The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me by White, William Allen, 1868-1944

[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force of will and both hands!]

CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"

This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pershing and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.

One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulance coming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking to some American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticed the arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans were after something in the neighbourhood--perhaps a big gun, perhaps an ammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the target when we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road. Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. It was getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that the ammunition trains would be passing that cross-road at that time. And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our hearts jumped--at least Henry's and mine jumped--as we saw that between us and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded and stalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the road from the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This," said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mighty dangerous place." As the word "place" escaped him he was on the ground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulance drivers--Singer and Hughes--neglecting to unlock the ambulance doors, ran up the road and began working with the drivers of the camion to get the great van on the road again. The other occupants of the ambulance also hurried to the camion--through the windows of the ambulance; no one was left to unbutton the thing for Henry and me. Henry insists that he was there alone; that he was afraid to follow me through the window for fear of sticking in it. He had not been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for a year and had no girlish lines in his figure. And the arrives were certainly bouncing in rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where we could duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulance was no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than an umbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully looking through the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure was less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance than it would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, held fast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next "arrive" to come with commendable fortitude. And then it came. It sounded like the old grand-daddy of all shells. We fancied we could sense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway we looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger. And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five feet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree. We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then our consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our eyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier. We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves, a certain calmness of soul--or was it merely a dramatic expression of a soldierly attitude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, who had been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the shell headed straight for us, it seemed that we should come back after the war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We had no desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about the tablet on that tree stump!