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By Root 8799 0

one else seemed to know about it. The garden had been attached to a pink vil a but the vil a had been mashed to dust as if a great foot had stepped on it. The garden was untouched, only a little weedy from neglect, roses were in bloom there and butterflies and bees droned around the flowers on sunny afternoons. At first they took the bees for distant arrivés and went flat on their bel ies when they heard them. There had been a cement fountain in the mid-dle of the garden and there they used to sit when the Germans got it into their heads to shel the road and the nearby bridge. There was regular shel ing three times a day and a little scattering between times. Somebody would be detailed to stand in line at the Copé and buy south of France melons and four franc fifty champagne. Then

they'd take off their shirts to toast their backs and shoulders if it was sunny and sit in the dry fountain eating the melons and drinking the warm cidery champagne and talk about how they'd go back to the States and start an underground newspaper like La Libre Belgique to tel people what the war was real y like.

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little back-house, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a clean scrubbed seat and a half moon in the door, through which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling hummed busily in and out. He'd sit there with his bel y aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy and at home while he stood wiping himself on a few old yel owed squares of a 1914 Petit Journal that stil hung on the nail. Once he came back buckling his belt and say-ing, "Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be

-189-if you could reorganize the cel s of your body into some other kind of life . . . it's too damn lousy being a human

. . . I'd like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sit-ting by the fire."

"It's a hel of a note," said Steve, reaching for his shirt and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it was suddenly chil y. The guns sounded quiet and distant. Dick felt suddenly chil y and lonely. "It's a hel of a note when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own race. But I swear I am, I swear I'm ashamed of being a man . . . it wil take some huge wave of hope like a revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again. . .

. God, we're a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tail ess ape."

"Wel , if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and the respect of us other apes, why don't you go down, now that they're not shel ing, and buy us a bottle of champagny water?

" said Ripley.

After the attack on hil 304 the division went en repos back of Bar-le-Duc for a couple of weeks and then up into a quiet section of the Argonne cal ed le Four de Paris where the French played chess with the Boches in the front line and where one side always warned the other before setting off a mine under a piece of trench. When they were off duty they could go into the inhabited and undestroyed town of Sainte Ménéhoulde and eat fresh pastry and

pumpkin soup and roast chicken. When the section was disbanded and everybody sent back to Paris Dick hated to leave the mel ow autumn woods of the Argonne. The U. S. army was to take over the ambulance service at-tached to the French. Everybody got a copy of the section's citation; Dick Norton made them a speech under shel -fire, never dropping the monocle out of his eye, dismissing them as gentlemen volunteers and that was the end of the section.

Except for an occasional shel from the Bertha, Paris

-190-was quiet and pleasant that November. It was too foggy for airraids. Dick and Steve Warner got a very cheap room back of the Pantheon; in the daytime they read French and in the evenings roamed round cafés and drink-ing places. Fred Summers got himself a job with the Red Cross at twentyfive dol ars a week and a steady girl the second day they hit Paris. Ripley and Ed Schuyler took lodgings in considerable style over Henry's bar. They al ate dinner together every night and argued themselves