BY April 6 the German drive had spent its fury, and the world quieted and turned normal again.(11) The next day Jimmy's group of the Reserve Mallet shifted its camp to Villers-Helon, a typical French one-street town that boasted a château, a cluster of farmhouses and yards, a few mean homes for the peasant population, and occasional makeshift shops. The camions walled the main thoroughfare.
Madame Salade ran a café in Villers-Helon.
Farr told Jimmy about her first. "She serves meals," he declared, "that melt in your mouth. And she's about the nicest old lady you'll meet in a month of Tuesdays. If you think the French people don't like us, just drop into Madame Salade's."
Jimmy promised, but during the next two or three days the confusion of getting settled in a new camp, minor convoys, and the inevitable camion cleaning for French inspection crowded the thought from his mind. It was Walker's queer comment that proved the immediate spur.
"Perrin," said Walker, stopping him late one afternoon, "if you ever want a good meal and happen to be broke, Madame Salade will put you on the slate till pay-day."
Jimmy grinned. "Thanks. I've heard about her place, and right this minute I'm hungry. But I generally manage to pay as I go."
"Yes," admitted Walker, "I know you do, but --- there are others who don't." He turned away abruptly.
As Jimmy walked down the street in the opposite direction, a tiny worry played tag with his thoughts. But he had the presence of mind to salute the owner of the château, who had been an officer in the War of 1870. He even paused to distribute candy and crackers and gum among the ragged urchins who mobbed him with shrill demands for chocolat and biscuits and blacjacque. Little courtesies of this kind went a long way toward cementing the cordial relations between the French and the Americans.
Ahead of him, after he had broken away from his young friends, Jimmy saw the dog which had attached itself to Company C during a convoy through the town of Nancy and which was made known to strangers with the confusing statement, "Yes, sir, his name is Nancy."
Jimmy did not know where Nancy was going now, but he guessed both of them were bound on the same errand. The dog's under jaw hung suspiciously moist and his tail wagged sanguinely. If Jimmy could read signs aright, Nancy was also hungry. So by the very simple process of trailing this four-footed guide down the hot, noisy street and through an open doorway into an unbelievably cool, quiet room, he found Madame Salade's.
A middle-aged French woman, large and motherly in appearance, sat knitting behind the wicket of her cashier's cage. When Jimmy saw her first, she was smiling indulgently over Nancy's attempt to beg for food.
"Bon jour, monsieur," she said to Jimmy, so cordially and so sincerely that he immediately felt at home. "Un moment, monsieur."
Nancy got his bone. Like the real gentleman he was, he took it outside to gnaw.
Madame Salade said something to Jimmy in French, and when he shook his head to indicate that he did not understand, and expected her to show mild irritation, she only smiled again and came over and put her hand on his arm and led him to the yard in the rear. It was a garden, gay with red and blue and pink flowers and thriftily-planted beds of lettuce and parsley and endive and chicory. Graveled paths framed them in ovals and squares and oblongs. On the lawn of closely-cropped grass rested several round tables, shaded by apple trees in full bloom. Jimmy had almost forgotten that such tranquil nooks still existed.
Jimmy ordered an omelette. He ordered an omelette with six eggs, and Madame Salade said, "Oo, la, la!" and held up her hands and laughed at his prodigious appetite. But she patted his shoulder, to prove she sympathized and understood, and plucked some flowers and made a bouquet for his table, and after she had brought the bread and silver asked him if he wanted a salad, too. Her, "Et salade, monsieur?" was like the thrill of a mocking bird.
Jimmy assured her he did, for he remembered now that the fellows had confessed her salads were manna for the gods. Her name, of course, was not Madame Salade. The real one tangled on American tongues, and they had honored her skill with the mixing bowl by calling her Madame Salade. Farr, who spoke French, said she had been childishly delighted when he explained the compliment.
The omelette, fluffy and yellow, and the salad, crisp and green, broke down Jimmy's last reserves. He laughed with Madame Salade, and pointed out objects and called them by their English names and had Madame Salade tell him what they were in French. Before the meal was ended, without any common language for the exchange of ideas, Madame Salade and he were old friends. She was mothering Jimmy, and Jimmy liked it, and she would mother the whole outfit, and they would like it too. It was inevitable.
Over at the desk, when he was ready to go, Jimmy paid his bill, which Madame Salade called the addition, with a five-franc note from his long wallet. She accepted the paper money reluctantly and twisted it and smoothed it before her so long that Jimmy was close to panic. Maybe it was counterfeit. But when she reached out, with a word of apology, and spread the lips of his billfold till it revealed a sheaf of other notes, and said happily, "Oo, la, la! Beaucoup!" lie suddenly recalled what Walker had intimated. Madame Salade, because of the bigness of her heart, would extend credit to any fellow who was low in funds. She had been worried for fear Jimmy's five-franc offering might be the last in his wallet.
"Madame Salade will put you on the slate till payday," Walker had said. Jimmy's gaze, wandering over the desk, fell upon an ordinary schoolboy's slate, with a single crayon line scrawled across the top: "A Kidder, 4 francs." It was Al's unmistakable handwriting.
Ten minutes later Jimmy cornered his driving partner out on the street.
"Al, you owe me four francs."
"How come?"
"I paid your bill at Madame Salade's. You might have asked me for a loan."
"Oh, that." Al's face screwed into a satisfied smirk. "That's just a little joke I pull. I'm not broke. Got change for a twenty?"
Jimmy counted it out. "I don't see anything funny in deceiving her."
"Fooling her, you mean. No-o. Well, maybe it isn't my best stuff."
That was one trouble with Al. He couldn't get the other person's point of view.
The next morning Number Four happened to be last car of a convoy rolling back from the front. About dawn, in a battered village somewhere near the lines, a girl came running to the roadside. She was an American girl in a nurse's uniform. As Number Four passed, she held out her arms. "Take me back with you!" she cried. "Oh, take me back with you!"
"Just joking," Al said.
But Jimmy knew better. The girl was not joking. There was real agony in her appeal. He could not stop, of course, and he drove on toward camp with the cry ringing in his ears. He wanted to go back and apologize, but that was impossible. It was like --- like a story without any beginning or end.
Two hours later the convoy ground to a halt. Number Four, at the end of the line, brought up at a crossroad in the open country, and an old French civilian who had been sitting on a rock came limping toward the camion. He looked tired and sick.
"Wants a lift," guessed Jimmy. At that moment the army regulation that forbade such a procedure seemed downright cruel. "Hop off, Al, and tell him we can't transport anybody except on written order."
At the starting whistle Al swung aboard Number Four. Something about his expression reminded Jimmy of the cat that swallowed the canary.
"Did you explain?" he asked sharply.
Al nodded, trying to keep his face straight. "I said to him, 'You got the wrong bus, mister. This is Number Four. Back a ways, around that bend in the road, is Number Thirty, which carries passengers. You stand right here till it rolls up and then climb on.' " Al slapped his knee. "And there's no Thirty in any outfit, see? That's a funny one to pull, fella."
Jimmy pictured the tired, sick old man waiting patiently for a camion that would never come.
"No," he told Al shortly, "that isn't funny at all."
After roll call a few mornings later, Lieutenant Crandall faced the assembled company.
"In some manner I shall not attempt to investigate," he began, "a rumor has spread among the French here in Villers-Helon that each of our camions is to be equipped with a cook-stove. Yesterday one of the inhabitants brought me a sample, trundling the heavy range to headquarters in a wheelbarrow."
Company C wanted to laugh. The line wavered uncertainly but stiffened again to rigid attention at the officer's sharp command.
"Now, the trouble with that joke is that it backfired. Most of them do. That Frenchman, hurt and offended, formed an unfavorable opinion, not only of the fellow who perpetrated it, but of his outfit, and of the whole United States which his outfit represents.
"We men of the Reserve Mallet are the samples from which the French must judge all those other millions of Americans who are coming. That makes it a duty to leave behind us, after our contacts, the impression of friendliness, of kindness, of helpfulness."
Lieutenant Crandall paused. He seemed to fear he might be talking over their heads. When he spoke again, it was in a vernacular they could understand better.
"We're a queer tribe at best," he said. "We eat and sleep and live in our trucks, like gypsies without a home. What the people of France ---particularly those who aren't in uniform---really think of American soldiers in general depends upon what they think of the Reserve Mallet. Let's surprise them favorably by proving ourselves pretty average run-of-the-mill humans with good intentions."
He was warming to his task now. He was making his company feel he was one of them.
"After all, our gypsying is like life in general --- only more so. We must be extra careful of what we say and do, because in all human probability we won't be passing this way again. We won't have the chance later to explain what we meant, or to apologize, or to make things right. To-day we crash into some little village. Tomorrow we crash out. Hello --- good-by! As long as there isn't any chance to correct mistakes, let's try not to make any. We should be able to pack up at any moment of the day or night and roll away, feeling that as far as we could, we've given a square deal to everybody from the mayor to the village donkey. Think it over."
Jimmy had never liked Lieutenant Crandall so well as he did at that moment. The officer was not much more than a boy himself, and he had said what he had to say with boyish sincerity. There was no anger or offended dignity or threats of punishment in that speech.
And it had driven home. Jimmy found himself eager to shoulder this new responsibility and prove himself before the French to be at least a tolerable example of what Americans should be. He guessed the other fellows felt that way, too, though nobody put it in so many words. It was the sort of thing you did not talk about.
Al shouldered close and said, "See anything funny about setting up light housekeeping in the camions, fella?"
Jimmy turned away without answering. He knew now who had played the joke. Well, that was over and done with. Al would know better another time after listening to Lieutenant Crandall's talk.
Just before taps that evening Jimmy dropped into Madame Salade's. Al was there, and Farr and Walker and Glover. They were walking about the tables in the garden, heads bent low and feet scuffling the grass. Madame Salade herself fluttered about, clucking like some mother hen whose chicks have strayed.
"Al's lost a locket," Farr explained. "We're trying to find it for him."
Outside on the company street the bugle sounded, and they ran for the door. But it was not blowing taps. This was a strident alerte. Once more the German war machine was rolling toward Paris, with Villers-Helon directly in its path. The Reserve Mallet must evacuate.
As the fleeing camions wound from the village, with Jimmy at the wheel of Number Four, Al hunched motionless in the far corner of the seat. He was strangely silent.
"Asleep?" Jimmy asked softly.
"Naw!" The voice was a growl. "I can't sleep." Al shifted his position and thrust his head from beneath the seat canopy. He seemed to be peering into the darkness behind, eyes straining to catch some picture in the murky background.
"Too tired?"
"Not that." And then, "Say, fella, you see that light of Madame Salade's as we drive away?"
'What light?"
"In her garden, where the tables are. A moving light. A lantern or something. Shifting here and there and rising and falling as if ---"
"As if what?"
"As if somebody's looking for something. Say, fella, you suppose she's looking for that locket?"
"Probably. She's that kind. I think she was more worried over the loss than you."
For a long time, while Number Four bored its way into the black tunnel of night, Al said nothing. When he did speak finally, the words limped and stumbled.
"I --- never owned --- any --- locket."
"What!"
"It's all a joke." Al's speech came with a quickstep now, a rush to cover the whole confession. "Last night I pretend to lose something, just to kid her, and I look around the grass and flowers and under the tables and then have Farr parley-voo to Madame Salade. I say it's a locket with my mother's picture in it, so she'll think it's valuable, and I plan to go back to-morrow and tell her I'm pulling a practical joke, sorta April Fool stuff, and to stop looking and laugh that off. And now---"
"And now," Jimmy finished, as Al paused, "Madame Salade is back there in her garden, searching for something that never existed."
"I know," said Al miserably. "I'll never try to pull another joke as long as I live. I'm cured."
The German war machine rolled over Villers-Helon and left behind a path of utter destruction. The Reserve Mallet never went back. It was another story without an end. Rumor whispered that the civilian population lay buried on familiar ground . . . Perhaps there was a mound in the garden Madame Salade loved so well.
SOMETIMES Jimmy wondered what Camion Number Four thought of the war. Patient old beast of burden, homeless, suffering from age and necessary abuse, grown gray with dust and caked mud, driven over strange shell-pitted roads in pitch darkness, overloaded till its sides warped and its floor creaked protestingly, it was apparently always eager for further adventuring. Jimmy liked to imagine it whinnying gladly when Al and he answered a convoy call. There was something pathetic and lonesome about Number Four in repose.
Even in retreat it kept its head high. For now the Reserve Mallet made no pretense at serving the front; drivers and cars fled before a mighty fury that swept down from the north. "Dropping back to La Ferté Milon," a sergeant told Jimmy. And so they were. But when they reached the town, there was no stop, and they went on and on, hour after hour.
Disquieting news snapped at their heels. Brame and Thimes and a dozen other towns familiar to the Reserve had fallen. Dulcy le Château, where they had unloaded yesterday, was now No Man's Land. Soissons and Château-Thierry were threatened. The Germans swept forward like a scythe, with Paris as the ultimate goal.
"Crank up! Crank up!"
This time the lead car started north, but the direction meant nothing, for the convoy wound back south in a gigantic circle. Hours and miles dumped into oblivion. There was no stop, no rest, no slackening in the steady march of retreat, till they reached Dhuisy, packed solidly with hundreds of camions.
The whole civilian population was evacuating. The roads into Dhuisy flowed with rivers of desolate humans, just as they had that other time up Noyon way. With the tragedy of Villers-Helon still fresh in his mind, Jimmy found himself once more brooding over the menace to non-participants in the war. He wished something would happen to make him forget.
With the experiences of the past hectic months crammed into the kit bag of his mind, he faced his own future with more confidence. He would be afraid again, he would always be afraid; but he had gained the knowledge that if a fellow did his job up to snuff, it left him no time to grapple with fear. There were too many other things to think about.
"Crank up! Crank up!"
They were off again. As the long line of camions reached the edge of town, Sergeant Wills hopped upon the running board of Number Four.
"Pull over to that yard yonder," he ordered. "We're going to help these civilians evacuate."
"Great!" said Jimmy with honest enthusiasm.
But when he saw their cargo, he laughed hysterically. Al called upon high heaven to witness the injustice. The camion was their home, their dressing room, their dining room, their sleeping room --- they couldn't put those things into it! Old Number Four sighed as its motor stilled for the loading.
By the simple process of picking them up, one by one, and tossing them willy-nilly into the camion, forty-five woolly, smelly, bleating sheep were crammed aboard. Then, with the tail gate in place, Number Four rolled south again.
"Listen, fella," said Al, "what does it say on those French freight cars that hold forty soldiers or eight horses?"
"Forty hommes --- eight chevaux."
"Yeah. Well, we better paint a sign on this bus. What's sheep in French? Brebis? Yeah. Make it read, forty hommes or forty-five brebis."
"C'est la guerre, Al!"
"Yeah," agreed Al glumly, "it's the war, all right. But me, I never expect to find a flock of sheep enlisted in any war I fight."
Hours later, at a little hamlet called Tissy, on the Marne River, the animals were turned over to the custody of the owner and his two sheep dogs. The man's thanks were profuse, but all the thanks in the world could not make up for the way Number Four smelled. As a home, it was pretty close to a total loss.
At Jaignes, which marked the end of a retreat that had stretched over seventy interminable hours, with only intermittent stops, Jimmy and Al elected to sleep outdoors and flung themselves upon the grass of a convenient park like the tramps they looked and felt.
It seemed to Jimmy he had no sooner fallen asleep than somebody was shaking him. But when he opened an eye to protest, he found it broad daylight.
"Convoy!" said Sergeant Elton. "Rolling to Château-Thierry."
"But we just came from there," wailed Al. "That's all we're doing for days and days ---just coming from there."
Sergeant Elton laughed. "Don't blame me; I'm not running this war. Breakfast first and" --- he looked them over critically and sniffed--- "you'll have time to wash your hands and faces."
So Number Four uncomplainingly pointed north once more, and on a dull mid-afternoon rumbled into Château-Thierry. The town was oppressively silent and deserted, with the store fronts boarded up and all business suspended. The convoy lurched through empty streets, swung right, and bounced along a rough woods road to a munition park fed by a temporary railroad.
"Tail gates down," came the order. "Back up to the train and let them load you."
The usual French corvée stirred into action. But all at once there came an interruption. A liaison messenger chugged into view on a motor cycle, the corvée turned tail and fled, and the train, without even a warning signal from the engine, scuttled out of the park. Sergeant Wills blew his whistle.
"Crank up! Crank up! The Germans are coming!"
In a jiffy the park emptied of camions. The lead car took the rough woods road as if it were concrete pavement, and the others, crowding each other till radiator almost touched swinging tail gate, scampered along in its wake. Number Four brought up the rear. Through Château-Thierry they charged, like wild elephants on a rampage, till they straightened into some semblance of convoy form on the road that led west to Crépy.
There were fleeing people on this road, just as there had been on every road all day. But these were different. They were soldiers, wounded, with arms and legs and heads bandaged, an overflow which the ambulances could not handle. As the empty camions swept past, they held up hands in mute supplication.
Al braked Number Four to a stop. "I'm going to give 'em a lift," he said defiantly. "It's against orders, but ---"
"Of course," Jimmy agreed quietly, "we'll carry them." He did not realize it at the moment, but the decision marked his character growth.
Gratefully the blessés piled aboard, for the most part soldiers from Morocco and Madagascar, till the camion was comfortably filled, with a lady refugee and two frightened children sharing the drivers' seat.
As Al let in the clutch, preparatory to the run for Crépy, old Number Four started so gently and thereafter picked her way so gingerly around the bumps that Jimmy decided she thoroughly approved her human freight.
At Crépy the convoy ground to a halt, and Number Four, tail gate down and ladder in place, was emptied of its precious cargo. Sergeant Wills, up ahead, casting a hurried glance of inspection down the camion line, deliberately turned and looked in the opposite direction till the last blessé was gone. That meant there would be no adverse report turned in to the C. O. Sergeant Wills was regular.
At eight that night they loaded from the same train that had deserted Château-Thierry, and that by some intricate process of switching and deploying had managed to reach Ducy, a little town just beyond Crépy. From the dark cavern of one of its freight cars Number Four drew twenty-seven ungainly boxes of gunpowder.
"And now," prophesied Al, with a certain note of elation in his voice, "we'll go up among 'em."
But they did not. There was too much shelling to warrant the risk. The great guns clattered and smashed and banged. The sky was etched into a spider web of fire. Planes buzzed like angry wasps. Occasional star shells, green and red and yellow, tinged the night with color. Instead of rolling to the unloading park, the drivers were ordered to burrow their camions into the shadows of a narrow street.
"Crawl inside and get what sleep you can," Sergeant Wills advised.
Jimmy crinkled his nose. Al stifled a yawn with a sniff. For Number Four still smelled of sheep. Anyhow, with the shell hits plumping here and there, twenty-seven boxes of explosives would not make exactly the kind of a mattress a fellow would choose for his bed. They retired to an adjoining courtyard.
The clanging of a village bell beat hard at their eardrums. Even before the anti-aircraft batteries let loose, both boys caught the peculiar, intermittent hum-m-mm-hum-m-m-m-m-m-m that identified German planes.
"An air raid," complained Al. "Say, fella, if I ever go to another war, I'll have it down in black and white first that I work only union hours and have a chance to snooze now and then."
"Go ahead and sleep," Jimmy told him with fine disdain. "The planes are over Crépy, and it's so dark here we're hidden like a needle in a haystack."
All about them, indeed, the night was as black as mud. But abruptly light stampeded the darkness, as if a midday sun had burst from a total eclipse. The leading enemy plane dropped an illuminating flare, which drifted slowly from sky to ground on a parachute arrangement. For miles the country flooded with a ghastly pinkish glare, so bright and penetrating that it pricked at Jimmy's blinking eyes.
A flaming torch descended upon Crépy. A bomb fell and exploded; another, and another, and still another, till the crashes were the beats of a nightmare drum. One of the first found its target. Over in the stricken city a hand-grenade factory caught fire. It blazed luridly, choking and belching as the powder burned, and snapping like a bunch of gigantic firecrackers as the grenades roared and burst.
Jimmy had seen plane attacks before, but this turning of night into day to make them effective seared his nerves. The whole landscape was a silhouetted mass of crimson glare. Al looked like an Indian, an Indian set on a pedestal, with a tremendous spotlight intensifying every hair of his head, every wrinkle of his uniform. Everything that had been invisible a minute before ---camions, walls, houses, trees, the hills behind ---- stood out nakedly. There was no escaping the pitiless glare.
Even the remaining planes could be seen clearly, high up in the purple sky, swinging across Crépy with military precision, in contemptuous disregard for the puny anti-aircraft guns. There were seven of them left. With the grenade factory demolished, they turned their attention to the railroad station. The first dropped sixteen bombs and retired. The second took its place and dropped sixteen more. The third maneuvered into position. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. The seventh. And always, when the ghastly red light began to wane into black murk, another parachute flare kindled it afresh.
"That's all for this time," Al said finally, as the crimson world shaded once more into the crepe of night and the German planes beat back toward their lines.
"And that's enough!" breathed Jimmy, still shaken. His troubled eyes fixed upon the blazing city and his nostrils sucked at the pungent smell of burning powder. "I don't mean just the loss of property and lives. They're terrible, of course, but what really matters is the effect, what they call shattering the morale of the Allies. It's as if the Germans have said: 'See, you can't stop us! We can destroy at will! Get out! Retreat! We're going through to Paris.'"(12)
At midnight the convoy stirred and began to roll. By dawn, when they unloaded in a park somewhere in a dense wood, the guns had quieted and the world turned normal. The bombing of Crépy was only a bad taste in the mouth.
Rolling back to camp, mile after mile, hour after hour, proved depressing. It was as they were obeying that enemy command to run before the avalanche. And when a sergeant met them, short of Ussy, and turned the convoy off on another road, with the information that camp had been abandoned and that a town farther south called Barcy was to be their new home, Jimmy's despondency deepened.
Al was driving. Jimmy hauled out a map and located Barcy.
"It's five or six kilometers north of Meaux," he explained, "almost on the banks of the Marne."
"Yeh?" said Al, to whom names meant nothing.
"In 1914," Jimmy recited, quite as if he were conning a lesson, "the first battle of the Marne was fought. The French, with their backs against the wall and the fate of a nation in the balance, telegraphed Paris for help. The city responded with its nondescript taxicab army, hurriedly recruited from the boulevards and rushed north in all available automobiles. There were no trenches nor shelter. The men met and fought hand to hand. Knives and bayonets and clubs and gunstocks were their weapons. But the line held. The Germans were halted in their march upon Paris. To-day they speak of that battle as the Miracle of the Marne."
"Yeh?" said Al.
"Well, the Germans are coming again, pushing aside all opposition, just as they did in 1914. If they reach the river, Al, there will be a second battle of the Marne. This time they may not be repulsed. They may crash through and sweep on into Paris."
Old Number Four snorted contemptuously. Probably it was only the back-firing of the motor, with the gas cut down and the camion coasting down a hill. But Jimmy chose to interpret it as the heartening assurance of the oldest campaigner of them all.
"And again," he said, laughing a little, "they may not."
The convoy rolled into the new camp with Jimmy humming softly the air of the French Verdun song, "They Shall Not Pass!" Its beat was to the smooth cadence of Number Four's motor.
THE French official in charge of the freight yards at Meaux was old and beaten. His eyes were tired. They lifted with lackluster indifference to observe the drivers of the camion that ground to a halt before him.
"English?" he asked, making conversation.
Jimmy, at the wheel of Number Four, crowded back his quick resentment. The French always made that mistake.
"American," he said loudly.
"Ah, Americans at last." For a fleeting instant a pin point of fire glowed in the official's tired eyes. "That is good. You serve. But you are only a handful. Where are the so-grand armies your country has promised?"
"They're coming," Jimmy told him doggedly. All over France they were asking that question. "We're mobilizing and recruiting and training and shipping soldiers across the ocean. It all takes time."
"Time, yes. But America has been in the war now more than thirteen months, since April, 1917. And what has she given la malheureuse France? Is it armies to bolster our worn forces? Divisions? Battalions? Even companies?" He shook his head sadly. "No, she has given us only words, excuses, promises. She will never give us more. I know. I have lived in those United States of yours. Her so-grand beau geste is what you call it the bluff."
"The Americans will come," Jimmy promised. He tried to say it with confidence.
The official took refuge in a French shrug. "I wish I could believe again."
This particular convoy had come to load with shells from the freight cars at Meaux, which since the capture of Soissons and nearer stations by the enemy marked the last reach of railroad transportation. As Number Four hacked to receive its load, Al offered his opinion.
"That old croaker," he said, "is talking through his hat when he says the American soldiers will not come."
"I hope he is," Jimmy answered without any real conviction in his voice.
Again the next afternoon scores of Reserve Mallet camions pulled into the Meaux yards for ammunition. At sight of the drivers of Number Four, the French official's eyes flickered with recognition.
Jimmy took the bit in his teeth. "The Americans will come," he declared, leaning from his seat to give emphasis to the words. "You wait and see."
The man sighed. "It does not matter now. If ever your President Wilson decides to send troops, it will then be too late. Once more the Germans are at the Marne. This time they cannot be stopped. France has no fresh reserves to stem the tide. Her own brave soldiers have grown old and spent in their four years of fighting. And the Americans, when we need them most, are not here. It is the end."
A sullen dislike of this French official with the tired eyes began to well in Jimmy's heart. He wished he had never talked to him. There was something upsetting, something terrible, in that calm assumption of defeat, with the blame placed squarely upon the United States' lack of faith.
When the convoy call sounded the next morning in the camp at Barcy, Jimmy had to whip himself into the seat of Number Four. All the way down the hill into Meaux the wheels of the camion seemed to be saying, over and over again, "It is the end --- it is the end --- it is the end." Dread of another meeting with that Frenchman in the railroad yards enveloped him like a shroud.
He could have shouted with happiness when the convoy stopped short of the depot in Meaux, turned west, and rolled into the open country beyond. That meant he was through with the man for at least another twenty-four hours.
Dawn was close the following morning before the camions reached their destination somewhere in the Montdidier area. Judging by the line of hulking shadows along the roadside, Jimmy decided it was to be a troop convoy this time. That was good. The cargo would be ---well, more human.
A little group came straggling from the darkness toward Number Four. Jimmy was about to call a greeting in French when the words choked in his throat.
For a voice, with no trace of accent, called blithely: "Bring the ladder, porter. Mine's upper six."
Jimmy could not believe his ears. But when somebody else said, "Never mind the baggage, George, but just show me to my section," he knew.
They were American soldiers!
He could not guess how many were waiting back there on the edge of the field. It was dark, and the road, like all French roads, disappeared around a curve in the immediate foreground. But they were Americans, and they were entraining on Reserve Mallet camions which served the front. He wished that tired-eyed Frenchman back in Meaux were there to be confounded.
"Climb in, soldiers," Jimmy shouted exultantly. "What outfit? Where're you going?"
"United States Second Division," a rumbling voice told him, "and we're headed straight through to Berlin."
Number Four did not carry its quota of Americans to Berlin, but during the hours that followed it set them well on the first leg of their journey. Other camions came trooping behind like docile sheep. Jimmy's rode too far front to check the limits of the convoy. He was not even sure he wanted to; better to let his imagination have full fling. For no matter how long the line, it would not have satisfied him unless it stretched all the way from the Marne to the farthest tip of southern France. Jimmy's imagination was greedy.
These Americans of the Second Division detrained in a field far northwest of Meaux. Lieutenant Crandall was waiting there with a French pink ordre de mouvement slip in his hands.
"They need machine-gun ammunition at Château-Thierry," he told Jimmy. "Can you run back to Meaux, load, and carry it up?"
"Yes, sir," Jimmy said, trying hard to keep his eagerness within decent bounds. That trip would give him an opportunity to pass the balance of the convoy coming up with its Americans.
The Lieutenant pointed. "Go out this side road, which is a detour, and bear left till you hit the main highway."
Al eased in the clutch and Number Four answered. Five minutes later it was edging its way between straggling columns of French infantry, bearded old men of thirty and forty, inexpressibly weary and dirty. Jimmy did not know it then, but these soldiers had fought on the Chemin des Dames and they had come back fighting thirty miles in three days.
"Their eyes are tired," he told Al.
The road dipped through a shallow valley and climbed to a summit, where Jimmy caught his first glimpse of the main highway. It was a wall. It was on fire, with billowing clouds of drab smoke smudging the clean blue of a June sky. He shook his head vigorously to clear his vision, and the illusion faded. The wall changed to a moving mass of camions. The smoke became dust from the churning wheels.
This was the historic Paris Road. Jimmy remembered, and with the memory came such pride of country as he had never felt before. This road had been immortalized.
Over it had passed the armies of Cæsar, marching with spears and shields; of Turenne, still afoot but with horses dragging clumsy cannons; of Attila, with lances and bows and arrows, riding in primitive wagons drawn by ponies from the plains; of Napoleon, his cavalry decked with shining breastplates and helmets topped by horsehair tails. And now, with their close-fitting uniforms of khaki, with their round packs that held blankets and outfit in single tight rolls but left the arms free, with their rifles that shot far and true, and moving swiftly with motor trucks over the same road that had known those other armies, swept the Americans.
The Paris Road was roaring. Number Four pushed into the traffic and went suddenly mute. Jimmy, vaguely conscious of something wrong, cocked an ear for the familiar drum of its motor, the creak and rattle of its body, the flap of its canvas cover. He could not hear them; they were swallowed in the greater din. What he did hear, behind and beyond all that reverberating thunder, sent the blood coursing through his body. It was the clatter of cavalry, the quickstep of infantry, fitted to the modern chorus of roaring camions.
The Americans had the side curtains up. They wanted to see and they had no objection to being seen. They perched in all sorts of grotesque positions, sitting, standing, straddling the body planks, doing acrobatic stunts. Most of them were bareheaded, with their shirts open at the neck. As they swished past, they waved greetings and shouted out songs at the top of their voices.
Jimmy liked that spirit. It meant they were not worried or under strain. They were more like kids on a joyride than soldiers.
That's what they were --- kids. Jimmy knew now why they didn't look like soldiers. He'd been expecting them to conform to the pattern of those French infantrymen back on the detour, whom four years of war had left old and worn. These Americans were different. They were youngsters, smooth shaven, tanned like Indians, their bodies trained to muscular leanness. They were fresh and alive and eager. As camion after camion hurtled by, rushing them toward the front. Jimmy's face wore an ecstatic grin. Here was youth to save the day.
The road ahead lay buried under a barrage of dust. It spewed dark blurs, that came closer and took form as camions, all keeping their intervals, all traveling at the same speed. "Gangway!" they seemed to shout. "Gangway for the Americans!" Dust caked Jimmy's eyelids, and etched the shape of his mouth, and choked his nostrils, and spilled down his throat till it formed a mud pie in his stomach. He didn't care. The Americans were going up to fight.
All at once he found himself rigid with apprehension. The camion line had snapped off short. On ahead the dust cloud settled to the road like a theater curtain when the play is over. The roar of triumph sobered to a thin wail. This was the end, then. The Americans were here, but only another handful, only a few hundred in all, probably exhibited in this dramatic fashion by some crafty showman to stiffen the French morale.
Jimmy closed his eyes. He guessed they were dull and tired, like those of the French official at Meaux and of the French infantrymen on that detour. Pride and happiness and enthusiasm went out of him like a long-held breath. After all, the Americans were not to have their rightful place in the sun.
It was singing that beat at his stunned brain like an alarm clock. He could hear it in the distance ahead, coming closer and closer and swelling to a boisterous chorus.
"Over here,
Over here -
He fought to open his dirt-encrusted eyes. He wanted to see and believe.
"Send the word,
Send the word---"
The Paris Road was roaring again. This time it was a mighty pipe organ. But through its heavy bass the song rang clear.
"The Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming -"
His eyes flung open at last, and what they saw set his heart pounding till it felt ready to burst. It was true: the Yanks were coming. The gap in the broken line had closed, and from the dust cloud loomed camion after camion.
Jimmy leaned forward. "More!" he begged. "More! More! More!"
More came. They kept coming till Jimmy eased back in his seat with a sigh of contentment. The dust cloud was a magician's hat; it never emptied.
All the long way to Meaux the camions howled past Number Four like a mad March wind. They were an endless column. Jimmy could not guess at their total, but he was confident now that the Americans were not being sent to the front to bolster some weakening French army. They were an army of themselves.
But he wanted to make sure.
"How many?" he asked an American sergeant when Number Four was stopped by a traffic jam in Meaux.
The sergeant knew what he meant. They were cheering in Meaux that day and tossing flowers into the passing camions, and one cry rang above all others. It was, "Les Américains!"
"Whole Second Division's going up, soldier," the sergeant told him. "Twenty-seven thousand strong. And the Third's coming along stepping on their heels. And listen, soldier, if that ain't enough, there's close to a million more Americans here in France just r'aring to go."
Jimmy wanted to thank him, but the words would not come. He looked at Al, hoping for help, and Al blew his nose and said hurriedly, "It's the dust."
Under Al's skilful piloting, Number Four pulled free of the jam and threaded its way through the packed streets to the railroad yards. Jimmy no longer dreaded facing the official in charge. He even began framing bitter sentences to fling at the Frenchman.
But when he saw him, Jimmy shucked off all notions of petty revenge. The official was at the gate, watching the parade of Americans. He stood straight as a ramrod, head back, shoulders squared. He did not look old or beaten any more. His eyes fairly shone. And he was singing, in tune with those fellows out in the camions:
"The Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming . . .
And they won't go back
Till it's over, over here."
IT was early morning on June 2. The night had been spent inching through ceaseless traffic.
"Woodpeckers," said Al, listening.
Number Four, with its load of ammunition, skirted a copse of trees, swung left past picture-book houses on the outskirts of a town, and ground to a halt at the edge of a river.
"Château-Thierry," said Jimmy.
The river was the Marne, which split the town into two portions. From the south bank camouflaged batteries of machine guns, manned by Americans, raked the streets on the far side.
A grizzled old sergeant came forward to the camion and lifted the rear curtain. His movements were slow, unhurried, as if he might have been sauntering into the street back home to examine the vegetables some huckster was offering for sale.
"Phutt-phutt shells," he told himself calmly. "Well, we can use them." Without raising his voice he called, "Detail," and a half-dozen privates jumped to attention. "Unload," said the sergeant.
He came to the front of the camion and put one foot on the running board.
"We're the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion of the Third Division," he said companionably, forestalling their questions, "and our job is to keep the Germans from crossing the Marne here in Château-Thierry. We'll do it."
"Sure?" asked Al.
"Oh, yes." There was a note of calm finality in the voice that made Jimmy believe in spite of himself. The sergeant, eyes partially closed, drawled on reminiscently, "We came in night before last, with Kaiser Bill's heavy artillery trying to convince us this was a kind of unhygienic spot to camp." He smiled tolerantly. "But by four in the morning we had seventeen guns in position and firing, and every time yesterday any mob of strangers with green-gray uniforms and round pot-helmets came sight-seeing over the river in Château-Thierry, we waved 'em back by running a few clips through the phutt-phutts. They always took the hint and went away from there."
"But how about night?" Jimmy asked. "You can't see the enemy in the dark, can you?"
The sergeant shifted his leg to find a more comfortable position. "Oh, at night. Well, with the guns set to spray the streets yonder to the north, and doing it sort of regularly, it doesn't make much difference whether we can see the Germans or not. The result is pretty much the same. Of course --- "His finger scrawled circles in the dust on Number Four's panel.
"Yes?"
"Well, up to this morning we were kind of handicapped by having to keep in mind the position of a few men of our own over there. We'd sent a little detachment from Company A across the river on outpost duty. It sort of cramped our firing." His face cleared. "But that's out now."
"Out?"
"Why, yes. About an hour after midnight the Germans piled in from the northwest and cut between our observers and the west bridge, which they had planned to use if attacked. The detachment made for the east bridge; they would, naturally. But our guns were playing a lullaby over that and they couldn't cross, and we were dimpling the river, too, and they couldn't swim it. Excuse me a minute."
To the north sounded a series of explosions like trench mortars. Across the river, where the streets had been etched by the morning sun, a fog descended. On the south bank the machine guns crackled in sudden fury, all of them joining the chorus.
"Woodpeckers," said Al again.
"A German advance," said Jimmy, sucking in his breath. "That's a smoke screen."
The cloud thickened and spread, rolling closer and closer to the river. Little bursts of flame tore from it, and the air whistled and droned with rifle bullets. All about them the machine guns swung in semi-circles, spitting fire in long staccato bursts.
It was all over in a few minutes. No enemy, Jimmy knew, could advance in the face of that deadly barrage. The smoke screen lifted lazily and dissolved like fog, till the sun shone once more on the empty streets north of the Marne.
The grizzled sergeant strolled to the waiting camion, leisurely wiping his hands. "Detail," he remarked in a conversational tone, "finish unloading." He scratched his head. "Let's see now, what was I saying?"
Jimmy searched his paralyzed mind a long time before the memory came. "Those trapped fellows on outpost duty across the river last night," he reminded, wondering why his voice sounded so hoarse. "Were --- were they all killed?"
"They were Americans," said the sergeant in mild reproof, "and Americans know how to take care of themselves. They don't scare worth a cent. Well, their C. O. yelled at us across the east bridge till we recognized his voice and ceased firing while he brought over his detachment."
The camion was unloaded at last. Al cranked the motor, and Jimmy, at the wheel, threw the lever into low. But even with the clutch pedal giving under his yielding foot, Jimmy hesitated. Some elusive question hid in the back of his mind.
"Oh!" he said. "When those Germans cut off the detachment from the west bridge, didn't they come over it themselves to this side?"
The grizzled sergeant answered politely, as one replies to children. "Naturally they didn't. You see, the west bridge was mined, and we just touched her off and blew her to smithereens. No, the Germans didn't cross. They never will cross the Marne in Château-Thierry."
Number Four rolled away from the sibilant chant of the machine guns.
"Woodpeckers," said Al.
"Gibraltar," said Jimmy.
They were thinking of different things.
It was mid-day on June 6. The convoy traveled west, bound for camp after unloading shells in some park near Rheims. Jimmy drove alone, with Al temporarily back in Barcy tinkering a disabled motor.
All that last hour, before they came to the forest, the camions had plowed through layers of dust. The air felt hot and dry. The chalk plains of the Champagne danced white under a blazing sun. But on ahead, like a mirage in the desert, were great trees, heavy with foliage and flowering underbrush, washed clean by cool blue shadows.
As the camions plodded closer, it seemed to Jimmy the forest beckoned. The tree tops were lifting chins and the flowers stalks crooking fingers. A vagrant breeze whispered of rest and comfort and peace.
The road split. One branch, the main highway, lay shimmering in the heat along the edge of the woods; the other, into which Sergeant Kane led the convoy, loomed black as a pocket where it wound in among the trees. Jimmy knew they had made a wrong turn. Perhaps Sergeant Kane had also heard the breeze whisper.
Something whirred and scuttled for cover. Jimmy, drowsily recalling such trails back home, thought at first they had flushed a covey of quail. His eyes opened in mild interest --- and remained open, wide and staring.
Those drab forms, plunging into the dark woods at the right, weren't birds at all, but soldiers, American soldiers starting an attack. Some of them wore khaki. Some had uniforms of forester green; marines, those. All of them leaned forward as they ran, like men facing a rain. Their rifles were ready at their hips, gripped by clenching hands. Vague gray shadows played over their brown helmets. They did not advance, as Jimmy had somehow imagined they would, yelling like Indians, "Ee-e-e-e-ah-a-a-a-yip!" They did not yell at all.
The whole thing was unreal. Jimmy had not supposed soldiers ever went into battle like this, bent over and racing, singly, by twos and threes, in little disorganized groups. It wasn't --- well, military. They should go in marching, with precise lines dressed smartly from right to left. There should be flags flying and drums rolling. There should be officers in the lead, waving their men on with swords. There should be somebody to attack, instead of a wood that did not answer back or show an enemy.
The convoy stopped. It had to. All the time more Americans kept springing up and crossing that road. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They spread and filtered into the forest.
Somewhere among the trees an infernal racket, like scores of electric riveters hammering in unison, shattered the silence. Jimmy knew them for machine guns; German Maxims they must be, for the Americans had gone in only with rifles and chaut-chauts and hand grenades. Those occasional louder bursts were exploding grenades.
The fighting wavered, stopped, went on again. The air crackled and snapped and filled with wicked keening noises. Jimmy listened breastlessly, trying hard to interpret what he heard into what he could not see. That was a Maxim, hissing and spitting from some hidden nest. Those were Springfields answering. Unmistakable, rifle shots; no other firearm spoke with half their venomous anger. This was a battle, then, between American rifles and German machine guns.
Jimmy shuddered. Four days ago he had seen the machine guns at Château-Thierry drive back a German advance. No enemy, he had told himself, could face their withering blasts. But the Americans, deep in the forest there, were doing it now. They must be doing it. Flank attacks, probably, with the rifles held at steady aim and fingers pressing slow on the triggers, a heritage from the hunters of Colonial days.
Jimmy's eardrums ached as he sought to identify the myriad crashes of bombs, grenades, trench mortars, chaut-chauts, machine guns, and rifles. They were blending now into a rolling thunder. Wisps of smoke above the tree tops, that had marked the progress of the charge, thickened yonder into the semblance of converging gulls over a gap in the woods where there was an open space, thriftily planted to wheat.
It was very pretty, that wheat field on the slope, lush and green in the sun and studded with blood-red poppies. But somebody was running through it, tramping down the grain; many somebodies. Their uniforms were gray. Khaki and forester-green followed hard on their heels.
Jimmy heard the machine guns break out afresh. Now whole batteries of them raved. The red poppies snipped from their stems and disappeared. The green wheat swayed before a gale and flattened and turned brown and sear. But the Americans went on stubbornly, deploying around the field, till they were swallowed by the forest beyond . . . . Jimmy found himself nodding exultantly. You couldn't stop the Americans.
The convoy starting whistle shrilled and the camions moved. At the far end of the road, where it joined the main highway, there was a sign pointing back along the dark trail. It read, "Bois de Belleau."
"Belleau Wood," said Jimmy. "I must remember that name."
IT was early July before Jimmy passed that way again. By now the Americans had driven the Germans from Belleau Wood and swept beyond to capture Vaux, and the names of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood were as familiar back in the United States as Lexington or Concord or Gettysburg.
"You'll see the forest in a minute," Jimmy promised Al. "Tall green trees and underbrush like a flower garden and -----"
They had come within sight of Belleau Wood. Its trees were no longer green. Those still standing were black, as if scorched by fire, with torn limbs and a scant covering of dead leaves; and those on the ground were white under their stripped bark and slashed into untidy heaps of kindling and logs. The ground itself was yellow, pock-marked darkly with shell craters, shallow dugouts, and hasty trenches. Flowers could not grow there.
Al whistled his amazement. "Looks as if a forest fire puts on the finishing touches."
Jimmy shook his head. "I don't think so, Al. Probably this section was captured and recaptured a dozen times during the fighting.(13) It must have been gassed and shot and shelled into --- that."
"I miss something," Al said enviously. "Hauling shells to some French ammunition dump, like we're doing to-day, is going to be pretty tame after what went on in there."
It was late that night before the convoy reached its destination, a combined ammunition park and concealed battery, with a vast cavern like an underground warehouse for the storing of shells. To make matters worse, the French sergeant in charge confessed he had no corvée to unload the camions. He was desolated, Jimmy gathered, but what could he do? A high French officer, a general, no less, had conscripted the men to repair a bridge.
"Hop to it, fellows," Sergeant Kane told the drivers unfeelingly. "Unload 'em yourselves."
Number Four backed into position. Jimmy and Al, feet dragging, trudged to the rear and let down the tail gate.
Al yawned expansively. "Let's get it over with in a hurry. I'm so sleepy I could---"
"Crash!" said something in the distance. "Roar-r-r-r!" said something else, coming toward them with the thunder of an express train crossing a bridge. And "Wham!" said still something else, just short of the park, with a terrific smash and shudder, as if the swirling world had collided with a wandering but very substantial planet.
Jimmy staggered as the earth quivered beneath his feet. His eardrums burned with exquisite pain. His whole body ached. Yet he had not been hit at all. It was only the concussion of the exploding shell.
"Eet ees the Germans," the French sergeant said, shrugging his shoulders in apology over this violation of his park. "The avion de reconnaissance he fly over thees afternoon and seegnal our poseeshion. Then bang! bang! the heets come, ici, there, all around, everywhere. Then no more shells. Silence. We wait. But they come again now, n'est ce pas? You weel make safe in the abri, s'il vous plait."
It did not need the far crash of another big gun to set their feet in motion. Just as they reached the safety of the dugout, a second shell exploded. This one was closer. And then, with the hideous wham! wham! wham! of a giant pile driver battering into metal, three more shells let loose.
The fifth of the salvo rushed over their heads, screaming its siren song, hit with a soggy plump, and --- and --and ---
Nothing happened. There was no detonation, no rattle of shrapnel hail. The shell had been a dud. But if the German battery, over the hill beyond its screen of poplars, had deliberately schemed to inflict agony of mind, it could have achieved no greater triumph. Waiting for the explosion that never came was a torture beyond anything Jimmy had ever known.
Nor was the ensuing silence calculated to still his threshing nerves. It seemed ages before the great guns resumed firing, but when they did, their reports, the unbelievable bass drone of the charging shells, and even the earth-rocking tumults offered distinct relief from the tension.
"Singing us a good-night lullaby," scoffed Al. "They'll quit after a while and let us unload."
But they did not. Savagely but steadily and methodically, the shells tore in and burst. Jimmy, quite as shaken mentally as he was physically, strove to gain control of his workaday mind by counting them. One, two, three, four, five --- there was another dud! --- six, seven. A long pause. Then another series of seven. The usual pause. The first crash of a new salvo, battering on and on till the total was again seven. This was a real bombardment.
A vagrant plan buzzed about Jimmy's mind. He brushed it away with a gasp, but it persisted. In the end he lifted a voice that sounded almost normal.
"Kane!"
No answer.
Jimmy called again, tacking a respectful "Sergeant" to the name. Kane, in charge of this particular convoy, was sensitive to his rank of non-com.
Still no answer.
"The C. O. of our picnic party has retired to parts unknown," Farr said dryly, waving an expansive hand backward toward the dark depths of the immense abri. "What's on your mind, Perrin?"
"I -well, it looks as if we'd be cooped up here all night unless we do something."
"We can crank up and beat it with our loads." This was Al's contribution, and his suggestion met with the blank silence it deserved. Al was always speaking first and thinking second-going off at halfcock. But this time he surprised them by adding, "Only, of course, it's our job to leave the shells here for the battery."
"Of course," Jimmy agreed softly, exactly as if he had said, "Good boy, Al!" For Al was learning.
"Which leaves us two cheerful choices," came Glover's voice from the murk of the cave. "Either we spend the night in this luxurious and quiet hotel, or else, with the French corvée temporarily hors de combat, we prowl to the lines and capture a few stray Germans, mark them P. G.,(14) and give them the job of unloading."
"Why not do the unloading ourselves?" Jimmy put in eagerly. "That was what I meant to suggest to Kane."
The plan brought a storm of protests.
"No, thank you," declared Walker, capping the unanimous decision. "I don't think I'm any bigger coward than the next fellow, but I can't quite see myself dashing out into that inferno of thunderbolts, with the shrapnel pelting like hail."
"But we don't have to," Jimmy pointed out. "Those shells are coming in on a schedule as regular as a clock. There they start again. Now count."
"Seven," announced Farr after the last crash.
"Check," agreed Glover and Walker.
"Now wait," said Jimmy, holding up a wrist on which glowed the radiant dial of his watch. "It will be five minutes---well, over four anyhow---before they fire again. I'll call the minutes for you. One! . . . Two! Three! . . . Four! . .
"Bang!" And, hard on its heels, a fusillade of other reverberating thumps, till the count was again seven.
"Now a rest of nearly five minutes. Do you get the idea, fellows? There are six camions out there, each with fifty-one cases of 75's, and there are twelve of us drivers here. The instant the seventh shell comes in, you dash out to the camions and begin tossing off the boxes. I'll be alongside, keeping tab on the time. At the end of four minutes I'll sound an alarm and we'll all scuttle back here till the next shelling is over. How about it?"
The response would have warmed the cockles of a college cheer leader's heart. They were with Jimmy to the last man.
So that was the way the drivers unloaded the convoy of shells for the battery. They claimed a time record, despite the interruptions spent in the safety of the dugout, which were utilized to get their breath and to count the arrivées from the German guns; and it is worthy of mention that the French sergeant, returning after a futile attempt to round up his laborers, watched them with popping eyes and wished he might draft those khaki marvels into his own service. Mon dieu, those surprising Américains!
They did not stack the cases of 75's in orderly piles, as the regular corvée would have done under happier circumstances. They did not put them away at all, but left the wooden boxes, some split wide open, where they fell from the camions, almost on the lip of the bombproof abri. What they did do was to complete the job of delivering ammunition to the battery. Jimmy had shown them the way.
AND now," said the aggressive voice of Sergeant Kane, who had miraculously reappeared at the last moment, "since we've shown this Frenchman how real Americans act under fire, it's time to crank up and get away. Make it snappy!"
Number Four, which had been the first car into the park, was the last to leave. Somewhere ahead the others were crashing and roaring for the safety of the open road, like wild animals flushed in a dense forest. Jimmy watching Al coax Number Four into a burst of speed, wet his lips and sighed his relief. The sound was almost a whimper. He wouldn't have ventured back into that park again for a million dollars.
Al braked sharply and dragged the camion to a full stop. Jimmy caught the tag-end of a muttered phrase.
"What's wrong, Al?"
"Our flashlight. Left it back there in the park. Going to get it."
Jimmy could not believe his ears. His flesh twitched and crept.
"Al," he protested shrilly, "you mustn't! You can't! The five minutes are nearly up! The shells will be coming in!"
"Not one marked Al Long. They never made a shell with my name on it. Sit tight, fella. I'll be back in a jiffy."
"Al! Al!" Jimmy was fairly screaming now. His clutching fingers reached for the other's arm and missed. He saw Al slither from the seat to the ground. "Don't try it, Al! You can't make it in time! Al, come back! Al!"
There was no response. The night, ominously still now, had swallowed the other boy.
Jimmy's mind and body seemed to freeze. He could neither move nor think. The watch on his wrist ticked away the seconds of eternity, till they marked the span of a full minute. And still Al did not come back.
Far to the north, beyond the poplars and over the hill, the guns howled afresh. The sounds came as a relief. They broke the fetters from Jimmy's mind.
His first impulse was to let in the clutch and run for it. Here on the very edge of the park, with his only protection a frail canvas cover overhead, ordinary caution urged that he drive out of danger. He fought back the temptation. He wasn't a coward, was he? Or was he?
Anyhow, he couldn't desert Al. Too late he saw that he should have piled out the instant Al left the car and prevented his insane rush back into the park. He might have tackled him, or wrestled him, or knocked him out; anything to stop him.
For Al's attempt to retrieve an ordinary flashlight was sheer madness. It demanded a certain kind of fulsome courage, of course, but not the real kind, builded upon the trampling over fear to accomplish a sane and necessary achievement. Al's kind was just foolhardy recklessness. That was the word, recklessness. And there was as much difference between unreasoning recklessness and calculated courage as there was between night and day.
The seventh shell exploded. The night slept again. Probably Al had ducked into the abri while the enemy guns raked the park. If so, he'd be back any second now.
A full minute ticked away . . . Another . . . Still another. Jimmy cupped hands to his mouth.
''Al! Oh, Al!''
"Jimmy!" It was Al's voice, but it came from the maw of blackness in a queer, wavering tremor.
"Al! Come back, Al! Hurry!"
"I'm ---hit, Jimmy." The words were slow, close-cropped, but clear as a bell. "In ---the leg. I can't---stand up."
Jimmy marched back into the park. He walked stiff-legged, thrusting one reluctant foot in front of the other. Every muscle clamped and protested.
"Where are you, Al?" shouted a voice that seemed to come from his throat and yet was not his at all. "I'll help you---"
The words jammed back into his mouth. White-hot irons pierced his ears. The earth, which a moment before had been so solid, rocked and heaved, and spouted into an avalanche of débris, and flung him flat on his face.
He lay for a moment stunned, content to rest and relax. He moved an arm experimentally. A leg. He twisted his head. With infinite labor he dragged himself to his hands and knees. It seemed a miracle he could move. But gradually, as his brain cleared, he realized that he had not been wounded. The force that had flung him headlong to the ground had been only concussion from an exploding shell.
"Don't play dead, Jimmy Perrin!" he told himself savagely, and strove to regain his feet, only to flatten again as another blast hammered him to the ground. The sky rained dirt and stones and metal slugs. Till the patter ceased, he kept his head low, tucked beneath a helmet that rang and clanked.
A third shell exploded well to the right. From under his iron hat he watched cautiously. A red spout of flame burst from the earth and a black pillar rushed up and drowned it.
He wanted to lie there cowering. He knew his legs were reeds too frail to support his body. He'd wait till the other shells had hit and cascaded. But some instinct yanked at his collar.
"Al!" he called. "Where are you, Al?"
"Over here, Jimmy."
On all fours he crawled in the direction of the voice. Daniel must have suffered like that when he entered the lions' den. Another shell roared and let go, so far away that the concussion was only a jar. Jimmy said "Four" out loud and continued his prowl.
He wished another shell might hit and flare, to give him his bearings. Hunting for Al in the pitch darkness was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. He called again, gulping twice before the sound came. But another crash, a little nearer, engulfed his puny voice.
"Five," he counted doggedly.
"Jimmy!" Al, only a few feet away, had heard that single word. "Here I am, Jimmy! Over to your left!"
He found him at last. Crawling resolutely forward, with arms and legs on an outward slant, he cradled Al's body with his own. Al said something, but Jimmy had no ears for his talk.
"Six," he counted.
"Crash!"
"Seven."
He lifted Al in his arms and began to run toward the waiting camion. Now his legs were tempered steel and pliant whalebone and each joint ball bearing. They raced like a powerful motor. In less than a minute Al was propped comfortably in the corner of Number Four's seat.
To the accompaniment of another incoming German shell, roaring like Niagara Falls, Jimmy piloted the camion to the main highway. The arrivée let loose as if the world had come to an end. Both boys quivered, and Al choked back a cry of pain. As they gathered speed, with the accelerator pressed to the floor boards, Jimmy turned to his companion with an exclamation of disgust.
"Now I remember. If you put your fingers in your ears and open your mouth when the explosion comes, it won't bother you a bit. I'm always thinking what I should have done when it's too late."
"Tell it to the marines! Like getting us unloaded back there! Like coming back into the park for me!" There was profound sarcasm in Al's voice, but it could not wholly smother the softer note.
A kilometer or so from the park Jimmy halted the camion and broke open his first-aid kit. Al's leg was clearly broken, but the flesh wound looked superficial. There had been little loss of blood, thanks to his prompt use of a handkerchief as a tourniquet.
"It isn't so bad," Jimmy told him, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. "You'll have to go to a hospital for a few weeks, of course, but you'll come out as fit as ever. It might have been a lot worse."
Al groaned. Then, as if to make clear the reason, he broke into a welter of words, "Naw, the leg don't hurt much. It's something else. Thinking of Number Four rolling on convoys without me, that's what hurts most. Bragging 'round I can't get hit because my name isn't on any German shell. No, I deserve all I get. I'm the noop of noops. Always plunging lickety-split into some mess. Say, fella, I'd give 'most anything to have that cool thinker that ticks in your bean."
Coming from Al, this was rare tribute. But Jimmy welcomed it, not as praise, but as a promise for the future. Al was finding himself.
"I'm going to miss you," Jimmy said.
"Yeah? Well, you'll be taking out the old bus by yourself for a while." Al thrust a hand into his pocket and hauled forth a nickeled cylinder. "Say, fella, you'll be needing a flashlight. Here's ours. I found it back there in the park."