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CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOKS BY ISABEL HORNIBROOK
Cloth. Illustrated. $1.50 each
CAMP AND TRAIL
FROM KEEL TO KITE
GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE
CAMP FIRE GIRLS AND MT. GREYLOCK
CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
BOSTON, MASS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: "My name is Fenn," he volunteered, bowing over the
Guardian's hand.]
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CAMP FIRE GIRLS
IN
WAR AND PEACE
By
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
Author of "Girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire,"
"Camp Fire Girls and Mt. Greylock," etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN GOSS
BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published, August, 1919
Copyright, 1919,
By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
All Rights Reserved
Camp Fire Girls in War and Peace
Norwood Press
BERWICK & SMITH CO.
Norwood, Mass.
U. S. A.
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CONTENTS
I. Gas Valley
II. The Minute-Girl
III. The Camp at Twilight
IV. A Wandering Powder-Puff
V. Camouflage
VI. Playing Submarine
VII. Menokijábo
VIII. The Leader
IX. The "Creature Far Above"
X. Aviators Unawares
XI. Knights of the Wing
XII. A Good Line
XIII. The Main Bitt
XIV. The Launching
XV. Seeking the Spark
XVI. Wigwag
XVII. A Radio Freak
XVIII. The Peace Babe
XIX. The Gold Star
XX. Christmas of 1918
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ILLUSTRATIONS
"My name is Fenn," he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian's
hand
Supported on either side by his comrades
"W'at for you painta her like dat--de leetla boat--eh?"
"I don't care what anybody says; I'm going to rest a while"
He sprang from under the wildly swaying timber
"I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE
CHAPTER I
GAS VALLEY
"Gas!"
Briefest and biggest of all words thrust by the Great War into the
fore-ranks of speech, the word rang aloud upon the summer air.
A kernel of compressed menace, it burst explosively, spread elastically,
until the very sky--the peaceful, lamb's-wool New England sky--seemed
darkened by its threat, until the brown buds, withered in their tender
youth, and the rags of yellow grasses blighted before by its poisoned
breath, trembled and wilted, as it were, anew!
It even withered the morning-glory bloom upon the faces of a quartette
of young girls, who stood a few yards to windward of a little
red-and-white post labeled "Danger Zone," on the other side of which the
warning was given.
Breathlessly, nervously, they shrank together until their shoulders
touched, like fledgling birds struck by the terrors of the first storm
that assails them in the nest, seeking for contact and comfort.
"_Now_ the party is beginning--the ball opening, as our boys say over in
France, when a gas attack is being launched against them. That
smoke-candle off there on the edge of the trench, which is doing more
than's required of it--bursting into flame as well as smoke--that's the
illumination for 'Fritzie's' party! And the rattle--you hear the
policeman's rattle, don't you, shaking its teeth down _in_ the
trenches--that's the opening stunt of the orchestra. See?"
It was a young lieutenant, a boy-officer of twenty-three, who spoke,
with a silver dart in his gray eye matching the gleaming bars upon his
shoulders, as he bent towards the tallest of the four girls whose face
was paling under her velvet hat, uniquely embroidered by her own hand
with certain silken emblems, typifying her name and symbol, together
with the rank she held as a Camp Fire Girl.
"Smoke-candle! D'you mean that foot-high metal thing flaring away there
behind the sand-bags, one of a dozen or so, stationed along the
trench-brim? They don't look much like ordinary candles, but they
certainly can smoke! Such horrid, blinding sulphur smoke, too! Bah!"
She caught her breath a little, that oldest girl, her wide dark eyes
watering, as a tiny yellow feather of the sulphur fumes, stealing
stealthily to windward, wafted from the wing of the main cloud drifting
off to leeward, tickled her throat in teasing fashion.
"Yes, it is blinding thick, isn't it? We must move farther to windward,
away from it." The lieutenant smiled down at her, thinking the hat with
its wide brim, and its delicate, emblematic frontispiece against the
rich velvet--representing crossed logs, a tongue of flame rising from
them and shading into a pearly pinion purporting to be smoke--was the
prettiest headgear he had ever seen.
"Thick! So thick that you could drink it, if--if it wasn't so horridly
pea-soupy and pungent, eh?" laughed another girl, who stood next to the
tallest one, their shoulders touching. "It's as dense as the fog our
Captain Andy used to tell us about; the fog out on the fishing
banks--Grand Banks--which he declared was so thick at times that the
poor fish didn't know when they were atop of the water; they went on
swimming up in the fog. Don't you remember, Olive?" she asked as she
merrily nudged the older, dark-eyed girl who wore the Torch Bearer's
insignia of logs, flame, and smoke--an insignia that stood for a
high-beating heart, as ready and eager to do its share in this moment of
world conflict, as that typified by the silver bars on the lieutenant's
shoulders and the cross-gun on his khaki collar.
It was he, Lieutenant Iver Davenport, or, to come down to detail,
Lieutenant Iver O. P. Davenport, who, thanks to his middle initials and
that keen silver of scrutiny between his narrowed eyelids, was
christened in his infantry company "O Pips," the camp nickname for an
observation post, he who answered, with brotherly freedom, glancing over
the Torch Bearer's shoulder at the brown-eyed girl beyond her.
"Yes, sis, it's as thick as the fogged-fish yarn, or as the fabled fog
that the half-breed pathfinder who was attached to our Boy Scout troop
used to tell of when he'd begin quite modestly that _he_ 'hadn't seen
fog ver' tick--_non_--only one time he see fog so tick dat one mans try
for drink eet an' mos' choke hisself; and wen dey take out dat fog wat
dat mans try for drink, dey take dat for make broomstick--yaas!' Oh! you
couldn't get ahead of _Toiney_; he who--was it three summers
ago?--pulled one of your Camp Fire Group out of dangerous quicksands,
eh?"
"Yes, that will be three years ago next August and we're going to camp
in that same region of white sand-dunes this coming summer, too, under
the spell of the Green Com Moon," returned the boy-officer's sister,
Sara Davenport, named by the Council Fire Sesooā, the Flame.
"Well! we won't see Toiney again." The eyes of the taller girl, Olive
Deering, watered, but in their dark, liquid depths shone Toiney's gold
star, never to be eclipsed. "He sleeps under the daisies of France. You
should have heard him march off to enlist, singing:
"'C'est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
Eet's a long way forre go-o--
C'est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
To dat chèrie girl--I--know!
Adieu, Peekadil-lee!
Adieu Leicestaire Square,
C'est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
But my heart--she's dere!'"
"Bravo! Ah, well, he's gone on the _longue chemin_ now--the long
trail--a trail of light it must be," murmured Lieutenant O Pips half
under his breath, his eyes, keen and misty, searching that dense yellow
cloud to leeward, billowing down into a ziggagging maze of trenches--the
cloud thrown off by the smoking sulphur candles, of which here and there
one did more than was required of it, yielded complete combustion and
burst into a ragged, rose-red banner of flame, that added weirdness to
the daylight scene.
Speaking of Toiney--light-hearted, raggedly romantic half-breed--who had
made the supreme sacrifice, presently drew the girls' thoughts to those
living comrades-in-arms of Toiney, the American soldiers now lined up
under that baleful yellow cloud, down in the invisible trenches,
undergoing the training of being "put through gas," in order to render
them expert in adjusting their gas-masks directly the warning was
given--the rattle sprung.
"'Fritzie's party,' as you call it, seems rather halting; they haven't
brought on all the fireworks yet, have they?" suggested a third girl,
known by the Council Fire as Munkwon, the Rainbow, in every-day life, as
now, Arline Champion, the shell-like tint of her cheeks deepening to a
hectic flush from the same expectant emotion which had paled her
sisters.
"No, sometimes the chemists of the Gas Defense Department who have
charge of these sham attacks, turn loose the smoke-cloud several minutes
before they thicken it with the poison waves--gas waves," the officer
answered. "They send it over every old way so that no man down there may
be caught napping," with a brief excited puff of laughter.
"And I suppose this sham 'party' is just as dangerous for the men in the
trenches here, being trained to meet gas, as the real one over there?"
Arline persisted.
"Sure! With them, too, it's the Quick or the Dead, as we say in the
army!... If any one is slow about getting into his mask--otherwise his
_chlorine-fooler_----"
It was at that moment that the whole round earth began, as it seemed, to
"fool" and make believe that an earthquake heavingly rocked it. Up from
the trenches came a loud, rolling report that echoed like thunder
through the yellow cloud. Tearing its veil asunder, a broad sheet of
flame leaped towards the sky. The ground shook under the girls' feet.
Wildly they clutched each other upon the sere skirts of Gas Valley, as
this portion of the great military training-camp, where soldiers were
initiated into the horrors of poison gas, was nicknamed.
"Ha! _Now_ the fun's really on! That turns loose the bitter
tear-gas--worse than a corner on onions for making one weep!" blithely
exclaimed the officer. "Don't be nervous! It's only the explosion of six
sticks of dynamite down in the middle of the trenches, which bursts the
shells on the surface, each containing a little paraffin cup--rice-paper
cup--holding a small quantity of oil, and under that the lachrymatory
liquid--the oniony 'tear-stuff' that would wring tears from a stone
image. There go the chlorine-cylinders, gasping, too!"
He pointed--that young officer, charged like a live bomb himself, the
heated tension of the scene and the excitement of having visitors
reacting upon a naturally fiery disposition--pointed across the
twenty-five yards of blighted vegetation which separated his group from
the trenches, at two tall iron cylinders near which stood a couple of
masked sentries, looming like brown goblins amid the yellow fringes of
the smoke-cloud.
"_What!_ Can they get as near to the horrid, deadly chlorine as all
that?" breathlessly gasped the youngest girl, Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl--amid
scenes like this, remote from the Council Fire, Lilia Kemp.
"Yes, if their masks are perfect, and properly adjusted. Those are two
of the young chemists from the Gas Defense, who are putting over the
'show,' and----"
"Oh, goody! I know now why we're urged to save and collect peach-stones
next summer--ever so many other kinds of pits, too--to make carbon for
soldiers' masks! 'Save the peach-stones; waste not one!' A few may save
a soldier's life! When I'm drying them in the oven--incidentally burning
my fingers, as I'm sure to do, I'll feel really like--like----"
"Like the real girl behind the lines," put in Lieutenant O Pips, his
eyebrows lifting, in turn interrupting Little Owl as she had blinkingly
interrupted him. "See, now, the 'ball' is on in good shape! There go the
big firecrackers simulating shells, so that the men's nerves may be
prepared for bursting shrapnel; and the electric bombs exploding
everywhere, in and out along the surface of the trenches, loosing more
tear-gas!--Oh! this--this is spectacular now. But you should just see it
at night. Then it's Inferno, sure enough!"
"It--it's that, in daylight, when one thinks of the _men_ down there!"
Olive Deering bit her lip, gazing steadfastly in the direction of the
veiled trenches, above which the yellow smoke-screen was torn by the
popping of monster firecrackers, pricked by the laughter of roseate
flashes, so bright, so elfin, that who could dream their fairy splendor
was but the glitter of a key to unlock tears?
"The men undergoing initiation in the trench-bays? Oh, bless you!
they're all right, unless--unless it should be a case of:
"'The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.'
"But there _won't_ be any 'blighter' to-day--there couldn't be!" He
bent, that very tall young officer, nearer to Olive's ear, the
nineteen-year-old girlish ear under the Torch Bearer's hat. "Nobody
knows how I have been looking forward to this day, Olive, this spring
day, when you girls would visit me in camp before I went over! I'm sorry
that your father, Colonel Deering, and your aunt chose to pay a visit to
Headquarters, Brigade Headquarters, instead--instead of coming on here
to inspect the fireworks in Gas Valley."
"Fireworks never to be forgotten!" murmured Olive, coloring a little as
the luck of this longed-for holiday coined itself into a silver bar in
the eager eyes bent upon her, matching the luck of those other silver
shoulder-bars for which the young Plattsburg graduate had "plugged" so
hard.
"Father has an old friend who is Captain of Headquarters Troop, but
we'll find him again later," she said, suddenly rather breathless from
the moving conviction that when the youth--for he was little
more--beside her faced the poisoned horror-waves of the real Gas Valley
"over there," when he crouched, sleepless, in a cold and muddy
trench-bay or led his men over the top, she, for him, would be beyond
all others--even more than the brown-eyed sister to whom his glance
roved now--the girl behind the lines, beyond the ocean, typifying
America the Beautiful, standing for all he would die, smiling, to
defend.
It may be that the prospect unrolled itself vaguely before the young
soldier's mind, for, as he straightened himself again, training his keen
gaze once more upon the smoke-cloud, thickened with poison-waves, he was
humming unconsciously, involuntarily, lines of a crude camp-song:
"Only one more kit-inspection,
Only one more dress-parade,
Only one more stifling stand-to--bleeding stand-to,
And the U. S. will be saved!"
"Stifling stand-to! Well, I guess the men down there in the trenches are
having that now, 'gooing' up their masks--their chlorine-foolers--in
that popping, heated cloud," gasped his sister, racy little Sesooā,
turning from a certain "kit-inspection" which she was holding upon the
toilet and general get-up of another visitor to Camp Evens, not attached
to her girlish party.
"Um-m! Isn't that muff of _hers_ pretty, the--the 'spiffiest' thing!"
appraised Sara in silent soliloquy, the springy elasticity in herself
causing her to rebound more readily than did her companions from the
shock of seeing a gas attack launched; at her core there was a gay
flame--a buoyant "pep"--which refused to succumb even to Inferno, with
its yellow acres of sulphur smoke, its deadly waves of chlorine gas, its
tormenting "tear stuff."
"Humph! Rather late for a muff, though, seeing it's April. We've
discarded ours," reflected further the self-constituted inspector of
"kit," otherwise clothing and equipment, upon the skirts of the
military training-camp, as she shot a firefly glance towards the sky,
more like July than April--flecked with lamb-like fleeces nestling in
an arch of blue. "But then one may be forgiven for holding on to a
thing like that! Adds the last touch of style to her costume! I wonder
how many birds gave up their lives to make that muff: all dove-gray
breast-feathers--tiny feathers--and the fashionable turban which goes
with it.
"Her tailored suit is perfect, too; almost puts Olive's new jersey one
in the shade," was the next random comment after a few seconds of
absorption in the noise and novelty of the near-by attack, the monster
fire-crackers, snapping, bursting, momentarily flowering in the yellow
field of smoke. "And her gray cloth blouse with that soft, swathing
collar around the throat, high under her ears!... Some officer's wife
most likely! Wonder what age she might be--thirty--thirty-two? For all
her style she isn't quite thoroughbred-looking like Olive--our Blue
Heron," shooting a sidelong glance at the pale, emotional face under the
velvet hat adorned with the delicately embroidered logs and flame. "And
she's not in the same class at all for beauty; judging by the profile,
that young woman could dispense with a little of her cheek-bone and
chin. But--but what a wonderfully smooth pink skin; looks as if it had
just been massaged--was massaged every day! Her skirt's a trifle long; I
suppose her feet aren't pretty; that would be in keeping with her
shoulders, for they're rather broad--looks as if she played basket-ball
and hockey. Athletic type, I guess. Her hair's much the color of mine,
but those silver threads in the mat over the ears--they--they add
distinction; almost wish _I_ were turning gray! What!"
The critic caught her breath, for the lone visitor, perhaps feeling the
scrutiny, turned and boldly looked at her--looked through her, felt the
Camp Fire Girl--with a glance as cool as an Arctic snow-blink. Bluish
eyes--this stranger had, the gray-blue of salt ice, that.... Were they
trying to infuse a little warmth into the ice-blink? Sesooā's confused
thoughts--rather abashed--never knew. For she hastily turned from this
kit-inspection in which she had been furtively indulging, to seek refuge
in the smoke-cloud.
And it was at that very moment that she heard a strange, hoarse
exclamation from her soldier brother. At that very moment, too, she,
together with her Camp Fire Sisters, felt as if the ground, now steady,
rocked once more violently, sickeningly, under their feet.
What was happening upon the near edge of that dense sulphur-cloud, to
leeward?
Its yellow muzzle was lifting.
Silently, stealthily, it was opening its poisoned mouth--and giving
forth!