''And they thought we wouldn't fight'', Floyd Phillips Gibbons [hot novels to read .TXT] 📗

bit for Uncle Sam's fighting men. We ask your subscription to a fund which we are raising to send cigarettes to young students of the university who are now serving with the colours and who are so nobly maintaining the traditions of our Alma Mater. Please fill out the enclosed blank, stating your profession and present occupation. Fraternally yours, —— Secretary."

The Major was watching me with a smile as I concluded reading.

"Here's my answer," he said, reading from a notebook leaf:

"Your letter reached me to-night in a warm little village in France. With regard to my present profession, will inform you that I am an expert in ammunition trafficking and am at present occupied in exporting large quantities of shells to Germany over the air route. Please find enclosed check for fifty francs for cigarettes for youngsters who, as you say, are so nobly upholding the sacred traditions of our school. After all, we old boys should do something to help along the cause. Yours to best the Kaiser. ——, Major. —— Field Artillery, U. S. A. On front in France."

"I guess that ought to hold them," said the Major as he folded the letter and addressed an envelope. It rather seemed to me that it would but before I could finish the remark, the Major was back asleep in his blankets.

By daylight, I explored the town, noting the havoc wrought by the shells that had arrived in the night. I had thought in seeing refugees moving southward along the roads, that there was little variety of articles related to human existence that they failed to carry away with them. But one inspection of the abandoned abodes of the unfortunate peasants of Serevilliers was enough to convince me of the greater variety of things that had to be left behind. Old people have saving habits and the French peasants pride themselves upon never throwing anything away.

The cottage rooms were littered with the discarded clothing of all ages, discarded but saved. Old shoes and dresses, ceremonial high hats and frock coats, brought forth only for weddings or funerals, were mixed on the floor with children's toys, prayer books and broken china. Shutters and doors hung aslant by single hinges. In the village estaminet much mud had been tracked in by exploring feet and the red tiled floor was littered with straw and pewter measuring mugs, dear to the heart of the antiquary.

The ivory balls were gone from the dust covered billiard table, but the six American soldiers billeted in the cellar beneath had overcome this discrepancy. They enjoyed after dinner billiards just the same with three large wooden balls from a croquet court in the garden. A croquet ball is a romping substitute when it hits the green cushions.

That afternoon we laid more wire across fields to the next town to the north. Men who do this job are, in my opinion, the most daring in any organisation that depends for efficiency upon uninterrupted telephone communication. For them, there is no shelter when a deluge of shells pours upon a field across which their wire is laid. Without protection of any kind from the flying steel splinters, they must go to that spot to repair the cut wires and restore communication. During one of these shelling spells, I reached cover of the road side abri and prepared to await clearer weather.

In the distance, down the road, appeared a scudding cloud of dust. An occasional shell dropping close on either side of the road seemed to add speed to the apparition. As it drew closer, I could see that it was a motor cycle of the three wheeled bathtub variety. The rider on the cycle was bending close over his handle bars and apparently giving her all there was in her, but the bulky figure that filled to overflowing the side car, rode with his head well back.

At every irregularity in the road, the bathtub contraption bounced on its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders, thus draped, were surmounted by a huge head, which by reason of its rigid, backward, star-gazing position appeared mostly as chin and double chin. The whole was topped by a huge fat cigar which sprouted upward from the elevated chin and at times gave forth clouds like the forward smoke-stack on the Robert E. Lee.

I was trying to decide in my mind whether the elevated chin posture of the passenger was the result of pride, bravado or a boil on the Adam's apple, when the scudding comet reached the shelter of the protecting bank in which was located the chiselled dog kennel that I occupied. As the machine came to halt, the superior chin depressed itself ninety degrees, and brought into view the smiling features of that smile-making gentleman from Paducah—Mr. Irvin S. Cobb. Machine, rider and passenger stopped for breath and I made bold to ask the intrepid humourist if he suffered from a too keen sense of smell or a saw edge collar.

"I haven't a sensitive nose, a saw edge collar or an inordinate admiration for clouds," the creator of Judge Priest explained with reference to his former stiff-necked pose, "but George here," waving to the driver, "took a sudden inspiration for fast movement. The jolt almost took my head off and the wind kept me from getting it back into position. George stuck his spurs into this here flying bootblack stand just about the time something landed near us that sounded like a kitchen stove half loaded with window weights and window panes. I think George made a record for this road. I've named it Buh-Looey Boulevard."

When the strafing subsided we parted and I reached the next deserted town without incident. It was almost the vesper hour or what had been the allotted time for that rite in those parts when I entered the yard of the village church, located in an exposed position at a cross roads on the edge of the town. A sudden unmistakable whirr sounded above and I threw myself on the ground just as the high velocity, small calibre German shell registered a direct hit on the side of the nave where roof and wall met.

While steel splinters whistled through the air, an avalanche of slate tiles slid down the slanting surface of the roof, and fell in a clattering cascade on the graves in the yard below. I sought speedy shelter in the lee of a tombstone. Several other shells had struck the churchyard and one of them had landed on the final resting place of the family of Roger La Porte. The massive marble slab which had sealed the top of the sunken vault had been heaved aside and one wall was shattered, leaving open to the gaze a cross section view of eight heavy caskets lying in an orderly row.

Nearby were fresh mounds of yellow earth, surmounted by now unpainted wooden crosses on which were inscribed in pencil the names of French soldiers with dates, indicating that their last sacrifice for the tri-colour of la Patria had been made ten days prior. In the soil at the head of each grave, an ordinary beer bottle had been planted neck downward, and through the glass one could see the paper scroll on which the name, rank and record of the dead man was preserved. While I wondered at this prosaic method of identification, an American soldier came around the corner of the church, lighted a cigarette and sat down on an old tombstone.

"Stick around if you want to hear something good," he said, "That is if that last shell didn't bust the organ. There's a French poilu who has come up here every afternoon at five o'clock for the last three days and he plays the sweetest music on the organ. It certainly is great. Reminds me of when I was an altar boy, back in St. Paul."

We waited and soon there came from the rickety old organ loft the soothing tones of an organ. The ancient pipes, sweetened by the benedictions of ages, poured forth melody to the touch of one whose playing was simple, but of the soul. We sat silently among the graves as the rays of the dying sun brought to life new colouring in the leaded windows of stained glass behind which a soldier of France swayed at the ivory keyboard and with heavenly harmony ignored those things of death and destruction that might arrive through the air any minute.

My companion informed me that the poilu at the organ wore a uniform of horizon blue which marked him as casual to this village, whose French garrisons were Moroccans with the distinctive khaki worn by all French colonials in service. The sign of the golden crescent on their collar tabs identified them as children of Mahomet and one would have known as much anyway upon seeing the use to which the large crucifix standing in what was the market place had been put.

So as not to impede traffic through the place, it had become necessary to elevate the field telephone wires from the ground and send them across the road overhead. The crucifix in the centre of the place had presented itself as excellent support for this wire and the sons of the prophet had utilised it with no intention of disrespect. The uplifted right knee of the figure on the cross was insulated and wired. War, the moderniser and mocker of Christ, seemed to have devised new pain for the Teacher of Peace. The crucifixion had become the electrocution.

At the foot of the cross had been nailed a rudely made sign conveying to all who passed the French warning that this was an exposed crossing and should be negotiated rapidly. Fifty yards away another board bore the red letters R. A. S. and by following the direction indicated by arrows, one arrived at the cellar in which the American doctor had established a Relief Aid Station. The Medico had furnished his subterranean apartments with furniture removed from the house above.

"Might as well bring it down here and make the boys comfortable," he said, "as to leave it up there and let shells make kindling out of it. Funny thing about these cellars. Ones with western exposure—that is, with doors and ventilators opening on the side away from the enemy seem scarcest. That seems to have been enough to have revived all that talk about German architects having had something to do with the erection of those buildings before the war. You remember at one time it was said that a number of houses on the front had been found to have plaster walls on the side nearest the enemy and stone walls on the other side. There might be something to it, but I doubt it."

Across the street an American battalion headquarters had been established on the first floor and in the basement of the house, which appeared the most pretentious in the village. Telephone wires now entered the building through broken window panes, and within maps had been tacked to plaster walls and the furniture submitted to the hard usage demanded by war. An old man conspicuous by his civilian clothes wandered about the yard here and there, picking up some stray implement or nick-nack, hanging it up on a wall or placing it carefully aside.

"There's a tragedy," the battalion commander told me. "That man is mayor of this town. He was forced to flee with the rest of the civilians. He returned to-day to look over the ruins. This is his house we occupy. I explained