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By Root 9075 0

ful of tobacco smoke and French poilus singing la Madelon. Everybody cheered when they came in and a dozen glasses were handed to them. They smoked their first caporal ordinaire and everybody set them up to drinks so that at closing time, when the bugles blew the French equivalent of taps, they found themselves walking a little unsteadily along the pitchblack streets arm in arm with two poilus who'd promised to find them their cantonment. The poilus said la guerre was une saloperie and la victorie was une sale blague and asked eagerly if les americains knew any-thing about la revolution en Russie. Dick said he was a pacifist and was for anything that would stop the war and they al shook hands very significantly and talked about la revolution mondiale. When they were turning in on their folding cots, Fred Summers suddenly sat bolt up-right with his blanket around him and said in a solemn funny way he had, "Fel ers, this ain't a war, it's a goddam madhouse."

There were two other fel ows in the section who liked to drink wine and chatter bad French; Steve Warner, who'd been a special student at Harvard, and Ripley who was a freshman at Columbia. The five of them went

around together, finding places to get omelettes and pom-mes frites in the vil ages within walking distance, making the rounds of the estaminets every night; they got to be known as the grenadine guards. When the section moved up onto the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun and was quartered for three rainy weeks in a little ruined vil age cal ed Erize la Petite, they set up their cots together in the same corner of the old brokendown barn they were given for a canton-ment. It rained al day and al night; al day and al night camions ground past through the deep liquid putty of the roads carrying men and munitions to Verdun. Dick used to sit on his cot looking out through the door at the jiggling

-187-mudspattered faces of the young French soldiers going up for the attack, drunk and desperate and yel ing à bas la guerre, mort au vachea, à bas la guerre. Once Steve came in suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his eyes snapping, and said in a low voice, "Now I know what the tumbrils were like in the Terror, that's what they are, tumbrils."

Dick was relieved to find out, when they final y moved up within range of the guns, that he wasn't any more scared than anybody else. The first time they went on post he and Fred lost their way in the shel shredded woods and were trying to turn the car around on a little rise naked as the face of the moon when three shel s from an Austrian eightyeight went past them like three cracks of a whip. They never knew how they got out of the car and into the ditch, but when the sparse blue almondsmel ing smoke cleared they were both lying flat in the mud. Fred went to pieces and Dick had to put his arm around him and keep whispering in his ear, "Come on, boy, we got to make it. Come on, Fred, we'l fool

'em." It al hit him funny and he kept laughing al the way back along the road into the quieter section of the woods where the dressing station had been cleverly located right in front of a bat-tery of 405s so that the concussion almost bounced the wounded out of their stretchers every time a gun was fired. When they got back to the section after taking a load to the triage they were able to show three jagged holes from shel fragments in the side of the car.

Next day the attack began and continual barrages and counterbarrages and heavy gasbombardmentsi the section was on twentyfour hour duty for three days, at the end of it everybody had dysentery and bad nerves. One fel ow got shel shock, although he'd been too scared to go on post, and had to be sent back to Paris. A couple of men had to be evacuated for dysentery. The grenadine guards came through the attack pretty wel , except that Steve

-188-and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate any-thing. In their twentyfour hour periods off duty they'd meet in a little garden at Récicourt that was the section's base. No