It was nearly eleven o’clock when Kendall and his companions arrived in the old cathedral town of Meaux and found accommodations in the H?tel Sirène, that rather quaint and down-at-heel hostelry which hides in a courtyard behind huge gates that close at an hour so early as to astonish Americans. Kendall was to discover that this was the universal custom in the smaller towns of the country—that the hotels closed themselves to guests in the early evening, and that to effect an entrance thereafter was an achievement.
They contrived, however, to find huddled accommodations, but Kendall did not find sleep for a long hour. Events were imminent, events both of the soul and material, and his imagination insisted upon handling them and scrutinizing them. Speculations upon the proximity of war mingled with anticipations and apprehensions of his relations with Andree.... He fancied she, too, was suffering a wakeful night....
In the morning he awoke and breakfasted in a dining-room filled with American newspaper correspondents, for Meaux was at that date one of their headquarters, with French and American officers and a few English Red Cross nurses.... Presently he was in his car again and moving through the narrow, crowded streets toward Montreuil. The open country, rolling, beautiful, rich, lay before him.
Here, indeed, were indications of war. The roads were crowded with the traffic of warfare, with vehicles of all sorts and descriptions moving toward the front or returning from the front. The greater part of them were huge French camions driven by poilus who looked out upon the world with eyes that had seen such sights as alter the fabric of a man’s soul during the four years that were drawing to a close. They were all in haste. American camions and camionettes and side-cars were rumbling or whizzing by. Refugees driving cows, urging on weary horses that dragged enormous two-wheeled carts heaped high with household treasures, appeared now and then.... These seemed to Kendall to savor more of the thing that was war than even such jolting, bumping pieces of artillery as he encountered now and then....
Kendall was within hearing of the big guns on the battle-line, yet all about him, spread in peaceful beauty, was a country apparently secure, apparently untouched by the devastation of an invading army. Yet, a few weeks before, German cavalry patrols had penetrated almost to this point. The fields were green and beautiful, promising abundant crops. Children were entering a little school-house just as children enter school-houses in America. Farmers were working in their fields.... If it had not been for the mass of military vehicles upon the roads and for an occasional distant rumble that might have been thunder, but was not the thunder of heaven, Kendall could not have sensed the proximity of war.
French soldiers on bicycles were frequent. Now a Frenchman on a bicycle is one of the sights of the war. Somehow he never seems to master the contrivance in all its intricacies. He can ride furiously in a straight line, coattails standing out straight behind, eyes fixed and determined, jaws set. So long as he follows a bee-line all is well, but you can read on his face that he realizes the uncertainty of life. Let him be compelled to swerve from his course, to turn a corner, or even to stop the machine to alight, and there is none so rash as to prophesy what will be forthcoming. Kendall saw one stocky poilu attempt to turn around. It was amazing! The man ricochetted off a camion against a stone pile, off the stone pile into a donkey-cart, off the donkey-cart into the arms of a troop of his marching comrades, scattering them like chickens, thence through the poilus in zigzag to a ditch, from which he presently rebounded, facing in the direction in which he had originally traveled. He did not turn. He had had enough of turning. Now he would keep on his way without meddling with Providence, doubtless intending to reach his destination by circumnavigating the globe....
Now Ken was passing long mule-teams driven by American boys whose faces were so incrusted in dust as to give them the appearance of figures carved out of ghastly rock. Ken could see the dust in drifts on their eyebrows, and their eyelashes had a strange albino-look. Again his car edged over to give space to a truck carrying to the rear the remnants of a destroyed German avion. This moved by to disclose a long column of Italian troops, armed not with rifles, but with picks and shovels—each man wearing on his cap a vivid red star. Not a hundred yards beyond was visible the gray rump of an observation balloon, kneeling on the ground in the midst of a cluster of trees like some unbelievably monstrous elephant, its back incrusted with something that might have been the green moss of great age. This was the camouflage to make it indistinguishable from the foliage of the trees.... Presently Kendall was passing groups of hangars, aeroplanes standing before them in the fields. Now it was a huge howitzer grunting and straining to be at its business farther ahead and lumberingly eager to join its voice with the roars of its companions. Once in a while by the roadside nestled a little plot of graves above which waved the tricolor of France....
An hour’s drive brought them to Montreuil and Kendall’s car descended the steep and crooked road that led into the valley where the tiny village, teeming with American soldiers, lay in all its morning charm.... It was not quiet. There sounded, every minute or so, the sharp crack of the marvelous little seventy-five sending its word of defiance to the German army which crouched behind the hills, making ready for another leap at the throat of France.
There was no stopping here. On they went along roads whose wooded sides concealed American artillerymen and artillery. Here was the edge of the front. Guns were actually firing over Kendall’s head at the distant and invisible enemy. He thrilled to this realization.... In a few moments they passed on their left a beautiful chateau, historic because it had been occupied by von Kluck as headquarters when his armies were rushing onward to meet their defeat at the Marne. The car passed through Bezu, where was an American field hospital occupying a tiny church, its operating-room now in the adjoining building, which had been, a few weeks before, the school crowded with urchins.... But there was neither priest nor school-boy now. All were gone; all had fled before the Hun and were scattered, God knew where, over the face of France.
Now Kendall’s driver turned off the main road and shortly another hamlet lay before them—the remnants of the place that had been Domptin. Here a military policeman halted them, demanded credentials and destination.
“You walk from here,” he said. “No cars pass over this road by day.”
“You know the way?” Ken asked his driver.
“Yes.”
So they alighted and trudged along the road. Ken observed many little craters by the roadside and in the fields, and, without asking, knew they had been caused by hostile shells.... It was very noisy—or so Kendall fancied. Artillery was at work on all sides of him, but it was only the desultory fire of the quiet day. Though the voices of the guns were audible, neither guns nor the men who served them were to be seen. Kendall’s pulse increased; he felt in the pit of his stomach that electric sensation which always came to him while he stood waiting for the referee’s whistle at the start of a football game.
They walked on. Even here, where the affairs of war were unmistakable, there was that exotic sense of peace. The woods were still green, the bushes thick and covered with foliage, the crops, almost ready for the reaper, waving and undulating as the breezes crossed the fields.... No human being was visible. Yet here ahead, to the right and to the left, was the locale of one of the most savage struggles of the war; here it was that the American Second Division was thrown into the line to stop the German as he marched, victory-flushed, upon Paris.... And here the German had stopped.... Just beyond were fields of wheat and woodlands tenanted by no living being, but nevertheless tenanted. In their depths, concealed from the eye, not reachable by any human hand, were the unburied bodies of American dead....
“Here we are,” said Kendall’s driver, pointing to a gray rectangular mass of buildings just ahead. “Paris Farms. Regimental headquarters of the Ninth Infantry.”
They entered the gates, passed the saluting sentry, and found themselves in a square courtyard surrounded by barns and farm buildings, with the old farm-house at the opposite end. Groups of men in khaki sat close to the walls. None were in the middle of the courtyard, and Kendall’s driver, instead of leading him up the path that ran directly to the door, conducted him in a round-about way, his shoulder rubbing the wall.... In the air above was the intermittent throb of a German aeroplane reconnoitering, and it was the duty as well as the desire of all men to remain invisible....
Life, for the most part, is made up of small matters, of small joys and small griefs, of little pleasurable surprises and minor catastrophes. In the ratio as the little joys outnumber the little sorrows we are happy. Tremendous events, crashing climaxes, occur in few lives. But we like to fancy ourselves participants in astonishing doings, and as the victims of beneficiaries of amazing coincidences. We are so constituted that we can be amazed at the slightest deviation from the normal, and the arrival of a genuine surprise can set us all by the ears with excitement.... A benevolent surprise awaited Kendall inside the door of the ancient farm-house. It was of not the least importance in the scheme of the universe and would not modify Kendall’s life by the breadth of a hair, yet it was potent to overshadow everything else in his mind for hours and to make him feel that he had been singled out by the powers for especial grace.
There was a broad hallway, cluttered with bedding rolls and occupied by a group of lounging soldiers. At the right was a room occupied as the office of the adjutant, which Kendall entered a trifle diffidently as a stranger, wondering what manner of men he would be required to have dealings with.... And then....
“Ken Ware!” shouted a voice, and a young second lieutenant with the most pitiable of mustaches—a yellow and yearning mustache—leaped from a desk at his right to greet him. “Where did you rain down from, and where did you get all those bars on your shoulders?”
It was Jimmy Martin, whom Kendall had last known as a newspaper man in Detroit, with whom he had been familiar in those affairs of young manhood which make for friendships to be looked back upon with longing and regret when the days and the affairs of young manhood have been engulfed in the past.
“What are you doing? What are you doing here?” Jimmy demanded.
“I’m in the Intelligence. And you—?”
“Intelligence officer of this regiment.... And only a second lieutenant. Ought to be a captain. Doing a captain’s work. Say”—he was a sudden young man—“wait till I get my tin lid and cane and we’ll go to see the sights. How long are you here?”
“Bring on your sights,” said Kendall. “While you are exhibiting I can get from you what I came for.”
“Wish you could stay. We’ve got a darn good mess. Not as good as we had the first few days, but good.”
“Why the first few days?”
“We went out and gathered up stuff to eat—to save it from the boche.”
“Foraging, eh?”
“Not exactly. We gathered it in and ate it to prevent its giving aid and comfort to the enemy. One day we got a pig at eleven-thirty and had chops for lunch at one. The colonel said that pork was too close to being pig for him. Next day we had rabbits. Speared them with pitchforks. There was a bully strawberry-patch up the line and we had plenty until a regiment of Senegalese moved in and looted it. There’s a patch of gooseberries in No Man’s Land, and we have the devil’s own time keeping the men from going out after them.”
As they passed out and through the barn into the woods Kendall explained his errand, and the conversation became technical. Whatever else he might have been, Jimmy Martin was engrossed in his particular job and, apparently, was admirably efficient. The greater part of the data Kendall wanted was at Jimmy’s tongue’s end; the rest would be readily obtainable from available records of Martin’s work.
By this time they had traversed a plainly marked road which led along the end of a field bordering the woods, and Jimmy complained bitterly of its evidence. “We’ve made that road since we came here. It’ll show up plain on their photographs and show a lot of circulation here.... You can see they’ve been droppin’ shells on it now.”
They entered the denseness of the woods to find it teeming with American soldiery who occupied the quiet of the day in enlarging and making more comfortable the makeshift dugouts they inhabited.... These were not such dugouts as Kendall had seen described in books about the war; they were such affairs as he had made himself when he was a boy and called “coojees,” where he had played robber and baked potatoes. They were hastily dug and as hastily covered with a mat of boughs and a layer of earth—flimsy sanctuaries, able to shelter from spraying shrapnel, but of no effect whatever against explosive shell.
Suddenly an invisible seventy-five was discharged almost at Kendall’s elbow, and Jimmy laughed to see his friend’s reaction to the unexpected sound. They parted the bushes and examined the beautiful little gun—that weapon which one may almost say has been the salvation of France!
A captain of artillery issued belligerently from a timbered dugout and confronted Martin. “Say,” he demanded, “you’re the ding-donged Intelligence officer that had me pinched the other night. Ain’t you?”
“Oh, was it you? Sorry. The boys are sort of stirred up about spies. They didn’t savvy you. When a strange officer comes poking around these woods looking for a place to light and asking oodles of questions about whether there’s artillery here and such like, somethin’s goin’ to happen. A couple of boys came rushin’ up to me to ask what to do, and I told them to pinch you. This place is full of spy rumors. Everybody’s seein’ them. The doughboy that hasn’t seen somethin’ darn mysterious and suspicious in the last twenty-four hours is hard to find.”
“Forget it. I was some lost. Should have reported before I came down.”
“Where was it they got Lieutenant Small last night?”
“Down this path about a hundred yards. His horse is there yet.”
Kendall and Martin walked that way. Under a shelter of boughs stood the handsome horse of which the dead lieutenant had been so fond; he stood quietly switching his tail and nibbling the leaves about him, all unconscious that his back would never again bear the weight of a gentle master.... And thirty feet away was the spot where Small had met his death, met it because he had scorned the shelter of a dugout, but with his French orderly had slept on the surface of the earth, with no shelter except a lean-to of brushwood.... On the surrounding bushes were gruesome shreds....
So this was war at last! On this spot a man had been killed by the enemy and the blood of him was not yet dry!... Somehow it convinced Kendall that he was at the front, that there was actual danger where he stood. He was experiencing the thing he had come to France hoping to experience.... And yet it was difficult to feel the fact. He had fancied the line of battle to be a constant tumult, horrible with tremendous showers of bursting shells and glorious with charges and defenses. In its stark actuality it was quite different. Affairs were gone about nonchalantly and methodically. Even the artillerymen who sent a shell now and then at some target they could not see served their guns in a bored manner.
It was only by a certain tingling of the nerves that he, a tenderfoot in this business, sensed the presence of war; that war was here about him, within reach of his arm. Those seventy-fives which spoke with such a vicious, through-the-teeth bark were sending lethal shells across the sunlit landscape, causing death and wounds. Possibly that very shell which he could hear as it sped on its way might kill an enemy.... And these boys killed with an air of detachment and ennui....
And the infantrymen! Scattered through the woods about their rabbit-warren of dugouts, they looked and acted like boys on holiday, on some camping excursion. They chatted and frolicked, and grumbled about the food, and because they were not relieved and sent to rest billets, and because the enemy did not try to advance, and because they themselves were not sent against the enemy. Kendall absorbed a feeling that they rather liked the whole thing, that it was just the life they were born to and were fitted to live—and that they knew it.
It was a picture, there in the bois, a picture that touched the imagination of that young man from the peaceful Middle West and would not soon be erased from his memory. The trees grew closely, admitting only patches of sunlight here and there, with an effect of peaceful, lazy, restful shade. One saw dimly. The scene was soothing to the eyes, alive as it was with movement. The brown of uniforms blended with the yellow-green of the foliage and with the red-yellow of the upturned soil where it had been broken by hundreds of shovels in the fashioning of shelters.... Kendall stood and watched and knew that he was beholding a sight which, in the years of his age, he would see again and describe again, and live again in the telling.... It excited him, yet he wondered why it should excite him more than it had done when he had seen other khaki-clad boys in camps in America.... It was because these boys slept with death for a blanket-mate. It was because no man of them knew what minute might call him with awful suddenness over the threshold of life and into the mysteries of death....
There had been no fire from the enemy. Since the dawn their guns had been silent, but now, without warning, the air was filled with a threat, with a sound which Kendall had never heard before, but which he recognized by the ............