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

And so we fell to talking about our towns. It seems that we had each had the same experience. Henry declared that, from the day it was known he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the town had set him apart; he was somewhat like the doomed man in a hanging and people were always treating him with distinguished consideration. He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the town boomer, had the memorial services all worked out--who would sing "How Sleep the Brave," who would play Chopin's funeral march on the pipe organ, who would deliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would send around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocks to print the eulogy in full and on the first page! Henry employs an alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whether he had decided to use "Wichita Weeps," or "State Stands Sorrowing." If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that would require a deck head. We could not decide, so we began talking of serious things.

How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn days when the man who went to France was a hero in his town's eyes. Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passed down America's main streets, all headed for France. And what proud pageants they were! Walking at the head of the line were the little limping handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came the middle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so boyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--the volunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half accoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly young. There had been banquets the week before, and speeches and flag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tears and good-byes across the land. And all this in a few weeks; indeed it began during the long days in which we two sailed through the gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such a bold and hazardous adventure. When one man leaves a town upon an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace. The danger in some way seems to be divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers often multiply the danger. There was little danger for Henry and me on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers. No particular advantage would come to the German arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne, carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on merciful errands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon, we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an interned leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had been told of how cunningly the Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric wires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source, how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship, how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts and rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they had scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country as they went to their training camps. Even to consider these things gave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat in the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had come before. And then our first real martial adventure happened, thus: