A lot of the boys I knew in the legion are gone now. While I was in the
hospital some of them got theirs. For instance, there was Allan Seeger.
It was reported not long ago that he killed himself while lying in a
shell hole, wounded. I don't believe that. I knew Seeger well, and it
doesn't sound like him.
He enjoyed a close, strange friendship with a negro from the
Barbadoes, whom we called Cafe-au-Lait because he was the color of
coffee more than half milk. Cafe-au-Lait had Seeger's watch when I
returned to the trenches, and he was in the shell hole with him when
he lay there wounded. He had been shot through the stomach and some
stretcher-bearers rescued him. He was put in an ambulance and sent
to the rear, but he died before they could get him to a hospital,
according to Cafe-au-Lait, who mourned his loss pitifully.
Then there was Christopher Charles, a dancer from New York, whom you'd
never take for a fighter, but who could show the way to most of us.
Another New York man in the legion was "Norri" Norritch. He was killed
at Belloy-en-Santerre after they took me away with my lungs full of
gas. They said he had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York
real estate.
There was one Briton in the legion whose name was Longman. He had been
discharged from the British army because he went to pieces after a girl
had turned him down. His one idea was to get killed. He was always the
first man over the top for an assault, and he never bothered about
taking shelter from shell fire unless he was dragged into it. But he
couldn't get hit.
Longman was reinstated in the British army for heroism and sent down to
the Balkans. Newspapers all over the world have told his story. He went
through the Serbian campaigns with all the fever, typhus and pestilence
raging through the camps, and it never touched him. He wooed death and
she passed him by.
Then the Turks took him prisoner. They never would have done it had he
known. Something knocked him on the head, and when he waked up he was
in a Turkish hospital.
It would be hard to find a more conglomerate body of men than the
legion. Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Poles, who will not fight for
Russia, but want to fight against Prussia; Americans and British,
shoulder to shoulder, sharing blankets and little luxuries that filter
into camp from time to time.
In my company were a Spaniard and a Chilian who had always been deadly
enemies. The Spaniard had lost a fortune gambling, and then the Chilian
won the girl the Spaniard was going to marry. They fought a duel, which
the police interrupted. Both joined the legion and were assigned to the
same squad.