. . . . . . . . . .
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 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 goes away ashamed of herself."
"But that's so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,"
said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the
Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such
concentration, when snatches of the Captain's lecture kept
breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of
the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive
glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was
something out of the ordinary about him.
The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed
out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude
saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He
listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then
frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his
momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had
particular associations with the air,--melancholy, but beautiful,
Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record
himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the
light, read the inscription:
"Meditation from Thais--Violin solo--David Gerhardt."
When they were going back along the communication trench in the
rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly.
"That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin
solo, wasn't it?"
"Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost
here."
"Are there many of your records?"
"Quite a number. Why do you ask?"
"I'd like to write my mother. She's fond of good music. She'll
get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing
closer to her, don't you see?"
"All right, Claude," said David good-naturedly. "She will find
them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I
had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets
a little income from them. Here we are, at home." As he struck a
match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared
behind the blankets. "Plenty of them around, these wet nights.
Get one? Don't squash him in there. Here's the sack."
Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust
the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously
trampled whatever fell to the bottom. "Where do you suppose the
other is?" "He'll join us later. I don't mind the rats half so
much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his
clothes off! Turn in; I'll go the rounds." Gerhardt splashed out
along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and
cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get
David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked
like on a concert platform, playing his violin.