FOR the first time in his life, Jimmy Perrin found it necessary to fend for himself. The moment could hardly have been more inopportune, for the double blow of Thad's departure and his own rejection had put him flat on his back, as sprawling and helpless as a baby fallen from its crib.
At most he had contemplated nothing more exacting than joining an ambulance unit and traveling to its base in company with the fellows who came over on the Aurania. That would have proved as simple as one of those personally conducted excursion tours in America, where a guide told you what to do, and where to go, and what to see, and made all the necessary arrangements.
But no. He was slated for Soissons all by himself. He must get up in the morning and write down the name of the railroad station, which was called a gare in French. Then would come the thousand and one problems of locating and reaching that gare, of buying a ticket, of getting his trunk checked, of finding his train, and the like.
Even back home he had been shy about asking questions. It was easier mentally, if not physically, to fumble around till he found what he wanted. There, if worst came to worst, he could always seek information and understand what he was told, because it would be in plain English.
But this was Paris. Outside the château at 21 rue Raynouard lay a foreign world, speaking a language that was as baffling to him as Greek or Arabic. There was no English on tap, from the gendarme on the corner to the conducteur of the train to Soissons.
"You can always make motions instead of trying to parley-voo," some fellow had joked yesterday. "The sign language is universal."
But that was all tommyrot. How could you motion that you wanted to go to Soissons, and please tell you the way to get there? You just couldn't. You'd probably wind up lost in Paris, and sleeping on a park bench, and getting arrested, and then trying to motion out to the judge what it was all about.
He lay awake for hours that last night at 21 rue Raynouard clawing at the puzzle.
It was Clinton who finally set him on his way for Soissons. Clinton, a tall, gangling New Englander and a blasé veteran of three months' service "up there", spoke understandable French.
"I have an errand over near the Gare du Nord this morning," he said carelessly, trying to be kind without making it obvious, "and if you like, we'll hire a taxi and I'll put you on your train."
"Please do!" said Jimmy, so earnestly that Clinton eyed him a little queerly. "Please! If it isn't too much trouble!"
So Clinton chartered one of the ancient two-cylinder cabs that prowled Paris, and chaperoned Jimmy to the station, and bought his ticket, and saw about his trunk (it turned out that baggage was not checked at all), and led him out on the platform to his train. And he talked. Not volubly, because he was from New England, but helpfully, encouragingly. Probably Clinton could remember when he first came over to this vast confusion of a foreign land.
"You'll learn," he said, and added laconically, "a lot. You'll have to. But it will come without your knowing it. You'll unfold and shuck out of yourself. So long, youngster."
It was not a prepossessing train. The engine seemed too small for its job. The cars, which were marked III, meaning third class, were equally toylike in appearance: tiny, dingy affairs divided into compartments with hard, uncushioned seats. They smelled as badly as they looked.
Some official on the station platform set the train in motion by lifting a whistle to his lips and blowing a shrill blast. As it began to move, a young fellow in an unfamiliar uniform slid into the seat beside Jimmy.
He had the earmarks of an American. Swallowing his distaste for making stray acquaintances, Jimmy addressed some question to him, holding his breath for fear the other would respond in a torrent of unintelligible French.
But he did not. He answered in good, honest American, which Jimmy had already discovered to be an entirely different language from English. He even seemed to want to talk. His name was Rollins, he said, and he was a member of the French Foreign Legion.
Jimmy explained that he was going to Soissons to join the Reserve Mallet. Rollins nodded; he knew about the service.
And then, just when Jimmy was coming down to earth again, the train crawled past a mass of ruins. A great building lay crumpled; the flat field surrounding it was seared and gashed, with curious holes dimpling its surface; trees reared gaunt and leafless, as if to emphasize the desolation.
"The Germans did that," Rollins said. "Used to be an aviation field. Bombed from the air."
An icy chill trickled down Jimmy's back. "You mean--- enemy planes?"
"Planes there. But yonder, along that road, where you see a clump of stones and sheared tree trunks, there used to be a house and a wood. The Germans went over them like a steam roller before they were stopped in the Battle of the Marne."
Jimmy gulped. Why, it couldn't be possible! The train was only a few minutes out of Paris. Surely the enemy had never been that close. But the evidence multiplied. He had to believe.
"Yes, the Germans were within twenty miles of Paris," Rollins answered his unspoken question. "And right now, up along the Chemin des Dames and over a fifty-mile front, they're massing for another offensive. This time they swear they will make the gates of Paris."
"They can't." Jimmy tried to say it stubbornly, but it was no more than a plea.
"I hope not. Anyhow, Soissons, where you're headed, is only a half dozen miles from the German lines. When the next advance starts, you'll know it first --- Here's my jumping-off place. Good-by and good luck, kid." There was a paternal note in that last word as uttered by the Franco-American soldier of not over twenty-one.
Jimmy slumped despondently. With Rollins had gone his last tangible hold on English-speaking civilization. In London he had rubbed elbows with a population that at least understood him. In Paris he had been one of the American Field Service crowd. But here he was a stranger, an utter alien, forlorn, confused, apprehensive, tossed willy-nilly among a people who were as different from him as night is from day.
In desperation he shifted his seat next to a clean-cut young fellow and offered an observation on the weather.
"Pardon," said the French youth, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Je ne parle pas anglais."
The new world had swallowed Jimmy Perrin. He blinked uncertainly and stared from the grimy car window at the passing scenery. He wondered how he would know when they reached Soissons. He wondered how he would find the Reserve Mallet camp. Soissons wasn't Paris; it was up on the rim of war. There wouldn't be any taxicabs there. He didn't know enough French to ask questions, to find his way about. Never in his whole life had he been so miserable and depressed.
His head ached. That dull roar of distant thunder vibrated a raw nerve . . And then, quite suddenly, he sensed that it was not thunder at all, but the reverberating boom of great guns at the front, somewhere ahead.
The train halted at every crossroad and tiny hamlet. It was like a mixed local, a milk train, say, back home. There were no civilians up here; everybody was in uniform. He caught glimpses of aviation fields, of what looked like ammunition parks, of trucks and ambulances and two-wheeled carts and gun caissons. There were even men digging ditches in some crazy zigzag layout. Because the laborers were soldiers, he knew they must be at work on new trenches . . . It was true, then. Those in charge expected the Germans to march again on Paris.
They came to Soissons at last. There was no conductor to announce the station. The dawdling train picked its way through a canyon of battered buildings, their red and green slate roofs glittering in the mid-day sun, to a wreck of a stone depot, and came to a permanent stop. It had to. This was the end of the railway line.
SOISSONS looked pretty shopworn. Certainly the depot, with its roof partially caved in and a jagged hole piercing the rear wall, was in sad need of repairs.
Ahead of Jimmy, to the north, stretched a tree-lined boulevard, paved with cobblestones. Two parallel lines of rusted steel marked a street-car track, but there was no car in sight. Trampish stores on either side glowered with hangdog faces. Some were tilted askew, some had been patched with wooden fronts to replace the original stone, and some had oiled paper instead of glass for windows. It was as if, not so long before, a baby cyclone might have chosen the neighborhood for a mischievous romp.
Jimmy walked down this second-hand street. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have found it a treasure trove of fresh impressions, but now the worry of locating the Reserve Mallet clouded his eyes. Groups of French soldiers, clad in faded-blue overcoats and uniforms, stared at him with frank curiosity. They wore whiskers, for the most part, and heavy walrus mustaches. Probably that was why they were known as poilus, which means hairy.
Jimmy selected one standing by himself---he did not want any audience---and made his first essay in French. He had practiced the words by himself and could pronounce them very creditably, but when he began to speak to this soldier, they tangled in his tongue.
"Reserve Mallet?" he said, with a vague motion that was supposed to indicate his lack of knowledge of the camp. "Trucks --- er, I mean camions? Captain Potter?"
"Je ne vous comprends pas."
Jimmy was licked; he knew he was. He fought back the desire to give up and walk away. His fingers balled into hard fists.
"Reserve Mallet?" he tried again, speaking slower and louder. This time he remembered to make the e's sound like long a's; he pronounced Mallet much as he should, without accenting either syllable --- Mal-lay. He divided camions into three equal parts. He made Potter end with an a. And wonder of wonders, he was understood.
"Oui! Oui!" replied the poilu, apparently as pleased as Jimmy that they were at last upon an understandable basis; and went on in a torrent of French that was far over the boy's head.
But he pointed, and picked up Jimmy's bag, and said something that Jimmy interpreted to mean, "Come on." He fell in behind like a grateful puppy.
They tramped an interminable distance down the apologetic street. The poilu marched with even strides, like the soldier he was, and Jimmy's legs twinkled after him, sometimes in cadence, but more often with a pace shortened and broken. He began to wonder if the other really knew where he wanted to go.
Presently they turned to the right, with open fields in the distance. And somewhere along here, before a trim stone house, the guide stopped and with a show of teeth pointed out a sign over the doorway.
The sign read, "American Mission."
Jimmy experienced one of those moments when he did not know whether he wanted to laugh or cry. He had counted on being led to the headquarters of the Reserve Mallet, and he had brought up at some missionary's home.
It was no use telling the poilu what was wrong. He couldn't possibly make him understand. So he did the obvious thing, which also happened to be the cowardly thing, and said, "Merci," in his best linguistic manner, wondering why it sounded like a forlorn prayer. The poilu accepted the tip he offered, made an about-face in true military style, and wandered off.
Jimmy went into the American Mission. Anyhow, the name gave him the right to expect a language he knew. Once inside the hail, he encountered another sign, "Headquarters, Reserve Mallet." (3he had not learned how. Instead, he handed him the letter he had been given in Paris.
The captain read it and looked the boy up and down. At that moment Jimmy would have given a million dollars to be taller and more military and more --- well, more desirable. He was afraid the captain might reject him offhand.
But he did not. He expressed neither pleasure nor displeasure. All he said was, "Ah, another recruit. Wait a minute", and went out of the room.
He came back accompanied by a boy in the uniform of the American Field Service.
"Private Jordan will accompany you to camp and turn you over to Lieutenant Crandall who will assign you temporary quarters till you are examined and sworn in."
Private Jordan wiggled a finger at him, and they left the building without a word. But that lifted hand fascinated Jimmy; there was no thumb upon it. And outdoors, when he stole a covert glance at the boy's other hand, he saw that, too, was thumbless. Jordan must have been in the war a long, long time, for both stubs were cleanly healed.
If Jordan had been silent in the captain's office, he more than made up for it on the march to camp. This led across a wide field, over real trenches, and through entanglements of barbed wire that had been cleared here and there for passage.
"So you're a new driver?" said Jordan. "Well, we need 'em. Short-handed all the time. Camp is on ahead in what used to be a famous park or promenade in peace times, known as the Mall. See that clump of bushes yonder? They camouflage an anti-aircraft battery. Two guns; we call 'em the 'twins.' You'll hear 'em any night now, when the German planes go over toward Paris, dropping a few bombs for our benefit. There are the barracks --- those squat frame buildings. Four companies here now, A, B, C, and D. Provisional; not numbered officially yet. The kitchens are in that grove of trees. Beyond them, near the old bandstand, is the atelier ---repair shop, you know. We're on the bank of the Aisne River, and the bridge up there is named Pont des Anglais."(4)
Private Jordan kept talking, but Jimmy lost the thread of his remarks in a lively curiosity to see things for himself.
In the immediate foreground were two wooden buildings, like long sheds. Beyond them lay an avenue with over-topping elms, and on either side of this broad macadam road, parked in orderly lines, scores and scores of trucks. They were huge five-ton Pierce Arrows, American made, with high wooden sides, canopied with stout canvas. Upon each was painted a number and a circular design, perhaps two feet in diameter, of two children, a boy and a girl, half hidden by a great umbrella. Some of the umbrellas were yellow, some red, some blue, and some green, with the different colors grouped in sections. Beyond the trucks a low-banked river wound sluggishly. And across the river was flat marshland that led up to a village; and on still farther, hills that cut off the horizon.
Private Jordan led Jimmy down the road past the trucks and turned him over to a second lieutenant, with the remark that here was a new driver Captain Potter had sent over. The second lieutenant, who was just a kid himself and ashamed of it, reprimanded Private Jordan for not saluting and told him to take the recruit to B barracks, where there was a vacant cot which would do for the present.
Late that night Jimmy awakened with the premonition that something was wrong. Just at first he could not remember where he was, and it took a faltering minute or so to adjust himself to the surroundings of an army barracks. Nothing seemed amiss. On either side fellows were sleeping peacefully, fellows who because of their greater experience would be the first to scent danger.
There were noises all about, to which he had not been accustomed: the breathing of the sleepers, some quietly, some raspingly; the sighing of the wind through the tall elms by the roadside; the plashing of the Aisne River; a faint, far buzz, like the distant call of a cricket, that kept growing in intensity till it resembled the burr-r-r of a rattlesnake. And then, somewhere to the northeast, a gun let loose.
The first boom was like a signal. Hard on its heels more guns crackled and spat and clattered. The buzz grew louder and angrier. Now the whole barracks stirred into life.
"What is it?" Jimmy asked the fellow on his right.
"German plane. Everybody out!"
They rushed from the barracks and made for the nearest trench. Overhead the whirring invader came closer and closer. Anti-aircraft guns belched and blared at him, in a series of salvos, each nearer camp than the preceding one. The sky across the river lighted with ribbons of fire as the many searchlights seared the darkness in an effort to find the target. And then, when the menacing burr sounded almost directly above, a powerful ray of light just back of Soissons caught and silhouetted a tiny silver moth winging through the black night. Instantly the "twins" of which Jordan had spoken accepted the challenge and roared their defiance.
It was all over in a few seconds. The plane, unhit, flew past, heading southwest toward Paris. Other batteries on beyond banged futilely and went silent. The night closed in again.
Laughing and joking, the other fellows stumbled back to their barracks and promptly fell asleep. But Jimmy lay wide-eyed and apprehensive. It was his second taste of an air attack, and he did not like it any better than the Zeppelin raid on London.
Five more times that night the German planes rode overhead. Five more times the "twins" whanged away. And live more times the barracks emptied in sullen protest.
"Don't the anti-aircraft guns ever bring them down?" Jimmy asked a hall-dressed youth as they walked back the last time from the trench.
"Once in a blue moon. The main idea is to fire and keep them from flying low enough to make fair hits with their whizz-bangs."
Jimmy thought this over. It looked as if the planes, practically immune, had all the advantage. He didn't like the idea.
Reveille sounded at six. Jimmy roused with the others and watched a little enviously as they lined up for roll call. He ate breakfast with them, using a borrowed mess kit, into which the cook's helper --- known as the K. P. or kitchen police --- heaped bacon and fried potatoes and bread. The K. P. also served a line of familiar repartee to nearly everybody but Jimmy.
Afterward, by copying the others, he made up his bed, and watched the boy elected barracks police sweep and clean up the big room. At eight the corporals and sergeants gathered the squads for work about camp, leaving behind in the barracks a very lonesome youngster by the name of Jimmy Perrin. He didn't belong!
Jimmy wandered to the shade of a tree on the bank of the Aisne and sat down. This was shortly after eight. The next thing he knew it was dinner time. Thanks to his broken sleep the night before, he had taken a four-hour nap.
He jumped to his feet in a panic. Probably the captain or Commandant Mallet himself had sent for him to be examined and sworn in that morning --- and he'd been sleeping!
He was not hungry at noon, and the food tasted flat. The others went out to work again, and Jimmy waited hour after hour for a call, doing nothing, which is the hardest thing of all to do, and had his only reward late in the afternoon.
"Perrin?" asked a tousled-headed boy, sticking his head in the barracks doorway.
"Yes," said Jimmy eagerly, and added a "sir" without any reason. This must be the summons to headquarters for which he had waited so long.
"You are to shift to A barracks for to-night," the messenger told him.
Jimmy shifted. A barracks was much like B, only with a different crowd. He went to bed at nine, when the bugle blew taps, and lay awake till midnight listening for German planes. They came at twelve-thirty and again shortly after one. It was another inferno, and Jimmy rose the next morning hollow-eyed from lack of sleep.
Saturday night he slept in D barracks. There were no attacks from the air, and he should have slept like a top. But he did not.
Sunday dawned cold and wet. Sunny France was not sunny at all. Outside it was raining steadily, and the fields were bogs and the roads running rivers. Jimmy's spirits were close to zero by this time, and he had begun to wonder what would happen if he packed up and left. He wasn't in the army; they couldn't call it desertion.
About mid-afternoon, when he had given up all hope, he was told to report to Captain Frost, who was the Reserve doctor.
"You here to enlist, Perrin?" said Captain Frost.
"Yes, sir," Jimmy answered, and bit his tongue to keep from saying, "Please!"
"All right," nodded the captain. "Strip."
The examining officer looked him over, and felt him, and thumped him, and plied him with questions, and made him read the headlines of a magazine across the room, and held up a watch and asked if he could hear it ticking, and had him guess the colors of some bound books on a table.
"One hundred percent," the captain pronounced. "Hold up your right hand."
And Jimmy, standing stark naked before him, took the oath of allegiance and signed to serve the United States of America. The usual words, "for three years", had been crossed out and replaced with, "for the duration of the war."
Five minutes later, fully dressed again, he walked out the door Private James Perrin, American Mission, M. T. C., A. E. F., Prov. Co. C, Convois Autos, Par B. C. M., France. It did not matter that most of the title represented his mail address.
He was in. He belonged. He was a duly enlisted soldier of the U. S. A.
JIMMY sloshed back to camp without once noticing the mud or water, and was promptly assigned a cot in a pint-sized barracks that housed half of Provisional Company C. Thirteen other privates, lolling away the rainy Sunday afternoon, looked up at his entrance. They were mostly clean-cut, upstanding fellows of the sort you would find on any college campus back home, and Jimmy decided he was going to like them. He was hungry for companionship.
A black-haired boy on the next bunk to the right studied him with lazy eyes.
"Greetings," he said, "and welcome. Ever drive a truck?"
"Easy as eating huckleberry pie. Just keep a tight rein on the beast, so she won't r'ar."
"I --—I’ll try."
The black-haired boy yawned and lay down. He was through with the conversation, through with Jimmy. Jimmy knew it as definitely as if it had been put in so many words.
From the far end of the barracks drifted a penetrating voice recounting some camp incident.
". . . naming the parts of the rifle," the voice droned, "in that lecture called 'The Use and Abuse of the Piece', when the door opened and his majesty the major popped in. Everybody froze to attention. Bob, who'd been in the Mexican Border mix-up and knew more about the in'ards of a gun than the lecturer, was off by himself, sans a rifle. The major spotted him and charged. 'Here,' he thundered, 'tell me, what are you doing away over here?' Bob held him eye to eye. 'Standing at attention, sir,' he said. And the fellows swore it left old Grumps pop-eyed and speechless for the first time in his life."
It seemed to Jimmy a good chance to start a conversation and get acquainted.
"Do you have to stand at attention when the major comes into the barracks?" he asked of his left-hand neighbor.
The boy reflected. "It's customary," he admitted, "but if you don't object to K. P. or something like that, you can just nod and say hello."
Jimmy felt squelched. He didn't like being laughed at any better than the next fellow. With tight lips he leaned back and listened to the remarks bandied back and forth.
"Pete says our friends up Chemin des Dames way dropped a shell on the railroad early last Wednesday morning and tore up a stretch of the tracks to Paris."
Jimmy opened his mouth to spike the news. He had come to Soissons that morning, and there had been no dislodged nor twisted rails. But the memories of his recent inane contributions to the talk held him silent.
"Trench rumor, likely," somebody said.
"Absolutely," somebody else agreed. "I heard it, too, and asked a Frog, and he said it was all a lie."
The topic was tossed into the discard, exhausted, and forgotten by all save Jimmy. To him it marked another lost opportunity.
He went outside to get a drink of water. Through the open window drifted a remark, "Pretty colorless. You could stand him up against a blank wall and erase him with a good rubber."
Jimmy flinched. He wondered if they were talking about him. When he entered the barracks again, he thrust out an aggressive chin, but nobody seemed to notice him at all. That was worse than open contempt.
He made one last despairing attempt. "A soldier named Jordan brought me over to camp the first day," lie said to a fellow standing near the door. "In what battle did he get his thumbs shot off?"
"Battle for a livelihood."
"What?"
"Jordie lost his thumbs working in a mill up Massachusetts way before the war."
"Oh!" said Jimmy, and could not for the life of him think of any appropriate remark to greet the information. The other fellow hesitated a polite moment, wagging his head solemnly, and then turned away.
"He thinks I'm dumb," Jimmy told himself miserably. "They all do. Just when I should say or do the right thing, my mind goes dead and leaves me tongue-tied. Won't I ever learn?"
Mess call sounded at five. There was no rush for supper. The barracks emptied slowly and the fellows sauntered down the street on which the company kitchens faced. A pair chatted idly together; three others locked arms for some weighty discussion; a half dozen frolicked in a horseplay game; two wandered off in the opposite direction, toward Soissons.
Only Jimmy Perrin walked alone. He ate alone. He came back to the barracks alone. He huddled alone on his cot, reading a book while the others gathered in groups, till taps blew at nine and the candles were doused and everybody turned in. Living with thirteen other fellows in what was really a dormitory, he had never been more alone in his life.
The days that followed salved the hurt a little with hard work. He did not have time to think. Reveille sounded at six, roll call and setting-up exercises began at six-fifteen, and breakfast was at seven. After that, sergeants took out groups for camp jobs --- corvées, they called them. It was plain day labor, like making roads, building new barracks and sewage plants, shoveling mud and sand and rocks into the trucks and then shoveling them out again. Dinner was at twelve, followed by more tasks that calloused the hands and bit at the backbone. Surcease came at four-thirty --- a period of sociability for the boon companions of Company C barracks. To Jimmy it meant only a time for solitary brooding.
He even welcomed the details that were parceled out in rotation. Kitchen police was his favorite, though it revealed itself as helping scrub pots and pans, serving meals, and doing odd jobs about the shack that began and ended with grease and dirt, because K. P. brought him in contact with Joe, an old regular army cook, who liked nothing better than to talk. All Joe asked was a silent, conscientious listener.
The other police assignments ---barracks, camp, dining room ---were not so bad. Guard, which meant walking a beat up and down the road between the trucks for two hours at night, with a rifle over your shoulder, was worst of all. It left you alone with your thoughts.
Meanwhile, the barracks situation failed to improve. One afternoon, coming back from work, Jimmy stopped and asked Top Sergeant Elton for a pass uptown. They were called permissions, and at regular intervals anybody who had not incurred the wrath of the officers could secure one, leave camp at five, eat in Soissons, and spend the evening as he liked, provided he checked in again by eight.
Jimmy did not know what he wanted of the pass, for life in Soissons had no particular appeal. He had asked for it simply to get away from camp for a few hours.
His entrance into the barracks interrupted an earnest conversation. On the bunk to his right sat Farr, the black-haired boy, together with Glover, Jimmy's neighbor on the other side, and Walker, who had explained Jordan's missing thumbs. Jimmy sidled to the adjoining cot and the talk resumed.
"Then we'll make it the Lion Rouge," said Farr. "I like the Croix d'Or, but the red animal sure puts out reg'lar scoffin's."
"Anybody else due for a permission?" asked Glover. "Four makes a better party than three."
They were going uptown, too. Jimmy accidentally dropped his mess kit and wriggled uncomfortably at the clatter. They'd think he was attracting attention to horn in on the party.
He lay on his cot, staring at the ceiling, while the three made their preparations. They were very thorough with hair and clothes and shoe brushes; they wound and rewound puttees; Farr borrowed a cap---not from Jimmy--- and Walker commandeered a loan of ten francs ---not from Jimmy.
Where was the Lion Rouge? How did you get to the place?
Jimmy turned the daring venture over in his mind. He'd drop in and have dinner at that hotel. Even if he didn't sit at the same table, he'd be in the same room and get the fun indirectly. It was a five-ton idea.
But he couldn't ask Farr and Glover and Walker the way to the Lion Rouge. That would sound like forcing an invitation; he would rather have them ignore him than be disgusted over his trying to make it a foursome. And after they had gone, with Jimmy watching their departure through clouded eyes, he found he could not ask any of the other fellows, either. They would put two and two together and get the wrong answer.
Too late he figured that he should have followed at a discreet distance, keeping well out of sight, till they had led him within sight of the hotel. But that was always the way. When it was too late, when the opportunity had passed, he always thought of what he should have said or done.
Anyhow, he could find the place. There would be a sign, or maybe an advertisement on the street, with a pointing arrow. No use crossing that bridge till he came to it.
Jimmy picked his way across the field to Soissons. It was dark already, even in the open. He had counted upon a city of lights and gayety and traffic; he plunged, instead, into a welter of blackness, with narrow, twisting streets as impenetrable to the stranger as the galleries of an unexplored cave.
"I might have guessed," he muttered, "if I had any mind at all. I saw London this way, didn't I? And Paris? Lights would be targets for the German planes."
The way from camp led through a narrow, hilly thoroughfare, no wider than an alley. It debouched upon a public square, or plaza, dim under the starlight. At the far side he chose the mouth of one of the opaque streets and felt his way into it by a guiding hand on the buildings that came flush with the walk. Immediately darkness swallowed him with a single gulp.
He fought on stubbornly. He turned corners and crossed streets and adventured into open places. Often, far back through a jumble of toppled stones, he caught glimpses of beckoning light or heard snatches of talk. Always, though, the voices spoke French.
Within an hour he was hopelessly lost. Before the war Soissons had been a city of nearly twenty thousand; now, with a civilian population of less than seven hundred, it spread a spider web of blind, torturous alleys and gaunt, deserted houses. There seemed to be no system to the streets; he would walk along one, turn right a block and then right again, only to discover that this last lane angled to a junction with the first.
Jimmy's worry grew to uneasiness and finally to blind panic. He could not seem to think. He was plunging ahead blindly, catapulting against buildings and obstacles. Sometimes he found himself on the sidewalk, sometimes out in the middle of the street. All hope of finding the Lion Rouge had long since gone. What he wanted now was to get back to camp.
He brought himself up with a jerk.
"Look here, Jimmy Perrin," he said, "you have a brain, even if it's rusty from lack of use. Set it spinning. You've been knuckling down to circumstances about long enough."
Five minutes of intensive thought solved the problem.
"Camp is north and a little east," he told himself. "All right. Find the big dipper in the sky." A partial revolution brought it into view. "Now the side points straight at the North Star . . . . There she is. Well, all you have to do is head that direction, bearing right, and you'll plump smack into camp."
At seven twenty-three a permissionaire from Company C, breathing hard and looking a little disheveled, handed in his pass to Sergeant Elton. The Top wasted precious minutes wondering about the triumphant gleam in Jimmy's eyes, but presently forgot about it in the stress of other duties. Jimmy Perrin had found himself --- literally.
UP the road to the bridge. Down the road to bandstand. Around the kitchens. Then up the road again to the bridge. Down the road to the bandstand. Around the kitchens.
That is what guard meant. Jimmy walked it from two to four one morning, doubling and redoubling so many times that presently his feet schooled themselves to the beat while his brain played hooky.
As he rubbed his calloused palms and eased his aching back, souvenirs of long days of toil about camp, his thoughts grew bitter. This wasn't war; it was slavery. Back in the States you picked men from the gutters for this sort of degrading labor -and if they didn't like their jobs, they threw them up and found others. In the army you couldn't quit. Road building, for instance. Why, at home convicts in the penitentiaries did that, breaking rocks for surfacing, making little ones out of big ones.
Jimmy had enlisted to be a soldier. Not to fight, precisely; not to lock horns with danger and death. Leave that to the doughboys and the marines, and maybe the engineers, and, safely to the rear, the heavy artillerymen. But certainly not to be a sweating, grimy day laborer in overalls, straining muscle and sinew for room and board and a measly thirty-three dollars a month. He wanted to drive. That was why he had enlisted in the Reserve Mallet --- to drive.
He swerved from the road to one of the hulking trucks. It stood like some huge beast, waiting patiently for the command of its master. The bigness, the power, the faithfulness gripped at Jimmy's hungry heart. He wanted to be assigned a car, and care for it as a cavalryman did his horse: feed it, groom it, pet and coax it, boast about it, wake it up in the morning and put it to bed at night. A truck would be more human to him than to any fellow in the barracks. He'd study its faults and whims and caprices; he'd make of it a real pal. Weren't they ever going to list him as a driver?
The wish had the same result as rubbing Aladdin's magic lamp. The answering genie appeared in the guise of Lieutenant Crandall, who stopped him after roll call the next morning.
"Perrin" he called, "I'm putting you on Number Four of the Yellow Umbrellas, as assistant to Bloot. He'll teach you to drive."
Bloot was the fat boy of Company C barracks. Jimmy didn't care much for him -he wasn't even the sort he wanted to have like him --- but probably Bloot would prove a capable instructor, and fat boys were proverbially good-natured and jovial. Everybody said so.
Tuesday morning at three-thirty Jimmy was called for his first convoy. Only one car, Number Four, was going out, and Bloot, in this pre-dawn chill, appeared anything but cheerful. He grumbled over the breakfast, he wanted to know why he was singled out of the whole company to roll, and he couldn't understand why the C. O. hadn't at least given him a proved and experienced helper.
"This our truck?" Jimmy asked, as they halted somewhere down the shadowy line.
"Camion --- not truck," Bloot corrected. "Don't talk like a noop. Yes, this is Camion Numero Quatre." He climbed to the driver's seat and sprawled on the cushion. "Fill the radiator with that canvas bucket. Get the water from the river."
The collapsible bucket held two or three quarts. Jimmy wore a path trudging back and forth between the Aisne and the car. Twice, in the mud at the river's edge, he slipped and plumped a foot ankle-deep in the icy water. But at last the radiator brimmed over.
"She won't start without priming," Bloot explained from his throne on the seat. "Unscrew the spark plugs and pour a little gas into each cylinder from that can."
Jimmy unearthed a rusty wrench and began the task. It was pitch dark and his wet fingers were numb, but he persevered.
.Now wind her up," ordered Bloot. "I'll work the spark lever."
Luckily, it was not very cold. Even so, the oil had congealed enough to make cranking a real task. Jimmy could not spin it, as he expected; his best was no more than a slow-motion revolution. But by some apparent miracle the motor caught and roared.
"Shall I take the wheel?" he asked hopefully.
"In the dark, without knowing the way out of camp!" said Bloot, apparently aghast. "Certainly not!"
They bounced and jolted toward Soissons, swung to the left across the dim bridge over the Aisne, and pointed through crooked streets on the far side into the open country.
Dawn came pinkly. Jimmy's heart sang an accompaniment to the waking birds and crowing roosters. He was out on convoy at last, rolling over strange roads, like a dream come true.
"Want me to drive now?"
"No," Bloot said shortly.
Perhaps five miles from camp they wheeled off the main road into an ammunition park, hidden among a dense growth of trees. Here Bloot presented some sort of written paper to the French officer in charge and backed his camion to a pile of square boxes.
Jimmy wondered if the next order would be to load the boxes. They looked pretty solid and heavy, and he guessed Bloot would have to lend a hand. But just as he was reconciling himself to the ordeal, a line of French poilus in tattered blue hove into sight and took over the work. They moved deliberately, stopping to chat and smoke. When the camion sagged protestingly under the added weight, the sergeant in charge squinted inside, counted, and called it a day.
"Swing up and bolt the tail gate," Bloot said to Jimmy. Then, "Crank up."
The loaded camion picked its way out of the park and settled to a steady grind toward the north. Bloot seemed disinclined to talk. Now and then he muttered to himself, presumably recalling wrongs and affronts, but it was purely monologue.
"Shall I take the wheel now?" Jimmy asked.
"No," said Bloot.
They covered another mile in silence.
"What's our load?" Jimmy ventured. "What are we carrying?"
"Powder," said Bloot. "Thirty-seven boxes of powder."
Maybe that was why Bloot wouldn't let him drive. Powder wasn't a plaything for kids. Jimmy wasn't exactly a kid, but Bloot probably didn't know he could drive expertly.
Another French corvée unloaded the camion at a second ammunition park nearer the front. It must have been well back of where the Germans had dug in, for there were no indications of danger. On beyond, the guns boomed occasionally, but the reports sounded as distant as they had in Soissons.
As the empty camion swung out to the road for the return trip, Jimmy made his final plea.
"I'll drive now," he suggested.
"No," said Bloot.
They reached camp in time for dinner. Afterward, while the fellows were putting away their mess kits at the barracks, Top Sergeant Elton appeared.
"Everybody will work on trucks this afternoon," he announced. "French inspection to-morrow."
So Bloot and Jimmy went out to Number Four in the long line of Yellow Umbrellas by the roadside, and improved the shining hours of the afternoon by making her spick and span. That is to say, Bloot sat by and told Jimmy what to do.
You began the cleaning process, Bloot announced, by sweeping the floor inside. Jimmy did that. Next you straightened the canvas sides and top taut over the hoops and cross-stringers. Jimmy did that. Then you scraped the mud from the wooden panels, brushed off the dust, and went over the paint work with a wet rag. Jimmy did that. This brought you down to the wheels, whose spokes must be cleaned and polished, and the tires, double cushions of solid rubber, from which wedged stones and débris must be removed. Jimmy did that. Then you crawled underneath ---never mind the mud puddle in which you lay ---and swabbed off the running gear with a mixture of gasoline and kerosene. Jimmy did that.
"Now fill all the grease cups," said Bloot, and so far forgot himself as to pass a can and a grease gun to the recumbent second driver.
There were ninety-three grease cups on Number Four camion. Jimmy knew because he counted them. He lay on his back in oozy mud and squirted grease into one after another, while large gobs of oily overflow fell into his eyes and ears. He found them in hiding places underneath and about the cylinder block, inadvertently identifying and swabbing clean many cups with his hair. He brushed and wiped the motor and spark plugs; he scoured the dirt-encrusted ignition wires; he wrestled with reserve cans of gas, great bidons holding fifty liters, or something over fifty American quarts. When he had done all this, plus a thousand and one incidental jobs, old Number Four was as immaculate as a second lieutenant on dress parade. Jimmy himself had absorbed a generous share of the oil and grease and mud and grime that had been the camion's; he resembled one of those Sengalese negroes that belonged to the French army.
Bloot made a last critical survey of Number Four.
"She'll pass muster," he nodded. "We did a good job."
After Bloot had waddled off toward the barracks, to wash up after his strenuous labors, Jimmy stood looking at the camion. He placed an affectionate hand on the hood.
"I think you and I would get along great together," he said. "Some day if ---well, if something happens to Bloot, I'll be driving you."
Friday ushered in another convoy. It began and ended in broad daylight, and there were six camions in the rame. All Number Four had to do was slip into place between Three and Five and hold its position. Nothing could have been more simple.
But Bloot would not give over the wheel. This time Jimmy did not ask for the privilege of driving, but nobody could have mistaken his occasional hints.
"Tired?" he asked.
"No," said Bloot.
An hour and several miles of silence.
"Jolting wrench your arms?"
"No.
They pulled into a park and were unloaded. The six cars headed back for camp.
"Much trouble holding a big bus like this straight on the road?"
Jimmy gulped and gave it up.
Three days later, on a trip noteworthy only for a pelting rain and muddy, almost impassable roads, he took the bit in his teeth.
"Look here," he began. "Why don't you let me drive? I want to learn how to handle a camion."
Bloot unlimbered vocally. It was an effort, but he did it.
"I've signed for this car," he said sullenly, "and I'm held responsible for what happens to her. If I let you drive, you might have an accident and smash her up. Then where'd I be?"
"I don't ---"
"I'd be in hot water over at the American Mission headquarters, that's where I'd be. When the United States took over the Field Service, I didn't enlist in the Reserve Mallet, but in the heavy artillery. There's a nice service where you can use your noodle, far enough from the front not to be annoyed. I'll be transferred the minute an American outfit in that branch shows up. But if my camion goes en panne, even if I'm not directly to blame --- wham! Investigation! Court martial! Transfer held up! I'm getting out before --- well, before it's too late. Now do you see why I can't take a chance of letting you wind Numero Quatre around a tree?"
They sloshed back to camp without exchanging another word.
At eight o'clock Monday evening, November 19, the barracks door swung open to admit Lieutenant Crandall. The company commander's quick eye counted the lounging boys, and he nodded his satisfaction. They were all present and accounted for.
"We have just received an alerte for an important convoy," he began abruptly. "The French ordre de mouvement has not come, and we do not know the starting hour nor the destination. But we must be in readiness. Every car in the Reserve Mallet will roll."
A tiny glow of exhilaration warmed the cockles of Jimmy's heart. Drivers were at a premium; he wouldn't be left behind. And even if Bloot refused him the wheel, he'd be there on the seat, wouldn't he, hunching old Number Four along, leaning right or left for the sharp turns, crouching forwards to detect and warn against dangers of the road?
"We're short-handed, as you all know," the lieutenant went on, "and it will be necessary to assign single drivers to several of the camions. Farr will take out Number One by himself; Walker, Two; Glover, Three; Perrin, Four---"
Jimmy stiffened. Now that his ambition to drive was about to come true, doubts of his ability prickled. He wanted to protest, to explain that he was new and inexperienced and had never driven a five-ton truck. But you didn't protest nor explain in the army; you simply said, "Yes, sir," and went ahead and did what you were told.
"The drivers will now go to their cars," Lieutenant Crandall ordered, "and see they are made ready for rolling. Each tank must be full. Both of the fifty-liter reserve bidons must be full. Get extra oil. See that the seats inside are secure. Start the motors and warm them up. Then go to bed. The call may come early."
Out of the camion line, after Jimmy had cranked old Number Four and was cocking an ear for any miss of the motor, a shadowy form loomed alongside.
"Bus O. K., Perrin?" the top sergeant's voice asked.
"R'aring to go," Jimmy told him with a gust of enthusiasm. He stepped closer. "What's become of Bloot?"
"Leaving in the morning to join an artillery unit. Lucky he stayed long enough to teach you how to drive one of these big babies. Give him credit for that."
Credit!
JIMMY'S eyes opened to the flare of a flashlight full on his face. A hand, invisible in the darkness of the barracks, shook him roughly.
"Convoy!" a voice warned. "Breakfast first. Then to your car."
After the sergeant had moved to the next bunk, Jimmy sat up and studied the glowing dial of his wrist watch. It was three twenty-five in the morning.
He dressed by thrusting his feet into socks and shoes, rolling his puttees, slipping on his blouse, and finally snuggling his body into the great sheepskin outer coat that offered real protection against the weather. His outer clothes had been sleeping garments, in lieu of pajamas.
Five minutes later, jostling scores of shadowy forms, he drifted to the kitchen for breakfast. It was a miserable meal. The oatmeal turned out lumpy, the condensed milk diluted till it tasted like water, and the bacon almost raw. He gulped down a cup of scalding black coffee and dumped the remaining cereal and meat into the G. I.(5) can.
Camion Number Four loomed gaunt and ugly. It cranked hard, as if in protest against being disturbed at this unseemly hour. But finally, after a reluctant snort or two, the motor hummed into life.
Jimmy crawled upon the seat, adjusted the sheepskin collar about his neck and ears, and waited. Other cars up and down the line awoke. After ten minutes or so, Jimmy shut off the motor. It was warm now, and a single twist would set it going.
He waited another fifteen minutes. Nothing happened. A second quarter of an hour. Still the cars had not stirred. It was the hardest part of any convoy, this waiting.
They were off at last, well after four. The camion ahead, with Glover at the wheel, was sucked abruptly into the darkness. Jimmy frantically jammed the lever of Number Four into low, released the clutch, and felt the huge car tremble and jerk. For a breathless moment he was afraid he had stalled. The motor hesitated, coughed apologetically, dug deep, as a slipping horse finds its footing in soft dirt, and then lunged forward with the bit in its teeth. Jimmy shifted to second speed and then to high with two pronounced jolts, discovering then and there that a five-ton truck did not gather momentum like a straight-eight roadster. But give him a chance; he'd learn.
By the time the sun had peeped over the horizon, with its promise of warmth, he began to enjoy the trip. It was lonesome, driving by himself, but it was good, too. Number Four behaved like a thoroughbred, tolerant of Jimmy's initial blunders and confident of his ultimate success. "A bit awkward at first, my right-hand drive," it seemed to say. "No, you can't steer me with finger tips; take a firm grip. Watch me on the sharp turns; I'm pretty long and my rear wheels cut short. Don't be afraid to feed me the gas; I won't choke. There, that's better --- purr-r-r-r-r!"
During the long grind that followed, Jimmy found ample time to master the intricacies of driving a five-tonner, and he made the most of his opportunity. Hour after hour, mile after mile, the convoy rolled over endless dusty roads; south from Soissons to Chateau-Thierry; west to Meaux; then on through Montreuil to la Ferté-sous-Jouarre, when the camions braked to a stop. By now Number Four was as obedient as a well-trained puppy.
Convoy Sergeant Wills hopped on the running board. "Old bus run all right?"
"Not a miss," Jimmy declared.
"Good! Let down your inside seats; we're going to load with French troops for the front. Want anything?"
Jimmy pursed his lips and stared reflectively at the sun on its downward path.
"No---o, only --- er --- when do we eat?"
"How do I know?" Sergeant Wills said sharply; and Jimmy guessed it wasn't the first time that day he had answered the question. "That's the C. O.'s business. Let him find the kitchen remorque."(6)
There was another wait, this time for the troops.
They came at last and clambered stiffly into the camions, twenty-four to a car, with an occasional officer taking refuge on the drivers' seat. Inside each camion, along either side, a hinged plank was lowered. A third plank, fitted into slots at front and tail gate, formed another long bench down the middle for its quota of eight soldiers. The packs were thrown upon the floor or hung by hooks fastened to the ribs of the canvas cover.
The convoy, heading northward now, resumed its monotonous rolling. Save for the gnawing pangs of hunger, which grew sharper and sharper as the afternoon wore away, Jimmy had no complaint. In the depths of his camion the French soldiers talked and laughed and sang, apparently with no thought for what to-morrow might bring. Their splendid morale tautened his sagging spirits.
Driving grew more complicated. The roads, which had been straight and level, began to kink and climb and descend in a series of devious roller-coaster twists. Mounting a hill meant zigzagging and doubling; coasting down the far side, Jimmy's camion would snake around S curves and horseshoe turns till he lost all sense of direction. Back home, on a touring trip, he might have paused at a beckoning hotel cupped among the trees, with some silly name like "Dew Drop Inn", to rest and get his bearings --- and eat.
Once, on a summit, he stopped in obedience to a signal from the car ahead and had a chance to appreciate the immensity of the troop movement. Ahead of him, behind him, stretching for miles and miles, looped over hills and through valleys like a giant boa constrictor, the road was a solid camion caravan. There were three hundred and fifty trucks from the Reserve Mallet alone, swollen by an uncounted number from other organizations, each with its twenty-four soldiers of France being rushed to the front.
"It looks like a circus parade," Jimmy decided; "only I don't suppose the greatest showman of them all, in his wildest dreams, ever imagined any parade so mammoth and colorful."
The descending sun blurred behind rain clouds low in the west. A cold, damp breeze insinuated itself beneath Jimmy's sheepskin coat. By eight o'clock that evening, when he rumbled through Crépy, it had begun to drizzle.
He was tired now, and hungry. But there was no rest, no food. The steering wheel fought him; it wrenched at his arms and carried the vibrations to his very spine. He was ready to call it a day.
The convoy wound across a plain. It passed from open country into dense woods, the Forest of Compiègne, where the road lay buried deep in heavy shadows. A dozen times in that black maw he reached for the switch on the dash, only to remember there were no lights to turn on.
Ahead of him he could discern second drivers plowing along with flashlights, bellwethers guiding their tumbling sheep of camions. He wished with all his heart he had such a helper --- somebody to talk to, somebody to smooth out the traffic difficulties, somebody to relieve him at the wheel. But he hadn't; he was going it alone.
The drizzle thickened to a steady rain, bucketing slantwise before the cold wind. Here and there a truck skidded from the hard surface of the road into the ditch at one side. That meant chains, to be clamped fast to the hooks in the midst of the downpour, or calling for towing help. And none of the drivers was in the mood to volunteer assistance at this stage of the convoy.
Jimmy gritted his teeth. He'd stay on that road or die in the attempt. Creeping forward yard by yard, climbing off his seat to see where the front wheels were trespassing, backing, shouting warnings to the camion behind, he fought it out till the forest dwindled at the edge of a city which he guessed must be Compiègne.
All through that black, stormy night he drove without mishap. Other camions stalled by the roadside, up to their hubs in mud, or crashed through fences, or broke down completely. One of the monsters even lay on its side, overturned and empty. Jimmy nodded, torn between apprehension and self-pride. After all, he, newest and rawest recruit, possessed something lots of the other fellows lacked ---instinctive driving skill.
The first pale gleams of dawn choked the pride down his throat. For hours he had sat slumped on the drivers' seat, straining with tired, aching eyes for glimpses of the vague, blunt square ahead that marked the camion he was following. And when daylight finally came, the square proved only an illusion, a shape conjured from something very like delirium. Ahead of him, as far as the eye could reach, lay only an ugly yellow mud stream that was the road. It was utterly deserted.
Just in time he fought free of the panic that threatened. "Don't lose your head again, Jimmy Perrin," he said aloud. "Do a little intensive thinking. First of all, where are you?"
He did not know. The sun was shrouded in cloud and fog; he could not tell one direction from the other. All he could ferret from a cloyed reason was the fact that the convoy had been heading north.
"Maybe I've wandered off on a side road, or maybe I've just fallen behind. The thing to do is speed up and see what happens."
Jimmy "stepped on it." The camion, given its head, galloped along like an eager horse. If the convoy was ahead, he would catch up with it. There would be stops and delays that must slow it to the pace of a snail. If he overtook the long parade, well and good; if he kept the foot accelerator flush with the floor boards for a reasonable period and failed to overtake it, time then to reconsider.
There was the other possibility that he would head straight for the German lines. This he tucked resolutely into the back of his mind and tried to forget.
For a long hour he drove desperately, coasting down steep hills at a furious pace, forcing old Number Four to its last notch on the level, rushing the grades to hold it in high as long as possible. Behind, inside the camion, the French soldiers were jounced and flung about without protest. Theirs not to reason why.
The sight of a great truck ahead, the rearguard of scores of others, was Jimmy's ultimate reward. He let the air from his lungs with a sigh of relief. It was like accomplishing something back home and having dad place a familiar hand on his shoulder and say, "Not bad, son; not bad at all."
The sun came out of the haze and grinned at him. As he dropped into position behind the last camion, a Red Umbrella of Company A, he noted the road was better. It was hard macadam here. The hills in the mid-distance were puny affairs that could be taken in second. The trees were sparser --- not forests. After all, it was a pretty good war ... Only he was hungry, terribly, ravenously hungry.
Once, during a stop, some second driver climbed on his running board and asked, very earnestly, "Say, soldier, when do we eat?"
"When we get to Berlin," Jimmy flung back at him.
"All right with me. That's the proper spirit, old timer."
Old timer! Well, he was. That bitter twenty-seven hours of driving had shucked off the last garment of the novice. Pitched headlong, untried and unsung, into the toughest convoy the Reserve Mallet ever experienced, he had made good. On with the show!
Once more the convoy resumed its serpentine crawl. The sun climbed lustily and tempered the chill of the air. The Frenchmen were singing again, "Madelon" and that Verdun challenge, "Ils Ne Passeront Pas!"(7) They had breakfasted on bread and pinard, of course, but ---well, they were singing.
About two that afternoon Jimmy trailed the Red Umbrella camion into a spick-and-span town, polished like a patent-leather shoe and alive with English troops, busy, efficient soldiers impressive at a considerable distance by reason of their shining brass buttons. The signpost said the town was Péronne.
"Hello, Yank," one of them greeted Jimmy as the convoy came to a temporary halt. "Up and doing, what? Well, we need the cargo you're bringing --- reinforcements."
"What's happened, Limey?" Jimmy asked. He said it familiarly, as if it were his right. Those last thirty-odd hours had stiffened his self-respect; never again would he cringe like a whipped puppy craving kindness.
"Bit of a mix-up around Cambrai yonder," the English private told him. "Taking advantage of the mist yesterday morning, and thickening it with artificial smoke, General Byng shot a fleet of tanks at the German lines, without giving warning by any artillery barrage.(8) The tanks broke down the wire entanglements for the infantry advance, and we won ground on a twelve-mile front to a depth of over five miles and captured many guns and prisoners." He paused and rubbed his chin. "But this wedge of ours is vulnerable on three sides. That's why we need reinforcements. How many, now, did you bring?"
"Thousands. Figure it out for yourself. Twenty-four to a camion, not counting officers, and hundreds and hundreds of camions."(9)
"Camions? Beg pardon? Oh, you mean lorries; that's what we call them."
"Trucks in the United States; camions to the French; lorries to you English --- the name doesn't matter."
"Right-o. It's whet they do in this man's war, you mean. Well, here's to you Yanks with your French --er---camions. You've done your job top-hole."
The starting whistle set the convoy in action, and Jimmy waved to his chance acquaintance, who stood arms akimbo, head high, jaw thrust forward. That fellow must have breakfasted well.
They rumbled over a bridge bearing the typical English sign, "Dead Slow!" and circled around the outskirts of the town to a stop.
"Tail gates down," ordered a sergeant, running along the line of cars.
Jimmy heaved his thanksgiving. This was the end. He slipped the chained bolts and lowered Number Four's tail gate, which seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He hooked the light ladder in place and stuck his head inside the camion.
"Alley oop!" he yelled. It was a mangled French phrase he had heard repeatedly on the ammunition convoys and meant, "All set", or "All ready", or "All out", or something like that. Anyhow, it served. The poilus spilled to the ground. There was as much baggage ---packs and guns and rolled blankets and yard-long loaves of bread and the like ---as there were soldiers; but in time the interior of Jimmy's camion was empty.
And then, from some mysterious source, food appeared. Yes, sir, food. It was only a skimpy cheese sandwich, but it looked and tasted like a banquet.
Having dined, Jimmy permitted his face to crinkle into a seraphic smile. "Now," he said, "for a little rest and sleep."
Up ahead somewhere a whistle shrilled --- a single blast to crank; two to start moving.
They were off again. Creakingly, laboriously, old Number Four stumbled into line and followed like a docile elephant prodded by its trainer. Jimmy started with a jerk that threatened to strip the gears, managed second speed all right, but nearly stalled getting into high. He shifted mechanically, apparently no longer having any mind to prompt him.
The convoy left Péronne behind and wandered into the open country, through the fields of Flanders. Jimmy was too tired to be interested in new scenery; it demanded every ounce of his will power to nurse along the staggering camion. He mustn't drop behind and get lost; he mustn't get too close and smash his radiator against the ugly tow-hook of the Red Umbrella ahead; he mustn't doze and swerve from that white ribbon of road.
An hour of driving sucked at his vitality. He began to appreciate what all that hard work at camp had been for. Another hour. More hours. An eternity of hours. Always, plodding but determined, the convoy rolled steadily on. Wasn't there any end at all to France?
They headed straight for the setting sun, which played tricks with Jimmy's wavering eyes. The whole world began to heave and undulate. Some things he saw; some were transplanted memories. Villages loomed ahead, capitulated to the stubborn charge of traffic, and were left behind. Under them the road flowed like a river; a dirty, sluggish river. The Mississippi. Trees on either side. Tangles of mistletoe in the top branches. Christmas trees loaded with presents: pop-corn balls, candy, something to eat. Fields. Cultivated fields. Barren fields. A good place for a baseball diamond, with somebody peddling hot-dog sandwiches. Trenches. Barbed-wire entanglements. The enemy waiting. A snack to gulp down before going over the top. The yard at home. His father calling him to lunch . . . He jerked the straying beast of a car back into the road just in time to miss the ditch.
The sun set again and night swallowed the myriad camions. Their echoing and re-echoing rumble was like thunder, like the ceaseless barrage before a battle. Buried in this din the camions split an hour from the grudging darkness. A second hour. They came to a town, precisely like the last, with slate roofs and squat stone buildings whose doors in solid walls buttoned the dwellings fast for the night.
This town was Braye. Jimmy caught the name as a doubting sergeant flared the signpost. Well, what did it matter? Braye or Soissons or Paris or Baraboo or New Rochelle or Madison --- towns were just towns, wherever you found them.
They halted in Braye long enough to replenish the low gas tanks. The fifty-liter can weighed a ton. Hoisting it to the running board looked impossible, jolting it to the next notch of the floor boards unbelievable, and tilting it to the seat and tipping it into the mouth of the tank simply out of the question. But Jimmy managed --- accomplished the miracle --- to the toll of protesting muscles, an aching spine, and a bruised toe when the bidon escaped and fell.
He was half asleep on the drivers' seat when the whistle pierced his eardrums. Instinctively he cranked; instinctively he clucked old Number Four into action. They were off again. Where? How much farther? How much longer? Didn't they know there was a limit to human endurance?
The next few hours were a nightmare, of which Jimmy retained no lucid memory. On and on through the darkness, stopping, starting, crawling in second, getting left behind, doubling the cripples, brushing the dim shadow of the camion ahead when it halted abruptly. On and on through a welter of dust and gasoline fumes. On and on through bewildering shadows and murky blackness. On and on without end.
They roared into another town, Montdidier, and came to a pause, with the engines purring in neutral. Jimmy's wrist watch said three ten in the morning.
A wan ghost loomed at his side, and Jimmy rubbed his grimy eyes and identified Sergeant Wills.
"Turn in and get some sleep," the sergeant told him.
There was a real fellow for you, Sergeant Wills.
Jimmy could have embraced him. As a matter of record, all he did was to grunt vaguely, slither to the ground, and weave uncertainly to the rear of his camion. The tail gate was a barrier, but he climbed it and pitched full-length on the hard floor inside, where the blessed oblivion of sleep engulfed him like a blow on the point of the chin.
"Hey, Perrin!"
It was later, two or three hours later, that the voice roused him. He could hear it, but the sound would not record on his mind.
"Perrin!"
No answer.
"PERRIN!" Much louder and more angrily.
"Whatcha want?"
It was Sergeant Wills, looking pretty hollow-eyed and broken himself. He was scowling.
"Get up and help unload a camion full of gas bidons," he ordered. "Come on, Perrin; shake a leg."
Jimmy did not answer. He was afraid if he opened his mouth he would say something that would shatter all the army rules and regulations ever made. But he did get up and ooze out the rear of the camion to the ground.
Sergeant Wills was a browbeating bully and unfair taskmaster, that's what he was. Wait till the war was over; he'd get him.
In company with three other luckless boys, under the cold if blinking eyes of the sergeant, the gas car was emptied and the bidons piled in a pyramid alongside. The task required a long hour of dirty, sweating labor.
"And now what?" Jimmy said belligerently to Sergeant Wills.
"Now," said Sergeant Wills, "if you'll wander around the corner yonder, you'll find the kitchen remorque. It's caught up with us at last. Joe has some slum and coffee and---"
Jimmy did not wait to hear more. Some mysterious power over which he had no control swung him about and shunted him toward the kitchen corner at a pace that accelerated into an eager lope.
The food was there. It hadn't been a false rumor. Joe, the cook, heaped Jimmy's mess kit high with savory beef stew, buried the cover under some kind of jam, filled his cup to the brim with piping hot coffee, and thrust a half loaf of bread under his arm.
Jimmy ate. He ate voraciously and savagely. It was the best meal, he told himself solemnly, that he had ever eaten in his life. Even the hard-crusted bread tasted like ambrosia.
Well, he'd earned it. Forty-eight hours at the wheel, without sleep or food --- the cheese sandwich had been no more than an appetizer --- and then the corvée work of unloading the gas car. Yes, sir, he'd earned it.
Some memory tapped at the door of his mind. It took time to get inside, but finally he welcomed it with a shout.
"Bread of adventure," he said solemnly to the fellow at his left. "That's what it is, bread of adventure. Gosh, it's good!"
HUSTLING out the rear doorway of Company C barracks to wash one morning, Jimmy plumped squarely into a tall, red-headed youngster.
"Well! Well! Well!" boomed a familiar voice. "If it isn't my boyhood chum from back home!"
Jimmy's hand gripped that of Al Long, one-time delivery boy for the Gem Products Grocery. Al was as welcome as pay day.
"I forget your name," he said to Jimmy, "but you're the fella that smashed up my truck last summer."
Jimmy unclasped his hand and stepped back, his first enthusiasm slightly chilled. "My name is Perrin," he told the other, and added quickly, "You spell it with two R's. What brings you here, Long?"
"I'm the new chauffeur the doc prescribed. General Orders, or whatever his name is, hears you fellas need help handling those big babies yonder, and hollers for Al to get on the job. I brung along thirty or so more drivers to take over."
Jimmy's startled eyes searched Al's khaki blouse for his rating. There were no bars nor stars on the shoulders, no chevrons on the sleeves. Al was still a buck private of the rear ranks.
"Say, you quartered in this little dump? Tough luck. They moved us into the big house over there." Al motioned vaguely toward the large barracks that had long been empty. "Casuals, they call our bunch. And are we! Taxi lads from New York's east side, brewery-truck wrestlers, moving-van muscle-bounds, private chauffs, delivery kings---anybody and everybody that can clamp the old foot feed to the floor boards and hold 'er there. You old timers of the Reservation Mal-let are gonna be taught driving."
Al might not be the best fellow in the world, and his conversation certainly had a way of getting under one's skin; but he fairly bubbled with friendliness, in pointed contrast to Farr and Glover and Walker and that crowd. Jimmy decided Santa Claus had brought him a present.
With a promise to see Al later and show him the ropes, he hurried into his barracks to make ready for roll call. It was late November now, and the high lights of the Cambrai convoy had dimmed. They had camped in beautiful, placid Montdidier for five days, sleeping and living in the camions parked along a tree-bordered street called the rue de College. And then one night, as abruptly as they had left Soissons, they started back, breaking the long trip by carrying spent troops for rest and refitting through Roye and Nesle and Estresses St. Denis to the tiny hamlet of Nointell.
For the Cambrai offensive had flattened against a stone wall of Germans.
Camping near Soissons once more, the Reserve Mallet resumed the even routine of army life. It was intermission till something happened.
The first "something" was the arrival of new recruits, including Al. After roll call and setting-up exercises that first morning, Jimmy attached himself to the boy from his home town.
"Say," Al began, swinging into step as they walked to the kitchen for breakfast, "what do you fellas do here?"
"Work," Jimmy told him feelingly. "We shovel sand and break rocks and build roads and dig latrines and drill and stand inspection for Major Robertson and---"
"Forget it," Al cut in. "I mean, where do you drive?"
"We load around here and farther south, at ammunition parks or railway heads--- Bucy, over that way; Soissons, down the road; dumps with no town near; everywhere--- and then roll a few miles up toward the lines to unload at Celles, Leuilly, Jauzy, Juvigny, Chavigny, Fismes ---"
"Wait! Wait! I can't remember names. They don't mean anything to me. What do you haul?"
"Troops sometimes, trench materials, 'pill boxes', guns, powder, rockets, shells ---"
"What kind of shells? Big busters?"
"All kinds. Mostly the French 75's so far." The power gained by superior knowledge set Jimmy's tongue wagging. "A camion load of 75's is around five tons; that means fifty-one wooden boxes of them. It takes fourteen trucks to move a 'lot': twelve with fifty-one cases of nine shells each, the thirteenth with fifty-two, and the fourteenth with the fuses or timers."
"And you haul 'em right up to the batteries?"
Jimmy was ashamed to say no, but he told the truth. "You see," he explained lamely, "everybody is getting ready for the next great offensive. Nobody knows whether the allies or the central powers will attack first, but it's sure to come. When the big fight begins, we'll probably drive right to the front."
"Ever been there?"
"No---o. We carried troops for the Cambrai campaign, but we unloaded at Péronne, back a few miles."
"Good night!" The right corner of Al's mouth twisted, to give his face an expression of profound scorn. "What kind of an outfit did they dump Al into? Me, the best driver in France, the nerviest soldier over here, pushing a battered old truck along the road a million miles from the excitement! Wait till I get out by myself --- I'll show 'em the way to the front. Leave it to Al. Say, when do I get one of those big babies to drive?"
"When do we eat?" Jimmy countered in camp repartee. "Joe's shooing the K. P. toward the pots and pans already. Make it snappy, Al."
Before the week was over, everybody in the Reserve Mallet knew Private Al Long. He was as conspicuous as a signal rocket flare, which you had to hear and see and even admire. Groups gathered about him and laughed uproarously at his jokes and yarns.
The officers knew him. He was given detail penalties for not saluting, for talking back, for being discovered in the six-inch drain ditch outside the barracks during an air raid, after the order to take cover in the trenches. Lieutenant Crandall publicly sent him uptown for a bath, but it served no permanent end. The next Saturday morning, at inspection, the major caught him with a blouse button swinging free, and condemned his appearance from uncombed hair to unshined shoes in the most vitriolic outburst the service men had ever heard. That was saying much, for Major Robertson was a West Point product, assigned to the outfit to instill discipline through fear and fury.
Company C knew him. He came into Jimmy's barracks one night, made himself thoroughly at home, and respectfully begged Dinty Deems to sing him the song about the horse that lost the race by inches. Dinty, flattered, began with the first line, "An old man sat in a grandstand seat", and made mournful nasal history of the long narrative ballad. Al objected that he had left out a verse; Dinty sang it again to prove he had not. Another recruit wandered in; Al had Dinty render it for his benefit. Ensued an argument as to whether or not the third and fourth verses had been transposed; wouldn't Dinty please sing it again, this time right? Farr, who had been sleeping, stirred into wakefulness, and was penalized by being forced to hear about the fifth trial heat of the famous horse. With one excuse or another, the irrepressible Al, pleading with sober face, managed to make Dinty run the song of the race exactly sixteen times. It was a record performance, over which Company C chuckled for days.
The French mechanics at the atelier knew him. He would roll up his sleeves and do things to a motor that amazed them. He could not speak a word of their language, but he hobnobbed long hours with them when he was supposed to be on corvée duty about camp.
And Al could drive. A sergeant took him out for a lesson on one of the camions and came back with wild, harassed eyes.
"He can make a car do tricks," the sergeant reported to his C. O. "Er --- better pair him with some --- well, conservative driver for balance."
In the meanwhile the friendship between Al and Jimmy, so hungrily visioned by the latter that first morning at the end of the barracks, was not going very well. Jimmy, watching Al's popularity grow by leaps and bounds, wondered moodily if he were wrong and the rest of the world right.
The first rift came, naturally enough, as the result of Al's stinging, offensive speeches. They rankled. Probably, Jimmy generously conceded, Al was handicapped by his former environment and would learn in time.
His lack of respect for authority, which was just a fancy name for plain insubordination, might be excused on the same basis. Give Al a month or two of discipline and he would turn out all right.
But his personal appearance could not be stomached so easily. Al was untidy; worse, he was downright dirty. That meant just one thing --- lack of self-respect. On this score the breech between the two boys widened appreciably.
After the evening in Company C barracks, when Al made a laughingstock of good old Dinty Deems, Jimmy began to avoid him. He met Al's advances with a laconic yes or no, and from friends they drifted into the status of chance acquaintances.
From this point the friendship piled fast upon the rocks. Al's incessant bragging rasped Jimmy's nerves; Al's lack of responsibility, as evidenced by his desertion of assigned work to foregather with the French mechanics, offended his sense of justice. The less he saw of Al, the better he'd like army life.
As for Al, he went his way unabashed. He was so sure of himself, so cockily confident, that he commanded attention and favors. For example, one evening he borrowed ten francs from Jimmy and gave a party at the Hole in the Wall --- without bothering to invite Jimmy.
It was the straw that broke the camel's back. The split between the two became definite and final; they ceased even to be on speaking terms. Ten francs was little enough to show up Al in his true colors, and Jimmy did not begrudge the paltry sum. But it was the end. He was through with Al for good and all.
Then the crowning catastrophe hit Jimmy squarely between the eyes. At roll call one morning Lieutenant Crandall announced that hereafter there would be two drivers to each car, and began to read the list. When he came to Number Four of the Yellow Umbrellas, he said distinctly, "First driver, Perrin; second, Long."
"Say," wailed Al in a discreet undertone, "can you beat that? Me a second driver! Me a second driver to a fella that never knows what a truck is till he runs into mine over in the States! Can you beat it?"
Jimmy shook a despondent head. Al and he were looking at the future from different angles, but the answer was the same.
You could not beat it!