and began turning his glasses toward the German lines]

The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when we
finally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagne
battle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands,
and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of English
tanks abandoned by the French. Lying out there in No Man's Land
between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn
out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else
in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne
drive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just how
far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last
spring, before America declared war. To begin: The French morale
went bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. The
French commission told us how sorely France needed the American
war declaration. But to say that the morale of a nation has gone
bad means so much. It is always a struggle even in peace, even
in prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nation
to keep any Nation honest. But when hope begins to sag, when the
forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant in
every nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil times
to rise--they rise. Leadership fails in its battle against them.
For a year after the morale of the French began to come back strong,
the French newspapers and French government were busy exposing and
punishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917.
German money has been traced to persons high in authority. A network
of German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of men
high in government--the kaiser is not above using the thief and the
harlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured into
certain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic
disaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intrigue
in Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the result
of three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly
the weakening under the strain of all these things, of this "too
too solid flesh and blood." During the winter of 1916-17 soldiers
at the front received letters from home telling of starvation and
freezing and sickness in their families. And trench conditions in
the long hard winter were all but unbearable. When a soldier finally
got a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroad
system breaking down and he had long waits at junction points with
no sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter. French soldiers going
home on leave would lie all night and all day out in the open,
drenched by the rain and stained by the mud, and would reach home
bringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trench
misery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to the
home while the soldier was away. Then when he went back to fight,
he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers without
supplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quantities to supply
the battle needs. In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head
in the army and ordered the men into their own barrage. Hundreds
were slaughtered. Thousands were verging on mutiny. A regiment
refused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. The American
ambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did was
when they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!
Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the department
heads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, and
the withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achieved
all but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth.

And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changed
the face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagne
at what might have been the wreck of France.

All is changed now. At every railroad junction the American Red
Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and
disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward
bound soldiers of France. The American Red Cross has the name of
every French soldier's family that is in need, and that family's
needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross. And the sure
hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of
the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation's political
consciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser's friends,
the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter.

We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotched
acres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenches
and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles,
and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture
of his soul's agony upon his daily work.

It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line.
We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had
been killed a night or two before. It was a disquieting sight, and
the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German
airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. Gradually
as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and
fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a
wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims. It
was bombed to death--but not to ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must
have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate,
all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned. Here and
there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to
their homes. A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle
of commerce flows down the streets. We went to the cathedral and
found its outlines there--a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the
pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and--if stone and iron
can be conscious--vain of its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet
square has been gouged in the pavement by a German shell, and the
hole uncovers a hidden passage to the Cathedral of which no one
in this generation knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about,
gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of the place cast
upon us, at the details of the devastation. The roof, of course,
is but a film of wood and iron rent with big holes. The walls are
intact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The Gothic spires
and gargoyles and ornaments are shattered beyond restoration, and
the windows are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of the
church gazed forth. Men come and gather the broken bits of glass
as art treasures.

That evening at supper in Chalons, we met some American boys who
said the French were selling this glass from the windows of Rheims
made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and green bitters
bottles, and still later we saw an English Colonel who had bought
a job lot of it and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in a
piece!

We had been in the place but a few minutes, when we went to the back
of the cathedral where we found an excited old man on the sidewalk
with a broom in front of a postcard printing office. He spoke to
Henry and me, but we could not understand him. He pointed to the
stone dust and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and to a hole
in the pavement, and then to a broken iron shell. It must have
weighed twenty-five pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it
clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It had dropped in but
a few minutes before we came. We went into his shop to stock up
on post cards, and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could talk
French, learned that another shell would be due in three or four
minutes, we left town.

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the German lines, hidden
only, and at that rather poorly, by camouflage--straw woven into
mats, and burlap, badly torn. We were between the German guns five
miles away, and the sunset. Great holes in the ground beside the
road indicated where they had been dropping shells, so our driver
tramped on the juice, the machine shot out at fifty miles an hour
and we skedaddled.

From the road out of Rheims we dropped into the valley of the Marne,
a most beautiful vine-clad valley, where the road turns sharply
from the German lines and soon passes out of the German range and
the shell holes at the side of the road disappear. But even shell
holes would not have taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley
as we wound down into it from the hill. Vines were everywhere. Rows
and rows of vines, marking a thousand brownish green lines in the
earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes were ripe and they
gave a tint of purple and brown to the landscape. It glowed with
colour. Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns dotted the
checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall
dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through
the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our
faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on
their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags
of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills,
all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of
colours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered,
there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--even
the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the
German bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan,
from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the
Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running
pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.

As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after
division of the French army was quartered upon the population,
thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we
realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every
few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come
in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front
or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far
away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful,
and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover,
the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash
the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions
comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human
heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day
or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village,
in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last
three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those
fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are
quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men
have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring
women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous
and gentle and as kind.

For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded
with soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly living
happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry
burst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichita
or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine
soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were
there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting
about here were just little children three years ago when their
daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by
the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but
rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East in
Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful
thing--what a hell in the earth, war is!"

And yet we know that young hearts will express themselves as they
were meant to express themselves even in the wrack and ruin and
waste of war. And this strange picture of love and death sitting
together some way reminded us of the phlox and the dahlias blooming
in the dreary dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle line.
And then our hearts turned to the youth on the boat--that precious
load of mounting young blood that came over with us on the Espagne
where we were the oldest people in the ship's company. And we began
talking of the Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded Youth.
If the war could lash our old hearts as it was lashing them, so
that even our emotions were raw and more or less a-quiver in the
storm of the mingled passions of the world that overwhelmed us, how
much--how fearfully much more must their younger hearts be stirred?
How could youth come out of it all unscarred! And she was such a
sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, so fine and brave and wise--yet
her heart was a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, his
keen sensitive face showed how near to the surface was the quick
in him. As for the Gilded Youth, we had seen there on the hill in
the misty night the great hammer of the guns pound the dross out
of him! And here they were all three alone, in the fury of this
awful storm that was testing the stoutest souls in the world, and
they were so young and so untried!

The roads over which we had been travelling for two days in our
car were military roads. And we could tell instantly when we were
inside the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking at the
road menders. If they were German prisoners we were outside the
thirty kilo strip. For when the Germans discovered last spring
that the Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the Germans
demanded a rule for the treatment of prisoners, which should keep
them thirty kilos from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had
been observing; but the Germans were not observing it, until they
found that they might suffer by non-observance. So when we left the
German prisoners and came to French road menders--generally French
Chinamen or Anamites, or negroes from Dahomey or other oriental
peoples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of the big guns.
These road menders always were at work. Beside every road a few
yards apart, always were little neatly stacked cones of road metal.
A road roller always was in sight. No road ever got bumpy and at
given distances along the road were repair stations for the government
automobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the machinery of war. At
night along these country roads, thirty kilos back from the line
we travelled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we hurried
through the night, passed village after village swarming with soldiers,
black and yellow and white; for the colour line does not irritate
the French; and we saw how gay and happy they were, crowding into
picture shows, listening to the regimental band, sitting on the
sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks.
Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark
and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps. And so in due course
we came to the end of the day's journey, at the end of a spur of
the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front. There we found
a field hospital of four thousand beds. And when there is to
be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing
that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the
hospital. It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a
hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed. We saw one
hospital train loading. This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred
cases in one day the week before we arrived. The big guns that we
had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the
line had been grinding their awful grist. We walked through the
hospital, which covered acres of ground. It is a board structure,
some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours
nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves heat most of the wards, and
hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds. Of
course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless.
The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning
men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to
the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about
flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the
Americans. They probably feel that there are more essential things
to consider than flies and their trysting places! In this hospital
we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen
years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We
saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic
type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby
looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and
the scum of the earth."

And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, and in a bull-pen near
the railroad station waiting for the trains to take them to the
interior of France were six thousand German prisoners--for the most
part well-made men. Here and there was a scrub--a boy, a defective,
or an old man; showing that the Germans are working these classes
through the army; but indicating, so far as one batch of prisoners
from one part of the battle line may indicate, that the Germans
still have a splendid fighting army. But the old German army that
came raging through Belgium and northern France in 1914 is gone.
Germany is well past the peak in man power, as shown in the soldiers
of the line. It is also likely that the morale of the German line
has its best days behind it. The American ambulance men in the Verdun
sector told us of a company of German soldiers who had come across
a few nights before to surrender, after killing their officers.
They appeared at about ten o'clock at night, and told the French
to cease firing at exactly that time the next night for ten minutes
and another troop of Germans would come across. The French ceased
at the agreed hour and thirty more came over and brought the mail
to their comrades! That, of course, is not a usual occurrence. But
similar instances are found. The best one can say of the German
morale in the army is that it is spotted. In civilian life the nearer
one gets to Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale seems
to be sound. These things we found in the air up near the front
line trenches, where German prisoners talk, and where one sees the
war "close up."

But we were going still nearer to the German lines, and the next
day we set out for Recicourt and arrived there about noon. It is a
little bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are quartered,
and a few score villagers huddle in cellars and caves by night and
go forth to their farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The
railway runs in front of the town, and the week we were there a
big naval gun was booming away on the railroad throwing death into
the German lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of the town,
across a bridge over a brook the white wagon road runs, and that
day the road was black with trucks going up to the front line with
supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly over in the woods a
few miles away. But we had no thought of danger as we tumbled out
of our car. We should have known that bombed villages don't just
grow that way! Something causes the gaping holes in roofs, the
shattered walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out-buildings!
Generally it is German shells, but we had been seeing bombed towns
for days, and we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the
bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood by the automobiles
at Recicourt, kicking the wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding
breeches--and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to preserve
that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that expanded the waistband
from 36 to 44 inches--little did it seem to Henry and me that
we should first meet a German shell face to face in a place like
Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. But we had scarcely
shaken hands around the group of American Ambulance men who gathered
to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G!--an awful sound! It was as
if someone suddenly had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store--at
Emporia--tinware, farm implements, stoves, nails and shelf-goods,
and had switched it with an awful whizz through the air and landed
it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic Forum, which seats
six thousand! We looked at each other in surprise, but each realized
that he must be casual to support the other; so we said nothing
to the Ambulance boys, and they, being used to such things, let it
pass also. We went on talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier.
So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the American Ambulance
Service. In a minute there was a fearful whistle--long, piercing,
and savage, and then they had taken the Peters Hardware stock in
Emporia and dumped it on the Wichita Union Station. This time we
saw a great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet away--over
by the wagon road, across the brook from us. Still no one mentioned
the matter. It seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a secret,
but if the others had that notion of it, far be it from us to blab!
An ambulance driver came lazying around the corner and began to
start his car.

"Any one hurt, Singer?" asked a handsome youth named Hughes, of
the Corps.

"Man hit by the first shell up here by the railroad. I'm going
after him."

"Hurt badly?" asked another boy.

"Oh, arm or shoulder or something blown off. I'll be back for
lunch."

The details interested us; we could see that the secret was being
uncovered. Again came an awful roar and another terrific bang--this
time the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before--perhaps 300 feet
away. Every one ducked. In five seconds they had taught me to duck.
It's curious how quickly the adult mind acquires useful information.
But Henry for some reason got a bad start, and his duck needed
correction. To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get as
much as possible of your body under the eaves of your steel helmet.
Somewhere between the second and third bang, they got a helmet on
me. No one knows where it came from, nor how it got there. But
there it was, while they were correcting Henry's duck. In spite of
them, when he ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multiplying
his exposure by ten. But it really does a fat man little good to
duck anyway; the eaves of his helmet hardly cover his collar. It
was while they were trying to telescope Henry that some one grabbed
me by the arm and said: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!" Abri was
a brand new word to me, but it seemed to be some place to go and
that was enough for me.

"Where" (read this line with feeling and emphasis) "is the abri?"
The ambulance boy took me by the arm and led me on a trot to a
dugout covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand bags, and we
went in there and found it full of French officers. They have some
sense. The abri would not turn a direct explosion of a shell; but
it would shield one against a glancing blow and against the shrapnel
which sprays itself out from the point where the shell hits like
a molten iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come over we left
the abri. The Germans had been allowancing Recicourt to nine a
day. But that day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. They
came very close and fairly fast together. As they came Henry was
sitting in the barn where the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunch
was on the table and Henry was writing. The shells sounded just
outside the barn. "What are you writing, Mr. Allen?" asked Major
Murphy. "I'm sketching," stuttered the Wichita statesman, "a sort
of a draft of the American terms of peace!"

After three extra bombs had come in the Germans turned their
guns from the town, and we had our lunch at our ease. And such a
lunch! A melon to begin with; a yellow melon that looks like the
old-fashioned American muskmelon and tastes like a nectar of the
gods, followed by onion soup. Then followed an entree, a large
thin slice of cold sausage which they afterward told us was made
of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then roast veal sliced thin
and slightly underdone with browned potatoes; then new beans served
as a separate course; then fruit and cheese and coffee and cigars!
And that in a barn!

[Illustration: "Come on! Let's go to the abri!"]

We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piled
into an ambulance, were buttoned in from the back by the driver,
and went sailing up the hill and into the woods. They told us that
we were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess. We remembered
that but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices,
that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and bloody
fighting. And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannon
roaring all about us. We were told that four thousand cannon were
planted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of them
were active that day. Yet we could see none, so completely were they
hidden by camouflage. The woods were barren of leaves or branches
though they should have been in foliage. We gazed through the windows
of the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and then
rather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefully
corded against the tree trunks were not sticks of cord wood at all,
as they seemed, and as they should have been if the wood had been
under the ax instead of under fire. They were French seventy-five
shells--deadly brass cartridges two feet long, all nicely and
peacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees! We rode
through them for several miles. Beside the road always were the
little heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always the
engineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made by
the incoming shells. And occasionally they were coming in; though
they seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest. The
ear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between what
are known as arrives and departs. The departs were going out that
day at the ratio of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wasted
enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize!
Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minute
or so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping of our own
broad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer.
For some way the sound of the shells of our own guns shrieking
over us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation of
a great faith.

At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we came upon the first
aid post, a quarter of a mile from the opposite edge of the wood
and but half a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun The first
aid post there was a cellar, half excavated, and half covered with
earth, and roofed with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usual
French doctors, stretcher bearers and American Ambulance men were
there. And there was the little cemetery, always found at a first
aid post where those are buried who die on the stretchers or in the
dugout. It was lovingly adorned by the French with the tri-colour
of France, with bronze wreaths, with woodland flowers, and was
altogether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. They showed
us a shell by the cave--a gas shell that had come over during the
morning and had hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It was
gently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed--but gingerly. Other
shells were popping into the place and fairly near us with some
regularity and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me that we
had no desire to stare grim war's wrinkled front out of countenance,
and we hoped that the Major and Mr. Norton were nearly ready to go
back. But we heard this:

From the Major: "How far forward can we go toward Hill 304; we would
like to see it, but have no desire to go further than you care to
have us."

And from the French lieutenant in charge: "Go to Berlin if you want
to!"

It occurred to Henry and me, considering our feelings, that the
Major's nonchalant use of that "we" was without the consent of
the governed. But when he started forward we followed. Our moral
cowardice overwhelmed our physical cowardice, and our legs tracked
ahead while our hearts tracked back. The Major swung along the road
at a fast clip; Mr. Norton went with him. For short-geared men we
followed as fast as we could, but it was at a respectful distance.
Nearer and nearer we came to the open field, and by the same token,
quicker and nearer and hotter came the German shells. We were
continually on the duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm that
made distance come slow. We came to a dead mule in the road. He
had been bombed recently, and was not ready for visitors. Now a
mule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but in the transition
state between a mule and hamburger, a mule leaves much to be
desired. As we passed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry began
his kidding. He always begins to guy a situation under emotion.
"Bill," he cried, "if we die we'll at least save our nice new
hundred dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And from me he got
this: "And say, Henry--if we die we won't have to face our wives
and tell 'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit! There's that
comfort in sudden death!"

It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen all there was to be seen
of the war. Hill 304 would be there after the treaty of peace was
signed and the Major and Norton then could come to see it. But
they were bound for Berlin; so we slowly edged by that poor mule;
he seemed to be the longest mule we had ever--well, he seemed to
be a sort of trans-continental mule, but we finally got past him
and came to the edge of the woods. It took about three ducks to
twenty yards, and passing the mule we had four downs and no gain.
That gave the Germans the ball. So when we got to the edge of the
wood and were standing looking into the French trenches and at Hill
304 off at our right, after the Major had handed Norton the field
glasses and Norton had considerately handed them to Henry, who passed
them to me for such fleeting glance as politeness might require,
the Germans came back with that ball. It came right out of Berlin,
too. One could hear it howl as it crossed the Thiergarten and went
over Wilhelm Strasse and scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. There
never was another such shell. And we ducked--all of us. Henry said
he never saw me make such a duck--it was the duck of a life-time.
And then that shell landed. It was a wholesale hardware store
that hit--no retail affair. The sound was awful. And then something
inside of me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had been reading
Dr. Crile's book on the anesthesia of fear, and suddenly it occurred
to me that the shell had hit me and torn a hole in me and that fear
had deadened the pain. Slowly and in terror my right hand groped
back to the place of the wound, expecting every moment to encounter
blood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched over, waiting for
the fountain of junk to cease spraying. Nearer and nearer came the
shrinking fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, but something
more terrible! There, dangling by its apex, hung that pie-shaped
slice of shirt from those cotton khaki trousers--ripped clear out!
And Paris fifty miles away!

Slowly we unfolded ourselves from the duck. And as we came up--sping!
went a sharp metallic click on Norton's helmet. A bit of shrapnel
had hit it. Under a hat he would have been killed! So we went back
to the first aid post--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer
force of will, and both hands!

So long as Norton and the Major had led the way from the dugout,
it simultaneously flashed over Henry and me that we should lead the
way back, and not leave all the exertion to our companions. So we
set the pace back.

At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomed
us back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our own
French guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. It
seemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as we
knew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage--which
was like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry
said: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, or
else it's syncopated." Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location
that Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal in
the neighbourhood!" And to the assembled company in the dugout he
remarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldog
model that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemen
will get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Which
he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came out
of the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back to
Recicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed the
gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the body
of a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met death
while we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk.

We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before we
could get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned
up the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used a
dozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And that
night as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital,
Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him in
our corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth of
metal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill," he said gently,
as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as I
ever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you're
wearing these days!"

For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience,
and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it
was not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laugh
at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly
hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out
in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went
out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of
an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and
Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks
under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused:
"I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went
out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last
we slept.

[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up
by sheer force of will and both hands!]




CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"


This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pershing
and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France
which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental
enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story
of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we
disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy
him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.

One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulance
coming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking to
some American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticed
the arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans were
after something in the neighbourhood--perhaps a big gun, perhaps an
ammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the target
when we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road.
Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. It
was getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that the
ammunition trains would be passing that cross-road at that time.
And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our hearts
jumped--at least Henry's and mine jumped--as we saw that between
us and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded and
stalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the road
from the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This,"
said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mighty
dangerous place." As the word "place" escaped him he was on the
ground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulance
drivers--Singer and Hughes--neglecting to unlock the ambulance
doors, ran up the road and began working wi