THE new driving partnerships were announced on Tuesday, November 27. After supper that evening, while Jimmy was sloshing his mess kit in the tub of hot water, Joe the cook wiggled a mysterious finger at him and drew him aside.
"Keep this under your hat, Perrin, because I want to spring it as a surprise." He halted long enough to make certain there were no eavesdroppers. "Day after tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and for dinner I'm going to feed the gang --- turkey! Not monkey meat, mind you, not goldfish, not corn-wooly, not anything at all that comes out of a can; but real honest-to-goodness Vermont turkey! Yes, sir, the commissary department of the A. E. F. is shipping each American outfit in France enough gobblers and trimmin's for a reg'lar Thanksgiving feast that'll stretch all the way from soup to nuts. Come early and often; there'll be seconds."
That night Company C barracks rang with barbershop chords. Dinty Deems obliged with "The Horse That Won the Race by Inches", a quartette sang "Tipperary", somebody wailed through "You're in the Army Now", a fellow fresh from Paris and its music halls introduced "Kaiser Bill" and "Over There", and Dinty had to be forcibly restrained from repeating his classic. During the momentary pauses voices hummed softly about the long, long lane a-winding, and the girl who round her neck she wore a yellow ribbon, and the advice to pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. Jimmy admitted it was a pleasant way to squander an evening, but he could not understand the celebration. Then Clover improvised:
"Oh, Joe the cook has this to say,
Parley voo!
Oh, Joe the cook has this to say,
Parley voo!
Oh, Joe the cook has this to say,
'You'll all have turkey Thanksgiving day.'
Hinky dinky parley voo!"
"But Joe told me to keep it under my hat for a surprise," somebody said.
"And me."
"And me."
Everybody laughed. The cook had confided his secret of a Thanksgiving dinner to the entire barracks crowd; and if the sounds of revelry about camp were to be taken at face value, the Reserve Mallet knew it to the last man.
There were no convoys Wednesday. Mouths went watering all day long in joyful anticipation; eyes hungrily swept the roads for sight of a Paris meat bus; officers even found pretexts to order empty camions to the railroad station at Soissons. But Wednesday passed turkeyless.
Thanksgiving morning dawned. At breakfast Joe the cook looked wan-eyed. "Not yet," he said, as the fellows flung their question at him; and once, when somebody asked for a second cup of coffee, he repeated mechanically, "Not yet."
There was still time. The turkeys might arrive any minute. But when mess call brought the crowd swarming at noon, noses lifted to catch the first savory odors of roasting fowl, Joe served a skimpy cold meal.
"Just lunch," he apologized. "The big spread will be at six to-night."
All corvée work had been suspended in honor of the holiday. That made the strain more maddening. Tip at the bridge corner of camp Jimmy joined a group that sat on the bank of the Aisne and skipped flat stones over the surface and lifted quick ears at every rumble of wheels in the distance.
Two o'clock and no turkeys. Three. Four. Five. Dark-ness set in, and the boys wandered disconsolately back to the barracks. Joe tried to cheer them with an ample meal, piping hot. But they did not want beef stew and beans; they wanted turkey. A fine Thanksgiving, this!
Friday morning Number Four was ordered out on convoy.
"Look here, Joe," Al said belligerently, as they gulped down coffee and mush before the kitchen stove in the chilly dawn, "if the turks come to-day, you save us a drumstick each and some breast. We won't be back till late.''
"Sure," agreed Joe. "Sure. If they come."
Number Four loaded with shells at Bucy, climbed the Leury hill, and wound upward to the famous Chemin des Dames. Along this road, which spanned a high plateau, the ground was furrowed and pock-marked with shell hits, and the soldiers had dug in for protection. But Jimmy and Al studied these new scars of war in moody silence. Their minds rode the food truck from Paris.
"Not yet," Joe told them when they reached camp that night. "The turkeys haven't come."
"And they won't," sneered Al. "Somewhere on the way to us they've been grabbed and cooked and eaten by the military police, or the Y. M. C. A., or a bunch of shave-tail officers, or somebody else that low. I'll bet a million dollars I'm right."
Saturday the Reserve Mallet still clung feebly to its hope of a belated Thanksgiving dinner. Sunday the fellows dumped it into the limbo of army disappointments and pronounced it a trench rumor sprung by some practical joker. There had never been any turkeys; soldiers didn't eat turkey and never would.
Jimmy, disillusioned, fell back for solace upon the problem of establishing some middle ground upon which to maintain relations with Al as second driver on Number Four. He didn't like Al. No matter how popular Al was about camp, Jimmy could never like him. The first time he had ever seen Al, back home when the cars crashed, he hadn't liked him. He remembered Al's reckless lunge ahead, his soiled appearance, his arrogant ways, his acting without thinking, his offensive independence, his contempt of authority --- oh, you could go on and on listing his bad qualities. Everything was wrong with Al.
But he had gained instant recognition here in camp. Jimmy resented the achievement; resented it till his mind, probing for reasons, flashed upon the answer. It was because Al possessed a certain quality of character that he, Jimmy, lacked. Al's supreme self-confidence made him a mixer, a hail-fellow-well-met.
"But he's all capital I," Jimmy protested to himself. "He's so wrapped up in his own importance that he can't even remember other people's names. Now I---"
He stopped and whistled softly. "I wonder if I haven't been posing as a little tin god myself and expecting the fellows to come kowtowing to me. If I want to make friends, I must give them something. That's what Al does ---gives them a laugh, answers their advances with a flip comeback, helps them enjoy themselves, keeps them from thinking too much about their own troubles."
It was a new point of view. Jimmy nursed it carefully.
"I've learned something from Al," disgustedly, "no thanks to him. That's the secret --- give. But where? How? To whom?" A sudden inspiration made him slap his leg. "Of course! If anybody in this outfit needs help, it's Al Long. I can't stand him day after day unless he changes for the better, and my job from now on is to give him a heaping fill of reformation, all the way from soup to nuts."
This determination to assume responsibility for Al's future conduct made Jimmy feel smug and righteous. No immediate opportunity for action presented itself, and he was canny enough not to force matters. The partnership began in an atmosphere of forced neutrality. Both boys shared in common their love for a car, and neither sought to shirk either driving or cleaning duties. Al was no Bloot. The combination, indeed, functioned far more harmoniously than either had any right to expect.
Jimmy, in an effort to find some avenue of approach, began to study the characteristics of his second driver, the good with the bad. He envied Al's forceful independence and at the same time deplored his habit of acting without plan or preparation. Because of this absurd hook-up Jimmy bought his compass in Soissons.
He wondered what the French word for compass was. Yesterday he might have asked somebody, but now he copied from Al's aggressiveness.
"I'm not going to depend upon others all my life," he said to himself.
So he purchased a French-English dictionary, by the simple process of boldly entering a store and searching and pointing, and when a patient thumbing through the book revealed that compass was boussole in French, he sought another merchant and bought that, too. He felt very proud of this achievement. It was a trivial thing, perhaps, but the realization that he had conquered a weakness flooded him with self-confidence.
"I'm learning," he exulted, and stopped, open-mouthed, at the tagging thought. "Why --- why, I'm learning from Al. In trying to reform him, I'm reforming myself. All right. We'll call it give-and-take. Now l owe him a boost."
Al remained sloppy in appearance, with black-rimmed finger nails, soiled clothes, and usually a smear of grease across his face. Jimmy approached the subject by attempting to explain how the officers looked upon untidiness.
Al's head jerked up. "Listen," he said, "no officer can tell me where to get off. No, siree. Pershing couldn't. I got my rights. I'm here to fight in a war and not to doll up for any pink tea. Lay off that stuff."
Jimmy, rebuffed, pursed his lips and said nothing more. But help came from an unexpected quarter. It was the day of official inspection of cars, and after the French captains had passed down the line, Lieutenant Crandall came back to Number Four.
"Long," he said curtly, "your personal appearance is a disgrace to the Reserve Mallet." He studied Al's insolent eyes. "I can give you details as a penalty. I can even make you permanent K. P. and take you off the list as a driver." The tiny quaver in Al's eyes gave him his cue. "You're part and parcel of your car, Long, which is the cleanest in the section. I'm ashamed of you. If your camion there could talk, it would say it was ashamed to be driven by anybody as dirty as you are. Think it over."
After Lieutenant Crandall had gone, Jimmy expected an outburst. To his surprise, Al shuffled uncertainly, held out his hands, looked from his greasy clothes to the shining truck, and said meekly, "I --- I never thought of it that way. Do you suppose Number Four really notices?"
Al began his reformation by the dubious process of helping himself to a bidon of gas from the camion ---Systeme D, the camp called appropriating things where you found them --- and utilizing it to wash his clothes. In the days that followed, his finger nails went from black to brown to gray to white, and his face acquired a freshly-scrubbed look. Voluntarily, without hint or duress, he asked for permission to go uptown and take a bath.
And something else, equally amazing, came to pass. One night Farr, the black-haired boy on the next bunk, said to Jimmy, "Perrin, you're a good sort. This Al Long chap they've wished on your car means well, but he's an awful pest. Yet you're tutoring him into the semblance of a human being. By the way, two or three of us are going to have dinner at the Lion Rouge in Soissons tomorrow evening. How about joining us?"
Even while he was accepting the invitation, Jimmy grappled with the shock of the news of Al's status. Al hadn't been popular with the right fellows; he'd been only a clown, a buffoon, to laugh at and with; not one to select as a close friend.
The dinner at the Lion Rouge, with its linen and silver and glass, offered partial compensation for the Thanksgiving turkeys that had failed to materialize. Better yet, it proved only the forerunner of other expeditions with Farr and Walker and Glover. Jimmy was introduced to Cecile, the charming damozel who with her pa-pa and ma-ma conducted the public baths, and he met Mademoiselle Furneau, just across the street. He brazenly bought flashlights from the three red-headed girls in the little shop on the rue de Commerce and pies from Novian at the end of the bridge. He dined at the Lion Rouge and the Croix d'Or, and cultivated a nodding acquaintance with Audrey and Suzette and Lucienne. And after a while, as his shyness wore off, he gloated over his ability to talk freely and entertainingly with the fellows about camp.
But all this came later, as a gradual development. After the first dinner in Soissons, Jimmy redoubled his efforts to help Al out of the rut, and found it a man's-size job. Al's mind had a habit of flying off at a tangent that left Jimmy baffled and helpless, like the affair of the mislaid soldier.
A week after Thanksgiving, to a day, Number Four pulled into the freight yard at Soissons for a load of shells. There its two drivers discovered a forlorn U. S. private, in full marching pack, leaning wearily against the platform.
Al looked him over. "Hello, soldier. What's wrong?"
"I'm lost," said the boy, shifting his heavy pack nervously.
"How come?"
The boy blinked his eyes. "Last night my company was marching through here, and some planes came buzzing along and dropping bombs, and the captain said, 'Duck for cover!' and I crawled under one of those freight ears and went sound asleep. When I woke up, it was broad daylight and nobody in sight. And ---and --- well, that's all, except I'm mighty hungry."
"Hop on. We'll take you back to camp and feed you. After that, somebody can locate your outfit."
"That's right nice of you-all," the lost soldier said, climbing to the seat. He faced them with a wistful air. "Does your company eat big?"
"Does it!" exclaimed Al, pretending to drool at the mouth like a dog. "Wait and see, that's all. Wait and see." The idea intrigued him; he gathered the shattered gastronomical hopes of the last week and paraded them. "What do you think's on tap for dinner this noon, soldier? Listen. We're going to have roast turkey and dressing, giblet gravy, salad, browned potatoes, cake and pie, lemonade, nuts, and all the fixin's."
"Jimminy crickets!" breathed the stranger, swaying partly in unison with the speeding truck and partly in ecstasy over the anticipated feast. Words failed him, and he fell back upon the traditional, "It ain't such a bad war after all."
At the unloading park, while the French corvée was emptying Number Four, the boy wandered away from the camion. Jimmy turned to Al with honest indignation.
"What did you want to tell him that for?" he demanded. "It isn't funny to fool a starving man with promises of a banquet."
"Isn't it though!" Al chortled. "That's about the best joke I've pulled yet. Expects turkey and gets slum or goldfish or corn-wooly! Trouble is, fella, you haven't any sense of humor."
Jimmy bristled. There is no insult more deadly than to be accused of lacking a sense of humor. Then, with his gorge still rising, he saw the joke of being offended and laughed --- laughed at himself.
"In a way, Al, you're right." What he said next sounded pedantic. "Only---only there are practical jokes that are harmless, and there are others that are cruel. Like this dinner bunk. Like the time you made poor Dinty Deems sing his song sixteen times."
"Dinty liked it," Al defended. "He wants to shine as an entertainer and I shove him into the limelight. Nothing to it! Say, let's get going; we're unloaded. Hi, soldier!"
They swung down the long road into camp just as the tag end of the mess line passed the cook. In another sixty seconds they had raced to the kitchen. Joe, beaming like a full moon, hammered on a big steaming pot with a long-handled spoon and droned, "Come and get it!"
Jimmy stole a glance at their chance companion. The boy was licking his lips and sniffing eagerly. Jimmy, recalling his own watering mouth a week before, guessed he already tasted the roasted turkeys and trimmings. He felt sorry for him. He wished he had told him the truth long before. Now it was too late.
"Here's a lost soldier, Joe," Al told the cook. "Fix him up something to eat off and give him some chow.
He says he likes white meat, with mebbe a drumstick on the side."
Al was rubbing it in. Jimmy scowled at him.
"Sure," said Joe. "Sure. Here you are, buddy. I'll heap the turkey and dressing on this tin plate, and the cake and pie on this can cover, and the pickles and sauce---"
Joe worked as he talked, slicing turkey and ladling dressing and gravy upon the makeshift mess kit. The eyes of the mislaid soldier were popping, but no more than Jimmy's and Al's. It was true. The Thanksgiving dinner had arrived at last.
There was even a typewritten menu for each man, which the company clerk had prepared as souvenirs of the occasion. It read:
At three o'clock that afternoon a staff car carried away a soldier to rejoin his outfit "somewhere up there." He went reluctantly, filled with a miracle dinner and much misinformation about how the Reserve Mallet fed its conducteurs.
Before he left, he cornered Jimmy and Al.
"I want to thank you-all for inviting me here to eat," he said from the heart. "I don't suppose, now, I could transfer to your outfit? No, not likely; it would be full-up naturally, what with your mess department and all. Turkey and goose and ---Say, can I get another bill-of-fare to show our fellows? They're going to need some convincing when I start telling them about that dinner."
NUMBER FOUR of the Yellow Umbrellas, splattered with mud from a long convoy, rumbled across the bridge into Soissons and swung down the river road to camp. Jimmy, at the wheel, cramped it expertly into its regular parking place, in line with scores of other canopied camions that stretched ahead as far as the eye could reach in the gathering darkness.
Al crawled stiffly to the ground and fitted his wrench to the plug of the water pump. The motor still turned slowly, forcing out a stream of dirty water as the radiator drained.
Across the road, in Company C barracks, they were singing. It was a silly song, a paraphrase of something or other from the stage:
"And when they ask us,
And they're surely going to ask us,
Just why we never won
Our croix de guerre,
They'll never believe us,
No they'll never believe us,
That there's a front,
But --- we --- don't --- know ---
just---where."
Al snorted his disgust. "That," he said, "is rubbing it in on a fella. I get me a transfer to the Reserve Mallet because I want to be up where the war is. 'A free-for-all, unattached supply train,' says Captain What's-his-name, 'that hauls ammunition and troops straight to the front. There's where you'll get action, Private Long,' he says. Action! Front!"
"But ---"
"Action!" The bitterness of Al's voice was beyond belief. "I come to the Reserve Mallet for action. I want to mix in the fighting. Well, what happens? Four months I been here, November to March. And what happens? Tell me that ---what happens? Precisely and exactly and absolutely nothing. I work around camp like a dog. I drill and stand inspection and get bawled out. I go over this old bus inch by inch a million times; wipe her body with a sponge, rub off grease with gas and kerosene, clean spark plugs, fill grease cups, lie on my back in the mud and swab the running gear."
"And drive her on convoys," Jimmy soothed, remembering his own first days in the army.
"Yeah, take her out and get her smeared with muck inside and out, so I can do it all over again." Al's voice thickened to a growl. "Convoys! Up before daylight, carrying icy water from the frozen Aisne in leaky canvas buckets, standing on the crank to get a quarter turn, and then doing it some more and still some more, till I can swing it clear around, and finally, after about an hour, getting the old motor to wheeze. Then away to some protected ammunition dump to load with shells; then to another protected dump to unload. Back to camp late that night, cold, wet, mud caked, hungry and all in. And always in the safety zone. Know what we are, fella? Slackers, am-bus-kays --- or whatever the French call 'em. No excitement, no action, no glory for Al. 'Hauls straight to the front,' says Captain What's-his-name. Bah!"
"Anyhow," Jimmy said philosophically, "we're safe."
"Safe!" The word was a red flag to Al. "Safe! I don't want to be safe. I want my chance to make good up wherever the front is. I want my reward. Know what I mean? Well, I'll tell you. The only thing a war can give a fella is a --- a medal, like the one they're singing about over there. Say, I want my chance to win a French croy ---a cross of war that proves to the folks back home I made good."
"Yes," agreed Jimmy, "that would be fine. Only a fellow doesn't enlist just on the hope of being decorated."
"Don't he? Don't he now? What else is there? What do you think I'm in this man's war for?"
Jimmy shook a puzzled head. "Forget it, Al. Screw in that water plug and let's get a snack at the kitchen. One of these days the Germans will launch their next offensive and you'll get all the action you want ---and maybe a croix de guerre. Who knows?"
"Rats! I know. Nothing ever happens and nothing ever will happen to this old stick-in-the-mud outfit. If they don't stir up some excitement pretty soon, I'll get a transfer to the tanks."
"But nobody is allowed to transfer out of the Reserve."
"Then I'll desert."
"Al!"
"Well, I got my rights. I join the army for action. There's fighting somewhere and I'm going to see it, even if I have to steal a truck and go joy-riding to the front. Nothing ever happens here."
This was the evening of March 20, 1918. At nine o'clock the next morning, shortly after Jimmy and Al had begun cleaning their camion, the enemy howitzer somewhere beyond the hills to the north flung a shell upon the outskirts of Soissons.
"And they call that war!" Al snorted. "Sending in a screamer every two or three hours, for fear we'll forget they're supposed to be fighting us!"
"Bang!" snarled the German battery up Chemin des Dames way for the second time, and "Br-r-r-r-r-r!" roared the shell coming in, and "Smash!" it exploded in the Place de Laon across the river from camp.
"Well, what do you know about that!" chortled Al.
"Say---"
"Bang!" said the howitzer again, and continued its defiant barks at minute intervals. Shells raked the roads leading into Soissons from the front. The range lengthened, with the railroad station as the target; shortened for a fair hit somewhere in the business district; cramped still more to drop a shell just beyond the end of the bridge, where a mass of earth and rocks flung up like a live volcano. This was getting close, for the Pont des Anglais spanned the Aisne no more than fifty yards from the last camion.
"We'd better knock off work and report to the barracks," Jimmy suggested nervously.
"Not Al. I like it. I'm going to stay right here and listen to the babies come purring in. Don't you know a shell won't hit you unless it has your name written on it? Fact. And they never made a shell marked 'Al Long.'"
Top Sergeant Elton settled the matter with a decisive call for assembly. At the barracks he told the drivers that an alerte had been received, warning the entire Reserve to be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice.
"Fill your radiators and tanks, warm your motors, and get what you need from the gas park," he ordered. "It looks as if the Germans have begun their attack."
The drivers scuttled out to the road. The guns still thundered, but the shells were now falling far afield. It seemed to Jimmy, staring at the scores of camions precisely parked in two long lines, that they were standing rigidly at attention, as if they, too, realized something was in the wind.
He patted the hood of Number Four. "It's coming," he said, taking care that the unimaginative Al did not overhear. "You and I will see real war now."
Al fell to work like a beaver. He was eager and excited, babbling like a youngster making ready for his first circus. Jimmy plodded silently, his mind on the future. He sensed that the test of his courage lay just around the corner of the to-morrows. And he wasn't sure of himself.
But they must be ready; in particular, old Number Four must be ready. So they filled the radiator and cranked the motor, allowing it to idle while they requisitioned a gallon of oil and a quart of grease from the park. A fresh bidon of gas was hoisted to the new rack over the tool box, giving them a reserve supply of four fifty-liter cans in addition to the full tank. The holsters on the dash were made ready for the rifles. The spare locker opposite the tool box was jammed with canned roast beef, corned beef, salmon, beans, and canteens freshly filled with water. You never knew --- the kitchen remorque might stray. After everything else was prepared, Al even fell to scrubbing at the mud that still plastered the side panels of the camion, and moaned when the bugle called them to the barracks once more.
"Anyhow," he said, "I've cleaned the number and the picture of the kids with the yellow umbrella. When we start chasing the Germans back to Berlin, I want them to know what car's their boogey-man."
It looked like moving day in Company C barracks. Beds were dismantled, blankets rolled, bags and packs strapped, guns stacked, ready for transfer to the camions. Al was stopped at the door as he sought to make another trip to Number Four.
"Not yet," a sergeant told him. "The shells are coming in again."
As a tag to his words, one screamed its course from the north and plumped into the river hard by. The drivers crowded the door, Jimmy and Al with the others. There was a squeamish feeling in the pit of Jimmy's stomach, and he wondered if anybody else felt that way, and guessed they did from the strained expressions. Only Al seemed immune, thanks to his firm conviction that his name was not on any German shell.
"Bang!" cracked the enemy howitzer again. "Br-r-r--r-r-r-r-sh-h-h!" sang its projectile in an unbelievably long bass roar. "Smash!" exploded the shell.
The hit was close to the camion line, almost opposite the parking place of Number Four of the Yellow Umbrellas. Mud and tree branches and metal cascaded like a mighty fountain. The climbing sun in the east, unable to penetrate the earthy cloud, temporarily blurred and shrouded the barracks in heavy shadow.
Two voices dinned in Jimmy Perrin's ears.
"If they've smashed Number Four," shrilled AI with terrible venom, "they'll---"
The words were swallowed up by a louder, more imperative command.
"Everybody to the abri!"
Weeks of back-breaking effort had gone into the building of that new dugout, ceilinged with heavy steel rails. The Reserve loathed it for its memories of toil and for its stuffy, stagnant air; but now it seemed suddenly the most blessed place in the world. For the first time in camp history, the fellows ran toward it willingly.
More shells fell close, but bit by bit the range lengthened, till they were only roaring by high in the air, and the order was given to vacate the dugout and carry bed rolls, barracks bags, packs, and rifles to the camions.
Al was still muttering. He snarled at the load that slowed his pace from barracks to truck, snarled at the authority that had cooped him underground when his car was in danger, snarled at the enemy for daring to shell the camp. It was only when he saw Number Four, still upright and apparently staunch, that his violent anger cooled.
The motor of the camion across the road was smashed like a delicate watch flung against a stone wall. The one behind lay toppling, its body a complete wreck. Number Four, too, for all her brave aspect, had suffered. A dozen holes rent the top canvas and back curtain; two ugly gashes splintered the panels. Inside the car lay six or eight chunks of iron shrapnel. Another piece, this one of brass, had imbedded itself in a wooden panel. Al probed at it with a knife blade, quite as if it were a mortal wound in some animate body.
A sergeant whistled two long blasts, "Crank up." Almost on top of the signal came the single blast to start. Nobody appeared to know where the camions were going, but they began moving, each crowding close to the one ahead, like a parade of elephants tail to trunk.
At the bridge corner the convoy doubled back down the camp road and rolled beyond the barracks, beyond the kitchens in their fringe of trees, beyond the bandstand of peace days, and came to a halt two or three kilometers farther along, in the shelter of a wood on the bank of the Aisne.
Here they parked temporarily. All afternoon the shells whistled toward the deserted camp and farther uptown, raking a broad expanse from the Mall to the railroad. Enemy planes circled constantly overhead, with the anti-aircraft "twins" in the field banging with futile ardor at the flying dots in the sky. The white puffs of their tracer bullets dotted the blue as if Charlie Chaplin had thrown a cream pie at heaven and it had splattered.
But just at dark, when the swarm of buzzing hornets decided to call it a day and winged northward for the German lines, a single plane loitered long enough to race audaciously above the camp. The "twins," undismayed by their blank record of months and months, banged and barked with fresh vigor; and all at once, quite without warning, the bird man stumbled and fell, bursting into scarlet flame, like a meteor. Nearer the ground the light died, leaving only a smudge of smoke. Jimmy had seen his first enemy plane brought down.
Late the next day, after confirmation that the Germans were advancing with appalling success, the Reserve Mallet camions rolled away. It hurt to say good-by to the old place, with all its memories, and Jimmy realized that it was to be the end of Soissons for him and the others. Yes, it hurt.
They made camp two or three kilometers south of Soissons, on the Villers-Cotterets road. When Jimmy leaned forward and snapped off the ignition on the dash, the hurt cankered. Soissons had been irksome, in decided contrast to the ease and luxury of life back home, but the Mall had been at least a real camp---honest-to-goodness kitchens, dining halls with tables to eat on, barracks with comfortable cots and with the American Field Service steamer trunks(10) for storing clothes, and running water, and a French store, and the dugout, and more of the niceties of a transplanted civilization than he had ever appreciated. Here there was nothing ---just a hard white road, lined on either side by hundreds of camions, stretching miles and miles into the distance like two parallel walls. Jimmy guessed the Reserve Mallet had abandoned comfort for service.
It was curious about Al. He took to the new life like a duck to water. That night when Joe the cook heaped his mess kit with food, Al came and squatted on the ground beside Jimmy.
"Say," he gestured with a spoon, "this is great." He flicked a questing insect from his puttee. "Back in the barracks I feel sort of cramped. This outdoors stuff is just what the doctor ordered. I like it. And when we roll up to the front, maybe to-morrow ----"
Jimmy stopped eating. His eyes stared straight ahead. In his irritation over the petty inconveniences he had forgotten the dangers that lurked around the corner. He was afraid of to-morrow.
HIDDEN by impenetrable darkness along the Villers-Cotterets road thirty camions, their motors drumming, waited the convoy signal. On the seat of Number Four Jimmy Perrin's body throbbed to the eerie chorus.
"Go!" shrilled the whistle, and the murmur swelled to a bass roar. The lead car flung forward. Behind it, uncouth shadows of the night, raced a company of ghosts, screaming rowdily.
Al broke the spell. "This," he said, trying to peer ahead into the gloom, "is where we find out just what the front looks like."
"Maybe," agreed Jimmy. His voice sounded flat; it lacked Al's exultant note altogether. "Maybe we will. And maybe, if we do get up there, we'll wish we hadn't."
"Why?"
Al had a disconcerting habit of popping questions at a fellow. The safest plan was to ignore them completely. But now Jimmy felt an overwhelming desire to talk; he guessed it was something like whistling up his courage.
"Oh, we haven't had any experience in real war, and we're so young, and ---"
"How old are you, fella?"
"Eighteen," Jimmy said. He coughed to cover his embarrassment. "Well, anyhow, I'll be eighteen this summer. How about you?"
"I'm an old, old man," Al drawled. "I was nineteen last month."
"There you are! That's the way they run this war! A couple of kids driving a five-thousand-dollar truck that's worth its weight in gold up here!"
"Chop it," Al said unfeelingly. "What do you need to shove a baby like this through the night without lights ---white whiskers and rheumatism and gout?" He leaned over to read the radium dial of Jimmy's wrist watch, and hummed, "It's three o'clock in the morning." Then, "Listen, fella; we're due to bury that old chestnut of the camp this trip. You know:
"'And when they ask us,
And they're surely gonna ask us,
Just why we never won
Our croys --- tum --- air,
They'll never believe us,
No they'll never believe us,
That there's a front,
But --- we --- don't --- know --
just --- wherrrre.'"
Jimmy's fingers bit into the steering wheel for the turn right into Soissons, but he offered no comment. The convoy fumbled its way through the black streets of the city and presently emerged upon the Château-Thierry road. Here the driving was easier, thanks to the giant poplars on either side. The speed increased.
Somewhere down the straightaway of that hard, white road the lead car turned to the left. Pawn had come now, a cold, wet, miserable half light that revealed leaden skies and dripping trees. Both drivers of Number Four snuggled deeper into their sheepskin coats.
At a roadside camp just beyond a little town that the signposts said was Le Charme, French troops climbed into the first two dozen camions.
"That leaves six empties, including ours," said Jimmy, when the last soldier had disappeared beneath the protecting canopies. "Do you suppose they miscalculated and won't need Number Four?"
"They'd better need Number Four," Al growled. "My ticket reads to the front."
An officer deployed the six empty camions to a corduroy side road, and they bounced and jolted over the logs to a temporary shed, where a corvée began loading them with guns and shells. These were the famous French 75's. The Reserve had hauled 75's in the past, but never before had a convoy included the gunners who were to fire them. Jimmy's eyes blinked uncertainly.
The thirty camions, once more reunited, creaked into action. The convoy was very businesslike now; its unusual speed spelled an immediate necessity for these troops and their artillery. They whipped through La Ferté Milon, Villers-Cotterets, and down the valley till they reached Vic-sur-Aisne. From the river the camions began to climb through a desolate expanse of country, torn and furrowed with trenches, shell craters and barbed-wire entanglements. It was wholly uninhabited, with no buildings for miles and miles. At sight of a signpost, its arrow pointing north, which read, "Noyon, 7.6 K", Jimmy whistled softly to himself.
"Look, Al," he said, waving an expansive arm. "Know where we are? This is the famous old Somme battleground."
"I don't want to see old battlefields," Al snapped. "I want new ones, with the fighting going on."
In a gully, hidden by a dense growth of willows, the convoy ground to a halt. There were English soldiers here, the first Jimmy had seen since the Cambrai trip in November, 1917. They lay on their backs or walked moodily to and fro, shaking their heads.
"We were up there," one of them told Jimmy, motioning toward Noyon and beyond, "but we had to give way. Why, we'd mow down Fritz by the thousands, and then, before we had time to get our breath, there were tens of thousands more of him beating us back. Nobody can stop him."
Staff cars with English and French and American officers came and went. Motor cycles driven by liaison messengers chugged in and out. Everybody seemed confused and uncertain. The Reserve's own staff cars, a Ford for each section of the convoy, were on ahead somewhere, determining the last frontier of reasonable safety.
"Do you think there's any real---danger?" Jimmy asked Al, moistening dry lips with his tongue.
"Sure," Al answered in his direct way. "You don't think this is a joy-ride to a picnic, do you? Scared?"
"No-o."
Darkness fell, and with it, as if for added protection, a dense fog. Under cover of this curtain the convoy resumed its way, winding slowly and carefully up the narrow road. Just short of Noyon the troops were unloaded, together with three camions of 75's. As the empty cars swung about in great circles for the run back to camp, the French fell into marching order and started forward, straight and true, in precise military form, toward that maelstrom of flashing light and echoing explosions beyond.
Three camions still remained with their precious shells and guns, including Number Four. These, in charge of Sergeant Wills, were ordered cranked.
"Where we headed for?" Al demanded.
"No specified spot," said the sergeant. "The orders are to take the 75's as far as we can and leave them." He added grimly, "They're going to be needed."
The tiny rame of three cars began its plodding trip. Noyon, dark but jammed with troops, was passed in a few minutes, and the convoy rumbled out of that town for Guiscard, perhaps nine or ten kilometers farther north.
And now Jimmy realized that he was in the midst of war. It was not nice at all, nor romantic, nor inspiring. There were no bands playing, no fife and drums, no flags flying, no gallant charges of the troops. Instead, there were only sights and sounds that filled him with a sense of awful depression.
Great guns boomed all about, with detonations that pierced his very eardrums. Explosions echoed and reechoed in that vast cavern of fog. Across the sky constant gashes of fire seared like lightning, turning the night into murky day, and above and on all sides, shells screeched and screamed like sirens gone mad.
Jimmy was driving. He found himself crouching over the steering wheel, head sucked low into the fur of his sheepskin coat. There was a lump in his throat, and his heart pounded like a trip hammer.
The whole civilian population was evacuating. People swarmed the road in frenzied haste, like wild animals fleeing before a forest fire. They seemed neither to see nor hear the cars, and it took expert driving not to run them down. All had tremendous packs over their shoulders---old, old men and women, saddened with the truth of defeat, and young boys and girls, uncertain whether it was adventure or bleak tragedy. Many of them held fast to a tiny child with either hand. Others pushed baby carriages, with the human freight almost buried under a load of household goods. Men passed leading a cow or a donkey; some even attempted to herd little flocks of sheep. Occasionally a rickety cart or wagon jerked by, drawn by some venerable ancient, with the women folk pushing desperately behind. Each vehicle was loaded high above its sides, with wooden cages of rabbits slung underneath and bird cages hanging from the corner posts. Here and there, also were little bands of British soldiers shuffling outward, worn to the breaking point by this terrific onslaught of the enemy.
"I didn't suppose," said Jimmy from the very depths of his heart, "that war was like this."
"It's great!" exclaimed Al.
They came to Guiscard at last and found it a madhouse. Soldiers were running about and shouting. Machine guns dinned like angry rattlesnakes. Heavier artillery crashed and thundered. Stone walls, that looked impregnable, abruptly crumpled into ruins. Signal star shells, red and green and white, scarred the black sky. Hailstones pelted against the walls of standing buildings --- no, they weren't hailstones, either, but bullets.
"Unload!" shouted Sergeant Wills. "Throw off the stuff in that courtyard, you two. Perrin, pull up by the church and dump. As soon as you're empty, run for it."
Number Four jerked its way past the other camions.
It stopped suddenly with a jolt. Stone in the road probably, Jimmy decided. It was. Al hoisted it to one side. Again Jimmy threw in the clutch, forgetting in the confusion to feed enough gas. The motor stalled.
Al cranked. It was the irony of fate that Number Four, grown decrepit in its long service since the first Battle of the Marne, chose this moment to balk. But the motor would not catch. Al cranked desperately. Still no firing spark. Behind him Jimmy heard the clanking of metal as guns and shells toppled from the other camions to the paved courtyard.
He was by Al's side now. Al was breathing hard and swinging his right arm as if to put new life into it.
"I'll take a try," Jimmy shouted in his ear. "Get back and work the spark lever."
He cranked. No response. He cranked again --- again---again. Still no response. His arm was limp now; his breath whistled in his throat. Well, if it came to the worst, they could desert the camion and run for it. Sergeant Wills would wait for them at the edge of town.
Jimmy tried again, in a last despairing burst of false energy. By some happy chance a hot spark ignited the gas-filled cylinder. Old Four's motor roared triumphantly. Almost before he could leap aside, Al had shot the camion in front of the church.
Leaving the engine running, the two boys rushed toward the rear to unload. The tail gate was down and they were scrambling, abreast, into the dark interior, when a quick command brought them up short.
"Halt!"
They slid back to the road.
"Put up your hands! So! Keep them up!"
The voice spoke in precise English, but there was an accent. A flare of light glinted greenly against a uniform.
"You may consider yourselves prisoners of war," the voice went on dispassionately.
In the gutter at one side a pile of refuse burst into flame. By its light Jimmy saw clearly the man who confronted them, pistol in hand. He was a German officer. The enemy had entered Guiscard!
At a hail of their captor's a lurking figure in the background came close and saluted. The officer spoke rapidly to him in German before he faced the boys again.
"You will get back upon the seat of your car with this man," he ordered, "and drive where he indicates."
As Jimmy climbed from the running board to the seat, hoisting his inert body with arms and legs that were like broken reeds, he admitted to himself that the worst had happened. He could look forward only to the routine of some prison camp, a thousand times more dreadful than anything he had known in the monotonous life of Soissons. He was sick. He was beaten down by fear. He knew himself for an abject coward.
Sliding limply along the cushion he gripped the steering wheel with numb hands. Al, panting audibly as from some tremendous exertion, settled by his side. The guard stood on the running board, a glistening Luger pistol ready in his hand.
"Where --- where shall I drive?" Jimmy forced himself to ask. His lips were dry, his tongue inflexible, and it was difficult to speak clearly.
The answer came in guttural German. Evidently the guard spoke no English. He pointed vaguely.
Jimmy pressed the clutch pedal to the floor boards and threw the shift lever into low. As he released the pedal, the camion began to roll forward. Its momentum was like a prod to the boy's stunned mind. For the first time since their capture, his brain began to clear.
"Listen!" Al's eager whisper spat at his eardrums. "I'm going to lunge at this fella and knock him off."
"No," Jimmy warned, so sharply that the muzzle of the blue-black Luger lifted threateningly. He wanted to tell Al that their guard couldn't be taken unawares, but the words stuck in his parched throat. If escape were possible, they must prepare a logical plan.
One last slender cord of will, still unbroken by fear, held Jimmy from absolute rout. His mind livened like a gymnast limbering for his stunt. Something in him was afraid and something else wasn't; something wanted him to run headlong, crying defeat, and then hide himself forever, and something else wanted him to back up against the last wall and fight to a finish.
After a long moment he leaned closer to Al, till his lips were at the other's ear.
"I'm going to speed up till we reach that dark stretch a block ahead and then stop her as short as I can. It ought to jerk that fellow off the running board. Are you game?"
"Sure," said Al. There was something heartening in Al's confidence.
The camion gathered speed. It accelerated from a limp to the pace of a brisk walk --- to a trot --- to an eager gallop. The guard called some command, but it was lost in the roar and rattle of their progress over the cobblestones. And then, as they raced into a deep shadow, Jimmy suddenly set the brakes hard, both foot and emergency.
It happened exactly as he planned. One instant Number Four was charging forward, a runaway with the bit in her teeth; the next she had stopped, quivering like a horse pulled to its haunches. The guard, wholly unprepared for this maneuver, flung into space and was gone.
"Step on the gas!" yelled Al. "Let's get away from here." He craned an inquisitive neck out one side and looked back. "Fella's lying in the road," he reported. "Stunned by the fall, I guess ---Hey, what's the matter now?"
For Jimmy had applied the brakes again. The camion ground to a halt. Just ahead, where some shell had sprawled them across the road, the stones of a fallen wall formed a complete blockade.
"Can't get by with the camion," Jimmy called. "But we can climb over afoot and run for it. Good-by, Number Four! Out with you!"
The motor died at a turn of the switch. Al, already on the ground, waited a moment for Jimmy, holding an arm to steady the other as he jumped. But Jimmy came slowly, almost reluctantly. There was no fear in him now.
"Al," he said.
"Yeah? Make it snappy. Save your wind for running."
"Al, do you remember that truck that burned in camp, and how the French officer had tears in his eyes when he looked over the wreck, and how he said it was a greater loss than a company of troops, because it couldn't be replaced and they could?"
"Yeah, but ---Say, let's be moving."
"Al, Number Four is priceless over here, up here. And she's loaded with guns and shells the Allies can't spare. We haven't any right to desert her and sneak off and save ourselves. Understand?"
"Why --- Say, are we going to run for it or stay here and be captured again?"
"Al," Jimmy said steadily, "if we do get away safely, the old bus is going to get away, too. We're going to escape with her or --- not escape at all."
"You're crazy!" shouted Al. "First off, we prob'ly can't start her again. Remember back there---"
Al's resolution to run for it was weakening. Jimmy knew by the sound of his voice. Without bothering to argue further, he reached in and turned on the ignition switch and set the levers on the quadrant.
"Wind her up, Al."
Al spun the crank. Immediately, as if in league with this new plan, the motor purred its appreciation. Number Four had no desire to be left behind.
A five-ton truck cannot be turned on a dime. To reverse it demands both room and time, and Jimmy had little enough of either. But even Al could not have done it quicker or more neatly. Within a scant ten seconds old Four was rolling along on its return journey.
There was no sign of the guard they had shaken off the running board. The street, indeed, was deserted. Hand-to-hand fighting in another quarter had drained it dry of soldiers.
They flashed past the church, past the courtyard that held the loads of the other camions, and presently rumbled into a parklike square. Here several dark forms ran into the road to stop them, but Jimmy drove at them full speed and they scattered. Hornets, which were bullets, buzzed angrily overhead; one or two spattered against the pavement. But none hit the camion or its drivers.
Just outside Guiscard, in the shelter of some trees, they found the two other ears. As Jimmy braked to a stop, Sergeant Wills ran up.
"About time," he growled. "Unload all right?"
This was hardly the place or the time to tell their story.
"No, we didn't," Jimmy admitted. "We --- we ran for it."
"Oh, scared off, were you?" Sergeant Wills was obviously upset by his baptism of battle. "Some people can't think in a pinch. At that, your fool getaway may have saved the guns from capture by the Germans. Fall in behind Number Three and let's roll back to camp."
They drove for a long time in silence, broken only by the incessant drone of the motor. Queer, Jimmy reflected, how it seemed to be singing triumphantly.
After dawn came, he looked curiously at Al. "Well, we had our little adventure."
"Yeah," Al said eagerly, "we pull enough stunts at last to have some French general kiss us on both cheeks and pin croys --- crosses of war, I mean --- on our manly boosoms."
"But ---"
"We get to the front, get captured, and get away clean with the old bus. When they hear what happened
"If they ever do."
Probably Al had not thought about that. His face screwed into a startled expression.
"We can tell them, can't we?"
"Yes," Jimmy agreed, "we can tell them, but ---" He began humming softly:
"They'll never believe us,
No, they'll never believe us."
Al thought it over. When he spoke again, the words were snarls.
"What do you need anyway to win a croy --- cross of war?" he blazed. "Fellas standing 'round with note books, putting down the stunts you pull? Your own gang of pussy-footing yes-men? Officer witnesses on deck to swear it's O. K.? Fat chance of anything like that happening!"
Jimmy could not understand Al's disappointment. A decoration had never seemed to him of less importance than at that moment. He tried to explain.
"If you do win a croix de guerre," he told Al, "it only means you can wear a little bar to show you have it, or the medal itself on state occasions. It doesn't tell anybody what you really did."
"Shut up!" Al snapped. He curled morosely into the corner of the seat and went deaf and dumb.
Jimmy wished he had somebody else to talk to. He wanted to talk. His elation over a job well done needed sharing. He even began picking half-forgotten speeches from the past. "'A fellow doesn't have to let fear bully him,'" Thad Carrick had said. Good old Thad. Where was he now? And Mr. Elliott with his crisp, "'My duty . . . It's my turn . . . I can be useful.'" Jimmy was beginning to understand what they meant.
Al eased deeper into his sheepskin coat and broke the long silence with an apologetic, "Another cold spell's coming as usual."
Jimmy stared at him in amazement. For the first time since the convoy had left its camp on the Villers-Cotterets road his own body was glowing with genial warmth.
"Doesn't feel that way to me," he said honestly. "It's turning out a grand day."
"CONVOY!"
It seemed to Jimmy the call was incessant. No hour now of the twenty-four that camions failed to roll. No rest or sleep for him, except cat naps in the corner of the seat while Al served his shift at the wheel.
"Convoy!"
Shells on Monday to a park north of Soissons. Guns on Tuesday to Pointoise. Troops on Wednesday to the old Somme battleground. Monday the park was being bombarded. Tuesday the German howitzers raked the road like some gigantic harrow. Wednesday the camions halted just beyond Vic-sur-Aisne, twenty or more kilometers short of Noyon, which had fallen before the enemy onslaught. A great smudge of smoke to the left marked the remains of an ammunition park that the French were burning as they retreated. Thursday the loudest thunderclaps to the north were identified as the explosions of "Big Bertha", a miracle German gun which actually hurled shells into the heart of Paris, more than sixty miles away.
"Convoy!"
Away at midnight. Back to camp the following morning at two. Another call at three. Twenty-four hours of mud and rain and fog, only to find a waiting order for a fresh trip. Time for a cup of hot coffee, yes; but hurry. The camions must go out. Away at sunset, at midnight, at dawn, at noon. Cars and drivers alike weakened under the strain.
"Convoy!"
Where this time? What would they haul? Troops? Guns? Munitions? Supplies? Jimmy never knew. Each convoy was a fresh adventure, with no preliminary hint of its destination, its duration, its danger, its nature. He had learned to take them as they came, without complaint or question, assured only that he might safely count on lack of monotony. Even the gas car trip offered new thrills.
Early Friday morning, after an all-night convoy, Number Four limped into camp with a very sick motor. Top Sergeant Elton, after listening to its wheezy respiration, agreed that the camion was in no condition to roll.
"I'll have the mechanics overhaul your motor during the forenoon," he promised, "and give you fellows a chance to catch up on your sleep. Hop to it. You'll be in camp all day."
Number Four was dirty inside and out. After Elton had gone, Jimmy and Al regarded her with brooding eyes.
"Looks pretty tacky," Jimmy admitted, stifling a yawn. "If we weren't all in from lack of sleep ---"
"Listen, fella," Al prompted, "you grab off forty winks while I give the baby a lick and a promise."
Jimmy grinned. "I'm not that tired. We'll pass up the sleep and polish her off together. Where's the broom?"
Six hours later the motor and running parts of the camion were as clean as newly washed plates, the paneled sides glistened as if freshly painted, and inside no speck of dust or mud met the eye. Number Four fairly beamed.
"Clean as a whistle and absolutely no smell," was Al's verdict. "Say, fella, let's keep her that way."
"Shake on it, Al. From now on we'll probably live and sleep in Number Four, and a fellow's bound to keep his own house in order." He yawned in frank abandon. "how about those forty winks or so before another convoy call?"
The two boys were inside the camion, fitting the poles of their canvas cots into the slots on either side, when Elton reappeared.
"Convoy!" he called.
In less than twenty minutes they were under way. The lead car pointed toward Soissons, and a little later they were rumbling through the battered city, coming now and then upon new ruins where the big shells had hit. From the door of a house that was only a mass of crumbled stones in the rear, three girls waved gaily as they passed.
"That's France for you," said Jimmy. "Every other woman in this country is wearing mourning for some close relative who has died in the war, and yet they have the courage and buoyancy to carry on."
The camions swept out of Soissons upon the Brame road, charging through Brame itself, through Bazoches (Al pronounced it Bazooky) and Fismes. On beyond, near Ville-en-Tardenois, they halted, and drivers were ordered to make ready the plank seats inside. It was to be a troop convoy.
The soldiers came at last. Al looked at them and sniffed. They were Colonial troops, the chausseurs d'Afrique, a silent regiment of black skins and fighting hearts.
"And no smell!" moaned Al in Jimmy's ear.
Darkness had fallen before the troops were loaded and the convoy resumed its way. It proved an all-night drive, with Jimmy and Al alternating at the wheel. Ahead of them the ghostly form of another camion lunged and swayed as the pilot to follow. They wound through Château-Thierry, La Ferté Milon, Villers-Cotterets, and Verberie to a tiny hamlet called Villers St. Frambourg, where the troops alighted.
Number Four of the Yellow Umbrellas had managed somehow, in the incessant jockeying for position, to edge in behind some Reds. The balance of the Yellows, ahead of this rame, started for camp. After a long delay, fully utilized by Al's comments upon how the war in general was being mismanaged, the Red camions began to move, only to pull up short a kilometer or two from the unloading point. Word quickly spread that the Colonials were to be carried closer to the front.
This change of program necessitated chasing after the Yellows and recalling them. All the camions turned and wound back through the village again. Because Number Four had been trailing the convoy originally, it became lead car in this new line-up, and on this reversal of position hinged its further fate. It was elected gas car.
Now, a gas car is wet nurse to the other camions. Its business is to load with five tons of gas and oil and succor trucks that have stalled from lack of fuel.
So while the other camions loaded with troops once more, Number Four rambled toward Pont St. Maxence. Halfway there the clouds split and drenched the earth with an avalanche of rain, which settled into a steady downpour. The gas park was a sea of mud. But Jimmy and Al, with the doubtful aid of Sergeant Kane, who respected his rank, piled on ninety bidons of gasoline and three hundred liters of oil. It was painful work for fellows who had not slept, but presently the camion was loaded to capacity.
"Follow the convoy to this point," ordered Commandant Mallet, who had come up in his staff car and who had been nodding his approval of the energy shown by these American volunteers, "and pick it up there, if possible." His finger traced the route on a map.
It did not seem possible, of course, considering the fact that the gas car was more heavily loaded than any of the other camions, but they took up the chase. It still rained with dismal persistence.
Jimmy drove. By his side Al, face smeared with a combination of water, sweat, and grease, groaned plaintively.
"Hurt yourself?" Jimmy asked, genuinely concerned over this display of grief. "Drop a bidon on your foot or something?"
"Naw," Al spat disgustedly. "But did you get a look at the inside of our car? Oil's leaked all over the floor and mixed with the mud from the cans. It's a reg'lar pigsty. We'll never get it clean again. This is the worst war I was ever in."
Just before they reached Clermont a road guard turned them aside on a detour around the city. Old Number Four's motor, that had been so thoroughly overhauled the day before, presently began to protest. It choked and spluttered as the camion crept up a long hill and paused here and there to fill tanks on stalled cars. On ahead somewhere the others discharged their troops and rolled toward camp.
Number Four of the Yellow Umbrellas fell in behind; in point of fact, it kept falling farther and farther behind, loaded too heavily to hold its own with the rollicking empties, homeward bound. Finally, to cap the climax, it ran out of gas itself. Jimmy and Al had been so anxious to fill the other tanks that they had forgotten all about their own.
Once more under way they ground along mile after mile in the dismal downpour, till they picked up the main body of the convoy again, by reason of the inert condition of the camions. Everybody was low on gas and oil, and the supply car was exceedingly welcome.
After it had passed out bidons to the others ---quite a while after, to be exact ---the newly massed camions, now a formidable array, jumped ahead at the whistle and were off. By now it was close to midnight of the second day.
As gas car, Number Four was allotted a place next to last, with the atelier or repair car bringing up the rear. Two or three kilometers along the way its mechanic dropped out to tinker some crippled motor, leaving Number Four as the snapper of the line. Five minutes later a Red Umbrella pulled up short just ahead, and a much-worried driver came back to borrow a wrench. His carburetor was full of water. He fiddled and fussed with it for fifteen minutes, starting and stopping his motor, till the balance of the convoy was long since out of sight in the darkness ahead.
At last Al lost patience. "Listen, fella," he said, "we're going to double you and go on."
The driver of the Red argued violently. He was hopelessly lost and had no idea how to get back to camp, he couldn't speak a word of French, and his motor wouldn't run more than a minute or two at a time.
"That's a nice piece you're speaking,' Al observed gravely, "and mebbe you've got more of the same. But we can't wait to hear it. So long." And he threw in the clutch and creaked past.
The first objective on the drive back to camp must be Clermont. At every signpost and kilometer stone either Jimmy or Al crawled out into the rain and flashed a light. The signposts said it was 2.3 K to this town and 4.7 K to that one. They did not seem to know Clermont existed. The stones were a part of the conspiracy to baffle them. And every now and then, to make matters worse, they came to a perfect network of roads, leading off in six or eight directions.
"Lost somewhere in France," grumbled Al. "When we do hit civilization again, I hope they won't be talking German."
At last, during one of their protracted stops, a French driver in a reconstructed Paris bus emerged from the darkness. He gave them some vague hints as to where Clermont lay. They proved valuable enough to carry them in that general direction, and old Number Four coughed and staggered along till it brought up short at the end of a one-way thoroughfare parked solidly with cars. An excited Frenchman waved them back when they tried to pass, pretending they could not understand the sign "Sens Unique!" Traffic, it seemed, must flow in the opposite direction.
Al sat tight at the wheel and waited. In another ten minutes peace reigned, and he put on full speed, stepped on it --- and dashed through. Several irate men in uniform yelled, but the drivers chose to be hard of hearing. There was no possible room for two cars to pass and what might have happened if Number Four had met another is hard to guess. Luckily none argued the right of way. The camion emerged from the narrow lane in safety, with its drivers in possession of more or less clear consciences. Theirs was the gas car; it was their duty to keep moving.
Clermont loomed ahead, sitting darkly on the top of a hill. The grade was steep and the road paved with the worst cobble-stones either Jimmy or Al had ever encountered. Two or three times, in some rut or hole, the tired and abused motor seemed on the point of expiring; but eventually it fought to the summit, a public square of the town.
From the murky darkness of a building a dozen French officers came running toward the camion. Jimmy motioned for Alto brake to a stop. He wanted to be diplomatic. Anyhow he couldn't get away with a sick engine.
After Jimmy had explained what section they belonged to, one of the most impressive officers told them to pass on, going back to camp by way of Criel, Senlis, Crépy, Viller-Cotterets, and Longpont. He spoke rapidly, clanking out the names as one says the alphabet. Jimmy tried to repeat them; Al tried. It was no good. They were too tired and sleepy. But the impressive one would brook no delay. He hopped up and down and ordered them on their way toute de suite! They went.
Wheezing along somewhere beyond Clermont they came suddenly upon a disjointed section of the convoy, halted but with motors still running. Jimmy jumped out and splashed ahead to the rear car, Number Nine of the Yellows, where he found Dinty Deems sprawled on the seat. Dinty announced that he didn't know why they were standing still and that he cared a whole lot less. By this time all the drivers were growing temperamental.
Jimmy and Al talked and dozed in an absent sort of way till the whistle blew and the line of camions began to edge forward. Nine never budged. They waited a polite moment or two and then doubled it. Later they learned that Dinty had fallen sound asleep and that when he woke up again, it was broad daylight. The motor still turned, but his camion was alone on a deserted road.
Jimmy was at the wheel now. Between the erratic motor and his dulled mind he managed to lose the guiding convoy. There was nothing to do but keep plugging along mile after mile, with Al snoring by his side and lurching heavily against his body. At last the camion popped abruptly into a little town and brought up at one end of a long bridge. Jimmy, deciding he needed a jolt to his thinking apparatus, waked Al and explained the situation.
A long conference ended with the decision to take a chance by going straight ahead over the bridge. They were as likely to be right doing that as by turning off the bisecting road that followed the river. Anyhow the bridge was smooth planking and the other road wasn't. They'd chance it. So Jimmy threw her into gear and crunched across.
At the far end of the bridge they found a very human and alert guard. He had seen the convoy pass, oui; they were on the right trail, oui; they should turn à gauche at the next corner, oui. Considerably elated they coddled old Number Four into life. Al took the wheel a little later. but the shift was awkward. and the motor took advantage of their sleepiness and coughed and stalled.
Jimmy crawled out to crank. A new and disconcerting sound of running liquid spelled more trouble, and he flashed his light under the drip pan. A steady stream of something was pouring from its outlet hole; either the gas line had sprung a leak or the radiator was emptying. By the lack of smell he surmised it was the latter.
With Al's assistance he discovered that one of the plugs on the water pump had jolted out. They had stopped in the nick of time, thanks to the stalled motor, else the plug would have spilled into the road through the vent of the drip pan.
After it was screwed into place again, each took a canvas pail and began to scout for water. The rain was still pelting ironically, but they could not utilize it. There was no visible pump or faucet in the town street. Al volunteered to walk back and confer with their sympathizing friend, the bridge guard, while Jimmy paced up and down the street, keeping a wary eye on the camion, though how anybody could ---or would want to---steal the old wreck, was quite beyond his comprehension.
It was a baffling street. The houses came flush with the edge of the sidewalk. Where there were gaps between the buildings, representing courtyards, there were also unclimbable walls and solid iron gates. At night, apparently, the residents retired to their strongholds and locked out the rest of the world. A dog or two snarled at Jimmy when he rattled the gates, but no human came to his aid. Even in France few people are about in country villages at three in the morning.
Al returned with cheering news. Somewhere on the street, farther along, there was a hydrant, that all who leaked their radiators dry might use. So they stumbled up the muddy road into the murk ahead, shooting the flashlights alternately to right and left, till they found the water pipe. In another fifteen minutes one of them cranked old Number Four, the motor wheezed into an elephantine snore, and they resumed their steady grind.
Nothing more happened till they reached Senlis, though at one point a French Berliet dashed suddenly across the road, heading point-blank at the camion. It promised a head-on smash up, but the driver evidently awoke just in time to veer away as abruptly as he had charged. They nodded understandingly. Both of them had known that frightful instant of lapsing wakefulness at the wheel.
In Senlis Sergeant Wills hopped on their running board and asked their company. Al told him peevishly they were Yellow Umbrellas, and couldn't he see the insignia on the car? Which, of course, he could not, what with the inky blackness and the pelting rain.
He laughed good-naturedly and said he had a message from their company commander. It seemed Lieutenant Crandall was on ahead somewhere, with the only two cars of the whole Reserve that could be located, and he wanted all Yellow-Umbrella strays to be sent to camp as promptly as possible. The lieutenant, it appeared, was very depressed at having lost or mislaid all his camions. Jimmy and Al grinned; it tickled them to think that even the efficient officer could not keep his convoy together.
Crépy was the next leg on the trip. Once on the road again the two boys spread out their map and looked to see if the town lay on the shortest route. Gas car or no gas car, they were determined to cut for camp in a bee line. But the map said Crépy.
Dawn came. It was a sullen morning, cold, wet, with great clouds whipping across the sky before a sharp breeze. The road, as far as the eye could reach, was deserted. Both of Number Four's drivers were thoroughly exhausted now, and they shortened their shifts at the wheel to a half hour each. Two nights and a day and more of steady rolling were exacting their toll.
The motor coughed apologetically, back-fired testily, coughed again, and died. Under ordinary circumstances either Jimmy or Al would have guessed the cause. But by this time they were so numbed from driving and lack of sleep that they simply fussed aimlessly with wires and pipes, cranking occasionally in a dispirited manner, till at last, by some chance inspiration born of their task as gas car, they deduced that the tank was empty. They hauled forth a bidon from their load and filled the tank.
Near the end of another hour Crépy loomed ahead. Al, at the wheel, had nursed a considerable speed from Number Four, and he rounded a corner without bothering to slow down. Only by dint of foot and emergency brakes was he able to stop in time to prevent them from ramming a motionless camion sprawled in the middle of the road, which proved to be the tail end of a convoy of two, one Red and one Yellow Umbrella, to say nothing of a Ford staff car, at the end of a towline by reason of a burned-out bearing.
The arrival of another Yellow Umbrella seemed to elate Lieutenant Crandall immensely. He fairly lorded it over his less fortunate brother officer.
After another of the interminable waits that always came at a tag-end of a convoy, they began to move. The two officers elected to pilot the other Yellow Umbrella camion, demoting its drivers to the towed Ford. The Red Umbrella fell into line next, and faithful old Number Four, the gas car, wheezed and limped along behind.
The rain stopped, the sun came out warmly, and both Jimmy and Al could guess the miles to camp. A new peace and contentment filled their souls. They began to reckon what day it was. Sunday, they decided. And then they realized for the first time that it was Easter Sunday. The knowledge, somehow or other, dulled the edge of their irritation and spurred fresh energy into their tired muscles and numbed brains. From there on they ran smoothly and rapidly. Perhaps Number Four also knew it was Easter Sunday.
It was nearly noon when they reached camp. They limped to the gas park, after stopping to watch the lieutenant drivers put out a fire that had started from the other Yellow's foot brake, and unloaded the bidons that remained, as well as the oil that was still in cans. Most of it seemed to be smeared over the floor of the camion.
Between them, staggering and uncertain, they managed to close the tail gate. Al cranked the car and threw himself upon the running board, while Jimmy maneuvered the camion to its parking space. Then, wearily, they climbed to the ground to reckon the cost of the trip in breakage and losses.
One tire was half gone. Three leaves in a front spring had snapped. Minor breaks and bends leered at them. Missing bolts and nuts were replaced with what looked like hollow staring eyes. Worst of all, the condition of the camion inside made it wholly uninhabitable.
But neither of them worried. It was Easter Sunday and they were back from forty-eight hours of rolling. They gulped down some delicious beef stew and crawled into the camion to untie their bed rolls.
Jimmy's nostrils quivered. He pointed at the mess of oil and mud on the floor.
"Clean as a whistle," he mimicked, "and absolutely no smell. ---Where do we sleep?"
"Outdoors," snapped Al. "Whaddaya want --- a brass bed, with a mattress and sheets and things, in some stuffy room?"
Curiously enough, Jimmy did not. He could think of no better place in all the world to sleep than outside, under the canopy of the smiling blue sky.