DECEIVING THE ENEMY
The moving picture boys slept well that night after the tremendous
strain and excitement of the day, and awoke the next morning none the
worse for their adventure, except that they were feeling a certain
soreness that vanished, however, as the morning progressed.
Blake found himself the object of congratulations from many of the
officers and men, for the news of his close call had spread rapidly.
“You just escaped by the skin of your teeth,” observed Lieutenant
Baker, a young officer with whom they had struck up a warm friendship.
“I sure did,” agreed Blake. “A few minutes more and everything would
have been all up with me.”
“Well, you were lucky to escape with your life,” said the lieutenant.
“That’s more than many of the poor fellows did.”
“Yes,” replied Blake regretfully, “Joe was telling me that a good many
of our fellows were killed by the explosion. But he said, too, that the
Heinies got it a good deal worse than we did.”
“That’s true,” confirmed Baker. “It was a sort of boomerang for the
Huns. They slipped their trolley some way and set the mine off a few
minutes too late. This German efficiency that we hear so much about
isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.”
“It’s getting to be deficiency, I guess,” grinned Joe. “Our boys sure
gave them an awful wallop yesterday.”
“We must have captured a raft of them,” exulted Blake. “When we were
going up the hill yesterday, it looked as though there were hundreds of
the Heinies coming back as prisoners.”
“Certainly was a bunch,” grinned Charlie.
“Yes,” replied the lieutenant with a smile of satisfaction, “we killed
a good many but we captured more. They’re getting easier to take than
they used to be.”
“Right you are,” chuckled Joe. “They don’t seem to like our game. I
heard that one of them said the other day that the Americans were easy
to kill but impossible to stop.”
“Impossible is right,” declared Baker. “We’ve got them on the run now
and it’s all up with them. It’s only a matter of time before we get to
that sacred Rhine of theirs and then they’ll throw up their hands. If
they don’t we’ll just have to finish up the job and go straight through
to Berlin.”
“That’s just what I’m hoping for,” said Blake grimly. “I don’t want
them to quit too soon. That would make it too easy for them. I’d like
to see the war pushed on German soil. I want them to taste a little of
what they’ve given to France and Belgium. I want them to hear the roar
of cannon and the screaming of shells in their own cities and villages.
I want to see their roads choked with refugees fleeing for their lives.
Of course, we wouldn’t do to them what they’ve done to the French and
Belgians. We simply couldn’t. It isn’t in our nature. We couldn’t
stand up old men and little boys and shoot them down. We couldn’t kill
helpless women and babies, but I would like to see some of their cities
go up in flames and their villages turned into piles of rubbish.”
He stopped, almost breathless with the intensity of his feeling.
“Blake is getting eloquent this morning,” laughed Joe.
“Yes,” assented the lieutenant with a smile, “but he doesn’t put it a
bit too strongly. He’s only saying what civilized people all over the
world are feeling. But there isn’t a chance of anything of the kind
happening. Those fellows bluster a lot, but when it comes right to the
pinch they’ll quit like a lot of yellow dogs. They’ll make door-mats
of themselves before they’ll take a chance of having their cities and
towns devastated.”
“That’s where the French and Belgians had it all over them,” broke in
Joe. “All Belgium had to do to save her beautiful cities from ruin was
to quit at the start. But her honor wasn’t for sale. The same with the
French. They had the stuff in them to stick to the end, to fight to
the last ditch. Look at them when things seemed so dark this Spring.
Did they quit? Not a bit of it. You didn’t hear a whine or yelp out of
them. But the Heinies will quit soon enough when they find things going
against them. You mark my words and see what kind of a prophet I am.”
“I think you’re right,” said the lieutenant, “but we’ll see. The thing
that counts just now is that we’re licking them to a frazzle. You were
speaking of the prisoners we took yesterday, but we got a good many of
their guns, too. Do you care to take a look at them? We’ve got them all
parked up here back of the Second Division.”
“Sure we would,” replied Blake, and he was echoed by the others
heartily.
A few minutes’ walk brought them to a field where the captured guns had
been collected. They made an impressive showing. There were over sixty
of them, of all calibers from the lighter field-pieces to the heavier
monsters of tremendous range and power.
“So these are the fellows that were barking at us yesterday,” remarked
Blake with exultation in his tones.
“Mighty big bunch of them,” observed Joe.
“And look at the way they’re painted,” said Charlie.
“All the colors of the rainbow. They actually make your eyes ache when
you look at them,” added Joe.
“But they make your heart glad to count them,” chuckled Blake.
“Hard to keep your eyes on ’em long enough to count ’em, though, fixed
up like that,” observed Charlie Anderson.
“What’s the idea of all this gaudy stuff?” asked Joe. “We’ve been
keeping the Germans so busy that I shouldn’t think they’d have much
time for art.”
“That isn’t art,” said the lieutenant dryly. “That’s business. It’s
camouflage.”
“Oh, that’s it!” exclaimed Blake with interest. “I knew that they
camouflaged almost everything else on earth and I knew they camouflage
the position of the guns, but I didn’t know they used it on the guns
themselves.”
“They don’t as a rule,” explained the lieutenant. “When they’re holding
a position on a certain front for any length of time, they content
themselves with hiding the guns so that the aviators can’t spot them,
but since we’ve forced them out into the open they’ve had to camouflage
the guns themselves. And it does pretty well as a makeshift, too, for
it’s mighty hard to locate them, with all these spots and stripes to
deceive the eye. Now, for instance, if this,” pointing to one of the
big guns near him, “were perfectly black, you could stand a hundred
feet off with a rifle and hit it without half trying. It would be no
trick at all because it would be a plain target. But if you tried to
get a bead on this gun now with all its colors, it would make your eyes
water, and ten to one you wouldn’t come within several yards of it.”
“That camouflage is a great idea,” said Joe admiringly.
“Big time stuff,” agreed Blake.
“It certainly is,” acquiesced the lieutenant. “But this is nothing
to some of the stunts these camouflage artists pull off. You moving
picture fellows are no slouches when it comes to faking things, I’ll
admit. You can make an audience think that it sees a man jump from the
ground to the top of the Woolworth Building. But if you could see some
of the things that our boys do in the camouflage training camps it
would make you sit up and take notice.”
“They’d have to be pretty good if they put anything over on us,” said
Joe, coming to the defense of his profession.
“I’m from Missouri,” remarked Blake incredulously. “You’ll have to show
me.”
“I’ll show you all right,” laughed Baker. “I’ll tell you what I’ll
do. There’s a camouflage camp of ours only a few miles from here in
a village back of the lines. We’ll be busy here for the next day or
two, consolidating our positions and bringing up our artillery in
preparation for another advance. If I can arrange it this afternoon,
I’ll get one of the army autos and whirl you fellows over. It’s likely
enough there’ll be some orders to be sent over there and I’ll ask our
colonel to let me take them. Would you like to go?”
“What a question,” laughed Blake Stewart, eager for the trip.
“You don’t have to ask us twice,” grinned Joe.
“Don’t leave me behind, Lieutenant Baker,” pleaded Charlie.
“All right,” concluded the lieutenant. “It’s a go then. I think I can
arrange it.”
His supposition was correct, for shortly after mess he sent an orderly
to the boys asking them to come to his quarters.
They complied promptly and found him sitting in an army auto waiting
for them.
“Ready, eh?” he greeted them. “Pile in then and we’ll break all the
speed laws between here and Hoboken.”
In a twinkling they were in beside him. He took the wheel, and the big
machine at once sprang forward.