LITMIR.BIZ

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her with eyes which expressed nothing save a dumb, numbed resignation.

      An old priest in a black robe came along and he stopped, being minded, I think, to utter some message of comfort to this wife of a soldier of France, and in her way, I say, as valorous a soldier as her husband could be, did he wear twenty decorations for bravery. But either the priest could find no words to say or the words choked in his throat. Above her drooped head he made with his hand the sign of the cross in the air and went away. And as I stood looking on I did in my heart what any man with blood in his veins would have done had he been there in my stead – I consigned to the uttermost depths of perdition the soul of the Brute of Prussia whose diseased ambition brought to pass this thing and a million things like unto it.

      CHAPTER V. SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY

      HAD we waited that night for Opportunity to knock at our door I am inclined to think we might be waiting yet. We went out and we set a trap for Opportunity, and we caught her. No matter how or whence, the chance we coveted for a lift to the battle came to us before the night was many hours old. But before the design assumed shape we were to meet as blithe a young Britisher as ever I have seen, in the person of one Captain Pepper, a red-cheeked Yorkshireman in his early twenties, a fit and proper type of the men England has sent out to officer her forces overseas.

      One of our Red Cross ambulances, while scouting out toward Noyon that afternoon, picked him up as he trudged up the road alone, with a fresh machine-gun wound through the palm of his right hand and his cap on the back of his head. His wound had been tied up at a casualty-dressing station and he had set out then to walk a distance of twenty-odd kilometres to Soissons, where he was told he might find a hospital to shelter him.

      He dined with us, along with the ambulance driver who brought him in; and afterward he insisted on sitting a while with us, though he had been fighting, day and night almost continuously since the beginning of the battle and plainly was far spent from fatigue and lack of sleep. So far as I might judge, though, he did not have a nerve in his body. Gesturing with his swathed hand he told us not what he himself had done – somehow he managed in his self-effacing way to steer away from the personal note in his recital – but mainly about the stupendous tragedy in which he had played his part. Considering him as he sat there on a broken sofa with his long legs outstretched before a wood fire, one could not doubt that it had been a creditable part.

      We gathered that in the second day of the fighting, as the English fell back before overwhelming odds but fighting for every inch, he became separated from his company. Next morning he found himself without a command in the heels of the orderly retreat and had offered himself for service to the first superior officer he met. Thereupon he was put in charge of a mixed detachment of two hundred men – gathered up anyhow and anywhere – and with his motley outfit had been told off to hold a strip of woods somewhere south of Chauny. Under him, he said, were stragglers cut off from half a dozen battered line regiments, and along with these, cooks, wagon drivers, engineers, officers’ servants and stretcher bearers. In front of the squad, beyond the woods, was a strip of marsh, and this natural barrier gave them an advantage which, plus pluck, enabled them to beat off not one but several oncoming waves of Germans.

      “We had machine guns, luckily enough,” he said; “and, my word, but we gave the beggars a proper drubbing! We piled them up in heaps along the edges of that bally old bog. Everywhere along the Front – where we were and everywhere else, too, from what I can hear – they have outnumbered us four or five to one, but I’m quite sure we’ve killed or wounded ten of them for every man of ours that has been laid out since this show started four days ago.

      “Well, that’s all, except that this morning about ten o’clock I was hit and had to quit and come away, because you see I wouldn’t be much use with one hand out of commission and bleeding all over the shop – would I now? I’m sorry to have to leave the chaps – they were a sporting lot; but since I had to stop a bullet I’m glad I’ve got a nice clean cushy wound. I shall be glad to get a taste of Blighty too; I’m a bit fagged, as you might say.”

      His head nodded forward on his chest when he got this far, and his limbs relaxed.

      He protested, though, against being bundled off to bed, saying he was quite comfortable and that his hand scarcely pained him at all, but the man who had brought him took him away. As for Carroll and Green and me, we slept that night, what sleeping we did, with our clothes on us, ready to rise and hunt the wine cellar if anything of a violently unpleasant nature occurred over our heads. During the hours before daylight there was a spirited spell of banging and crashing somewhere in the town, and not so far away either, if one might judge by the volume of the tumult, which rattled the empty casement frame alongside my bed and made the ancient house to rock and creak; but when dawn came the gables above us were still intact and we were enjoying our beauty sleep in the calm which succeeded the gust of shelling or of bombing or whatever it was.

      CHAPTER VI. THROUGH THE BATTLE’S FRONT DOOR

      IMMEDIATELY after breakfast, in accordance with a plan already formulated, we quietly took possession of one of those small American-made cars, the existence of which has been responsible for the addition of an eighth joke to the original seven jokes in the world. We didn’t know it then, but for us the real adventure was just starting. There were four of us in the flivver – the driver, a young American in uniform, whose duties were of such a nature that he travelled on a roving commission and need necessarily report to none concerning his daily movements; and for passengers, our own three selves. For warrant to fare abroad we had a small American flag painted on the glass wind shield, one extra tire, and an order authorising us to borrow gasoline – simply these and nothing more. Very unostentatiously we rode out of Soissons, steering a northwesterly course. We might not know exactly where we were going or when we should be back, but we were on our way.

      At the same time, be it here said, there was method of a sort in our scheme of things, for we were aiming, as closely as we might, at the point where approximately the main French command jointed on to the right wing of the British, we figuring that at the junction place, where the overlapping and intermingled areas of control met, and more especially in a confused period when one army was falling back and the other bringing up its reserves, we stood a better chance in our credential-less and unaccredited state of wriggling on up from the back lines to the Front than would elsewhere be possible.

      We reckoned the prospect after this fashion: If the French find us traversing the forbidden lands they may take it for granted that the British permitted us to pass. If we fall under the eyes of British guardians of the trail they are equally likely to assume that the French let us through. And so it turned out; which I claim is added proof that the standing luck of the American newspaper reporter on a difficult assignment is not to be discounted.

      In stock we had one trump card, and only one, and we played it many a time during that somewhat crowded day. All of us were in khaki with tin helmets upon our heads and gas masks swung over our shoulders. The heavy trench coats in which we were bundled prevented betrayal to the casual eye of the fact that none of us wore badges denoting rank, upon our collars or shoulder straps. Outfitted thus we might have been major generals or we might have been second lieutenants of the American Expeditionary Forces. Who, on a cursory scrutiny of us, was to say?

      So we decided among ourselves that ours must be a rôle suggestive of great personal importance and urgent business. Did any wayside sentinel, whether British or French, move out upon the crown of the road as though he meant to halt us, one of us, with an authoritative arm, would wave him clear of our path and we would go flitting imperiously by as though the officiousness of underlings roused in us only a passing annoyance. It proved a good trick. It may never work again in this war, but I bear witness that it has worked once.

      In the very first leg of this expedition good old Madame Bonneaventure stood our friend. The River Aisne skirts the city of Soissons. At the far side of the bridge, spanning the stream, which bridge we must cross, stood a French noncom, charged, as we knew, with the duty of examining the passes of those outbound. If we disregarded his summons to halt, complications of a painful nature would undoubtedly ensue. But as the car slowed up, all of us with our fingers figuratively crossed, he either recognised the driver as one who passed him often or was impressed by our bogusly impressive mien, or possibly

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