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Claude stripped off his shirt and slid into the pool beside Gerhardt. "Gee, I hit something sharp down there!
Why didn't you fellows pull out the splinters?"
He shut his eyes, disappeared for a moment, and came up sputtering, throwing on the ground a round metal
object, coated with rust and full of slime. "German helmet, isn't it? Phew!" He wiped his face and looked
about suspiciously.
"Phew is right!" Bruger turned the object over with a stick. "Why in hell didn't you bring up the rest of him?
You've spoiled my bath. I hope you enjoy it."
Gerhardt scrambled up the side. "Get out, Wheeler! Look at that," he pointed to big sleepy bubbles, bursting
up through the thick water. "You've stirred up trouble, all right! Something's going very bad down there."
Claude got out after him, looking back at the activity in the water. "I don't see how pulling out one helmet
could stir the bottom up so. I should think the water would keep the smell down."
"Ever study chemistry?" Bruger asked scornfully. "You just opened up a graveyard, and now we get the
exhaust. If you swallowed any of that German cologne--Oh, you should worry!"
Lieutenant Hammond, still barelegged, with his shirt tied over his shoulders, was scratching in his notebook.
Before they left he put up a placard on a split stick.
No Public Bathing!! Private Beach
One of Ours 147
C. Wheeler, Co. B. 2-th Inf'ty.
. . . . . . . . . .
The first letters from home! The supply wagons brought them up, and every man in the Company got
something except Ed Drier, a farm-hand from the Nebraska sand hills, and Willy Katz, the tow-headed
Austrian boy from the South Omaha packing-houses. Their comrades were sorry for them. Ed didn't have any
"folks" of his own, but he had expected letters all the same. Willy was sure his mother must have written.
When the last ragged envelope was given out and he turned away empty-handed, he murmured, "She's
Bohunk, and she don't write so good. I guess the address wasn't plain, and some fellow in another comp'ny has
got my letter."
No second class matter was sent up,--the boys had hoped for newspapers from home to give them a little war
news, since they never got any here. Dell Able's sister, however, had enclosed a clipping from the Kansas City
Star; a long account by one of the British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the hardships the
soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies, mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a group
of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where they had been washing their socks. He had just finished
the story of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where the original Garden of Eden was
said to have been,--a desolate spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very religious Swedish boy
who was often silent for days together, opened his mouth and said scornfully,
"That's a lie!"
Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you know it is?"
"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the Garden, and there ain't no man going to find
it. It ain't intended they should. The Bible says so."
Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your
cherubims are still there?"
"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim? Nothin'!"
The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.
Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead? Solid ivory!"
Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off with his washing.
. . . . . . . . . .
Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof
sodded over. The Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the place he gave over to the
officers for a kind of club room. One night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the gun
teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes, smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin
cases. Gerhardt was working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean copy of a rough map
they had drawn up together that morning, showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could sit
among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.
There was one officer who could talk all the others down, wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached
from the Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet four, and very broad,--a dynamo of
energy. Before the war he was building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in his excavations
One of Ours 148
he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius Caesar's fortified camps. This had been too much for his
easily-inflamed imagination. He photographed and measured and brooded upon these ancient remains. He was
an engineer by day and an archaeologist by night. He had crates of books sent down from Paris,--everything
that had been written on Caesar, in French and German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to
him in the evening. The priest believed the American was mad.
When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest in classical studies, but now it was as if he
were giving birth to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam. It also drove other ideas
into his exclusively engineering brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his countrymen.. He
travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he
had a chance to enlist.
In the Battalion, Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men never knew whether he was explaining the
Roman general's operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from one to the other. Everything
was in the foreground with him; centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens found out
about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big
black cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French characteristics, coaching and preparing them.
It was his legs that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on two short stumps.
"Now you fellows don't want to forget that the night-life of Paris is not a typical thing at all; that's a show got
up for foreigners.... The French peasant, he's a thrifty fellow.... This red wine's all right if you don't abuse it;
take it two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery.... You don't have to be rough with them, simply firm.
Whenever one of them accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her twenty-five francs; then I look her
in the eye and say, 'My girl, I've got three children, three boys.' She gets the point at once; never fails. She [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]