VIII “ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy

I

Now the rivalry between Captain Trowbridge, the general’s youngest aide-de-camp—called Tommy by the general when there were no inspectors or other nuisances hanging round—and Sergeant Gray began before they sailed for France. Not that Tommy would have conceded rivalry. The distance vertically between an aide-de-camp and a sergeant is something between the aviation record for altitude and the farthest fixed star.

As for significance and insignificance, there were times when Sergeant Gray felt that he hardly cast a shadow, and numerous instances when Tommy, though in the same room with him, could not see him at all. This fading away of Sergeant Gray had begun with his leaving Harvard and enlisting as a private in the Army, with a sort of Harvard idea of proving that, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, he was really no better than any one else. But his almost complete erasure—so far as Tommy was concerned—had begun with the affair of the general’s niece and the bran muffin.

By thus enlisting he had, of course, expected merely to demonstrate his true democracy; and then after a suitable time to take such training as was deemed necessary and immediately thereafter put on a Sam Browne belt and a silver bar—perhaps two. Probably two. And have a striker to polish his boots, and wear spurs and carry a crop and have people look after him in the street and say: “I’ll bet that fellow’s some scrapper, what?”

As a matter of honesty, one of the first investments he made after enlisting was in a Sam Browne belt. He kept it locked up in the brown tin trunk under his camp bed, of course, along with the signed photographs of several débutantes and a reserve store of cigarettes and some hand-knitted socks and three pairs of silk pajamas with his monogram on the pocket, which he hid with a sense of deadly shame. After a day or two with the troop he began to have nightmares about somebody discovering those pajamas.

But as a matter of fact things slipped up badly. First the Government, unable itself to swank round in anything but sack suits, issued a ban against the military belt, and made a lot of otherwise well set-up and slim young officers—and others—look as though they had dressed in a hurry and forgotten something. Stout generals who had depended for years on the belt rather than on their rectus and oblique muscles suddenly extended in the direction in which they were going and had to have a supplementary hook and eye put on below the lowest button. Thus the Army at one stroke lost all waistline whatever, and a man was likely to find his breeches reaching up to his armpits or clinging perilously to his hip lines, depending on his tailor’s taste in figures.

That was the first blow, and Sergeant Gray took it sulkily. During the first meeting of the staff after the aforesaid ruling he voiced his sentiments to the general’s horse, which he was in process of polishing to that varnished perfection which generals affect.

“Headquarters looks like a blooming maternity ward,” he muttered bitterly.

On top of that came the second blow. No one could enter an officers’ training school until he was twenty-one. And Sergeant Gray was exactly twenty years, eight months and three days old.

“Holy mackerel!” he reflected gloomily. “You’d think the Germans were going to ask for our birth certificates. If I’m strong enough to valet twenty horses I guess I could bear up under a Sam Browne belt.”

This second blow did something rather terrible for a time to Sergeant Gray. He still loved his country, but he hated the War Department. It had reflected on his manhood.

“Oh, very well,” he said to himself. “If I’m too young for responsibility, I’m too young—that’s all.”

He then proceeded to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for four lively months.

“What the devil has got into the Headquarters Troop, Tommy?” inquired the general pettishly.

“Lot of young porch climbers! If they persist in jumping the M. P.’s somebody’s going to get into trouble. The hospital’s full of ’em now.”

That, however, was before the situation developed between Gray and Tommy and so Tommy merely said: “Not enough to do, sir, probably. Some of them might help at the remount station. Lot of wild horses there now, sir.”

“Anybody know anything about horses?”

“I believe Gray does, sir. I understand his people have a ranch in the West, and he plays polo somewhere on Long Island.”

“Curious thing, this new Army,” observed the general. It was not the first time he had made the remark. The first time was when he had happened on his youngest brother-in-law scrubbing the floor at division headquarters. “But—c’est la guerre, Tommy. C’est la guerre. Send him in.”

So Sergeant Gray came in and the general viewed his tall figure with shrewd and kindly eyes—veiled, however, with the fiercest of eyebrows.

“I understand you know all about horses, sergeant,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Humph!” said the general. “Know anything about them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what do you know about the horse?”

Sergeant Gray considered.

“Sorry, sir,” he apologised. “Afraid I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s a quadruped, of course, sir, belonging to the genus—”

Here the general, who had a cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other, angrily put the match in his pocket and the cigarette on the floor and got up. He was a very large man in several dimensions.

“Don’t be funny with me,” he snarled. “Don’t be funny with me!”

Sergeant Gray looked plaintively misunderstood.

“If the general will only explain what he means, sir,” he said. Generals and so on are supposed to be addressed in the third person; see the Manual for Instruction in Military Courtesy.

The general was eyeing him with the searching glance that comes with the first star on a man’s shoulder and so increases with their number that by the time a man has four he can see entirely through the War Department.

“It was you, wasn’t it,” he inquired, “who sneezed into my horse’s ear the other day when I was mounting?”

“It came on me suddenly, sir. One minute I was all right, and the next—I’ve had a touch of coryza, sir. The dust—”

The upshot of it was that Gray went temporarily to the remount station and in the intervals taught the Headquarters Troop—which is cavalry—to ride.

He stood, tall and relentless, in the middle of a muddy ring at monkey drill; and round him circled the terrified rookies on unsaddled horses, clutching madly first at manes; then, as they slid inevitably back, gripping with frenzied legs at the hip bones of their mounts; and finally sliding with the slow relentlessness of fate off the rear, giving a last despairing clutch at the tail as they fell into the mud.

“That fellow’s got real horsemanship, Tommy,” observed the general one day. He had ridden up outside the paddock and, unseen by Gray, was watching the scene. “Good-looking young devil, too. Perfect seat. What’s he got those horses running for?”

It is unfortunate to have to record that at this moment the general suddenly left his saddle and flew over the paddock fence. One moment he was there, a fine soldierly figure on his English saddle with exactly an eighth of an inch of white collar at the neck of his blouse—and the next moment he was gone.

“Good Lord!” said Tommy.

On the other side of the paddock fence what appeared to be a largish heap of mud stirred and then raised itself to a semisitting posture and attempted to loosen a rope which was inexplicably about its chest. That failing, it cleared away the mud from one eye and mumbled: “What the hell happened to me?”

The one eye, rolling wildly, finally focused on a blue-white young face bent over it.

“I didn’t see you, sir,” explained Sergeant Gray wildly. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you—let me at the rope, sir.”

The general was now sitting up and spitting mud. He said nothing. He moved first one leg and then the other and then stared round him wildly. Through the slats of the paddock fence he could see Tommy, alighted and supporting himself by his horse’s neck and torn apparently by emotion. He was quivering from head to foot.

“Nothing hurt, Tommy,” said the general finally. “If you can find a hoe or something I should like to open my right eye.”

Tommy, thus adjured, took his handkerchief out of his mouth and gulped twice.

“Very well, sir,” he said.

The general, still sitting, then turned his gaze on Gray and commenced a sort of monologue which shall here be indicated as follows:

“!!!!?!?!?!!?——?——?——?”

Sergeant Gray’s colour came back slowly. After all, if the Old Man could talk like that he wasn’t dead or dying. Nobody facing eternity would so risk his soul.

“I was roping them, sir,” he said. “I didn’t see you. I used to be able to throw a rope fairly well and I— You were behind the horses, sir,” he finished feebly. “I hope you don’t think it was intentional. Why, I—I might have killed you!”

“You’ve damned half killed me as it is,” said the general, carefully standing up.

Then suddenly he began to shake. His vast figure quivered, his breath came in gasps. Sergeant Gray, watching him with dreadful anxiety, heard a deep stentorian rumble interspersed with breathless wheezes. The general was laughing!

“I’d give a million dollars to have seen Tommy’s face,” he said, and shook again.

There was after that a queer sort of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray, based as it were on mutual admiration—not unmingled with apprehension. Sometimes there was a little twinkle in the general’s eye when Gray’s back was turned, though his severity never relaxed. He told the story on himself once or twice at dinners, too, and made a great hit with it though he always told that Tommy had fainted; and as it was Tommy’s duty to go to dinners with him and see that the general was on the hostess’ right, with the prettiest débutante in the room next to him, Tommy got rather fed up with it.

“Never knew what struck me,” the general would say with his deep-chested rumble. “One minute I was on Sachem and the next I was over the fence and completely buried. Had to be excavated—like a sewer. And there was Tommy, crumpled up in a faint, and this young devil of a Gray digging for me. Only found me by the end of the rope sticking up.”

So Sergeant Gray’s commission remained in the dim future, and round the barracks he took to humming rather mournfully a song that ran like this:

On his sleeve he wore a piece of ribbon;

He wore it in the summertime and on an August day.

And when they asked him why in hell he wore it—

It stood for his commission, which was far, far away.

The lieutenant inspected all the rifles;

And when he’d done inspecting them he said what he’d to say.

Then all the lit-tle soldier boys were worried—

They knew that their commissions were far, far away.

“Far, far away!” bellowed Sergeant Gray in a plaintive howl like a dog baying at the moon.

Then the division got ready to move and did move eventually. And owing to the wager about a bran muffin, Sergeant Gray met the general’s niece and went straight clean crazy about her. The pink hat she wore covered the universe. The world was awheel when she was in her little car. And the depth of his madness about her was exactly the profundity of his jealousy of Tommy. They were held up for a week at the port of debarkation after all; and every day for as many hours as possible Sergeant Gray was mentally on the ground letting her walk on him. And every evening Captain Tommy Trowbridge took her to the theatre or sat on the veranda and spoke plaintively about a fellow’s chances over there; and if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

“I’ll be darned glad,” said Peggy’s father—her name was Peggy—“when I can sit on my own front porch again and not be mentally assassinated by some young idiot in spurs who wants to rave about never coming back.”

But Peggy’s mother only smiled and sent the butler out with orangeade and cookies. She knew that they were all little boys really—for all their trappings. And she knew, too, that some of them would not come back.

On the night they were finally to go Sergeant Gray very deliberately went A. W. O. L. for three hours and lurked in the shrubbery round Peggy’s house. He had already said good-bye to her and if he hadn’t had a sense of humour he would probably have said a great deal more. But she had only known him seven days; and all he said to her was that if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

So he lurked round the shrubbery—and Tommy was there, of course. But so was the general and the elderly divisional chaplain, who was an old family friend; and Gray’s fear of a sentimental parting between Tommy and the girl died painlessly. Though even hearing her voice set his heart alternately sinking because of leaving her, and beating one hundred and twenty to the minute at the thought of coming back in a Sam Browne belt, and so forth, and laying his one bar—possibly two, certainly two—at her feet.

Ultimately he wandered back to the camp and was stopped by a sentry. Sergeant Gray was singing.

“The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,” he warbled, “are as a string of pearls to me.”

“Aw, stop that racket!” said the sentry coldly. “Where’s your pass?”

“Each hour a pearl, each pearl a tear,” carolled Sergeant Gray. “Why, look who’s here!”

“Your pass!” repeated the sentry firmly.

“Now look here,” argued Sergeant Gray. “You’re not going to be persistent, are you? Why, man alive, you are going to stay here, and I”—he lowered his voice to a wistful key—“I am going, who knows whither! In an hour, or perhaps two, I shall be gone, probably never to return.” He became sepulchral. “As for man, his days are as grass—” He forgot the rest of it.

After a time the harassed sentry let him by and stood staring after him. “Gee!” he muttered.

Sergeant Gray swung along the dusty road between the line of barracks and stopped outside headquarters. Late as it was, the building was brilliantly lighted and through one of the windows the chief of staff could be seen mixing himself a mild drink. Sergeant Gray stopped and stared in at him. He admired the chief of staff. After all, why only one bar—or two? If the war lasted long enough he might get to the very top and be dined to the limit by people with sons who wanted commissions. And then—

He gave an unconscious imitation of the stride of the chief of staff as he went toward the troop headquarters.

The troop was frightfully busy. It was assembling in full kit and was to march to the lighter carrying saddlebags, blanket roll, rifle, belt, bayonet and pistol. The saddlebags bulged like pop-overs, since they contained clothing, toilet articles and cigarettes. Also cigarettes. Also more cigarettes. And yet again—

Sergeant Gray, still humming, wandered into the barracks, where the stable sergeant said: “Where the hell’ve you been? Having a last drink with the general?”

Sergeant Gray surveyed him with a loving eye. He loved the stable sergeant. He loved the mess sergeant. He loved the whole mangy troop. He loved the world.

“Let’s make it up, dear,” he said sweetly. “Kiss me, won’t you?” The stable sergeant eyed him menacingly and then thought better of it. “I’ve been out under the stars,” cooed Sergeant Gray, “thinking about the exigencies of war and that you and I may perhaps be separated over there, never to meet again. I’m all broken up, old man. If it happens, promise me—”

The stable sergeant retired, muttering.

Gray then made a final inspection of his barracks bag, which contained cigarettes. Also and incidentally:

(a) Extra uniform.

(b) Socks.

(c) Winter and summer underwear.

(d) Extra blanket.

(e) Extra shoes.

(f) Writing paper.

(g) Books, ranging from a Testament to a detective yarn.

(h) Pencils.

(i) Chocolate.

(j) Spurs.

(k) Sewing materials.

(l) Letters to read on shipboard.

(m) Foreign service cap.

Nor was this all. Surreptitiously stowed away was a pair of leggings and a trench coat of great expense and admirable fulness of tail. These for that great day when he received his commission. He packed and rolled carefully, humming meanwhile:

I want a belt just like the belt

That all the shavetails wear.

It has a strap that goes up the back

And makes the ma’m’selles stare.

It’s made of leather with a hook or two,

And you can bet it makes the girls love you.

I want a belt just like the belt

That all the shavetails wear.

At last he was ready. On his head he placed his steel helmet and then proceeded to hang his accoutrements onto various parts of his person. He weighed about three hundred pounds by that time and walked rather like a diver ready to submerge.

“Holy mackerel!” he groaned to the mess sergeant. “How far is it to the blooming lighter, anyhow?”

“Only six miles,” said the mess sergeant cheerfully.

“I’m about as portable as a steel range.”

Nevertheless, he felt that now for the first time he presented a truly martial appearance. He wished the girl could see him. He set his mouth in grim and rather ferocious lines and took a glance at himself in the broken mirror on the wall. Now bring on the Hun!

However, some of his joy in his appearance was dimmed by the appearance on the scene at one a. m. of a camp orderly carrying a portable typewriter. The troop, lined up and totally unable to sit, cast agonised glances at the case.

“An extra machine for the general,” said the camp orderly in a bored voice. “The general intrusts it to Sergeant Gray, who will be held responsible for it.”

“Holy mackerel!” protested Sergeant Gray. “Look here, son! Look me over! Do you see any place to hang that damned thing? You go back and tell the general that if he wants me to carry it I’ll have to swallow it.”

However, in the end he had to take it; and something of his fine military frenzy died in him.

At four that morning the division, as it stumbled in more dead than alive, had coffee on the pier. Sergeant Gray, by getting into line ever and anon, managed to land four cups, which he supplemented with some doughnuts. He felt a trifle low in his mind, however. And for quite two minutes he stood gazing in the general—and quite erroneous—direction of the abode of the general’s niece. He then sighed and ate his eighth doughnut and in due time went aboard ship. It took some four hours to load five thousand troops; and during all that time Sergeant Gray stood as lithe and graceful as a steel safe and guarded the general’s typewriter.

All attempts to get rid of it were abortive. He appealed to the general’s secretary, a wan and distracted young man, without success.

“Where is he anyhow?” he asked.

“In the bridal suite.”

“Well, you take this thing, won’t you?”

“Me? Don’t you think I’ve got anything to do? The staff’s in bed and the aides—” Here words failed the secretary. “And keep away from the bridal suite. The Old Man’s trying to get his wife on the ship’s telephone and Central’s threatened twice to report him.”

By seven o’clock he got rid of the typewriter by placing it outside the general’s door, where the division adjutant fell over it five minutes later. Being a person of quick temper, when he had picked himself up he kicked it and permanently disabled it. This is, so far as is known, the only casualty suffered at any time by the division as a whole, because—but why worry about the armistice now?

By seven o’clock the effect of the doughnuts and coffee was entirely gone and there was no hint of breakfast.

“When do we eat?” inquired Sergeant Gray of the supply sergeant.

“Paris, probably,” returned the sergeant. “D’you know our heavy freight’s gone astray? All we’ve got, so far as I can make out, is the box with the chaplain’s communion service and the Old Man’s air mattress. Not a saddle. Two hundred of ’em somewhere—probably shipped to the Belgians.”

“Don’t find ’em,” implored Sergeant Gray. “If they’re found I’ll have to carry the whole blooming lot. Seem to think I’m a slow freight.”

At ten o’clock Sergeant Gray performed a melancholy duty. This was to sit at the peril of his life in an open gangway and write post cards announcing his safe arrival on the other side. “If we ever get over,” explained the noncom who distributed them, “they’ll cable and the cards will be mailed. If we don’t—”

Sergeant Gray sent one to his mother first. After that he wrote one for the girl. After that he sat and thought about Tommy for quite a length of time. As man and man, he’d have given Tommy the race of his life and won, he felt. As between Harvard and Yale, too, he’d back old Harvard every time. But as between officer and noncom! And girls were queer too. They fell for rank right along. Put an officer’s insignia on any sort of a stuffed shirt, he considered miserably, and they’d put his photograph in a silver frame and set fresh flowers in front of it.

“The thing to do,” he reflected, “is to work hard and keep out of trouble. Then when I get my commission—”

This is the story of how Sergeant Gray kept out of trouble.

Now it should be understood from the start that Sergeant Gray had nothing on Tommy as to jealousy. And it hurt his aide-de-camp-ly pride to be jealous of a sergeant. And though he was normally a kindly young man with good manners who always asked the dowagers to dance while hoping they wouldn’t, he considered that the best way to hide his jealousy was to assume an attitude that either ignored Gray altogether or kept him underfoot.

So he found the general’s typewriter, badly wounded and with the key with the interrogation mark entirely gone—and any general will know that this absolutely impaired its usefulness, because generals are always writing letters to Washington asking why certain things are not being attended to—and he followed the scent as a dog trails a rabbit. Which brought him to Gray. Not that this was surprising. It was Tommy who had sent the typewriter to Gray to carry.

“Gray, did you leave that typewriter outside the general’s door?” he demanded in his best imitation of the general’s manner when a recommendation of his had come back from the War Department marked “Disapproved.”

“I did, sir,” said Gray. The “sir” irked him fearfully just then.

“You didn’t by any chance kick it when you did so?” asked Tommy.

“I didn’t understand that I was to do so, sir,” said Gray.

Tommy gulped. It was he who found his rank a handicap just then.

“Go and get it,” he ordered, “and put it where it belongs. And don’t try to be funny with me.”

He had got that, too, from the general.

Gray did as he was told, smiling grimly the while. If Tommy felt that way about things, all right. But just then the honours were his and he knew it. It was the beginning of the feud between them.

His rage against Tommy was most unjustly increased at finding himself far below decks in a room with five others—to be exact, with the stable sergeant, the mess sergeant, the supply sergeant and two duty sergeants. They were dropping down the river by that time and the stable sergeant, having selected the best bunk, was lying in it closely covered. Every now and then he put the blankets over his head. Sergeant Gray eyed him with some contempt.

“If you’re sick now,” he observed, “you’ll never reach the other side.”

“Sick, hell!” said the sergeant. “D’you see that sign?”

The sign was a melancholy one. It forbade absolutely all smoking below decks and on the decks above after dark. To defeat which ruling the stable sergeant was blowing the smoke from his cigarette under the bed clothing.

“Put a dog under this blanket,” he said complacently, “and he’d come out deloused all right. Say, I’m going to suggest that to—”

But Sergeant Gray was not listening. He was making an interesting experiment, which was to see whether or not he could swallow the smoke from a cigarette. He failed.

By twelve o’clock he felt very empty and extremely forlorn. The city was not even on the sky line and already illimitable distance seemed to separate him from Peggy. He stood at the rail and gazed back, but he had extreme difficulty in imagining what she might be doing at that hour, their common life having covered something less than twelve hours out of the past week. But twelve hours was seven hundred and twenty minutes and life was measured by heartbeats; seven hundred and twenty minutes at, say, eighty heartbeats a minute—

After the noon mess of boiled cabbage, tripe and tea, orders began to issue from headquarters.

The general had had a large desk put in the sitting room of the bridal suite and sat behind it thinking up orders to issue. He did this because his stomach was none too good and occupation kept him from worrying about the sea.

“First of all,” said the general, “is the matter of neatness. Take this order, Lewis.” Lewis was the secretary and was trying to steady the tripod of the field typewriter between his knees—there was some motion on—and to conceal a certain indigestion he had felt since the first roller. “As military neatness is one of the first qualities of the soldier, special attention is to be paid by the officer personnel to cleanliness of the decks. It is therefore forbidden to throw burned matches about.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was feeling a trifle dizzy.

“Tommy!” he called.

The aides were in the next room, playing chuck-a-luck in cautious silence. They had laid a folded bath towel on the top of the table and on it the dice fell softly.

“Coming, sir,” said Tommy, and appeared in the doorway, rigidly at attention, but with the edge of a two-dollar bill protruding from a pocket of his blouse.

“When my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps,” observed the general suavely, “I would be greatly pleased if they will ask the staff to meet me here at four o’clock.”

“Craps, sir?” said Tommy, greatly hurt.

“And I’d like to know whether you young gentlemen have entirely finished with the candy my niece sent me.”

“Candy, sir?” Tommy’s tone was indignant.

“Don’t repeat everything I say!” warned the general as the ship gave a real wallow. “Anchor that damned typewriter to something, Lewis, and then go and bring me a cup of hot water. I’m heading for a bilious attack.”

Then he eyed Tommy. He was in that state of mind and body when he cherished no illusions about his friends, and the possibility of Tommy as his nephew-in-law was not particularly pleasant. Tommy was just a bit too military. His neatly shined boots were at too precise an angle.

The general, who had outlived that phase of militarism some twenty years before and liked to relax now and then, felt sometimes that Tommy was trying to set him a good example.

“About that candy, sir,” said Tommy, still aggrieved and every angle of him correct, “I would like to say—”

The ship gave another roll. No, Tommy would not do. He was too damned persistent.

“If my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps, as I observed before when you interrupted me,” said the general most unjustly, “I should be highly gratified if they will say to the staff that, if they have quite finished their various poker and bridge games, the commanding general will see them here at four o’clock.”

Which, of course, was not precisely the message Tommy and the others delivered. That is what aides-de-camp are for.

Now the real story of the enmity between Tommy and Sergeant Gray dates from precisely thirty seconds after that speech of the general’s. For Tommy, going out slightly ruffled, met Sergeant Gray in the passage—or whatever they call it on a ship—and the sergeant, having just been thrown against a doorway, had struck his right crazy bone and was holding himself tight so he would not yell. Tommy, ignorant of the accident, paused before Gray and said in his most aide-de-camp-ly manner:

“Sergeant!”

At which the usage of war demands that the sergeant salute and reply, “Sir.”

But Gray was past even the usages of polite society. He still stood looking into vacancy and trying not to yell.

“Well?” said Tommy, waiting for the proper thing to happen.

Slowly Sergeant Gray came back to partial consciousness and turned a pair of eyes filled with fury on Tommy.

“Oh, go away and lemme alone!” he said. Which was neither Harvard nor regulations, and immediately made him liable to court-martial.

Tommy flushed.

“I’m in no hurry, Gray,” he said urbanely. “I’ll just wait here until you have a moment to think.”

“I’ve d—I’ve darned near broken my arm.”

“I’m waiting.”

A dogged resolution not to salute Tommy at any price was rapidly forming in Sergeant Gray’s mind. He dropped his right arm limp at his side and made an abortive effort to raise it.

“Can’t lift my hand, sir. Awfully sorry.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Tommy. “The voyage will last ten days and I’m prepared to stand here until you salute me, if—”

“If it takes all summer,” finished Sergeant Gray. “Very well, sir. But I shall be obliged to report to my captain that I am being subjected to persecution.”

It had ceased entirely to be a matter of rules and regulations and was now a matter of a girl. Both of them knew it. The anger between them was primitive jealousy complicated by a Sam Browne belt and two parallel bars. Tommy under ordinary circumstances was a nice chap who sent his mother flowers on her birthday and would pick up pedestrians in his car and give them a lift quite often, unless he was on his way to play golf. On those occasions he hadn’t time to stop. And Gray was one of those fellows, even at Harvard, who liked to chat with motormen on street cars and always sent the telephone girl a box of candy at Christmas and was likely to pick up a stray dog ’most anywhere and take it into whatever place was nearest and order it a square meal. Wrapped in paper of course.

But a very brief acquaintance with a girl—the same girl—had changed them both.

So they stood there rigidly and in silence until at two minutes after four the general put his head out of the door and said:

“Tommy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the hell has happened to the staff?”

“Sorry, sir.” Tommy was a bright pink. “Gray has refused to salute me and—I’ll notify them at once, sir.”

The general stood in the doorway and drew himself to his full and awful height. He was not, at that, much taller than Gray, but he had a chest like a hogshead and room enough for a whole constellation of stars on his shoulders.

“Come in, sergeant,” he said grimly, and stalked into his room grimly and creaked into his chair grimly.

Of course he would normally have done nothing of the sort. He would—the matter forcing itself on his attention as it had—have ordered Gray in irons at once. But there was the Peggy complication. He was very fond of Peggy.

“Of course,” he said, also grimly, “you know this is a court-martial offence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unless there are extenuating circumstances. In that case—”

He eyed Gray.

“I couldn’t move my arm, sir. I’d knocked my crazy bone.”

“Can you lift it now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Very well,” said the general. “You will salute Captain Trowbridge fifty times. In the passage when he returns.”

There was, for just the fraction of a second, the exchange of a glance of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray. It was, on the general’s part, by way of being a twinkle; and on Sergeant Gray’s, of triumph.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“Well?”

“Is Captain Trowbridge to return the salutes?”

“According to regulations, he will.”

And again, for the fraction of a second, they exchanged glances. The general liked Tommy, and in a sort of watchful and reminiscent way—remembering West Point probably—he liked Gray. But whom a general loves he chastens.

It was a very sulky Tommy who returned to the chuck-a-luck games some time later, while the staff smoked cigarettes in the general’s room and discussed such matters as physical exercise for the troops; and mumps and submarines and the rotten food the Navy gave the Army; and what the deuce had happened to the heavy freight; and seasickness; and the fundamental motives of Pershing’s strategy. A certain number of them began several times to say: “When I was in the Philippines—” and were cut short hastily.

It was when they had all gone that the general sent for Gray and made him his sergeant-orderly. He made it very clear that Gray was still under the ban of his displeasure and that the real reason he was taking him in at all was to clean up after the staff. For the floor of headquarters looked rather like the floor of a pool room, being covered with burned matches and cigarette ashes and torn-up bits of paper on which various members of the staff had noted suggestions to be made to the general—and then thought better of it.

“I have come to the conclusion, Gray,” finished the general, “that the only way to keep you out of trouble is to keep you in it. You’ll have plenty of it right here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with a sort of sinking conviction that he would now have to polish the general’s boots, until he remembered that the general had a valet along. What the deuce did a sergeant-orderly do, anyhow?

“You will stay within call,” said the general, “and make yourself generally useful. Better clean up this floor now. And hereafter, sergeant, you will make note of the name of any officer throwing matches or ashes on my floor. Keep a pad and pencil in your pocket.”

Then he went to have tea with the captain on the bridge, accompanied by the chief of staff carrying his tea ball. The general drank only his own tea.

This is really the story of a feud and its culmination. Feuds are of two sorts: The sort that spring up spontaneously out of an initial injury, and the ones that grow slowly from small things to greater ones. This was both.

Some time later Tommy sauntered into the general’s room for one of the general’s cigarettes. His own tobacco tasted queer to him—not that he was seasick of course. And seeing Gray there he did not see him—which happens in the Army now and then—and lighted a cigarette and threw the match on the floor. Whereupon Sergeant Gray got a pad out of his pocket and wrote something on it.

Tommy was vaguely uneasy. He went into the aides’ room next door and pondered. And when he had lost three dollars and twenty cents more he went back for another cigarette and lighted it and waited developments. They came. Gray got out the pad again and wrote on it.

This time Tommy told the aides and they put their heads together, but it was no use. It wasn’t the taking of the cigarettes. The general expected that, for—having almost as much privacy as a canary bird—he had never found a place where they were sufficiently concealed. Though he had done fairly well for a few days once with a box marked: “Memoranda for book on the new warfare.”

During the time the general was having tea Sergeant Gray’s list grew. He got—to be exact:

The divisional judge advocate.

The divisional adjutant.

The chaplain.

The master-at-arms.

The ship’s executive officer.

A seasick brigadier general—who threw his whole cigar on the floor and groaned. Gray had hardly the heart to put him down.

A lieutenant colonel. This latter waited some time and threw three matches and two butts on the floor. But this was because he was impatient. He had been notified that he was promoted to a full colonel, but his papers had not come before sailing and he wanted permission to put on his eagles for dinner.

Some time later the general returned. He was quite cheery, having done all the talking and made an excellent case for the Army versus the Navy, and he smiled grimly over Sergeant Gray’s list.

“Tommy!” he called. And when Tommy came, neater than wax and slightly dignified owing to the matter of returning fifty salutes, the general very pleasantly read:

“Captain Trowbridge, two matches.

“I am determined,” said the general rather oratorically, “to enforce military neatness about me. Pick ’em up, Tommy.”

Which Tommy did, grinning sourly and avoiding Sergeant Gray’s eye.

“And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The first thing that was noticeable was the Gallicisation of the ship. The doughboys had French phrase books and pored over them diligently. There was a sprinkling of British added to the conversation also, owing to the magnificent presence of an English sergeant major on board.

“Attention for the sergeant majah!” or “Gangway for the sergeant majah!” they would call when he appeared. “Cheer-o” and “Feeling rather ducky this morning, aren’t you?” vied with such French phrases as “Très bon,” pronounced tray bone, and “Combien,” pronounced according to taste and directed at the boy behind the grating who sold tobacco and candy. The routine of the ship went on, varied by reveille and mess calls, by shooting craps and by physical exercise which consisted mostly—owing to lack of space—of putting the men on their backs and having them raise their legs in the air, on the count dropping them with tremendous thuds to the deck.

“Not dignified,” reflected the general, watching them, “but better than nothing. It might be good for the waistline.”

He took to doing it himself in his stateroom and one morning Sergeant Gray, drowsily keeping watch on the deck outside the window of the general’s cabin, was electrified to see a pair of strong and muscular bare legs, topped by feet, rise into view and disappear some six times.

This keeping watch had been Gray’s idea. It had come as a result of the united efforts of William, the general’s colored valet, and Lewis and Sergeant Gray to get the general each morning into his rubber life-saving suit for practice in case of necessity; and into his life belt in time for fire drill. The general always blamed the suit for his troubles—or his valet.

“What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?” he would roar. “Arms paralyzed?”

And when it was all over and the general was near his boat and the troops were rushing up the companionways like battering rams, each man holding to the breeches belt of the man ahead, with the little fellows who lost their footing swinging like the cracker on the end of a whip, while the staff stood at different stations timing the drill with stop watches, Lewis and Gray and William would sink into chairs and perspire.

“Eleven minutes!” Lewis would groan. “If we’re struck he’ll go down like a stone. He’s too big to move fast.”

“Dollars to doughnuts he’d refuse to leave without full equipment,” said Gray rather bitterly. “There’s only one thing to do, Lewis. He oughtn’t to be alone at night.”

“He’s got a bunch of aides.”

“He has,” assented Gray grimly. “I call ’em, don’t I? D’you ever know ’em to waken until I’ve banged at their doors for ten minutes? Eleven o’clock this morning before one of them showed up! No, this is up to you and me, Lewis.”

“All right,” said Lewis without enthusiasm. He loved the general as a mother loves a child, but he generally felt that he was running the entire division. In speaking of the general to his intimates he always said “we.”

“We issued an order about throwing cigarettes overboard this a. m.,” he would say, for instance. “If a sub should pick up two in a line she could get our course.”

Or: “Sorry, old-timer. No cards for me. We’re seeing the staff at ten-thirty.”

So: “All right,” he said. “Well?”

“He’s all right in daylight,” said Gray. “Or he will be as soon as he gives up that rubber-suit business and sticks to a life belt. It’s night I’m thinking about.”

All of which leads merely to the next step in the feud. For Lewis and Gray and William—at his own request—divided the night into three watches and hovered like ministering angels on the deck outside the bridal suite. But things were uneventful enough, except that William, his first watch on, hearing strange and stertorous sounds from beyond the porthole, roused Gray with a shuddering fear that the general had had an attack of apoplexy. And except that the general, finding Gray yawning all over the place one morning, observed tartly that he’d better stop shooting craps all night.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.

It is unfortunate perhaps that the night Tommy could not sleep for thinking of the girl and the night Sergeant Gray saw the submarine should have coincided. It was not really a submarine, so there is no need for excitement.

Gray saw the periscope quite plainly. It may have been merely a nocturnal whale dreaming, like Tommy and Gray, of a lost love, it must be so frightfully easy for a whale to lose track of his love in the Atlantic—or it may have been the leg of a table or an empty crate. Considerable excitement was wasted on empty crates in the Atlantic during the late unpleasantness. Whatever it was, Gray was not in much doubt. But he waited to be quite sure, because a fellow hates to get five thousand men up on deck in the middle of the night for what may turn out to be the carcass of a horse.

So he stood bent over the rail. And at that moment a figure came along the empty deck, walking as men walk at night when they dream of a house in the country with a lot of vines and things and a girl waiting in a runabout for the five-twenty from town—and the figure held between wistful lips a lighted cigarette.

It took just one and a half seconds for Gray to knock the cigarette out of the aforesaid wistful mouth—and then he did it by jarring rather than direct action. For he miscalculated his distance and hit Captain Trowbridge, Yale, ’16, aide-de-camp and captain of artillery, a mighty slam on the ear.

Some moments later the general opened his porthole and put out his head. On the deck just outside was a darkish mass which seemed to be still and yet in violent movement.

“Stop that!” roared the general. “Get up out of that and get below decks. What the—” There has been considerable military language so far. We’ll call it mischief. “What the mischief d’you fellows mean, anyhow?”

The mass slowly became two masses and took on vertical instead of horizontal dimensions. But neither mass spoke. By common consent they separated, looking—as Elizabeth Browning says—two ways, and moving in the direction they were looking.

It was the chaplain who first noticed next morning the coincidence that one of the general’s aides-de-camp had a swollen left ear and that the sergeant-orderly had a cut lip.

The chaplain sauntered into the bridal suite and—having been most military for two seconds—took one of the general’s cigarettes, surveyed himself in the general’s mirror and observed: “Been having a family row, I see.”

“Pick up that match, chaplain,” said the general testily. “What sort of a row?”

“Been some sort of a mix-up between Tommy and Gray. Wish I’d seen it. Must have been considerable of a scrap.”

“Nonsense,” snapped the general. “What’d they fight about?”

“Search me!”

“Besides, an officer and a noncom—”

The chaplain, who was fond of boxing, had doubled up his fists and was making tentative passes at the general’s trench coat, which was swinging on a hook.

“They haven’t liked each other much for some days,” he said, and got in a beautiful hook on the general’s collar. “ ’F you ask me, it’s mutual jealousy.”

“I see,” said the general in a thoughtful tone. He greatly admired the chaplain, though he complained of him bitterly. “Can’t teach him discipline,” he would say at dinner parties. “Goes A. W. O. L. whenever he wants to and turns up blithely with some excuse or other and a box of cigars for me. I don’t know what to do with the fellow.”

“How dreadful!” the débutante on his right would breathe.

“Horrible,” the general would agree. “But I can’t put him in the guardhouse, though I’ve threatened it. The men love him. They call him the Bird of Paradise. Fact. I’m the Old Bird and he’s the Bird of Paradise.”

Upon which his great shoulders would heave and the débutante would try to think of the proper thing to say.

So the general saw how the chaplain’s mind was working.

“There wasn’t much time,” he observed.

“It wouldn’t take much time. Not with the young lady I have in mind. If I were not a married man—”

But the chief of staff came in just then, very military and precise, and the chaplain became just as military and precise and went out.

During the day the general issued more orders, to keep him from thinking about his stomach, and went on deck to read for a while, taking a book on military tactics and a detective story with him. So long as Tommy was near him he read tactics. But for quite a long time he sat and looked at the sea and thought about his niece back home, who was all the daughter he had, and these two young rascals pommelling each other under his window the night before. It took him back quite a number of years.

“The young fools,” he said reminiscently.

Well, there was no use worrying about it. They were going to war and no one could tell who would come back. He looked aft along the deck to where those fine boys of his were clustered against the rail, and he wondered.

II

They landed eventually and a code signal went back overseas at once, liberating several thousand post cards announcing their safe arrival. And a certain girl who lived near the port of debarkation and had been meeting the postman every morning for some time, got three of them. Two of them she put in her desk and the third one she put in the pocket of her sweater and carried with her. It is too soon to tell which one that was. But her mother found it and took it to her father—pretty well worn it was by that time—and he said: “The kiddie’s always off at some sort of a tangent. She’ll forget him in a week.”

“She isn’t eating.”

“Probably eating between meals,” he said callously. “Ice-cream sodas and that sort of stuff. Cut her allowance.”

But a morning or two later at breakfast he said over the morning paper: “Looks as though Charlie wouldn’t get any fighting after all. They’re breaking fast.”

Charlie was the general.

“Damned shame too,” he added.

“Father!” said a choked voice. “How can you? Wouldn’t you be glad if it was all over? And they’d all come home and—”

Here the girl lost her voice and left the table in a hurry.

“Humph!” said her father thoughtfully. “What was the name on that card?”

And on hearing it: “Better take her down to Aiken for a few weeks,” he said. “She’s got some sort of a bee in her bonnet.”

“She has,” said her mother grimly. “She can tell you herself. I won’t.”

But of course she did, almost immediately, and the cook in the kitchen heard a loud roaring from the dining room and slipped into the pantry to listen.

“Never!” said the roaring voice. “Never, with my consent. D’you think I’ve lost my mind? Send her here! I’ll tell her! I’ll settle this matter! This is one time when I shall assert myself in my own family.”

So they sent for the girl and she came and he asserted himself for fifteen minutes. At the end of which time he apologised. Then he argued for fifteen minutes, at the end of which he was perspiring and humble. At the end of an hour he was a cringing, pleading male, offering bribes of new cars and saddle horses; and was only met with something like this, delivered in a gentle patient tone:

“I only feel that it is my duty, father dear. Of course I cannot expect you to understand. It is the call of my country. I must accept. Some one person out of this family ought to do something.”

“Your brother is over there fighting.”

“Exactly,” she said in her patient way. “And millions of other people’s brothers to be looked after.”

“What d’you mean then—some ‘one’ person?” he persisted, sensing a gibe.

“From the three of us.”

“Look here,” he thundered, “aren’t we working? Haven’t I ruined my voice for the Liberty Loan?”

“Not noticeably,” she said coldly.

But everybody knows the rest of that conversation. It took place in about a million homes, and in a certain fixed percentage of instances it ended in a trip to Washington and certain tearful fittings of girlish uniforms. And in the end one blue-and-white or pink-and-white bedroom being closed off; and certain sheepish visits to its emptiness; and a renewed, terrified scanning of the daily papers for submarine sinkings. From which it will be seen that the girl did not go to Aiken. That is the story.

The curious thing about this story is that it is a war story without any war in it whatever. Of course the people at home did not know that. Sergeant Gray’s family, playing golf at Del Monte, always visualised him as a sort of storm centre for Hun strafing. They considered that German shells would seek him as orange juice seeks the eye. And Peggy’s people saw her wandering over battlefields at night, stooping ever and anon amid flying bullets to soothe the wounded, and perhaps being captured by the enemy.

But the real facts were rather different. Not that the girl wouldn’t have gone straight into the jaws of hell if she had had a chance, or that Sergeant Gray wouldn’t have done his fair share of the fighting and considerable more. They were both just out of luck, that’s all.

It was late summer when the division reached France and went into training in the general direction of the Front. It had been trained pretty fine already and was reported to G. H. Q. as being in first-class condition by a lot of inspectors-general—nicknamed the Pickwick Club by the general in confidence to the chief of staff.

The general had a compartment in the train going up, and he took the chief of staff in with him and put Sergeant Gray in an upper berth because it might be necessary to speak French during the night. He had been studying French himself, but the French didn’t seem to know their own language, and when he got excited he mixed considerable Filipino Spanish in it and it was rather like a salad.

Tommy had been missing when the arrangement was made, and sometime after midnight he turned up and in—on the floor of the compartment. He was sleeping there quite peacefully when a German shell struck him in the chest and a startled voice belonging to Sergeant Gray said: “Awfully sorry, sir. Just wanted to get a drink of water. Had no idea you were there.” He thought he had jumped on the general.

“Wuf!” coughed Tommy, holding his chest. “Wuf! Wuf! What the dickens do you mean—trying to murder me?”

Sergeant Gray listened. The general was wide awake by that time, but continued to snore.

“Why the devil don’t you sleep where you belong then?” whispered Sergeant Gray furiously. “I’ve sprained my ankle on you.”

The next snore the general gave sounded strangely like a snort.

Now I am perfectly aware that in our Army no commissioned officer swears at a noncom, and that if he ever did the noncom would of course not swear back. But it must constantly be remembered that the situation between Tommy and Sergeant Gray was extramilitary. It was man to man. It was Yale to Harvard and Harvard to Yale. And it was jealousy to jealousy.

Well, they got to their area finally and did the usual things, such as getting rid of the manure heaps in the street and learning to brush their teeth in the mornings while the astounded French populace looked on. Except the officers, they washed mostly in the street at the town pump and drill over, they bought chocolate sweetened with saccharin, and writing paper and vin ordinaire at the little shops. They grew quite accustomed to cows breaking through their ranks when they were drawn up for the solemn ceremony of retreat; and to having these same cows wander at night into the stables where some of them were billeted and lie down with them to pleasant dreams. And they gave their monkey meat and tin willie to the French children and their extra underwear—finding how badly they needed it—and bought green cheese at the cheese shop, and had to report to the regimental doctor afterward.

But always, always, they waited for the order to move up to the Front. And it did not come.

The Headquarters Troop got very low in its mind. There they were, on their toes to get to work, and life consisted of trucking every blasted thing they needed six kilometres from a railhead, fighting the military police for diversion and as usual attempting to evade the early-morning shave by liberal applications of talcum powder to jaws and upper lips. They had been there about five weeks when William, arriving in the kitchen for breakfast after helping the general into his clothes, announced that the general was sick.

“Or if he ain’t he’s goin’ to be,” he asserted. “He was readin’ the morning mail and talkin’ to himself something awful. Then I give him the last of that there grapefruit we brought over, and all at once he give a yell and I ain’t seen him since.”

“Where’s the grapefruit?” inquired Sergeant Gray anxiously. As sergeant-orderly he was now a part of the household and ate in the kitchen. He didn’t mind that at all, but it gave him an uncomfortable sense sometimes of being warmer and better fed than the other fellows. It was awfully good for him, too, being an excellent offset to being a spoiled only son. Every now and then he helped the cooks pare the potatoes. But he sometimes wondered about his mother playing golf in California. He was afraid she might think she hadn’t raised her boy to be a potato parer.

“If you ate that grapefruit!” he threatened William.

“It’s there—unless the aide-de-camps’ve got it,” said William. “They’re like these here vacuum cleaners, them aide-de-camps. They—”

Sergeant Gray, who was of the age that is always hungry, tiptoed into the hall of the little French house and gazed into the dining room across. The grapefruit was there, and sitting behind it was Tommy, booted and spurred, with a new riding crop on the table and a fresh morning shave and a very feminine-looking letter in his hand. A hot wave of jealousy flashed over Sergeant Gray.

Tommy glanced up.

“Sergeant!”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with suspicious eyes on the letter.

“Bring me some powdered sugar.”

“Sir?” said Sergeant Gray.

“Powdered sugar,” repeated Tommy in a cold voice.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You heard me!” bawled Tommy. “Sugar! Powdered sugar!”

Now a sergeant-orderly has many duties. They consist frequently in doing anything that the proper person for the job may flunk. He may be put to anything from raking the general’s lawn to leading a platoon over the top in battle. But there is nothing in the regulations about powdered sugar.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray, and retired to the kitchen. It was empty.

“Sugar,” muttered Sergeant Gray furiously. “I’ll see him in blazes first. Sugar!” He sat down.

“Sergeant!” came a very military voice from across the hall.

“Sugar! I’ll sugar him!” mumbled Sergeant Gray, glancing round the kitchen.

Almost thirty seconds later he stalked into the dining room and placed a bowl before Tommy, and Tommy—feeling the magnanimity of victory—observed that it was a nice morning.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray, and retired, taking Tommy’s glass of water with him, ostensibly to refill it. Having done that he proceeded systematically to empty the water pails in the kitchen.

It was only an instant after that that he heard wild and choking speech from the dining room, and ran in. Tommy was on his feet making hideous grimaces.

“Water!” he yelled. “Quick! Get me some water! I’m poisoned! I’m—”

“Just discovered there isn’t any water, sir,” said Sergeant Gray. “I’ll run to the town pump for some, sir.”

Tommy, however, shot past him to the kitchen and was making a frenzied round of the water pails. Finding none, however, he poured some scalding coffee instead and but substituted one agony for another.

“Awfully sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Gray in the tone one uses to a sick child. “If I can do anything—”

Tommy steadied himself with an effort and confronted him.

“Gray, what did you bring me for sugar?”

“For sugar? Wasn’t it sugar, sir?”

“You know darned well it wasn’t sugar.”

“It was in a box,” protested Sergeant Gray in an aggrieved voice. “I’m no cook, sir, but it looked like sugar. If you didn’t notice the difference yourself, sir—”

Tommy looked at him speechlessly and went out. And Sergeant Gray’s smile was a mirthless one, for there was the edge of a pink envelope sticking out of the breast pocket of Tommy’s blouse.

It is most unfortunate to have to record that that day the general developed mumps. It was given out in the division as bronchitis, of course, and the general lay in a high French bed and roared orders to the chief of staff outside the door and threw a puttee at William when he suggested a hot lemonade. But part of the time he lay in the bed and nursed two grievances: First, that the Germans were breaking fast and unless they moved up soon they might as well not move at all. And second, that his family had had an attack of insanity and had allowed Peggy to come to France. He considered that girls were of two kinds: The ones to be taken care of and babied and have their railroad tickets bought for them and the automobile rug tucked in round them and a kiss for every birthday and one to grow on. And the others. The general’s niece belonged to the first kind.

She was in Paris.

“I’m going to come to see you before I really settle down to work,” she had written. “Lots of people here say I can’t do it; but I saw the nicest general yesterday and two colonels to-day. They all seem to be going in your direction soon and they all think you are a perfectly wonderful soldier and that if anything happens to General Pershing, which of course we mustn’t hope for—”

“Little minx!” said the general. “She’ll have the whole general staff eating out of her hand in a week!”

“And I’ll be in a pretty pickle if she comes here.”

However, the word pickle brought a terrible pain immediately in front of his ears and changed the trend of his thoughts.

The general had considerable time to think during the next few days. Mostly he thought about war and what wires he could pull to get to the Front. But he also thought about Peggy and Tommy and Sergeant Gray. He was a very wise man and he considered it unlikely that pure family affection was bringing the girl to visit him. Which was it then? Gray or Tommy? The general decided that it was Gray by a very easy method. He simply tried to think which one he would choose if he were a pretty girl and twenty, and he decided that it would be Gray.

Yes, the girl was only twenty. She had fibbed about her age a bit to get over; but, then, a good many others did. Only it was unfortunate that she had antedated her birth a number of years before her parents were married.

It was some days later that the general told Tommy she was coming. Tommy stood in the doorway, very rigid and trying not to inhale germs, and acknowledged that he, too, had had a letter.

“She can’t stay here,” said the general. “Don’t know how the deuce she’s put it over, anyhow. Against every regulation. Likely to make trouble all round. You fellows will have to look after her, y’know. Only going to keep her one day.”

“I was wondering, sir,” said Tommy, “if I could get Paris leave for a day or two. I need some uniforms, sir. Not immediately, sir,” he added hastily, seeing something in the general’s eye. He had no mind to be sent back to Paris while she was in camp.

“I’ll see about it.”

“And—if you are well enough to talk, sir—”

“I’m not,” said the general fretfully. “What is it?”

“I have been thinking about Gray, sir. I understand he is anxious for a commission and that you are thinking of— The recommendations for the candidates’ school are ready to be filled out.”

There was a small twinkle in the general’s eye.

“Run away and play, Tommy,” he said. “There are moments when I realise my age and general unfitness for the service. But I’m still running this division, thank God! And you might intimate as much to the chief of staff sometime.”

Left alone, the general reflected.

“Now Gray,” he considered, “wouldn’t have done that. He’ll use his wits or his fists or both. But I miss my guess if he’d try to put Tommy out of the way.”

Here, however, he dozed off and was only awakened by the arrival of the storm centre, accompanied by two very important general officers and a fatuous captain, who had tucked her up most of the way in the motor and already had the light of insanity in his eyes.

“Mumps!” she said to Tommy. “Why, the poor old dear! Then I’m going to stay right here and nurse him.”

“He needs you,” said Tommy in a maudlin tone. “He needs you awfully. We can put you up, you know. We—”

But she was not listening to Tommy. As a matter of fact, for the last thirty miles she had not heard a thing the general officers said, such as: “It was the plan, in case the enemy reached this point—” or: “These buildings on the right contain engineers’ stores. Those are pontoons for bridges.” Or even the captain: “Are you quite sure your feet are warm?”

She was homing like a pigeon, though she did not know it.

She greeted them all: the judge advocate, who was not really so formidable as his title and should have been in his office at headquarters quarrelling with the mayor about taking over the town hall; and the chaplain, who had an open tenderness for her—only he would have called it tendresse now; and such of the staff as could pretend it had business there; and naturally all the aides. And then she saw Sergeant Gray.

Now it is hard to say just how she had thought of Sergeant Gray. She had always known that Tommy, for instance, and the others, would be living comfortably somewhere and mostly sending out orders to fight and that sort of thing. But Gray was different. She had always pictured him in his helmet, one of a long grim line crouched waiting to go over the top. She had had a number of such pictures of him stored away, but she had not exactly anticipated finding him in charge of a detail cleaning out the town well.

Yet when she looked down the narrow street that is precisely what he was doing. She looked away for fear he might feel uncomfortable and said at once:

“How military you all look! You’re so imposing. Some of you may have noticed,” she added, “that I am in uniform myself.” But she was really saying to herself fiercely that it took all sorts of things to make a war, and certainly clean drinking water was one of them.

So Sergeant Gray kept on with his work and found a number of things that the French population had missed for years, and had continued healthy in spite of, and the general’s official family surrounded one member of his personal family, and clanking with spurs and swollen with rank, took Peggy inside. The odds were certainly Tommy’s that afternoon.

III

Gray knew exactly what was happening inside the house when Tommy took the general’s niece in to see him. She would go upstairs and speak to the general from the door, and they would stand round bored and hardly talking until she came down. And then they would all become animated and tell anecdotes; and the chief of staff would sit at the piano and sing wistfully; and an aide-de-camp would bring him some canary seed; and the chaplain would give his imitation of Harry Lauder making a speech; and Tommy—

“Get the hell out of here!” he snarled at a cow ambling gently along the street.

The general entertained vicariously at dinner that night for his niece. There were her visiting escort and part of the staff and the general’s own household. And before dinner the chaplain, who had had the mumps, came and sat with him.

“Well?” said the general.

The chaplain lighted one of the general’s cigarettes.

“She has seen him,” he observed. “He was as you arranged, in charge of a detail cleaning out the town well. He was game all right. I thought he’d probably hide, but he didn’t. I’m bound to say, however, that he’s been in a fighting state of mind ever since.”

“But he didn’t hide. That’s the point. What’s she doing now?”

“They are having tea,” said the chaplain. “There are eight of them—and at least seven are planning to sit beside her at dinner.”

The general chuckled. Lying there in the high bed, his face gave rather the impression of a small barrel needing to be hooped.

“I’m going to have him wait at table to-night, Chaplain,” he rumbled. “If there’s any nonsense about either of ’em, that’ll cure it.”

“I don’t know,” observed the chaplain in a doubtful voice. “I like Gray and I don’t believe that you’ll do any good by humiliating him. He enlisted to fight. It isn’t his fault that he isn’t fighting now.”

The above space represents what the general said just there about the division not getting forward. But when he became calmer:

“Got to offset the idea she’s got about Gray,” he justified himself. “She knows that story about him roping me over a fence, and like a fool I spent a whole evening telling about the mischief he’s been up to at different times. She’s got to see him with his claws clipped.”

The chaplain differed and said so:

“Life,” he pronounced in his best pulpit manner, “life clips all our claws eventually. But why not leave to the young their illusions and their dreams?”

“Piffle!” said the general rudely.

Now Peggy took off her uniform that night, which was forbidden in the little book she carried round with her, and came down to dinner to meet the waiting household in something rather unwarlike and very pleasing to behold. Not real evening dress, you understand, for the war was still on though dying fast. And had her hand kissed by a French officer who had invented an errand so as to meet her. Then they all went in to dinner; and there were commissary chocolates on the table; and four candles standing in saucers; and on a side table a box of the general’s most cherished cigars, which he had thought were safely hidden away in one of his kit bags.

The chief of staff sat at the head of the table and Peggy sat on his right.

The rest drew lots of an army cap to see who should sit next to her—and Tommy won.

“How nice!” she said, when he sat down. She would have said the same thing to any one, but Tommy grew quite lyric.

“It is Fate,” he said. “Kismet. Even though the rest of them fall on me afterward and rend me, this hour is mine.”

“Think of it!” said Peggy in the exact words used by every girl who got to France and met some one she knew over there. “Meeting here like this so far from home!”

“If one wants a thing badly enough,” said Tommy, “it just naturally comes.”

“Soup, sir?” said a deep bass at his elbow.

Tommy glanced up hurriedly, but all he saw was Sergeant Gray’s rather fine profile as he placed the soup plate.

There was a very quiet little game played at dinner that night. Only Peggy and the players knew about it. It consisted mainly of most obsequious and zealous service on the part of Sergeant Gray, so that Tommy had not a moment for any real conversation. Between courses Gray stood firm and silent behind Tommy’s chair, and when he disappeared kitchenward Tommy would try hastily to make up for lost time.

“If you could only know what this glimpse of you means to me, Miss Peggy. You know, when you are thinking a lot about one particular person—”

“More chicken, sir?”

“No!”

Gray would move on and Tommy would begin again, the light of desperation in his eyes.

“It’s been hard to keep my mind on war, I can tell you. Ever since I heard you were coming—”

“More potatoes, sir?”

“Look here,” Tommy said finally in a low and furious voice, “when I want more food I’ll ask for it. D’you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Gray in the tone of a well-bred butler.

After that he offered Tommy nothing whatever and left him conspicuously without dessert. Peggy, who had been rather flushed and silent during the meal, smiled somewhat grimly at that. But she ate very little. The plain truth was that Miss Peggy was having to reassort quite a number of ideas, and among them was that mental picture of Sergeant Gray in a steel helmet leading a forlorn hope across No Man’s Land and later being decorated by her uncle, the general. Getting accustomed to having the greatest military figure in the Army in bed upstairs with the mumps and the devil of the Headquarters Troop carrying round the mashed potatoes was rather a strain.

Her escort left that night and Peggy slept at a Red Cross hut in the village, but before she left she had a few words with the general.

“I do think,” she began spiritedly, advancing into the sick room. “I do think—”

“Go on out!” roared the general. “Do you want to go round with a face like a balloon? Go on out!”

“Don’t waste that military tone on me,” said Peggy severely. “I don’t care whether I get it or not. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think about you.”

She then sat down on the general’s bed and stared at him coldly.

“Don’t you think,” she said, “that when you have gentlemen round you—”

“Get off the bed, Peggy,” begged the general in a different tone. “Don’t you know there is always some fool inspector or other looking for things to take back to G. H. Q.? Do you want to ruin me?”

“You ought to be ruined. Let me tell you, you haven’t fooled me for a minute. And if you think it is funny to take a friend of mine and just because you have the authority—”

Here—to the general’s horror—she curled up on the foot of his bed and began to cry. He was really awfully disturbed. He sat up in his blue-silk pajamas—he was president of the pajama club the aides had got up, because he had a monogram on his left cuff; but he did not know he was president—and patted her and in his anxiety revealed a great deal he had not meant to reveal—vocally, not physically.

“Good heavens,” he said at last, “what do you want me to do, anyhow? Kiss him?”

“He ought to be an officer and you know it,” she said in a smothered tone. Her face was buried in the eiderdown comfort. “He’d be a good officer, too, and you know that. He wants it more than anything.”

“I dare say,” said the general rather grimly. “Well, if you’ll get up and behave according to the regulations and not have me court-martialed, I’ll see what I can do.”

She sat up then and gave every evidence of being about to kiss his inflated face, but he held her off.

“May I tell him?” she asked.

“You may not,” said the general sternly. “I may have my weak moments and submit to being bullied when I’m sick. But the time hasn’t come yet when I allow the women of my family to make my promotions, thank heaven! Now run and have the chaplain take you home. And for heaven’s sake, remember that he’s a married man and susceptible.”

Peggy left at the crack of dawn the next day. If she had expected to be seen off with the éclat of her arrival she was disappointed. Not an aide showed up; but a tall young man with a sergeant’s chevrons and a pair of hungry eyes was standing outside the general’s doorway.

“I had to see you,” said Sergeant Gray rather huskily. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“Well, if you hadn’t—” said Peggy.

“I made a fool of myself last night, you know. I was nearly crazy. Not,” he added hastily, “that I cared a snap about what I was doing. That’s all in the day’s work. But to have to listen to that— Am I ever going to see you again?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Peggy briskly. But there was a shake in her voice. Because after all there was a rather considerable chance against it. Sooner or later they would move up, and then—

“Of course we’re going to meet again,” she said determinedly. And because that was an emotional sort of subject she added: “Isn’t it queer there is nobody up? I thought the Army rose at the crack of dawn.”

There was a scarcely perceptible twitch of Sergeant Gray’s upper lip and inside the house the general’s bell was ringing furiously.

“Great luck for me they’re not here,” he said. “I’ll carry any message you care to leave. I’m a sort of cross between a nursery maid and a messenger boy, anyhow.”

“I shan’t leave any messages,” said Peggy coldly.

“You’ll—do you mind letting me know your address when you’re located?”

Of course this was only surface talk, because the car had come up which was to take her back, and the chauffeur, who was from the troop, was staring straight ahead and listening hard. Also, the general was now beating a tattoo with his bell and the noise was horrible. What Sergeant Gray was really saying with his eyes was that he worshipped her.

“I’ll be very glad to let you know,” replied Peggy primly, and got into the car. It is entirely significant of the sort of girl Peggy was that Sergeant Gray ran true to form and tucked her in.

“Are you sure your feet will be warm?” he asked tenderly.

Even Peggy, who was feeling awfully slighted by Tommy and the others, smiled at that. It was so exactly the tone the maudlin captain had used coming down. Gray gave a final pat to the rug, a tender pat because it covered Peggy, and lowered his voice.

“I had a lot of things to say to you,” he said hurriedly. “But every time I think of something I remember that he said it to you last night. The only thing he didn’t say was—”

“Yes?” said Peggy expectantly.

But the chauffeur had planned that by starting early and going very fast he could get four hours in Paris, and so moved off. Long after the car had disappeared down the crooked little street, and while the general’s bell gave evidence of hysteria, Sergeant Gray stood looking after it.

At least he had seen her alone. There would be a price to pay for it, but it had been worth any price. As to punishment:

“Ça ne fait rien,” muttered Sergeant Gray. Which is army French for not giving a tinker’s damn.

Exactly one hour late that morning, a shaking William took the general his coffee.

“Clock an hour slow!” the general shouted in a frenzy. “Are you going to tell me that every clock in this whole house is crazy?”

“ ’Pears like they are, sir,” quavered William. “The cook’s clock and mine—they’re both off an hour. I just called the aides-de-camp, sir, and Captain Trowbridge’s like he’s out of his head.”

The general put four lumps of sugar in his coffee and stirred it reflectively.

“Who saw my niece off, William?”

“ ’Pears like nobody did, sir.”

“I see,” said the general thoughtfully. “William, find Sergeant Gray and send him here.”

When Gray arrived, somewhat breathless, the general let him stand at attention for some time. The feeling Gray had now and then that a touch of spot remover would take him out entirely returned very strongly.

“For some curious reason, sergeant,” said the general, “two clocks in this house lost an hour last night. Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Humph!”

The general looked away. Drat the boy, anyhow! He wondered if he had ever had such desperate eyes when he fell in love for the first time. He had been in love in a perfectly nice way so many times since. But he rather hoped he had never looked like a cross between a sheep and a Bengal tiger.

“I’ll give you one minute to explain,” said the general coldly.

“I wanted a word alone with Miss Peggy, sir. I’m sorry if it caused any trouble.”

“Trouble!” bawled the general, and sank back among his pillows. “The plain truth is, Gray, that I’ve got to get rid of you. You’re making an old man of me. I’m going to turn you over to somebody else.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gray, growing even paler.

“You will have a week’s C. B. and K. P.,” said the general. Which sounds rather like the conferring of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, but is not. “And after that I’m going to send you to an officers’ training school. And,” added the general grimly, “if you don’t behave yourself may the Lord have mercy on your soul!”

So Sergeant Gray pared potatoes and did various menial duties for a week in the headquarters kitchen and sang as he worked, mostly about wanting a belt just like the belt that all the shavetails wore. He irritated the cook considerably. And now and then he encountered Tommy and saluted him according to the regulations and without any particular rancour. Because very soon now he, too, would be clattering about in a belt and spurs, and so on—and Tommy’s single advantage would be gone.

Now and then Tommy addressed him rather sharply, and at those times Sergeant Gray bore himself with admirable humility and muttered: “Ça ne fait rien.” He was unbelievably well behaved those days.

Then the time came to leave, and the general gave him a little talk on the responsibilities of being an officer and the spirit that lay behind service to his country and pretty nearly brought him to tears. After that he went away, and with him from the general’s household went something of gaiety and youth and irrepressible spirits. The division drilled and waited, and outside his military family the general was his rigid and soldierly self. He made rounds on horseback, accompanied generally by Tommy, and discovered a number of things he wasn’t meant to see; and then rode back to divisional headquarters and searched his dispatches for the orders to move forward. But none came and the Germans were breaking.

In his secret heart Tommy was a bit relieved. He was willing enough to fight, but after all the end of the war would have its advantages. On the long rides through the French lanes he took again to visualising the little house somewhere and Peggy in it and golf for two on Saturday afternoons. After all, if the Germans gave up it would be not only because of the army in the field but of those—like themselves—who waited behind the lines. He offered that to the general one day and the general was unappreciative.

“Don’t talk like a jackass, Tommy,” was what he said.

So through all the early fall the Germans slowly retreated; and the division waited, growing more and more down-spirited; and the girl in a seaport French town poured innumerable cups of coffee and cut innumerable sandwiches; and Candidate Gray worked for his commission. He worked doggedly night and day. He sat up at night studying and dragged his tired young body out of bed at reveille and shaved and made his bed and ate his breakfast hurriedly, and was all that a candidate should be.

Now and then he got a very brief letter from Peggy. It would detail her work carefully, but it would say very little about herself, and after a time he grew jealous of her work. She seemed to be obsessed with it, and the slow and painful fact dawned on him that she loved the whole Army.

“She doesn’t give a hang for me,” he said to himself more than once. “She was nice to me because of the uniform and what it meant. And she’s being just as nice to about six hundred a day right now.”

The sad part of it was that he was nearly right. The girl had just discovered service and was enamoured of it. She went back at night to her dreary room in a cold French house, and heated water and soaked her tired feet in it and then crawled into bed to keep warm. But at daylight she was up again, putting on all the extra clothing she had and drinking a cup of execrable coffee sweetened with saccharin before starting on her tramp through the incessant rain to the canteen.

She was too busy to think about Gray or Tommy in the daytime and too tired at night. She began to feel old and matronly and rather like a mother to all the world. And when the hospital trains arrived all the love in her went out to the cheerful boys who were so grateful to her for what she sometimes felt was so pitifully little.

So her letters grew detached and impersonal, and Candidate Gray, studying them carefully, found no hope in them and set his teeth doggedly. If only the Germans didn’t break entirely! If only he’d get his chance!

Then the Germans broke.

It was too cruel! Too incredible! The thing was over and he had had no part in it. The division had had no part in it. The day of the armistice, that brought so much joy with it, brought to about two million men a sickening sense of futility; of lost opportunity and wasted effort.

Candidate Gray sat in his barracks and gloomed. After all the commission had been only a means to an end. He wanted to fight. If he had had a boyish feeling that he wanted to lead instead of being led—well, he was very young. And he wanted terribly to prove that he was a man.

And after a time, however, he brightened up. The fellows in the trenches would have a rest, anyhow. Of course he felt that the armistice was a blunder. The Hun ought to have been licked to a finish. But at least the war was over. He dreamed a dream of a little house within motoring distance of town and Peggy in it and golf for two on Saturday afternoons.

Having thus begun to see the brighter side of things he wandered into town to look for the disbursing paymaster and buy him a drink or two, this being preliminary to an appeal to get permission to sign a cash receipt for his month’s pay, thus saving a certain amount of time in case the armistice meant twenty-four hours’ leave—which was important. It meant getting into the nearby city early and thus getting the best room in its only hotel. And it meant, too, sending off as soon as possible a letter to Peggy which was in his pocket.

“I’ve been recommended for my commission,” he had written, “and it ought to be along pretty soon. I shall get a few days’ leave then, and I thought if you didn’t mind I’d drop in and see you.” Dropping in to see her meant travelling a day and a night in a French train and probably sleeping on the floor or in a baggage rack. He had tried this last and it wasn’t bad. “I’m pretty well knocked out by the armistice naturally, but I suppose a lot of poor devils who have had it hard will be mighty thankful.” He had hesitated over the signature and finally ended it “yours.”

“And that’s God’s truth too,” he had muttered.

Then he went out and played the eternal game of the private soldier in a small French village full of officers—did his best to avoid saluting by trying to look as though he was invisible and, if that ruse failed, never looking above the second blouse button of any uniform he met.

“What you don’t see won’t hurt you,” he muttered.

In ten days or so Peggy’s letter came back.

“How splendid to think you are going to be an officer,” she wrote. “But I always knew you would be. And, of course, I shall be delighted to see you, though I’m afraid I shall be awfully busy. Yesterday we served—”

All the balance was about her work. It was not entirely a satisfactory letter, and there was a casual mention of a Red Cross major that set him frowning. Of course those Red Cross chaps would be hanging round her. There was always some one hanging round her. He added that day a new jealousy to the ever-present one of Tommy, and had to go out and buy his lieutenant’s insignia to cheer himself up.

Then one day a rumour spread through the camp; an incredible thing that took all the courage out of the hundreds of expectant young hearts and sent the weak sisters among them to the French wine shops to forget their wrongs in cognac. The rumour was that all promotions were cancelled.

Gray got it from the one-time mess sergeant of the Headquarters Troop from the old division. The M. S. had been recommended, too, and was looking blue round the lips.

“I don’t believe it,” said Gray stoutly, but with a sinking heart.

“All right. You’ll find out.”

“But—but why? We’ve worked like dogs. Sending us here was equivalent to a promise that if we made good—”

“Any old time they’ll keep a promise they don’t want to! Come on and have some cognac. I’m going to drink myself to death.”

Candidate Gray went back to his barracks and sat down on his bed. The bottom had dropped out of his world. All that study and effort, and now—nothing. Back where he had been. And not even a fight to look forward to. Something of the fine faith he had in his Government and its promises died that afternoon, never after to be wholly revived. For the incredible rumour proved to be true. All promotions were cancelled. All earned commissions were cancelled. From that time on effort in the Army was to be without reward.

The Army generally adopted an attitude of ça ne fait rien. And Sergeant Gray said it, too, but without any conviction. He was seared to the very soul.

There were thirty-eight desertions from the Candidates’ School in the first twenty-four hours. After that they lessened, for most of the weak sisters had gone. But the spirit was gone out of the men.

On the tenth day Gray wrote again to Peggy—a cheerful letter which almost made her cry.

“I had expected to put on a little side when I came to see you. But two things have interfered. First, I won’t be able to come. Second, there isn’t any side to put on. I have buried my officer’s equipment in an old beet field and perhaps some day it will be recovered and hung in a museum as a relic of the great war. Probably I wasn’t officer stuff, anyhow, so it’s just as well. Way down in my little inside I’m a bit disappointed, but ça ne fait rien.

“I’m not going to bother you with any more letters. I know you are busy and I haven’t any right to take up your time.”

He hesitated a long time after that and then just wrote “God bless you” in a shaky hand and sent it off before he lost his courage. Because his courage was not quite so good as it had been. He was beginning to lose faith in himself.

Of course his psychology was wrong. He felt this new and cruel army order as a personal stigma. He was somehow less of a man for it. He gave the girl up on the head of it and took to wandering round the camp at night, giving her up again every minute.

He was entirely inarticulate and there was no one to voice his misery to, so he did like most lovers and chose some other’s disconsolate words to fit his case. On a bright night he was prone to sit on the barracks steps, for instance, and plaintively bay at the moon:

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart

Are as a string of pearls to me.

He would be carried away by emotion after a time and forget the one hundred and eleven disgruntled candidates within.

My rosary. My rose-a-a-a—ree.

His heartbroken wail would penetrate the thin walls and loose window frames of the barracks, and a chorus of groans would echo from the inside, followed by the opening of a window.

“Aw, go to bed and forget it!” a voice would say.

And after a time, chilled to the bone and having finally renounced her, he would retire to his cot, take off his shoes and putties, his hat and blouse, and turn in.

Once warmed through, he slept extremely well.

He went back to the old division after a time, to find things going on much the same. The general was too good a soldier to tolerate any slacking. But there was a subtle difference. Only the chaplain remained the same, for only the chaplain had not hoped for promotion, and the general, who had been in the Army a long time, and had therefore developed a sort of armor-plate philosophy.

And on the third day of Gray’s return Tommy came back from seven days’ leave. Sergeant Gray saw him coming back, gay and debonair and clanking, and viewed him with lowering suspicion. A little later Lewis came to the door for a breath of air and Gray stalked up to him.

“Where has he been?” he asked. “Trowbridge?”

“He says he’s been to Paris,” said Lewis rather fretfully. The general’s uncertain temper had been very certain the last few days.

“Like hell he’s been to Paris!”

“I don’t know where he’s been,” said Lewis, “and what’s more I don’t care. I’ll tell you this, Gray: If the Old Man doesn’t stop working me day and night I’m going to—”

“I know where he has been,” said Gray darkly, and stalked away.

That night, the chauffeur being laid up, Sergeant Gray drove the aides to a Red Cross dance, and carefully and with extreme deliberation ditched the lot of them six miles from anywhere. The aides, after considerable conversation, walked back in the mud and Gray curled himself up inside the car and gloomed for quite a length of time. After which he went asleep and wakened in the cold dawn with a sort of ready-made conviction that he was going to ditch Tommy as easily as he had the car and much more permanently.

But that very day he had to acknowledge that the honours of the game Tommy and he were playing were Tommy’s—to that point.

After nightfall it was the chaplain’s benevolent custom to show moving pictures in the village square.

The chaplain considered it an excellent time to enlighten the French population as to America; but as most of the pictures were of the old Wild West, doubtless the French will continue to think it our native pastime to shoot up gambling hells and ride madly on horseback with drawn revolvers after people we do not happen to fancy.

In the square Gray met Lewis and paired off with him out of sheer loneliness.

“The Old Man thinks we’ll be going home soon,” said Lewis.

“Humph!” said Sergeant Gray, whose faith in the general was moribund along with other things.

“Well, don’t you want to go?”

“Ça ne fait rien,” observed Sergeant Gray out of a low mind.

The hero in the picture, having rescued the girl from eleven bandits and fired sixteen shots without reloading his revolver, now took the girl in his arms and turned Lewis’ mind into a new channel.