VICTORIOUS 
 
 A Novel 
 
 By 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE 
 
 OUR NAVY AT WORK 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 He Who Gives All Gams All 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I The Overture 
 
 II IB Which the Memory of an Old Love Plays Havoc 
 with a New; Cries "Place a la Jeunesse!"; and 
 Makes Mention of a Vision of Jeanne d Arc . 19 
 
 III How Andy Entered Dangers Beyond the Danger- 
 
 Zone; and of a Pace at a Car-Window ... 49 
 
 IT Of a Gracious Grafter; of a French Maid and a 
 Drafted Pro-German, and of Two Persons Un 
 der a Parisian Moon; Yet, Withal, of the Order 
 and Disorder of War ........ 64 
 
 T Tells of a Little Town that Goes to War; of a 
 Woman with a Red Cross; of a Girl with China- 
 Blue Eyes, and of a Mother that Did Not Have 
 a Service-Star ........... _ 85 
 
 VI Takes Andy Brown to the Trenches; Pursues Love, 
 
 and Pledges Faith to a High but Difficult Cause 96 
 
 VII Concerns Some Experiences, Psychological as Well 
 as Physical, of a Conscientious Objector; and 
 Tells a Good Deal About Democracy in the Dol 
 drums ............. 113 
 
 VIII Devoutly Devoted to Trouble ....... 133 
 
 IX Of Sarah Brown, and of a Yellow Letter Found in 
 
 a Trunk ............ 145 
 
 X Hats Off; The Flag! .......... 151 
 
 XI How Politicians Can Eat Their Cake and Have It 161 
 XII Chrissly Hears the Nearer Waters Roll ... 178 
 
 XIII A Short One, Showing, However, that France Is Not 
 the Only Place Where Fate Gathers Threads 
 for Her Intricate Web ..... 187 
 
CONTENTS Continued 
 
 CHAPTEE PAGE 
 
 XIV Showing, Among Divers Startling Matters of Im 
 port to Andrew Blunston, One that Should Long 
 Be of Import to All His Fellow-Countrymen; To 
 Wit, the Early American Front 193 
 
 XV Wherein the Dragon Swallows the Sun .... 217 
 XVI Treats of Love Among the Ruins 221 
 
 XVII Proves that Gratitude May Warm the Barest 
 Bosoms, and Gives One Recipe for a Commis 
 sion in the Censorship 237 
 
 XVIII Presenting Sylvia Raeburn in a New Role . . 248 
 
 XIX How Miss Hattie Discovered a Little, and Chrissly 
 
 Lost a Great Deal 260 
 
 XX But What About Andy? 269 
 
 XXI Recording Two Highly Emotional Experiences . 280 
 
 XXII Containing Some Adventures of a Pupil in the 
 School of War and Showing How Le*onie Did 
 Not Wait in Vain, and How Andy Found His 
 Soul 291 
 
 XXIII Sarah Brown Hears News of Herself and of Her 
 
 Son 320 
 
 XXIV In Which "My Lord Fighteth the Battles of the 
 
 Lord" 328 
 
 XXV How Andy Went "Over the Top" S43 
 
 XXVI Just a Chapter To Be Skipped by Everybody that 
 
 Doesn t Care About Love 350 
 
 XXVII How Chrissly Came to Mirande-la-Faloise, and How 
 
 Andy Stayed There 367 
 
 XXVIII Of the Glory of the Stars, and of How "One Star 
 
 Differeth from Another Star in Glory" . . . 391 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 THE OVERTURE 
 
 ON THE second of April, 1917, among the multitude of 
 events, portentous and minor, taking place in the experience 
 of the world s people, the following occurred in the lives of 
 those persons with whom this chronicle is chiefly concerned : 
 
 At 5 :36 A. M., a mature alarm-clock, which lost six minutes 
 every night, broke the stillness that had, for seven hours and 
 more, prevailed in Sarah Brown s bedroom. Mrs. Brown 
 awoke instantly, but she did not instantly get up. Hers was 
 a small town, and the citizens of small towns are early risers, 
 but her hours out of bed were so long and so wearisome that 
 she had no inclination to lengthen them. So she lay there, 
 pretending to herself that she had better begin the day by 
 planning what she was to do, although aware that what she 
 would have to do would be only what she had done daily for 
 many years. 
 
 She sat up at last, however, and walked, barefoot, a tall 
 thin figure that patently had once been pleasing, to the 1870 
 bureau. A lamp stood there, and she lit it. 
 
 For her inattentive gaze the mirror presented a dark- 
 browed, sallow face, rather sunken and deeply lined, under 
 plentiful hair of black and silver. Her features were still 
 handsome, though their expression was one, not of present 
 strength, but of strength that had been and was departed. 
 
 She dressed mechanically and stole softly down the stairs 
 in her slippers and out to the kitchen, where she set the kettle 
 
2 VICTORIOUS 
 
 to boiling over the gas stove. Then she went to the hall and 
 called irp to tuo third f.oor: 
 
 "An-n-n-^ ! K 
 
 There was no answer. 
 
 "Andy I" called Mrs. Brown. 
 
 Prom somewhere aloft, a sleepy "Yes, mother" replied. 
 
 Mrs. Brown opened the windows of the dining-room. The 
 rumor of the frogs had hardly ceased along the river, but, 
 borne on the inrush of spring air, there came the quick 
 clucking call of house-hunting robins. The fluttering window- 
 curtains were of a cheap lace, and on the sills stood tomato- 
 cans covered with crepe-paper and bearing red geraniums; 
 the curtains needed washing, but the coal-dust from the heavy 
 freight traffic somewhat excused that. Of late years, Mrs. 
 Brown s chief method of lightening household cares had lain 
 in postponing them; since it was only meals that could not 
 well be postponed, she confined herself just now to breakfast, 
 and to hurrying her son, whose late hours with his books made 
 him dilatory in the mornings. 
 
 "You ll be late at the office," she called again. 
 
 "I am getting up, mother." 
 
 "Then let me hear you moving!" 
 
 From the attic bedroom came a double thump. 
 
 "You re just lying in bed and pounding your shoes on the 
 floor!" called Mrs. Brown. 
 
 It was rather a game between them, that thumping, though 
 neither openly admitted it. However grown-up he must be 
 during the rest of the day, Andy was his mother s little 
 boy for those few minutes each morning, and she was not un 
 happily aware of it. Now, the matutinal game ended, a dim 
 head thrust itself over the top of the stair-well. 
 
 "Don t you believe me ?" it asked. 
 
 "Yes," said Sarah reluctantly. "But you re not dressed. 
 You d better hurry : the eggs are on." 
 
 A moment later, she had further evidence of her son s 
 awakening: all the way down-stairs floated the music of his 
 resonant voice. He was singing It s a Long Way to Tipperary 
 while he searched under the bed for a lost collar-button. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 3 
 
 The eggs were not "on," but Mrs. Brown put them there. 
 
 This gave her a moment of leisure. She opened the front 
 door and went out upon the small square porch. 
 
 A girl was sauntering down the street, a blonde girl with a 
 plump pert face. Hooked over her arm was an empty basket 
 that swayed as she walked. Her bright blue eyes laughed at 
 Sarah Brown, to whom she said "Good morning." 
 
 "Going to market?" she added. 
 
 No, Mrs. Brown was not going to market ; she had "got her 
 things up street last night," but: 
 
 "Will you be in time, Minnie ?" asked Andy s mother. 
 
 "I guess not," said Minnie; "I never am. Still, we get 
 nearly everything at the Shuman s stall, and Chrissly Shu- 
 man always saves them for me." 
 
 II 
 
 Minnie went on to the market-house. That big building 
 with the bowed roof was still crowded by townspeople, gentle 
 and considerate enough in most of the occupations of life, but 
 now jostling one another before the heavily laden stalls behind 
 which Amishmen in shovel-hats and Mennonite-women in 
 black poke-bonnets stood to sell the produce of their uberous 
 farms. 
 
 Through a score of greetings, Minnie edged her way toward 
 the most fecund stall in the market-house. It bent under 
 piles of tempting food methodically arranged, and it recoiled 
 from the concerted onslaught of a phalanx of the town s best 
 people. Back of it stood, selling his wares, an imperturbable 
 Amishman in his brown homespun, large, bearded, his hair 
 flowing free to the nape of his neck and then cut with square 
 severity. A buxom, bonneted wife, her ample bosom covered 
 by a sober kerchief, assisted him, and, at one corner, their 
 broad-shouldered boy, the adolescent replica of his father, red- 
 cheeked, smiling, served still other customers and looked with 
 dark expectant eyes beyond the buyers. 
 
 Minnie leaned against a neighboring stall until a moment 
 when the Amishman and his wife were entangled in the hag- 
 
4 VICTORIOUS 
 
 gling of a local bank-president. Then she promptly ap 
 proached the boy. 
 
 "Hello, Chrissly," she said. 
 
 Chrissly dropped a cabbage that was on its way to the out 
 stretched hands of Colonel Eskessen, owner and editor of the 
 Americus Daily Spy. In the boy s eyes, expectancy became 
 realization; his broad grin showed twin rows of white and 
 even teeth. At first he could not speak; he could only bob 
 his head. 
 
 "How do you feel about the Germans now ?" asked Minnie. 
 
 The grin faded. 
 
 "Ok," said Chrissly, "the Germans is all right. Mind what 
 I tol you las market a ready ? What f er have we to mix in 
 an pick on em?" The red in his cheeks deepened. "An 
 now the pressident is goin afore Conkress, they says, an 
 talk some more still. Des isli alle letz I mean, that s all 
 wrong yet." He stumbled between his two idioms, and then 
 his emotion tripped him into the jungle of his native Pennsyl 
 vania-Dutch. "Die prerogative powers fom pressident " 
 
 "That s all right," laughed Minnie. "I guess nobody s go 
 ing to get hurt. Got my tilings I told you last market I d 
 want?" 
 
 Chrissly returned to his form of English, and to radiance. 
 
 "All but that chicken/ he said. "The chickens is all gone." 
 
 Colonel Eskessen was prodding a lump of butter with a fore 
 finger. He conveyed the forefinger to his mouth ; but he eyed 
 Minnie restively. 
 
 "Gone? The chickens all gone?" gasped Minnie. 
 
 "I couldn t help it," pleaded the now discomfited Chrissly. 
 "My pappy sold em when I wasn t lookin ." Minnie was pout 
 ing. "But I saved a duck fer you still," said Chrissly. 
 
 Colonel Eskessen was abstractedly eating dried-beef from a 
 pile on the stall and glowering at the unheeding girl. Chrissly 
 proceeded to fill her basket with food that, contrary to the 
 market-rules against reservations, he had retained for her. 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 Out of "the Browns house," having breakfasted, came 
 Andy. He was just a lank freckled lad, with a cheerful face, 
 and he was clad in all the effulgence of a small town s "swell 
 dresser"; there were boys exactly like him, that morning, in 
 hundreds of towns throughout the United States, at first 
 glance in no wise remarkable; and yet, about him as about 
 them, there was that which commanded confidence and won 
 affection. Perhaps, in Andy, it was the frankness of his really 
 fine brown eyes, or the earnestness and enthusiasm of the light 
 that, issuing thence, enfolded him as with an aura of idealism. 
 Perhaps it was his innocence and that lack of humor which 
 can exist, in one of our people, by the very side of a full 
 share of the American sense of fun. He radiated energy and 
 good will. He obviously gave, and he obviously so expected a 
 fair return that he never dreamed the need of demanding it. 
 
 People coming from market smiled back at him. When he 
 turned into Elm Avenue, which is the main street of the town, 
 the girls at the "Fashion Emporium" and the "Racket Store/ 
 who went to work early, called "Hello" ; so did the employees 
 on their way to the silk-mill and the umbrella-factory and the 
 shirt-factory, and the proprietor of the "Philadelphia Shoe 
 Store" crossed the street to "give him an item." 
 
 Andy, on his way along Second Street, had passed the old 
 stone Blunston house, an ivied relic of colonial times, shut up 
 now these several years, and was wondering whether its appar 
 ent changelessness was symbolic of the town. Somebody had 
 said so. Somebody had said it must have been Lawyer 
 Dickey that in Americus, save for the temperature, which 
 was never the same for twenty-four hours on end, each day 
 was like its predecessor, and Colonel Eskessen had supple 
 mented: "But none of them unpleasant." Andy saw both 
 points but didn t wholly agree with the former. He might 
 have admitted that its atmosphere of contentment was the 
 salient quality of this town rising from the silver river and 
 surrounded by high and gentle hills ; but he would have pro- 
 
6 VICTORIOUS 
 
 tested "he protested now to himself, as he walked whistling, 
 officeward that he found variety here. 
 
 Of course, there was not much variation in the routine of a 
 Daily Spy reporter. He knew just what, within certain well 
 defined limits, this morning and the afternoon would bring 
 forth: he would report to Colonel Eskessen; glance at the 
 Philadelphia papers to see whether President Wilson really 
 meant to say anything decisive in his heralded appearance be 
 fore Congress; ask the copy-boy to save him the New York 
 World when it came in on the ten-thirty train, so that he 
 shouldn t miss Owen Evans Paris dispatches; and then he 
 would go on his route about town seeking the local news. He 
 would write that, or his share of it the same sort of news 
 that he always wrote would go home to midday dinner, come 
 back, and read proof and go home again, this time to supper. 
 But there was always the evening. Last evening there had 
 been a party at the Kellers , and to-night, in the Armory, the 
 Four-Leaf Social was going to give a dance. 
 
 He had passed from these thoughts and was wondering 
 whether "we ll get into the war," and cheerily trusting that 
 we might, when, looking up, he saw Minnie Taylor coming 
 toward him, her full market-basket on her arm. He flushed a 
 little and touched his pale blue necktie, to make sure that it 
 was just where it ought to be : one night he had had a horrible 
 nightmare; he dreamed that he was going to the office and 
 met Minnie and found he had no necktie on. 
 
 Minnie and Andy were of the same age : it was that age at 
 which the girl is so much older than the boy. Minnie saw 
 Andy approaching, though she pretended not to, just as he 
 saw her and pretended he didn t; but Minnie gave no furtive 
 touches to her person or apparel : she knew that she was right. 
 
 "Hello," she said. 
 
 Andy said: "Hello." He looked at the basket and put a 
 wholly unnecessary question: "Been to market?" 
 
 "Yes. Where d you think?" 
 
 "The North Pole. Wish I could carry that for you, but 
 I ve got to hurry to the office." 
 
 "You always do have to. And it s heavy to-day, too." She 
 
VICTOKIOUS 7 
 
 let her eyes meet his. "Chrissly Shuman gives me good meas 
 ure." 
 
 In the language of the town, Andy was "going with" Min 
 nie; that is the way that Americus described the beginnings 
 of courtships. Andy had never seen Chrissly, whose father 
 had only recently deserted the Doncaster market for that in 
 Americus, and Minnie knew this. If, however, she wanted to 
 waken any jealousy in the heart of her admirer, she failed. 
 
 "Be sure you re on time for the dance to-night," he said. 
 "Fll come round at half-past seven." 
 
 Minnie thought that too early. 
 
 "Well," said Andy, "maybe there won t be many more 
 dances." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Perhaps we re going to get into this war." (Andy Hoped 
 we were going to get into the war, but he didn t think so.) He 
 spoke only because the conjecture struck him as one that it 
 was manly to utter. 
 
 "I don t see what that s got to do with dances," said Minnie. 
 She turned up her little nose. "Besides, we re not going to 
 get into it. Everybody says so. War? We should worry." 
 
 She gave him a sprig of trailing-arbutus that Chrissly Shu 
 man had given her. 
 
 So Andy went whistling to the Spy office, reported to Col 
 onel Eskessen, glanced at the Philadelphia newspapers, decided 
 that nothing tremendous was going to happen, reserved the 
 New York World against his return and started on his route. 
 All was just as it had been since he first "went on" the Spy; 
 all was just as he had known it would be ; as far as work was 
 concerned, all would go on just this way forever. War? He 
 looked at the smiling people on Elm Avenue, at the busy shops, 
 at the quiet dwelling-houses that lined the side-streets; he 
 looked across the shining river at the peaceful hilltop fields 
 hedged about with forests of pine: soon the spring wheat 
 would be green there, and then soon it would be yellow; a 
 little while and it would be harvested and sent on its long way 
 to feed the European participants in battle. But that would 
 be, as it had been, America s only part in Armageddon. He 
 
8 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 wished it were not so, but so it would be. War? Minnie s 
 irony was right : we should worry ! 
 
 IV 
 
 Colonel Kai Eskessen, however, being an older man, and an 
 older newspaper-man, than Andy, was wont to read the 
 news with another sort of eye. To-day, after he had started 
 Andy and Kepler, the senior reporter, on their rounds, the 
 colonel, in his cluttered office, did first follow his custom 
 of clipping and pasting editorials from the Philadelphia jour 
 nals and of sending them to the composing-room to be placed, 
 uncredited, in the editorial column of that evening s Spy, but 
 when he then turned, also as usual, to their first pages to look 
 over the important news of the day, he perused the reports 
 from Washington with a face that grew grave and graver. 
 
 The colonel was a short shambling man. He had pale eyes 
 with a good-humored twinkle in them and a head quite bald 
 in its curiously square top, across which he carefully brushed 
 the scanty, neutral-colored locks released for such service by 
 a part low over his left ear. His coat was never without its 
 G-. A. E. button and, although in excellent health and the 
 owner of a prosperous newspaper, he drew a comfortable Civil 
 War pension. The farmers at the semi-weekly market ob 
 jected, behind his back, to his custom of making his breakfast 
 by sampling their wares, and his political opponents, for he 
 dabbled in politics, said that he had no journalistic backbone 
 they declared that the Spy s motto was "All the news it s 
 safe to print" but he was a good husband and a kindly man ; 
 he understood the difficult art of small-town journalism, and, 
 if he suppressed more interesting facts than he printed, his 
 reticences were to conceal faults, never to withhold praise, 
 and they kept him friends with four-fifths of the town. 
 
 The colonel had served through one war, and lived through 
 another. He knew what a war was, and he did not want his 
 country to enter one, if entrance could be avoided honorably. 
 Life had become neat and comfortable; things had seemed 
 fixed and in his particular case, as in the case of most of his 
 
VICTOKIOUS 9 
 
 friends, the source of this well-being was a slowly and peace 
 fully evolved body of investments that war would almost cer 
 tainly calcitrate. 
 
 He turned to the financial pages and the stock-reports. Al 
 ready there were signs of uneasiness. 
 
 The colonel called the copy-boy. 
 
 "If anybody comes in, Bud," he said, "tell em I ve gone 
 next door to Lawyer Dickey s on business and I ll be back in 
 ten minutes." 
 
 He went into the ground-floor room of the building next 
 beyond his own. It had been intended for a shop, but Lawyer 
 Dickey had always used it as his office. 
 
 "Jim," said the colonel, "I thought I d just drop in to see 
 you about collecting those unpaid subscriptions, but I must 
 have left the list on my desk. I don t seem to have it 
 about me." 
 
 He did not offer to go back to get the list. Every day Col 
 onel Eskessen came in for a ten-minutes chat with his life 
 long friend, which lasted for at least half an hour, and every 
 day he made some such excuse as the unpaid subscriptions 
 for visiting in business-hours. The subscriptions were never 
 collected ; the colonel did not want them collected ; they were 
 those of old friends that, he knew, could neither afford to be 
 without the paper nor yet to pay for it. 
 
 Dickey was the colonel s antithesis. He was big and ag 
 gressive; he looked like Daniel Webster in his old age. 
 He swore like a sailor and said "Now I Lay Me" every night 
 before he got into bed ; when Lawyer Dickey had won a suit 
 for the Pennsylvania Kailroad by proving contributory negli 
 gence on the part of the legless, damage-claiming employee, 
 and by thundering that the fellow had been drunk while on 
 duty, Jim Dickey would make a special trip to Philadelphia 
 on a pass, to be sure and see that the losing suiter was pen 
 sioned. 
 
 "Sit down, Kai," said Dickey. "Still afraid we re going 
 to war?" 
 
 The colonel sighed. 
 
 "It looks that way," said he. 
 
10 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Not on your life," said Dickey. "That d be something def 
 inite, and anything definite s as contrary to the principles of 
 that fellow down in Washington as eating lettuce with a fork 
 is contrary to the principles of a rabbit/ 
 
 "Well, I don t know. He may be forced into it." 
 
 "Forced ? You don t know what you re talking about ! You 
 can t force a rabbit to fight." 
 
 "But Jim," protested the colonel, "he s as good as said " 
 
 "He s as good as said a hundred things on every important 
 subject that s come up since he s been in office," Dickey inter 
 rupted, "and every one of the things he s said has contradicted 
 the other ninety-nine. Look at Mexico" he jerked his head 
 toward the southern wall as if there were a map of Mexico 
 there instead of a case of calf-bound law-books. "He double- 
 crossed Huerta, the only chance Mexico had. Then he played 
 with Villa and told Carranza to get out of Villa s back yard. 
 Next day he was across the fence with Carranza and helping 
 him heave rocks at Villa. He sent a few soldiers into Mexico, 
 ordered em out, sent em in again, ordered em out again, 
 called for more soldiers just enough for the Mexicans to 
 laugh at told some of those they needn t come after all ; then 
 drew out the whole kerboodle. Forced to fight! Good God, 
 I only wish he could be ! I ve lived seventy-five years like a 
 good American, but I m beginning to think I ve lived too 
 long ; I m beginning to be ashamed of my country when it sits 
 around and gets rich out of letting other folks fight its bat 
 tles." The old man thumped his desk. "The only reason for 
 expecting he ll fight is that he got himself elected by saying 
 he kept us out of war !" 
 
 Colonel Eskessen looked gloomily into the street. 
 
 "I telephoned the Doncaster New Era this morning," he 
 countered. "They say the A. P/s got his speech and it s sure 
 for war." 
 
 "Oh, of course he s said something!" jeered the lawyer. 
 "What did he do when the Dutchmen blew up the Lusitania ? 
 He typewrote em a letter! Then they torpedoed the Hes 
 perian; he typewrote em a letter. Then they torpedoed the 
 Arabic and he typewrote to em again. I don t believe they 
 
VICTORIOUS 11 
 
 read em any more they don t have to. Dear William: 
 kindly remit/ Why, there ve been more Americans killed by 
 Germans in this war than were killed by the Spanish in our 
 war with Spain. Did you know that ?" 
 
 Colonel Eskessen nodded. 
 
 "Well/ pursued Dickey, "who cares? We re too proud to 
 fight. The only thing we do is to send a Texas politician 
 abroad to make peace, and he s the man that says he fore 
 warned Europe of the war forewarned every country, on his 
 own showing, except his own !" 
 
 "I know all that, Jim," said the colonel; "but the events 
 of the last month certainly seem to indicate that the president 
 can t help himself." 
 
 "Poof !" said Lawyer Dickey. "February s armed neutral 
 ity s as good as we ll ever get, and we ll probably go back on 
 that in May. We won t have war till all the typewriters are 
 worn out and the typewriter-factories shut down." 
 
 At exactly the moment when Mrs. Sarah Brown s alarm- 
 clock was waking her in Americus, Andrew Blunston was get 
 ting ready to go to bed in New York. The hotel-room that he 
 had occupied since his return from France a month ago was 
 littered with papers, for he had been writing all night. 
 
 Blunston rubbed his deep-set, dark eyes. His face was 
 weather-beaten and his brown hair streaked with gray. His 
 physique was excellent, but this last war was wearing. He had 
 written his account of the first battle of Ypres by candle 
 light, under shell-fire, working for ten hours at a stretch and 
 after three days without sleep and almost without food, yet 
 now, in this April of 1917, he felt the effects of one night s 
 toil. 
 
 He was too tired to reread his article for the evening edition 
 of the paper that employed him; he must leave that to the 
 copy-desk. He had rung for a bell-boy five minutes since. 
 Now the boy came in. Blunston thrust his manuscript into 
 an envelope and handed it to the bell-boy for delivery two 
 hours later. 
 
12 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "All right," said the boy; "an here s a telegram for you. 
 It must V come las night an they forgot it. I found it at 
 the desk/ 
 
 He went out, and Blunston opened the telegram: 
 
 "Passport Bureau State Department refuses re-issue your 
 passport doubtless due your criticism administration s pre 
 vious war policy must get right with them if you re to be any 
 use in case America takes active part in war. 
 
 "Brannan, Mg. Ed." 
 
 Blunston went to the door. The vague figure of the retreat 
 ing bell-boy was just disappearing around the corner of the 
 hall. Blunston summoned him to return. 
 
 "Have me wakened at eleven o clock," he said, "and see 
 that a long-distance call to the "War Department is put in for 
 ten forty-five." 
 
 The door closed again, and Blunston, flinging off his coat 
 and waistcoat, paused before a leather traveling-case for photo 
 graphs, which stood open upon his dressing-table. There was 
 a picture of his mother and one of his father, both reproduc 
 tions of daguerreotypes, and beside these the faded likeness 
 of a young woman ; she wore the "mandolin-sleeves" of twenty- 
 odd years ago, and they were so ample that a half of each 
 had been beyond the range of the camera; she was black- 
 browed and black-haired; her face was handsome, strong, but 
 it was unlined. 
 
 Blunston flung wide the windows and looked out, for a few 
 minutes, at the early morning quiet of Fifth Avenue. The fa 
 mous street was empty; the city seemed sleeping through the 
 dawn. 
 
 VI 
 
 Six hours later, in another part of New York, a girlish fig 
 ure, swathed in a peacock-blue kimono, was sitting before a 
 telephone. Any one entering the bedroom would have seen 
 only her back and, above a graceful neck, coils of really 
 golden hair. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 13 
 
 She spoke into the transmitter; her voice was low, but of 
 excellent timbre: 
 
 "Mr. Tottem, this is Miss Eaeburn. Good morning/ 
 
 There was an answer. 
 
 "Mr. Tottem," said the wearer of the peacock-blue kimono, 
 "I ve thought all night long about your offer. I think I ve 
 seen all its advantages. I know it would mean a lot to a girl 
 that has only been playing seconds, the way I have, and, judg 
 ing by what you tell me about London, war would be hard on 
 the stage and good for pictures ; but I can t accept your offer. 
 It s very kind of you, and I m grateful, only I mean to stick 
 to the speaking-stage, even if we should go to war/ 
 
 VII 
 
 That was at about half-past eleven. At the same time, but 
 at a time recorded with him by Central reckoning, the occu 
 pant of a bed in a Chicago hotel that hotel being the per 
 manent home and voting-address of the sleeper began to 
 show signs of awakening. 
 
 The sheet, which described a gentle arc above the occupant s 
 stomach, rose and fell with less regularity. Farther down, a 
 foot was evidently twitching. The coverings hid even the top 
 of the sleeper s head, but a plump fist was presently extended, 
 and then a whole-hearted yawn disturbed the quiet of the 
 room. 
 
 The fist opened; it closed upon the sheet and dragged it 
 down down below a thicket of iron-gray hair, below half- 
 opened hazel eyes, aquiline nose and a little gray mustache 
 and a double chin. The process did not cease until it had re 
 vealed the front of a silk nightshirt embroidered with pink 
 rosebuds. 
 
 Mr. B. Frank McGregor was awake. 
 
 Somebody had been pounding at the door. Mr. McGregor, 
 without arising, reached the key and turned it. 
 
 "Come in," he said, and there entered a colored boy in the 
 uniform of the hotel. 
 
 The boy held out two slips of paper, one white and one 
 green. 
 
14 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Mornin , Mr. McGregor," said the boy. "Here s yo ticket 
 an yo Pullman." 
 
 "Good morning, George/ said Mr. McGregor. "What 
 time does the train start?" 
 
 "Yo got three-quarters of an hour, Mr. McGregor." 
 
 "All right. Clear away that mess" Mr. McGregor s nod 
 indicated a table littered with bottles, glasses, syphons, and" 
 the blue-prints of what appeared to be plans for aeroplanes. 
 "Tell Harry to send up my regular breakfast and then phone 
 my chauffeur to bring the car round. Say I ve got to go to 
 Washington and I m in a hurry." 
 
 VIII 
 
 At one o clock, eastern time, a shaggy-haired, dark man, 
 with protruding eyes, then copy-reader for a New York news 
 paper and on the day-shift, entered his paper s office and 
 paused, as usual, before the case of little boxes that held 
 employees mail. He drew out one envelope. It was a manila 
 envelope and addressed in pencil to "Mr. Louis Garcia." 
 
 He read: 
 
 "There has been found in your locker a check from The 
 Star for $75. This confirms me in my belief that, despite 
 your denials, it was you who sold our aldermanic-bribery 
 story to that paper, tinder the circumstances your services 
 are no longer required here. Please draw from the cashier 
 one week s salary in advance. Check from The Star enclosed 
 herewith. "JAS. M. BRANNAN." 
 
 IX 
 
 Over the Ha}^tian coast, that second of April, the sun, 
 which had still a month of uncontested sovereignty ahead of 
 it before the advent of the rains, shone ardently out of a 
 waxen, turquoise sky. Only the laziest of breezes floated up 
 from the Caribbean and found its way through the Windward 
 Passage; it just ruffled the sea to a chatoyant luster, and, 
 with the quietly moving sea, moved a few ships black shapes 
 of floating steel. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 15 
 
 Ashore, between two groups of trees, the one palmettos, 
 the other a motley of pines and Bermuda cedars, a row of 
 men crouched and strained their eyes across the glimmering 
 plain toward the mountains. A light haze hung above the 
 land. Back there were rising forests in which cocoa, ginger 
 and arrowroot grew wild, thickets of yellow acoma, manchi- 
 neel, mahogany, satinwood and cinnamon. From the edges 
 of those forests small puffs of smoke appeared, and now and 
 then a bullet slipped through the palmettos and sent a great 
 frond circling slowly downward. The men near the shore 
 also had guns in their hands: they were American marines. 
 
 "What s that?" demanded one of them. 
 
 He pointed to a four-legged, cringing figure that was com 
 ing toward them, from the nearest forest-edge, at a sort of 
 slinking trot. 
 
 "It s one of them wild hawgs," said his neighbor. 
 
 A third man had better eyes. "Looks like a wolf," said he. 
 
 It did look like a wolf. Even though it was coming directly 
 toward them, they could see a bushy tail sagging low be 
 tween its hind legs. It had pointed ears, erect. It was a 
 brindled brown and gray. 
 
 "Wolf, hell," said, however, the first man. "Wolves is the 
 only kind o wild animal they ain t got in this stinkin hole. 
 It s some sort of a dawg." 
 
 The third speaker raised his rifle: 
 
 "I m goin to take a chance at him." 
 
 "Hi ! Don t you do it !" A dozen voices joined the chorus 
 of protest. A lieutenant s added to them official finality. 
 
 The men began whistling. The animal stopped, regarded 
 them uncertainly, came on. 
 
 He came all the way up to them, wagging his bushy tail 
 without raising it. He did not leap upon them or kiss them ; 
 he did not bark; but very quietly, and yet very briskly, he 
 moved from one outstretched palm to another and shoved his 
 damp cold muzzle into each. 
 
 "Gee," said the man that had first observed him : "Here s 
 a mascot for us ! I told you guys it was a dawg." 
 
16 VICTORIOUS 
 
 France rises five hours before America; it was six o clock 
 of the afternoon in France when Louis Garcia was reading 
 his discharge in New York, but at that hour there was still 
 in progress at a corner of France something that had begun 
 there before the dawning. It had begun long before Mrs. 
 Brown s alarm-clock wakened her, and yet it was no more 
 than under way when Minnie Taylor said: "War? We 
 should worry !" 
 
 There had been an unexpected German advance at an in 
 consequential point of the Western Front. It was nothing 
 much. It had, indeed, no military importance whatever. It 
 secured, next day, only a few lines in the American news 
 papers. Nevertheless, it meant death to scores of persons; 
 it meant ruin to hundreds, and in the present chronicle it 
 is a factor not lightly to be disregarded. 
 
 In the early darkness had sounded a rushing of feet, a 
 pounding upon doors; then cries and lights and confusion. 
 Men swore; women wailed; roughly wakened children 
 shrieked impotently. Horses and oxen were hastily harnessed 
 by lantern-light, live stock herded; furniture hustled from 
 ground-floor rooms; out of windows, clatteringly opened, 
 mattresses and cradles were tossed. 
 
 Within an hour the houses of a village were left tenantless, 
 the village empty. 
 
 Morning, and all the rest of the day, showed, down a long, 
 white, poplar-bordered road, the procession of one of those 
 caravans so familiar now, a few years ago remembered only 
 by them who remembered 1870. Wagons, carts, bicycles, 
 wheelbarrows and baby-carriages hauled by animals, dragged 
 by men and women, propelled by children, and all heavily 
 freighted. Here, on the toppling top of some ramshackle con 
 veyance, heaped with the household goods of generations, a 
 great-grandfather, too feeble to walk, carrying his great 
 grandchild; there, chairs, tables, bedding, clothes, kitchen- 
 utensils, tossed together in panic; everywhere, blocking the 
 white roadway, all but the decrepit plodding onward afoot. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 17 
 
 THere were mothers with babies at the breast; plucking 
 at their mothers skirts there were crying children that had 
 not so long since learned to walk. There were white-haired 
 men, grasping palsied canes and bending far toward the earth 
 that was soon to receive them. There were girls that sobbed 
 and boys with swollen eyes round from fear; and there was 
 a mad woman that, in 1914, had given her betrothed to the 
 hopper of war and now fled in her wedding-clothes. But men 
 of fighting-age there were none. 
 
 Whoso could at all carry carried a bundle weighted to 
 the theretofore unguessed limit of the bearer s strength 
 a bundle pregnant with convertible property, heirlooms or 
 pathetic keepsakes. Every little while the limit was exceeded 
 or the road too hard : a bundle fell and aborted its sorry con 
 tents amid the dust. 
 
 There was little talking, only commands to the draught- 
 animals, sometimes the words of one woman seeking to com 
 fort another, or of a mother petting or urging a child. For 
 the most part, the caravan might have been a caravan of 
 mutes, pressing their palms against their foreheads, making 
 helpless gestures with their eloquently opened hands, dully 
 accepting the inevitable. 
 
 One girl there was, however, who went with her hands 
 clenched and her head up. She was broad-shouldered, full- 
 bosomed, erect. She walked as only peasants walk and queens. 
 Others, all the others, were as insensate ligan swirled along 
 with a torrent; in this girl s agate eyes there burned a cold 
 fire, under the tan upon her cheeks there was a red; she bit 
 into the crimson of her lower lip until it grew as white as 
 the strong compressing teeth. Her name was L6onie Picaud. 
 
 XI 
 
 In the Capitol at Washington, a lantern-jawed man was 
 addressing a joint session of the two Houslfrof Congress. He 
 was saying: 
 
 "But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall 
 fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our 
 
18 VICTORIOUS 
 
 hearts for democracy, for the right of those who submit to 
 authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the 
 rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion 
 of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace 
 and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last 
 free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our for 
 tunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, 
 with the pride of those who know that the day has come 
 when America is privileged to spend her blood, and her 
 might, for the principles that gave her birth and happiness 
 and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she 
 can do no other." 
 
 Thus, for those with whom we are here concerned, and for 
 millions of other persons, the second of April, 1917. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN WHICH THE MEMORY OF AN OLD LOVE PLAYS HAVOC WITH 
 A NEW ; CRIES "PLACE A LA JEUNESS 
 TION OF A VISION OF JEANNE D ? ARC 
 
 A NEW ; CRIES "PLACE A LA JEUNESSE \" ; AND MAKES MEN- 
 
 BLUNSTON he had his passport now sat in the smoking- 
 car of the afternoon accommodation-train. He wore his old 
 war-correspondent s uniform. For the first time in many 
 years, he was going home. 
 
 He could not say why; or would not. There had been a 
 time when he loved all Doncaster County, and, especially, 
 Americus, but that was when he loved also a girl of the small 
 town; and the girl married another man. The Americus of 
 his birth and boyhood had become only that dream-home 
 whereto tired and busy men withdraw, from crowded cor 
 ners of the earth, in that brief pause between daylight and 
 evening, or in the last minutes of waking before sleep. Now, 
 not only in age, but in deed. Blunston had almost reached 
 what he knew must be the summit of his career; a few inevi 
 table steps, and he would have achieved, in his profession, the 
 peak he had been so long striving for. During the breathing- 
 spell before that last ascent, something had compellingly urged 
 him to make, for so long as possible, the dream-home real. 
 
 In the Doncaster station, where he changed trains, he 
 bought a copy of the Americus Daily Spy. He smiled at the 
 quaint wording; it represented a tradition: 
 
 "A delightful social occurrence occurred last night, when 
 ten of her young friends tendered a surprise-party to Miss 
 Annie Drumbaugh, residing at 922 Barber Street, on the oc 
 casion of her seventh birthday. There was a gift-shower and 
 various games were played. At a seasonable hour refresh 
 ments were served and an enjoyable time was had by all." 
 
 19 
 
20 VICTOK10US 
 
 There was not much changed in the Spy. In another 
 column he did find an account of a fire in a hardware-store, 
 written with spirit and a vivid appreciation of dramatic and 
 news values; the author of that, he reflected, would soon be 
 working for a Philadelphia paper; but most of the material 
 might have been clipped from any issue of twenty years ago. 
 
 He turned back those twenty years. 
 
 Sarah Tollens had then been on the safe side of the rigid 
 social dividing-line of the town. Her people she was an 
 only child were proudly poor, and Sarah was tall and dark 
 and handsome, and Blunston was engaged to her; but there 
 had drifted to the little community a certain Phil Brown, 
 one of those American adventurers who had flocked to Hawaii 
 in the early nineties and who, having first cast their lot with 
 the cause of Liliuokalani, ended by plotting her overthrow. 
 Marriage before acquaintance is one of our national dogmas : 
 Brown, folding about him the mantle of romance, married 
 Sarah out of hand in the winter of 1896, and Blunston, de 
 ciding that since he could not have love, he must have labor, 
 began his journalistic career. Everybody, he reasoned, must 
 have in his life something bigger than himself. He saw no 
 more of Americus; he thought no more than he could help 
 of Sarah. Once Lawyer Dickey inserted in a legal communi 
 cation the statement that the Browns had named their first 
 born Andrew at the mother s behest and McKinley at the 
 father s, but Blunston tried to see no significance in the for 
 mer name; later, Mr. Dickey ventured to remark that Phil, 
 having enlisted for service in Cuba and got as far as Porto 
 Eico, was dead of red-tape and fever at Montauk Point, but 
 Blunston did not get the letter until many months later at 
 Peking. 
 
 By that time, he was a war-correspondent, and even war- 
 writing was an old story. The Boxer revolt, the Philippine 
 rebellion, the Boer war and the Eusso-Japanese, Italy s ven 
 ture of 1912, numerous promising disturbances in Central 
 and South America and both the Balkan conflicts Blunston 
 had seen something of them all. But since the autumn of 
 1914, he had held that the Entente was fighting America s 
 
VICTORIOUS 21 
 
 battles along with its own, and he had been devoting his en 
 ergies to the aid of those voices which pleaded with us to 
 play our part. Now his country s feet were set upon the road 
 to which he had helped to lead it; he himself beyond the 
 draft-age, Blunston was, at all events, to crown his life s 
 work by chronicling America s share in the World War. 
 
 There were those who did not like him for his previous 
 propaganda, and there had been some trouble about securing 
 the papers necessary to his return to France ; these difficulties 
 seemed at last at an end. The Committee on Public Infor 
 mation had announced that, by arrangement with the War 
 Department, a dozen correspondents would accompany our 
 armies abroad. He had secured for himself one set of creden 
 tials. 
 
 He pushed his service-cap back from his grizzled hair. 
 There was a light on his weather-beaten face. 
 
 The train rounded a hillside. Blunston looked out at the 
 mile-and-a-half breadth of river dotted with rocks and leafy 
 islands and surrounded by wooded hills. This was Home. 
 
 The first of the rules to provide for a happy homecoming 
 is that commanding us not to remain long away. The station 
 at which Blunston dismounted appeared to him smaller than 
 formerly and dirtier. The Three Mounts House and the 
 Adams Hotel, which he remembered as prosperous hostelries, 
 were fallen to the tavern-state. No city in China, no ruined 
 village in Belgium had seemed so remotely strange to him. 
 
 At the corner of Second Street, where a farm-wagon was 
 standing, he saw an Amish boy engaged in repairing some 
 piece of harness. At least the Amish costume was familiar; 
 its wearer might have been one of the acquaintances of the 
 prodigal s early days, untouched by time. 
 
 "What is the best hotel in town?" asked Blunston. 
 
 The lad looked up. 
 
 "Sir?" 
 
 It was the old countryside equivalent of "what ?" Blunston 
 smiled in recognizing it. He repeated his inquiry. 
 
 "I don t know still." The Amish boy s teeth flashed a 
 ^friendly grin, but he shook his long hair helplessly. "I heard 
 
22 VICTOKiOUS 
 
 folks talk about the Americus already; but I ain t no use 
 fer hotels/ 
 
 In the past few weeks, the fact of war had come home with 
 startling speed to hundreds of persons in Doncaster County; 
 to Chrissly Shuman, who had as yet seen no soldiers, it now 
 first came home in the form of a war-correspondent s uniform. 
 
 "They re tryin to take me," confided Chrissly. "Us Amish 
 don t hold by fightin ; but they re tryin to take me cause 
 I ain t joined church yet." His eyes smoldered as he bent 
 again to his work. "Germany s all right," he said; "we ain t 
 got no business pickin on to Germany." 
 
 II 
 
 A change in Elm Avenue Blunston saw immediately: it 
 had been barbarously denuded of its trees, and standards for 
 electric lights replaced them. The old-fashioned brick-dwell 
 ing that had stood opposite the Opera House in the memories 
 of his boyhood was suffering, among its neighboring shops, 
 from the tenantless disrepair of-* superannuated property 
 "held for a rise in values," and when the returned native 
 registered at the Hotel Americus, his name meant nothing 
 to the impassive clerk. 
 
 Then he chanced to look over his shoulder and saw, coming 
 up the center of the street, two hundred pounds of human 
 flesh under a blue cap and in blue clothes. It couldn t be 
 and yet it was "Babe" Campbell: "Babe," the town s 
 only policeman when Blunston was a lad, hale at seventy-odd, 
 the town s only policeman now. Blunston ran out and 
 pumped the old man s heavy hand and shouted his greetings 
 into the old man s long-deafened ears. 
 
 He was just about to reenter the hotel when he encountered 
 Lawyer Dickey, headed for the barroom where, every after 
 noon on leaving his office, he took his sole daily dose of alco 
 hol ; a drink of whisky followed by a glass of lager-beer. The 
 attorney spoke to him precisely as if they had parted but 
 yesterday. 
 
 "There are odd things happening/ said Lawyer Dickey, 
 
VICTOKIOUS 23 
 
 when Blunston and lie were seated at a dark table in the 
 shadows behind the swinging doors. "People are changing 
 life-long opinions. There s Hunter, the wall-paper man, a 
 dyed-in-the-wool Eepublican and a G. A. K. at that: they ve 
 thrown so much sand in his eyes that I bet, if you talked an 
 cient history to him, he d say Bryan was right when he ruled 
 that Americans ought to keep off the sea." 
 
 Few people speak in paragraphs; Blunston began para 
 graphs, but seldom ended one. His voice was quiet, and 
 the conclusions of his sentences were generally lost outright. 
 
 "That would be ancient history," he began; "of course the 
 people in Washington weren t really too proud to fight : only 
 too fat ... even to get ready . . ." 
 
 The war-correspondent left his lawyer still brooding over 
 his beer, and walked toward Second Street, until he reached 
 the house that his first American forefathers had built in the 
 middle sixteen hundreds. 
 
 Standing in a vast plot of ground well away from the 
 street, it was a long, stone, ivy-covered building, rather Lan- 
 castershire than colonial. Blunston had not asked Lawyer 
 Dickey to go back to his office for the key. The remaining 
 son contented himself with strolling around the house and 
 about the great yard behind. 
 
 Oak and honey-locust and Norway-maple, their riot of fo 
 liage made a grateful screen from the afternoon sun. The gar 
 dens had died of neglect ; but a petulant cat-bird was calling 
 from the thicket as one always used to call ; there flashed from 
 the Yellow Spanish cherry-tree an oriole in the colors that, 
 thus seeing them, Sir George Calvert had chosen for his ser 
 vants livery. 
 
 There was no war here. The empty old house cast across 
 the sunlight a slanting shadow like the cool breath of a peace 
 centuries old. 
 
 No fence separated this yard from that of the distant 
 house-next-door. That was a comfortable brick house, scarce 
 fifty years its neighbor s junior, and it, too, had always been 
 inhabited by Blunstons. He could see some women s frocks 
 there now probably those of the cousins he tepidly liked and 
 
24 VICTORIOUS 
 
 never wrote to, three women of about his own age and unmar 
 ried. The girls would have grown up to be like their father. 
 He supposed he ought to go across to them. 
 
 He came upon a picture typical of the more leisurely phase 
 of small-town life in America since the time when it ceased 
 to be a farm isolated in the wilderness. Save for the costumes, 
 Blunston could have imagined himself restored to the era of 
 fox-hunting Quakers that were his ancestors. Black-haired 
 Cousin Flora sat beside the tea-table on the grass ; red-haired 
 Cousin Mollie and red-haired Cousin Becky were chatting 
 volubly to a tall, lean, spectacled man in a white waistcoat, 
 who must be the Ealph Bolingbroke from the big gray house 
 on Oak Street, who owned the local umbrella-factory ; as well 
 as to the merry, sharp-eyed young woman of considerable 
 girth, who must be Bolingbroke s new second wife, and who 
 talked instead of listening. Everything was correct, every 
 thing was pleasant; above all, everything was established. 
 
 His cousins greeted Blunston with shrill cries of delighted 
 surprise; Ralph shook hands and gravely presented him to 
 Mrs. Ralph. Blunston, who always drank tea in a sort of 
 vague Celtic twilight, uttered attenuated sentences and was 
 glad when Mrs. Ralph put an end to them by saying that she 
 hadn t read his work but didn t approve of it. He wished 
 that the conversation would swing away from himself and 
 give him more news of the townspeople. 
 
 It did when Miss Hattie Lloyd arrived. Miss Hattie 
 looked as old as the town and knew every evil thing that had 
 ever been done in it ; she was miniature, witchlike body with 
 a sharp red nose that met a sharp white chin; she perpetu 
 ally hugged herself and shot pricking glances at you from the 
 corners of her beady eyes whenever she said anything espe 
 cially unpleasant. 
 
 The talk might have shifted without Miss Hattie s advent ; 
 nevertheless, it was Miss Hattie s knife that severed the 
 thread. 
 
 "Andrew," she said, "I suppose you find people a good deal 
 changed here, don t you?" 
 
 "No . . . perhaps ... not seen many," he murmured. 
 
VICTORIOUS 25 
 
 "A good many that were up in the world have come down," 
 said Miss Hattie. She seemed to find the fact decidedly sat 
 isfactory. "Seen Sarah Tollens?" 
 
 He knew it was this name he had been rather anxious to 
 hear, but he did not like hearing it from Miss Hattie. 
 
 "Nobody sees her now." Miss Hattie cocked her head. 
 "She lives in a dreadful part of town. Of course none of us 
 have ever seen her since her marriage." 
 
 Blunston could feel the heat of his cousins silent indigna 
 tion. They had disapproved, he recalled, of Sarah when she 
 broke her engagement to him, but they were not ghouls in 
 the graveyard of other people s affections. He did not answer 
 Miss Hattie. 
 
 Perhaps young Mrs. Bolingbroke felt the tension and 
 wanted to relieve it : he was sure she meant no harm, but she 
 said: 
 
 "Oh, yes: it s Mrs. Sarah Brown you re talking about. 
 She was an old sweetheart of yours, wasn t she, Mr. Blun 
 ston?" 
 
 He smiled faintly. As soon as he decently could, he left. 
 
 Mollie followed him to the gate. 
 
 "I m sorry," she said. She knew he would know what she 
 meant. 
 
 "Is it true?" asked Blunston. 
 
 "What that abominable old woman said? Well, yes, I m 
 afraid it is. Sarah s just dropped out. Only it oughtn t to 
 be talked about because it s nobody s fault." 
 
 "No," said Blunston, "of course it isn t." 
 
 He was thinking of taking the evening train back to New 
 York. 
 
 ill 
 
 It was Colonel Eskesson that kept Blunston in town over 
 night. The short man with good-humored eyes and scant hair 
 dragged across the bald flat top of his head had not altered 
 within Blunston s memory, but he could not recall Blunston 
 unaided. 
 
 "Why, so it is!" he beamed once the aid had been given. 
 
26 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Darned if it isn t Andrew Bhmston ! How are you, anyhow ? 
 You must have had some exciting experiences in France. 
 Better come with me to the Elks to-night; we re going to 
 present wrist-watches to all the officers of Company C." 
 
 The colonel had had a busy day, as usual, and his made-up 
 bow-tie had slipped around his low "stand-up" collar until it 
 was directly under his right ear. He was still dazed by the war 
 and its potential effect on his investments there had been 
 some absurd talk in the Philadelphia newspapers about the 
 possibility of the government s taking over the railroads 
 and, as Blunston adapted his stride to the older man s, Colo 
 nel Eskessen dismissed the national situation with a chuck 
 ling reference to Lawyer Dickey: 
 
 "So you ve seen Dickey ? Yes, yes : same old Jim. Suppose 
 he told you the Democrats were riding the country to perdi 
 tion? He tells me that every morning, regular. What is it 
 the fellow said in the magazine? Making the world safe 
 for Democrats? That s Dickey all over. Fine old man, Jim" 
 Mr. Dickey was perhaps two years the colonel s senior 
 "but well, a little impulsive now and then." 
 
 At the Elks headquarters, they passed, through a second- 
 floor room in which the Americus Silver Cornet Band was 
 playing, to a pleasantly cool balcony overlooking a leafy back 
 yard. Several guests in uniform were there, and presently, 
 after the wrist-watches had been conferred, the band played 
 Keep the Home Fires Burning, and everybody joined in the 
 chorus. 
 
 A voice rose clear of the others. It was not one of those 
 voices superior and conscious of its superiority : it was dis 
 tinctive because it had to be. 
 
 The singer was a very much dressed lad, a lad freckled, 
 red-headed. He did not know that he was singing in a 
 stronger voice than his neighbors; his face was radiant with 
 a troubled enthusiasm, and his firm brown eyes were fixed on 
 the war-correspondent. 
 
 Their glances met. The boy flushed. He stopped singing 
 and looked away. 
 
 "Who is he?" asked Blunston. 
 
VICTORIOUS 27 
 
 "That?" said his host. "Oh, that s Andy." 
 
 "Andy?" 
 
 "Yes, one of our reporters. Andy Brown. You remember 
 Sarah Tollens? Oh, yes, of course 
 
 The colonel also remembered something. He hurried away 
 from the topic of Andy s parentage: 
 
 "His clothes are just part of his enthusiasm. So proud of 
 being a reporter, you know. Has the news-sense. Oh, quite 
 valuable: he knows everybody in Americus and who married 
 everybody and who s cousin to who and everybody knows 
 him and likes him everybody." 
 
 "Did this boy write a story in to-day s Spy about a surprise- 
 party at . . ." 
 
 "Yes. He wrote our fire-story, too." 
 
 That he had written them both, Blunston wanted to say, 
 was incredible ! 
 
 "He s crazy to go to war," the colonel was saying. "Volun 
 teered, but they found a heart-murmur. Just as well. The 
 fellows say Andy came across a wounded rabbit out here in 
 the woods one time; he carried it all the way back to town 
 to be killed because he hadn t the heart to kill it himself." 
 
 Andy Brown did know everybody in Americus, but, for 
 all his obviousness, there was nobody in Americus knew every 
 thing about Andy. His love of the woods and the river was 
 common to most of the townsfolk; the spirit that strung 
 dance-programs across his bureau was a spirit shared by half 
 the other boys ; his attentions to bangled Minnie Taylor were 
 the mere effervescence of youth. But the war had set an in 
 delible mark on his soul. 
 
 The sinking of the Lusitania began it. The effect of this, 
 however, seemed to have passed away until he heard Lawyer 
 Dickey talk about Germany treading on democracy s toes, 
 when the chance of our joining the European struggle seemed 
 to Andy a sort of heroic gambol. Then had coine the acknowl 
 edgment of a state of war; the printed appeal to "Enlist and 
 Avoid the Draft" and to "Join Your Home Company and 
 Fight Beside Your Friends." Andy was carried high on the 
 flood of patriotism : only his mother s dependence had some- 
 
28 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 what checked his progress. He dreamed a day-dream about 
 Joan of Arc a sort of Franco-American Joan of Arc, with 
 golden hair and girlish figure and low and thrilling voice, 
 but with a pure face and brave enkindling eyes he volun 
 teered. 
 
 Much of this, although he was not himself acquainted with 
 it, Colonel Eskessen s talk conveyed to Blunston. He was in 
 the midst of it when Blunston saw the president of the Mer 
 chants and Manufacturers Association rise: 
 
 "We have with us to-night," that gentleman said, "a son of 
 Americus that Americus is proud of, a famous war-corre 
 spondent who has just returned from the Western Front, 
 where some of our evening s guests will soon be going " 
 
 In short, Blunston was called on for a speech. 
 
 When he sat down, and the company, with the notable ex 
 ception of Andy, were singing My Old Kentucky Home, a 
 waiter handed him a note. It was addressed to "Mr. Blun 
 ston, Present," and was written in the cramped, boyish hand 
 of one that has long ago formed the habit of the typewriter. 
 It asked the favor of an interview "after the meeting/ and 
 it came from Andy. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the damp coolness of the street, Andy was waiting. It 
 was too dark to see him. 
 
 "Well?" said Blunston. 
 
 He wouldn t help the boy to utterance. He expected him 
 to ask for a letter to some editor in Philadelphia. 
 
 "The Field Service Regulations say an accredited corre 
 spondent can have a messenger when he goes to France. Can 
 I be your messenger?" 
 
 It came out in a burst. Blunston could hear the boy gasp 
 at his temerity when he said it; he hoped the boy could not 
 hear the gasp with which it was received. 
 
 ". . . qualification," stammered Blunston. "Have you 
 any?" 
 
 Andy had regained his desperate courage : 
 
 "I m a hustler. Colonel Eskessen will tell you. And I ll 
 
VICTOKIOUS 29 
 
 go for almost nothing just enough to keep things running 
 at home." 
 
 "A war-correspondent . . . much of the danger, none of 
 
 the glory." 
 
 "Oh, I couldn t be a correspondent." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I can t write." 
 
 ". . . can t tell till you try. Good story on the fire, poor 
 on the surprise-party. . ." 
 
 "You you asked the colonel who wrote them ?" 
 
 Blunston swore softly: there was reportorial keenness in 
 this young man. 
 
 "Sir?" asked Andy. He had not heard the oath, and he 
 asked what Blunston had said with just the word the Amish 
 boy had used. 
 
 The correspondent was amused : this was a queer mixture of 
 sharpness and provinciality. His amusement betrayed him 
 into a passing amiability. 
 
 "Do you know French?" 
 
 "I took it in high-school." 
 
 "Oh, lord ! where did you learn to write ?" 
 
 "I can t. I just started in. Lately I ve been trying to bone 
 up. And then I study all the president s speeches ; he writes 
 so well." 
 
 "He what?" asked Blunston. 
 
 "You don t mean you don t think so ?" 
 
 Blunston s answer was not intelligible. What he was think 
 ing about, as they walked down the dark street, was something 
 that Andy would never know. 
 
 "Sir?" said Andy. 
 
 This time the servile provincialism on the lips of Sarah 
 Brown s son annoyed the man that had loved Sarah Tollens. 
 
 "Don t say that," said Blunston sharply. "Never! You 
 mean What : say <What. " 
 
 "Yes, sir," said the boy. 
 
 "And don t say Yes, sir 5 and No, sir. Yes and No/ 
 It s the tone. . . ." 
 
 What was it Colonel Eskessen had told him? Something 
 
30 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 about a wounded rabbit. This boy who couldn t kill a wounded 
 rabbit wanted to be a war-correspondent. 
 
 "The thing s absurd," said Blunston; "the whole thing." 
 The mud, the filth, the risks, the horrors! "Why do you 
 want to go ?" he asked. 
 
 Apparently Andy found it hard to talk of his emotions. 
 Nevertheless, they were stronger than his tenderness for 
 them: in a few disjointed, half-apologetic phrases, he made 
 his hardened senior understand what the coming of war had 
 meant to the boy in Americus, what the great rising of the 
 nation, what it had been to him to volunteer, and what to be 
 refused. 
 
 They had come to a halt, Blunston did not know why. 
 
 "Our own doctor said it was all nonsense about the heart- 
 murmur," Andy said. "One man in ten has it, he told me. 
 And it won t interfere with my work if you take me. I m as 
 strong and healthy as any man my age." 
 
 Blunston believed it. "Only," he persisted, "I still don t 
 see. . . ." 
 
 And then Andy, in a flash and without violating the sanc 
 tity of his dream, made his poor Franco-American Joan of 
 Arc a living thing to his hearer : 
 
 "I ve got to do my part; everybody s got to. A fellow feels 
 that. It s kind of as if Joan of Arc had come back, and come 
 to America and reminded us of Lafayette, and as if she she 
 was really a saint, you know, right out of Heaven " He 
 broke off with a gulp. "I ve got to help," he ended : "and this 
 is the only way I can." 
 
 There was a burst of light beside them. It blazed over the 
 face of the freckled boy, transfigured by earnestness, the lips 
 compressed, the eyes on fire with a high eagerness. It came 
 from an opened door, and in the doorway stood silhouette^ 
 the tall thin form of a woman. 
 
 "Is that you, Andy ?" asked the woman. 
 
 "Yes, mother," said Andy. He laid an appealing hand on 
 Blunston s sleeve. "Mother, this is " 
 
 "It s impossible," Blunston almost shouted. "Don t need a 
 messenger. Always work alone anyhow and . . ." 
 
VICTOEIOUS 31 
 
 He turned to escape; but Andy s grip lost its persuasive 
 quality; it became force; it held Blunston fast, while Andy 
 said: 
 
 "Mother, this is Mr. Blunston, the famous war-correspond 
 ent. He s come to talk to you about my going over there to 
 be his messenger." 
 
 Whereupon, leaving them facing each other, Andy ran in 
 continently into the house. 
 
 Did Andy know of that old engagement, and was he making 
 capital out of his knowledge? Blunston swept the thought 
 away : whatever she might seem to others, to a boy his mother 
 is always a wonder-worker; Andy had taken it for granted 
 that, chance having brought about this meeting, Mrs. Brown 
 could get her son what he most desired. 
 
 "I heard voices," she was saying her voice was monot 
 onous "I always wait up for him not that it s necessary ; he 
 always has been a good boy and so I opened the door." 
 
 "How do you do, Sarah?" Blunston said. 
 
 Their cold hands met ; hers was hard. 
 
 "How do you do, Drew ?" There was an observable pause. 
 Her back being to the light, she was as .much hidden from him 
 as Andy had been when they met on Elm Avenue. Blunston 
 was glad to have his interlocutor concealed. "Won t you 
 come in?" she asked. 
 
 "I no. If you don t mind," he said, "I d rather . . ." 
 
 The house was shabby; her brief hesitancy told him that. 
 She wanted to encounter him no more than he wanted to 
 encounter her. It was Andy s doing. 
 
 "Does An does the boy," he hurried, "really want . . " 
 
 "To go ?" It was just the way she used always to help him 
 out, and yet it was now with an air of weariness that he found 
 painful. "He does want to. I didn t know he could care so 
 much for anything." 
 
 Blunston noticed that she mentioned her son by the per 
 sonal pronoun rather than by his Christian name. 
 
32 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "His whole heart s just set on it," she added. 
 
 Blunston had never dreamed of taking a messenger; he 
 didn t need a messenger! 
 
 "Of course," Andy s mother continued, "he ll worry ahout 
 me; but he made arrangements before I mean when he vol 
 unteered and he will now. I didn t know he was thinking 
 of going this way but I knew he meant to go somehow." 
 
 "You you might lose him," said Blunston. After all, the 
 fact had to be voiced. 
 
 He was thinking of her. She had said little of herself; she 
 had said nothing of their past affection for each other. He 
 should have remained in Americus. There was something 
 above love, in love there was something above desire and pride : 
 there was obligation. Sarah couldn t stand the blows, still less 
 the slow attritions, which some women could stand. He might 
 have softened these, and without her knowing it oh, in a 
 thousand ways ! And that she could not stand those blows and 
 attritions yes, he had known that when he went away. "In 
 the life of each, there ought to be something that is bigger 
 than anything else": for such a something what chance had 
 Sarah Tollens had? 
 
 "I know" her head was bent, in the darkness her hands 
 seemed to be plucking at her skirt "and yet his heart is set 
 on it, and, you see, he s done a lot for me everything and 
 I ve not been able to do anything for him and well, letting 
 him go is about all I ve got to give him." 
 
 Blunston raised his hat and turned abruptly down the street. 
 
 "I ll see what I can do," he told her as he left. 
 
 VI 
 
 After an uncomfortable night at the Hotel Americus, for 
 staying at which his cousins were properly affronted, he called 
 Washington by telephone and learned that the rule concern 
 ing accredited war-correspondents messengers had been sus 
 pended. 
 
 He went over to the old house and sat, for a long time, un 
 der the Yellow Spanish cherry-tree, where his cousins could 
 
VICTOEIOUS 33 
 
 not see him. Once he took from, a pocket his copy of yester 
 day s Spy and studied carefully the account of the fire and 
 the note of Annie Brumbaugh s birthday-party. He thought 
 of years ago and of last night, and though he saw no reason 
 for altering his opinion that Sarah Tollens must forever re 
 main Sarah Brown as, indeed, there was none he saw with 
 equal clarity his responsibility therefor. Then he walked over 
 to the Spy office. 
 
 Andy was alone. The boy was sprawled over a littered table, 
 his red head close to a pile of pulp-paper ; he was coatless, and 
 his shirt-sleeves were held up by a pair of contrivances of pink 
 elastic that looked like a woman s garters. 
 
 "Andy," said Blunston, and he said the name without an 
 effort. 
 
 The boy jumped up. A joyful grin bisected his face. 
 
 "I want you to come out with me/ the elder man explained, 
 "for a walk." 
 
 Andy cast a troubled eye at his manuscript: 
 
 "I m just writing a local; I m afraid I can t leave right 
 away." 
 
 "I ll fix it with the colonel," said Blunston. "That story 
 of the surprise-party, never do it again. . . ." 
 
 Andy s eyes were large. 
 
 "But I meant to tell you last night," he said: "that s the 
 way they like it." 
 
 ". . . going to be another they/ " said Blunston. "The 
 fire-story was you. ... Of course, your literary ideals are 
 all wrong, but I believe I can teach. . . . Never mind about 
 a week s notice. . . . You won t have to write any more lo 
 cals unless you don t . . ." 
 
 Andy began to tremble: 
 
 "You re going to take me?" 
 
 "No. Take you for a walk. . . . Come on." 
 
 Andy, struggling into his coat, amazedly followed Blunston 
 into Elm Avenue. They strode up the hill. 
 
 Minnie Taylor was coming down it. On her head she car 
 ried her father s last week s earnings in the shape of a new hat, 
 terribly and wonderfully made. She was still angry at Andy 
 
34 VICTORIOUS 
 
 for wanting to go to war when she preferred his attentions 
 from a close corner, so she began to harden her pretty plump 
 face and turned up her pert nose; but, when she saw him in 
 the company of a stranger in uniform, her manner shifted. 
 
 "Hello, Andy/ she said. She slowed her walk just enough 
 to make it proper for him to stop and present his friend, yet 
 not enough to make it certain that this was what she desired. 
 
 "Hello, Minnie," said Andy. He bowed with an air perhaps 
 tinged by a new superiority and, still with that air, passed on. 
 
 "I have to be personal," said Blunston when, in silence, 
 they had gone a dozen paces. "That, for instance ..." A 
 jerk of his head indicated the back of the discomfited Minnie. 
 "Er any love-affairs, or ... ?" 
 
 "Not on your life," Andy declared. But he had a con 
 science; it produced a hurried qualification: "Of course, I 
 like Minnie that girl who just passed but we re on the 
 outs now." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "She well, she doesn t understand what a man s duties are 
 in war-time." 
 
 "Oh," said Blunston. His quiet glimpse of her had im 
 pressed him with the fact that Minnie, like most pretty women 
 of brief understanding, understood at least what she wanted. 
 "You meant to marry . . .You thought of that? I have 
 to ask. ..." 
 
 Andy blushed. He dared not guess what all this was lead 
 ing up to, but the priest must answer the bishop, and the re 
 porter must not deny the war-correspondent. He had never 
 admired Blunston s news-articles so much as those of Owen 
 Evans, but he admitted Blunston s greatness. 
 
 "I might," he conscientiously admitted, "but it d all be long 
 from now. There s my mother, you see. And besides" his 
 determined purpose was uppermost "I ve got to get to this 
 war somehow." 
 
 This purpose was uppermost. That, Blunston reflected, 
 was to be considered. 
 
 "About your mother ... If you went . . ." 
 
 "If you took me?" 
 
VICTOEIOUS 35 
 
 "If you went away." 
 
 The boy was ready there. Of course, he would worry : his 
 mother was not the sort to do well alone in the world. But 
 he wouldn t worry over finances. Kepler, the other reporter, 
 would board at the Brown house, and Andy had another 
 boarder in view, with a third in the offing. Then Mrs. 
 Brown had never considered applying for it until Andy, vol 
 unteering for the army, had bethought himself of it, had 
 looked the matter up and, as he said, "put it through" there 
 was her pension as a Spanish- American War widow. 
 
 Blunston turned away from that. They had gone into one 
 of the quieter streets, and there the older man directed, with 
 some skill, Andy s talk to his chosen work. 
 
 A half-hour s conversation sufficed. The boy was on fire 
 with his passion : he wanted to help win the war ! 
 
 "And it would help, wouldn t it, Mr. Blunston? To be a 
 war-correspondent s messenger, I mean. I don t mean that s 
 not a lot for me to get, but I mean I mean, since I can t 
 fight, it would be kind of helping the big men like you with 
 the what do you call them? Lines of communication? 
 between the folks at home and the boys over there." 
 
 Blunston said yes. 
 
 "Just what does a messenger do, Mr. Blunston ?" 
 
 That he wanted to be a correspondent s messenger before 
 he knew the nature of a messenger s duties: this, to the cor 
 respondent, was one of the highest proofs of Andy s ability. 
 
 Blunston stopped. He fronted the boy, put his hands on 
 Andy s shoulders, looked him hard in the eyes. Andy re 
 turned the gaze, questioning, hoping, but unquavering. 
 
 "You re sure?" said Blunston. 
 
 "Of myself ?" Blunston noted that Andy had now perfectly 
 acquired his mother s trick of finishing the elder man s sen 
 tences. "Oh, yes, sir I mean : oh, yes !" 
 
 They were silent for a moment, eyes on eyes. Then : 
 
 "It s rough." 
 
 "I can stand that." 
 
 "Dull. . . 
 
 "I don t mind." 
 
36 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Dangerous. . . " 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "You ve got to want to do your duty . . . to be a soldier 
 ... to help your papers public . . . the American peo 
 ple ... your country, more than anything else . . . 
 than comfort, promotion, life . . ." 
 
 Blunston s face was very grave; Andy s was as it had been 
 in the radiance from the doorway of his home last night 
 
 "I will," he said: "I do." 
 
 It was in the nature of an oath. 
 
 Blunston s hands gripped Andy s shoulders, then dropped. 
 
 "Now go away," he said. "I ll see you at your house at six 
 o clock." 
 
 VII 
 
 Blunston s contract with his newspapers was not for any 
 cabled reports; for immediate news they were depending on 
 the large news-services. Blunston was to send descriptive ma 
 terial by post descriptive material of the sort with which the 
 crowded wires could not well be burdened. He went now, 
 however, to the telephone-booth at the hotel and, for several 
 hours, annoyed the commercial travelers by preempting the 
 telephone for long-distance calls. 
 
 Then he went to Lawyer Dickey s office. 
 
 "The key to the old house," he said. . . 
 
 He was going to live in the old house. 
 
 He was going to resign his dearest ambition. He was going 
 to teach Andy as much about journalism as it was possible 
 to teach him in such time as remained. He was even going 
 to make a compromise with veracity. The syndicate could not 
 afford to provide him with an assistant, the War Department 
 would not let him have a messenger; but the State Depart 
 ment would issue Andy a passport, and the adjutant-general 
 would withdraw the credentials given to Andrew Blunston 
 and issue them to Andrew Brown. 
 
 For reasons that he did not altogether care to go into, 
 Blunston was making his great sacrifice. Andy was to go 
 to France a war-correspondent. 
 
VICTORIOUS 37 
 
 Andy was to be told that Blunston s hard work abroad had 
 worn him out and that he was too ill to return to France. 
 Andy was to address all his manuscripts to Blunston, who 
 would rewrite them and transmit them to their destination. 
 In order to avoid local gossip, the proposed service to Phila 
 delphia and New York papers was to be dropped, so that no 
 body in Americus would wonder how a man resident there 
 could be writing from the Western Front. It was all, when 
 it came to the doing, immensely simple. 
 
 A casuist might, of course, have raised objections, but 
 Blunston found himself quite void of casuistry. Andy did 
 not want the fame of signing what he wrote did not yet 
 deserve it. There was a larger debt to be satisfied than any 
 of mere literal honesty : there was an inherited judgment-note 
 that the new generation held against the old. 
 
 Andy, painful as it may be to record this, bowed to his 
 superior s decision upon the point of professional ethics. He 
 accepted it, to be frank, with sheer joy. He was still some 
 what timid about his abilities, and he was genuinely sorry 
 that ill-health had overtaken Blunston; but the joy of youth 
 is ever ready to assume that maturity, having had its fling, 
 pants with anxiety to make way for its successor. 
 
 He had prepared himself for an heroic scene of manly 
 brevity and restraint when he should break the news to his 
 mother ; but Sarah Brown took it with only a slight tighten 
 ing of the lines about her mouth. 
 
 You ll be needing extra socks," she said "warm ones. 
 They say it s cold over there. And I ll knit you a sweater." 
 Before he went, she would bake some of the Dover-cakes that 
 he loved and surreptitiously slip them into the bedding-roll 
 that he already talked of buying. 
 
 Everybody else for he had to tell everybody seemed de 
 lighted, though not so bewildered as Andy, by his good for 
 tune. The girls at the Fashion Emporium clubbed together 
 and presented him with a necktie, which he would be unable 
 to wear under the strangling, straight collar of his uniform, 
 when his uniform came. The Racket-Store clerks gave him a 
 half-dozen cambric handkerchiefs with pink borders. The 
 
38 YICTOEIOUS 
 
 Blunston girls father, who had fought through the Civil War 
 and been in Libby, slapped him on the back and said he 
 wished they could change places. Mrs. Bolingbroke patron 
 ized him kindly. Colonel Eskessen was shiningly proud of 
 him and promised to send him the Spy regularly. The town 
 expected him to do great things ; it said so ; it shook his hand. 
 
 Everybody, that is, but Minnie. 
 
 "I think it s mean of you/ she said. "Just risking your 
 life for nothing ! Why, you re not even going to fight !" In 
 her china-blue eyes there was the moisture of chagrin. 
 
 He was too busy to be disconcerted by Minnie. Although 
 his patron intended to rewrite all that Andy wrote, it was 
 necessary that Andy be taught whatever was possible, and 
 Blunston shrewdly believed in the boy. Sometimes they took 
 a canoe and guided themselves on the rushing currents and 
 between the blue-gray rocks of the river, where the trees of 
 clustering islands met overhead, and landed at one of the 
 islands and studied there. Once they walked into the hills 
 behind the town, where, though the dogwood was no longer 
 in bloom, yet on her dark canopy the chestnut still strung 
 ochre plumes, and wild roses shone among the creeping win- 
 tergreen. For hours on end, the veteran dissected the war- 
 correspondence in the New York papers, explained the "lines 
 of the armies," commanded the recruit to write column upon 
 column for immediate destruction, and poured forth scraps 
 of advice perpetually punctuated with the order "Get this in 
 black-and-white." 
 
 Came the marvelous morning when the postman delivered 
 a registered envelope containing the coveted "Accredited 
 Correspondent s Pass" Andy s credentials. It was dated 
 boldly from "War Department, Washington, 15. C." : 
 
 "The bearer, Mr. Andrew McKinley Brown" (Andy was 
 timid about his middle-name when anybody was around, but 
 here it was, a typewriter having trimly tucked it into a wait 
 ing blank space on the printed form) "Mr. Andrew McKin 
 ley Brown, whose photograph and signature are hereto at 
 tached, is hereby accredited to the Commanding General, 
 
VICTORIOUS 39 
 
 American Expedition in France, United States Army, with 
 permission to accompany said troops, subject to the Regula 
 tions governing Correspondents with Troops in the Field and 
 the orders of the commander of said troops. 
 
 "This pass entitles the correspondent to passage on mili 
 tary railways and, when accommodations are available, on 
 Army transports, with the privileges of a commissioned offi 
 cer. . . ." 
 
 The name of the secretary of war was printed below it; 
 it was marked "Official" and signed by the adjutant-gen 
 eral s own hand; and it contained a blank line for the sig 
 nature of the commanding general to be placed there on 
 Andy s arrival in France. 
 
 Lest Washington might change its mind, Andy, with trem 
 bling hand, signed immediately at the place reserved for 
 "Correspondent s signature." He went out and had his pho 
 tograph taken a most unflattering, shiny photograph and 
 would not leave the photographer s shop until the print had 
 been made and pasted on the spot designated for its recep 
 tion. 
 
 Andy, who had been thrice to Doncaster for feverish "try- 
 ings-on" of his uniform, now donned it immediately and, 
 walking down Elm Avenue, decided never to take it off. It 
 was veritable khaki, and an officer s in everything but the in 
 signia. The buttons bore the American eagle and bound their 
 proud prisoner to the army ; around the upper portion of the 
 left sleeve was a green brassard bearing a red C, which 
 marked Him as a real war-correspondent accredited to the A. 
 E. F. Andy felt a throb of patriotism in his very throat, of 
 responsibility to the vast American newspaper-reading public 
 in his pounding heart. 
 
 And then the telegram. 
 
 It was not much. It was only "Tuesday, 10 A.. M." and 
 the name of some clerk that meant nothing. The day was 
 fixed, even the hour. 
 
40 VICTORIOUS 
 
 VIII 
 
 He went to see Minnie, but Minnie had gone to the annual 
 "outing" of the Four-Leaf Social. Well, it didn t matter! 
 At the Spy office, Colonel Eskessen said "God bless you," 
 and Kepler told him he d make good; and Lawyer Dickey 
 came in oh, by the merest chance ! and blew his nose. 
 
 Blunston was to meet him at the station, go to New York 
 with him, and see him sail. The porter from the Hotel Amer- 
 icus drove up for Andy s bag and bedding-roll and said he 
 wouldn t take any money for the job. 
 
 Andy ran up-stairs for a last look at his attic-bedroom, at 
 the thumbed school-books and the other long-treasured vol 
 umes in the hanging bookcase ; at his precious paints and at 
 the dance-programs strung across the mirror. He had put 
 away childish things. 
 
 Then he found himself down-stairs standing in the door 
 way alone with his mother. He glowed with excited expect 
 ancy, but, as he glanced back at the little living-room with 
 its marble-top center-table bearing the family-Bible, at the 
 chandelier he had recently laboriously gilded, which now con 
 trasted too brightly with the worn chairs descended from the 
 days of the Tollenses glory, at the lambrequined mantel 
 piece on which stood, beside a new photograph of Andy in 
 uniform, a photograph of Andy in his first baby-clothes as 
 he looked at these and at the tired face of his mother, some 
 thing clutched at his soul. 
 
 She was standing there, a gaunt figure, whittled thin by 
 the years. There was more gray than he had before noticed 
 in her black hair, more lines in her sallow face. 
 
 "Now then, Andy," she said, "don t run any risks you don t 
 need to. I know you ll not shirk any you oughtn t to shirk. 
 Don t worry about me : I m all right. I m not going to worry 
 about you if I can help it, and I m not as much afraid of 
 those TJ-boats as some people. Write once a week, and " 
 she put out her long thin arms awkwardly "be a good boy." 
 
 She had spoken between appreciable pauses. At each pause 
 he wanted to interrupt; first, he wanted to say some of the 
 
VICTORIOUS 41 
 
 fine encouraging things he had thought of for this occasion; 
 next, he wanted just to say anything that would tell her of 
 that which was clutching at his soul. But he only flung him 
 self into her arms and kissed her and, looking down into her 
 dry eyes, whispered chokingly : 
 
 "All right, mother. I love you, mother. Good-by." 
 Without turning, he ran down the steps and into the street. 
 He heard the cheerful song of a yellow warbler from the 
 garden behind the house. Because she held them back until 
 she had closed the door between them, he did not hear his 
 mother s sobs. 
 
 IX 
 
 On his part, Andy found that the pain of farewell, if it 
 did not immediately end, was at least soon suspended. When 
 they are not short, the griefs of youth are only recurrent. 
 He was a boy being pushed toward the goal of his desire: it 
 would be too much to expect that all his thoughts should re 
 main behind him. 
 
 He had been in Philadelphia, but to "New York this was 
 his first visit. He went about in a daze, overcome by it. Only 
 the consciousness of his uniformed glory kept his head steady. 
 Broadway, Fifth Avenue all that had been, theretofore, but 
 magic names: "It s simply great," said Andy. 
 
 He listened for every word that he could salvage from the 
 colliding voices of passers-by: "An he said . . . an 
 then she said . . ." that was Fifth Avenue ; "He s wonder 
 ful ... she s an artist . . ." that was Broadway; "But, 
 my dear, it never gels you anywhere" this was Forty-second 
 Street. At a shop-counter a too-showily dressed girl was 
 proudly calling the attention of her attendant saleswoman 
 to another purchaser, well but quietly garbed : "See that lady 
 over there? Ain t she grand? She s my gentleman friend s 
 wife." Andy observed that, in their peculiar drawl, all the 
 women were talking of men, and all the men of women. 
 
 In the taxi-cabs that Blunston shoved him into and out 
 of, beside the counters on which his cicerone rapped for more 
 speedy attention, across the white napery and shining silver 
 
42 VICTORIOUS 
 
 of a roof -garden dinner a New York dinner in a New York 
 fairyland roof-garden! Andy s companion poured out his 
 fragmentary, but continuous, advice. 
 
 He had written his charge a score of letters of introduc 
 tion: to French politicians, American soldiers, cosmopolitan 
 journalists : "Here s one to a Chicago man . . . he s . * . 
 and named McGregor . . . somewhere on a matter of con 
 tracts of some sort." 
 
 Andy heard and understood and agreed, but his spirits 
 were high with New York and his heart already aboard the 
 waiting transport. He snatched only stray phrases, when he 
 had to be alert if he were to offer satisfactory repartee. 
 
 ". . . and don t make it a rule to end every sentence with 
 a preposition," said Blunston, "because . . ." 
 
 "Is there any rule against ending one with a conjunction ?" 
 asked Andy. 
 
 Blunston s keen eyes narrowed suspiciously. "How can 
 you?" 
 
 The laughing boy had his example ready: "Please move 
 your chair away from that electric-fan which you are sitting 
 between me and." 
 
 "We shall be late for the theater . , ." said Blunston. 
 
 That was a joyful little comedy to which he took his pro 
 tege on the eve of Andy s departure for the war. Like most 
 of our American-made comedies, it was very nearly a farce. 
 This was why Blunston who had seen it twice and knew 
 the players personally and did not like it had selected it 
 for Andy s vision. He wanted to give the lad a cheerful go 
 ing. New though a New York theater was to the boy, Blun 
 ston s roof-garden talk had succeeded at last in lessening 
 Andy s attention to the things about him and in directing it 
 more and more toward the things ahead. Of these he was 
 thinking when, as they took their far-forward seats and faced 
 a stage set as a drawing-room with French windows opening 
 on a moonlit garden, some one entered from those windows. 
 
VICTORIOUS 43 
 
 The r61e was secondary unpunctual as Blunston and his 
 friend were, it was still too early to permit the entrance of 
 the star and the first words spoken were trite enough; but, 
 at the sight of her and the sound of her low voice, Andy s 
 fast-dwindling timidity; vanished altogether. He gripped 
 Blunston s arm: 
 
 "I can t see my program. Who s that?" 
 
 His neighbor looked from one side of the stage to the 
 other. "The man in the check " 
 
 "No, no. That girl!" 
 
 "The one at the table? That s Mildred" 
 
 "I don t mean her. I mean the the beautiful one," gulped 
 Andy : "the one that just came on." 
 
 He saw a graceful, shining, girlish creature, her glistening 
 hair in a heavy knot above her creamy neck, her eyes like 
 the skies of morning, her lips like berries from the garden 
 whence she came. Radiant, but radiant in the simplicity of 
 things immortal, she moved with the clean-limbed grace of a 
 dryad and spoke with the low clear voice of one among the 
 oak-groves about Tithorea. Awake, he had never before seen 
 such poise; he could not at once believe the reality of what 
 he saw. 
 
 "Oh, that" Blunston was saying: "that s Sylvia Raeburn. 
 She is rather pretty." 
 
 Rather pretty ! She had come nearer to the footlights, and 
 Andy saw how, for all her rippling hair was golden, her 
 arched eyebrows were well-defined, and how, though her eyes 
 were frank, they were but the wistful surface of a pool too 
 deep for fathoming. 
 
 "Southern," said Blunston, a . . . no sign of it in her 
 speech . . . well liked ... a nice straight sort of person, 
 only never anything but a second . . . satisfactory actress, 
 never a great . . . won t set the North River on . . ." 
 
 The rectitude of her body, the health of her soul, were 
 recorded in the clarity of her glance and the unstudied surety 
 of her rare gestures. Andy was very young, and this was a 
 perilous picture of youth for youth to gaze on. 
 
 The play progressed. An entr acte followed. Blunston 
 
44 VICTORIOUS 
 
 drew some lesson from the fact that American readers had 
 seen the news of the doom of Przemysl before he and the 
 other correspondents, twenty miles away from that city, and 
 the millions of Germany and Austria, so much as guessed 
 that the place was soon to fall. . . . 
 
 Then she was in the garden that had before been glimpsed 
 only through the French windows of the drawing-room. She 
 brought to the painted scene the true perfume of lilac and 
 syringa; she inhaled the hot atmosphere of the theater, she 
 gave forth the sweet breath of flowers in the open air. Andy s 
 impression of her came in volleys : her body was harmonious ; 
 she had a trick of puckering her beautiful brows that was 
 not a frown from within, but the shadow of a cloud of per 
 plexity, evoked by her childlike wonder at a world less lovely 
 than herself. 
 
 Blunston was tired. He hoped that he was doing the right 
 thing in sending Andy abroad : the right thing for that Sarah 
 Tollens who could never be again, for himself and for the 
 something that he had come to see as the most important of 
 all. On the stage, the star was prancing through a boisterous 
 love-scene. Andy s eyes, he noted, were not on her, but they 
 were bright. Blunston hoped that the boy was not thinking 
 too much about Minnie Taylor. 
 
 The star had a fall in that boisterous love-scene. She fell 
 over a flower-pot and made a limping exit. 
 
 The opening of the next act was Miss Raeburn s. Evening 
 had fallen on the garden; the dryad was as if she had not 
 long since leaped ashore after a plunge in the Cephissus ; dew 
 seemed to sparkle on her curling lashes, and there was star 
 light in her hair. 
 
 Between adolescence and maturity lies a period, all too 
 brief, when the individual, still "appareled in celestial light," 
 may try the unknown fires of manhood and not be burned; 
 it is the period when beauty is at once an element in itself 
 and yet more beautiful because of what it expresses. Beauty, 
 the wonder holy and elusive, is just around the next corner. 
 She has left, as you pursue her, a trail of rosebuds; on the 
 light breeze is still the music of her ever-flying feet ; a little 
 
VICTOKIOUS 45 
 
 nearer, and you will hear her singing that she is youth and 
 wistful gladness, that she is high adventure and lofty duty 
 that she is Springtime and God. 
 
 But Andy was to see no more of Sylvia Raeburn to-night. 
 The manager appeared before the curtain and announced 
 that the boisterous star had sprained her knee and could not 
 go on. The performance must stop. 
 
 Blunston, as they filed out, said he was sorry that Andy s 
 enjoyment had been curtailed. Andy scarcely heard him. 
 
 Earlier in the day, when they arrived there, the gilt grandi 
 osity of the hotel-entrance had impressed him, the odors of 
 so many Egyptian cigarettes, the fashionably-dressed women 
 that crowded the elevator and powdered their unconcerned 
 noses before its mirrors, the impassive bell-boys and the 
 waiters carrying late breakfast-trays or early cocktails. Now 
 all this left him cold. Then he was going out to help in the 
 war, with War Department credentials that made him almost 
 an officer; now he was going, but with the added inspiration 
 of the vision beautiful. 
 
 Blunston came into his room to smoke a pipe before going 
 to bed. He took up the subject of censorship: other things 
 being equal, a correspondent s work depended on his ability 
 to be tactful with the censor; to antagonize the censor for 
 any minor cause or personal quarrel was to end one s useful 
 ness ; but if, as there was small chance it would, any difference 
 arose over a vital principle, then an honorable man could but 
 do his duty and face the consequences. Andy remembered it 
 afterward. 
 
 That night he dreamed of his modern Jeanne d Arc and 
 saw her in the likeness of Sylvia Eaeburn. He knew it wasn t 
 love he felt: she was too remote for that. Yet he knew it 
 wasn t only adoration. He had always seen his Jeanne as 
 much the Sylvia of this evening, only now the details were 
 clearer. The wonder holy and elusive, the wistful gladness, 
 the high adventure and the lofty duty : in soul and body she 
 was what the historic Jeanne must have been, what to-night s 
 Sylvia must be ; as brave as the one, as beautiful as the other, 
 and like the Lily of Quito pure, "un Us d une beaut e admira- 
 
r 46 VICTORIOUS 
 
 We" which, he had read in the Lives of the Saints for he 
 had read nearly every dusty book in the Americus Public Li 
 brary was watered by the blood of Marianne de Jesus. 
 
 XI 
 
 Andy met Blunston in the hotel s lobby next morning. 
 
 "Why," said the lad, "I hardly knew you: you look so 
 different." 
 
 Blunston was in mufti. He smiled wryly. 
 
 "I ve no more use for a uniform," said he. 
 
 He rode with Andy in a taxi to the pier, a Blunston whose 
 weather-beaten face was rather drawn and very thoughtful, 
 yet a Blunston that gave advice, and sometime shyly indirect 
 encouragement, to the last. Andy said next to nothing, but 
 his companion fought the silence that strove to settle upon 
 them. 
 
 "It s the people at home you re writing for," he said. 
 "They don t want to know strategy . . . generals . . . 
 but . . . Did I say they want to know what it s all like, 
 even the dull deadly grind of it ? . . . If you can do that, 
 it s worth while. These soldiers can t express themselves. 
 But you . . . You re part of a letter-home for the whole 
 army." 
 
 And again, apparently apropos of nothing: 
 
 "Correspondents casualties will go up if they give us a 
 just chance, as they should, but never heavy. So far . . . 
 Needham . . . and then Jones on the Lusitaniia . . ." 
 
 He put a hand on that shoulder of Andy nearest him and 
 gripped it. 
 
 "Democracy," he said : "that s why we re in this war. Keep 
 it in your head and keep faith with it." 
 
 The taxi sped down a large street or bumped over a small 
 one. Now they would leap forward, and again come to a 
 jolting halt, all at the command of some traffic-policeman 
 unseen by the occupants of the cab. 
 
 They were at the pier-gates. Together they shouldered 
 
"VICTORIOUS 47 
 
 Andy s bundles and passed into the resounding shadows of 
 the pier. 
 
 The street was crowded with sightseers, roofs of the sur 
 rounding warehouses black with them. 
 
 "Wonder the mayor doesn t come with a brass-band . . . 
 present a bouquet . . ." grumbled Blunston. 
 
 Bales, boxes, a few porters with barrows, officers seeking 
 lost luggage, military-police in khaki, private policemen in 
 gray uniforms, detectives in plain-clothes, customs-house 
 men : into a crowd of these Andy and Blunston plunged. Far 
 ahead were three squares of light out of which three gang 
 planks rose to the still invisible ship: up there, out of the 
 darkness, shuffled endless lines of brown soldiery. 
 
 A port-officer at a high desk demanded Andy s passport, 
 marked it and referred its bearer to an embarkation-officer 
 thirty yards nearer the central gangplank. 
 
 "Eight in there," that officer said to Andy. "Stand aside, 
 men!" he called to the trudging soldiers. To Blunston he 
 said : "You can t go aboard with him. I ll see that his bag 
 gage gets on." 
 
 Blunston handed one of the soldiers some money and with 
 it that portion of Andy s impedimenta he had been carrying. 
 
 "Andy, never trust the military-arrangements with your 
 luggage, if you can yourself look out for . . . Don t lose 
 sight of that soldier !" He stuffed a package into the pocket 
 of Andy s blouse. "I shan t wait on the pier ... too dull." 
 He took the boy s hand and pressed it hard. "Remember to 
 cable if you get into any trouble, or need . . . I ll keep you 
 posted about home. Good-by. Good luck." 
 
 He pushed Andy into the mounting line of soldiers. When, 
 having slowly climbed the long ascent to the deck, the boy 
 looked back, Blunston had disappeared. 
 
 Andy took out the package and opened it. It contained 
 three new one-hundred-dollar bills and a note-book carefully 
 written and indexed in Blunston s precise hand. The book 
 proved to be a record of all the verbal instructions Andy s 
 friend had given him during the past few days ; it concluded 
 with this "Envoy": 
 
48 VICTOBIOUS 
 
 "Never forget that you have a duty to the army, to the 
 public, to your country. If you happen on any staff-secrets, 
 don t betray them for the sake of a beat. If you happen on 
 something that the public ought to know, don t suppress it 
 for anybody. If you happen on anything of value to your 
 country, remember that that takes precedence of anything 
 else. 
 
 "Get the big feature in the first paragraph, then elaborate 
 and end with a bang; don t split infinitives; don t end sen 
 tences with prepositions (or conjunctions!) when you can 
 avoid it without strain. Go slow, but don t go to sleep. 
 
 "Kemember, however much your profession is abused by 
 those outside it or inside, it is a profession to be proud of. 
 In your particular job, leave generals to the cable-services; 
 you are the voice of the man in the ranks. Could you ask 
 better? 
 
 "Keep a cool head and a clean heart. 
 
 "And God bless you ! 
 
 "ANDEEW BLUNSTON." 
 
 The reference to conjunctions showed that the writer had 
 been working on these notes last night, while Andy dreamed. 
 
 XII 
 
 That was at ten o clock in the morning. At five o clock in 
 the afternoon, the transport sailed. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 HOW ANDY ENTERED DANGERS BEYOND THE DANGER-ZONE ; AND 
 OF A PACE AT A CAR- WINDOW 
 
 IT WAS with a high head that Andy entered the white- 
 walled room in the rue de Constantine which was the chief 
 censor s office. 
 
 Heaps of printed forms and boxes of stationery were piled 
 on the bare floor. A few collapsible chairs stood about. From 
 the top of the single table, Andy was confronted by the soles 
 of a pair of spurred boots. 
 
 He hesitated a moment and then stepped forward. Two 
 legs ran out of the boots and down to a tilted chair ; up from 
 the chair rose a narrow-chested figure, on the sloping shoul 
 ders of which were the insignia of a first-lieutenant.* He had 
 a cadaverous face; his dark hair was thick, a mass of stiff 
 curly tendrils; his protruding eyes dull. Evidently he had 
 breakfasted well, for he sat picking his teeth in unspeculative 
 calm. 
 
 "Good morning," said Andy. 
 
 The dental operations were not at once discontinued in fa 
 vor of conversation. Andy felt the flush that crept over his 
 freckled face. 
 
 "I ve come to report, sir," he said. "I m an accredited cor 
 respondent." 
 
 Very slowly the lieutenant removed his feet from the table. 
 He spat out the latest discoveries of the toothpick, but the pick 
 itself he only shifted to a corner of his thin lips. 
 
 "Well," he said, "you re not the only one." 
 
 Andy s flush deepened. "My orders," said he, "are to re 
 port to the chief censor. That s Major Curtis." 
 
 * In justice to individual censors, the author wishes to state that 
 the man Garcia is wholly a fictitious character intended only to 
 typify the evils of censorship. 
 
 49 
 
50 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Oh, you don t have to see him. I m in charge." 
 
 "Very well, Mr. " 
 
 "Lieutenant Garcia." 
 
 Andy drew from its breast-pocket his precious papers. 
 
 "Here are my credentials, Mr. Garcia." 
 
 "Lieutenant Garcia," that officer corrected. 
 
 "Fin sorry," said Andy; he was ashamed of his mistake. "I 
 thought lieutenants were called Mister." 
 
 "Not in the A. E. F. they re not," Garcia responded. He 
 accorded Andy s treasure the favor of a cursory glance. 
 "Well," he asked, "what do you want ?" and tossed the paper 
 back to his visitor. 
 
 Now Andy was only amazed : "Why, I the first thing, I 
 guess, is to have these credentials forwarded for the signature 
 of the commanding general. That is the first thing, isn t it ?" 
 
 Lieutenant Garcia gave the innocent paper another glance, 
 but this time it was a glance of amusement. "Take it away. 
 We re not bothering with those souvenirs from Washington." 
 
 Andy picked up his credentials as a boy might lift from a 
 road the body of his pet dog that a scornful motor has killed. 
 
 "Then what is the next thing ?" he asked. He tried to speak 
 respectfully, but he could not then add to his question the 
 "sir" of the conscious subordinate. 
 
 Garcia produced a paper of his own. "This," he said. "It s 
 the correspondent s agreement. You needn t take up my time 
 reading it. It s just a form. Sign it for us to file : that s all 
 you ve got to do." 
 
 Told not to read it, Andy obeyed. This lieutenant made 
 him feel much younger than he felt when he left Aincrk-u^. 
 Andy shifted from one foot to the other: "Is that all?" 
 
 "Yes. Come here whenever you want a pass to the Amer 
 ican camp. We ll send over to the provost marshal s for it. 
 It ll take about a day." 
 
 "I thought my credentials " began Andy. 
 
 Garcia made a gesture of impatience. "I ve got more trou 
 ble with you correspondents than a dog with fleas," he said. 
 "You reporters all think you can come and go around the 
 camp just as you like. Well, take it from me, you can t. 
 
VICTORIOUS 51 
 
 We re no Brand Whitlocks. "What we want you fellows to do s 
 to get down there when we re ready for you and write stuff 
 that ll get behind the doughboys and that ll keep the people 
 back home in a good humor." 
 
 " I thought there mightn t be much to write just yet," said 
 Andy. 
 
 " Then make it," said Garcia. "Make it, damn it, make it! 
 Look here: The papers of you accredited men have put up a 
 thousand dollars for each of you with the army, and we re 
 using that to pay for your seats in the reporters automobiles : 
 it s ten dollars a day apiece, and you re charged whether you 
 use the car or don t. I advise you to go down to the camp and 
 get your money s worth." 
 
 "Doesn t that thousand go toward our food and lodging 
 down there?" gasped Andy. 
 
 "You bet your sweet life it don t. The officers aren t going 
 to have you i ellows messing with them. You ll live at the lo 
 cal hotels and they ll make you pay cash." 
 
 Another correspondent, a fat smiling man with bright black 
 eyes, was waiting his turn in the anteroom. 
 
 "Just arrived?" asked the smiling man, as Andy, deeply 
 flushing, closed the door between Garcia and himself. 
 
 Andy couldn t speak. He nodded. 
 
 "Well, I suppose Garcia told you to get behind the dough 
 boys." 
 
 Andy nodded again. 
 
 "He tells that to every new man," said the stout correspond 
 ent. "He s got to: you see, the artillery and aviation don t 
 exist. Did he tell you he d charge you a ten-spot a day 
 whether you were at the camp or not? He tells us all that. 
 Forget it." The speaker slapped Andy kindly on the back. 
 "Don t take Louis Garcia too hard. He s a squirt." 
 
 II 
 
 Andy s FrencH was faulty. There was some confusion 
 about his ticket, and he started incorrectly for the American 
 camp. One day found him getting off the wrong train to 
 
52 VICTORIOUS 
 
 change for the right one at a village vastly different from 
 those in which his country was preparing for its great effort. 
 The name of this village was Mirande-la-Faloise. 
 
 Somebody had told him that the Germans had been here, 
 but if that was so, they could not have hurried away; indeed 
 the little place could not have been under fire, for nowhere, 
 except in his home town, had Andy seen anything more peace 
 ful. Twin rows of white cottages, clean and thrifty, bor 
 dered the single street down which, during his half-hour s 
 wait, the American sauntered. At the farther end beyond the 
 church with its Gothic tower and medieval clock, there stood 
 a quite formidable house, an old inn that seemed to date from 
 centuries gone by and that displayed for sign the lilies of 
 French royalty ; and behind this, long meadows fell away to a 
 shady woodland thick with oaks that must have been full- 
 grown when Gaston conspired with Montmorency and Eich- 
 elieu wrecked the hopes of "Monsieur le Grand." Andy, 
 though he had read a little of those events, looked, rather, 
 with a sort of homesickness at the fertile fields that, divided 
 and subdivided, stretched beyond the Inn of the Lilies. The 
 perfumed air sighed contentment; a little creek, purling 
 through the meadows, sang a cradle-song. The only signs of 
 war were a few British Tommies dozing in shady doorways; 
 but one of these, between naps, told Andy that the street was 
 empty because the population, which had fled before the 
 enemy, was as yet forbidden to return. 
 
 Mirande-la-Faloise: Andy liked the name. He liked the 
 place ; he thought that he would remember it. 
 
 in 
 
 On the evening of his arrival at one of those villages in the 
 broad stretch of country called the American camp, Andy, 
 making busy notes by candlelight, felt that he had seen more 
 than he could ever remember and much more than, when he 
 returned to Paris for residence at the camp was impossible 
 so long as the promise of food and lodging was not kept he 
 could ever write. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 
 
 53 
 
 There was the series of villages, all alike. Crooked streets 
 full of mud when it rained, and of dust when it didn t. 
 Groups of American soldiers playing with French children; 
 others in the high fever of the newcomer s passion for souve 
 nir-purchasing ; rows of decadent cottages. On the doors of 
 
 the best houses were rude signs : 
 
 MAJOR POMEROY, 
 
 CAPTAIN SCHULTZ. 
 
 On the doors of the stables, which appeared to be mere 
 wings of the houses, were other signs : 
 
 SQT. BACOPOULOS 
 & 
 
 16 MEN. 
 
 Every cottage boasted its elbowing manure-pile; the larger 
 the pile, the richer the householder and there was much vul 
 gar display of wealth. The public fountain was presided over 
 by the statue of a saint, but about the sculptured feet a 
 medical-officer had strung the warning: "Unfit for Drinking 
 Purposes." 
 
 He saw the rigors of training, the apparently spasmodic 
 efforts to teach the new trade of war. Marches, musketry- 
 drills, machine-gun drills, trench-digging, the education in 
 trench-attack and trench-defense : Andy saw it all. 
 
 He was living at a village-inn, dirty and expensive. Here, 
 on the first night, as he climbed the rickety stairs to bed, 
 Andy was brought to a pause by a distant rumbling. A sol 
 dier was passing him. 
 
 "We must be going to have a thunder-storm," said Andy. 
 
54 VICTORIOUS 
 
 The soldier laughed shortly. "Those are the guns," he said ; 
 "yon can often hear them if the wind s right/ 
 
 Dull and far-away the sound was, but without cessation it 
 continued through the night. It invaded Andy s sleep. 
 
 Some of the correspondents lived in this inn. They were 
 a little jealous of every newcomer, but Andy s frankness and 
 enthusiasm won his way. "That kid" they called him at first 
 and were inclined to sneer at his "greenness." 
 
 Of course, he was to cable nothing, and that was a stigma : 
 
 "How much you sending a day ?" the newest to the business 
 asked him. 
 
 "How do you mean <how much ?" asked innocent Andy. 
 
 " "How do I mean ? The mimic laughed ; one or two of 
 his comrades, standing by, snickered shamefacedly. "I mean 
 how many words are you to cable ?" 
 
 "None," said Andy. 
 
 "Help!" groaned the young veteran. "Here s another 
 journalist." 
 
 Nevertheless, they ended by liking him, and affectionately 
 changed "that kid" to "the kid." Andy folded to his breast 
 the wonder of being a war-correspondent for the first time. 
 
 He took trips far away from the training-camp to supply- 
 bases in the making, to hospitals and great works that were to 
 be. There, in the words of the men that showed him about, 
 words that the correspondents of the Paris newspapers flung 
 broadcast to their hungry countrymen, he found the spirit of 
 rush and ingenuity and bigness that was America. Peeping 
 through a single large gun and watching its greased spirals 
 vanish in the shining disk of the mouth, he heard an officer 
 say : "We re going to have a thousand of these next month." 
 His first prisoners he saw laying the main of a water-system ; 
 he heard that highways were to be widened to accommodate 
 camions four-abreast. 
 
 We were to use one hundred and twenty-five miles of four- 
 inch water-pipe. We were erecting a pair of salvage-depots 
 to repair clothing, rifles, motorcycles, automobiles, field- 
 glasses, watches, rubber-boots, harness; when completed, they 
 be the largest in the world. Here, at Bordeaux, a city 
 
VICTOKIOUS 55 
 
 was building beside a city: the capacity of the old harbor 
 would be fifty times multiplied, ten times as many ships could 
 be unloaded as formerly and three times as many docked ; the 
 eight hundred and seventy switches in the railroad-yard would 
 control two hundred and twenty-five miles of new track there, 
 and from these would be sent forth nine hundred and sixty 
 standardized locomotives and thirty thousand freight-cars 
 from home; to supply purified water, there would be con 
 structed reservoirs that would give six million gallons a day. 
 
 "We ll need one hundred and sixty-two million cubic feet 
 of filling to bring the ground of the yards to a proper level," 
 an engineer told Andy. "And just you watch us throw it in." 
 
 Of its sort, there would be nothing on earth the size of the 
 clearing-house that was to go up midway along the lines of 
 communication : a mile broad and nearly seven long, four and 
 a half million feet of covered storage capacity and ten million 
 of open ; enough war material could be housed there to supply 
 a million men for thirty days. Not far away, there was 
 planned a plant for the mere assemblage of aeroplanes, not 
 even their repairing, where twenty thousand men would be 
 employed. 
 
 "Twenty-five thousand planes," said an inspector. "That 
 is what the secretary of war has promised, and he says the 
 factories back home are ahead of schedule." 
 
 Could it all really be accomplished, a hovering British cor 
 respondent wondered. 
 
 "Bet your life it can," said the inspector. "America always 
 starts with an auger, never with a gimlet." 
 
 "But sometimes," Ferlet, a thin, excitable French reporter, 
 hazarded, when Andy made shift to translate this statement, 
 "sometimes to start well a gimlet is necessary." 
 
 As for Andy, he was drunk with the sense of immensity. 
 What were the slights of officers, what even the drawbacks of 
 the confused training-camp, in such a scale as this on which 
 the great American effort was proceeding? 
 
56 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 IV 
 
 Andy had secured a single table in an obscure corner of the 
 general dining-room. He was waited on by a beautiful, petti- 
 coated panther, a dark, broad-shouldered, full-bosomed girl 
 that steered with flexuous turns of her body a burdened course 
 through the clutter of servants and officers: she walked like 
 a queen and dominated the entire inn. Andy heard somebody 
 address her as Leonie and ask, in easy French, for a place. He 
 looked up and recognized his friend of the censor s anteroom. 
 
 "Well, well/ said the new arrival . He came over and shook 
 hands. To Andy s delighted wonder, he said his name was 
 Owen Evans. "I thought I d run down here for a day or two, 
 but there doesn t seem to be room, even to eat." 
 
 Andy scarce dared offer such a dignitary a place opposite 
 him, but he managed it, and Evans was soon gorging. While 
 he gorged, he talked, mostly of his latest grievance. He had 
 been recently to Italy and complained of the Italians in 
 sistence on correspondents securing certificates of registration. 
 
 "But our trouble s going to be with our own people," said 
 Evans. "Some day my great-grandson will be flunked at 
 school if he doesn t know stuff that our censors have killed." 
 
 He left Evans, who had some writing to do, and passed 
 through the bar, a hall and into the narrow, low-eeilinged 
 room beyond. The shutters were closed, to let no light out 
 and no air in. The place was filled with the glare of lamps 
 and the mixture of fumes from oil and imperfectly digested 
 alcohol. There was a great crowd there, too ; not of French 
 peasants, who drink their light wines liberally diluted by 
 water, but men that drank too much liquor and drank it neat ; 
 girls, no Delilahs, nor yet one that would have received so 
 much as a glance of pity in a larger village, but women against 
 contaminating contact with whom a cocotte of Paris would 
 have withdrawn her passing skirts. There was no music, how 
 ever low ; no games, however wild ; nothing but a few men in 
 uniform, the tilted bottle and the reeking girls. 
 
 Andy hurried into the street. He walked through the vil 
 lage and down the long road beyond. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 57 
 
 Moonlight "Somewhere in France." From far away that 
 low thunder which was the guns; over there, beyond those 
 dimly silhouetted hills and across valleys to Andy invisible, 
 iron mouths were vomiting a deafening Niagara of death; 
 here, about him, only that distant rumble hinted just then of 
 war ; a train in a tunnel, perhaps ; breakers on a rocky coast. 
 Moonlight, and the straight white road, shining silver under 
 the bordering rows of Lombardy poplars; behind him, the 
 tiny thatched hamlet. 
 
 In a field a few steps off that road, rose a big black build 
 ing with a peaked roof. Andy went into it. 
 
 It was amazingly full of men men at tables, writing let 
 ters ; men reading magazines ; checker-playing men ; but Kem- 
 brandt every one, whose faces were lighted by candles planted 
 on rails along the walls. At the farther end a group was 
 gathered about an older man, who played the piano and sang 
 with them. 
 
 It was Old Black Joe. These men were a bit of the Ameri 
 can Army, and this hut a bit of the American Y. M. C. A. 
 
 In a quiet room at the back of the hut, an Association- 
 worker, who had been teaching French to a class of American 
 soldiers, was now teaching them French history. In a corner, 
 behind a counter, another worker was serving the canteen. 
 The bulletin-board announced a track-meet for the next day 
 and a baseball game for the day to follow; there was to be a 
 variety-show on Saturday. Close beside the bulletin-board 
 hung a large placard with this staring legend : 
 
 You PROMISED MOTHER A LETTER: 
 WRITE IT Now ! 
 
 The hut had been full when Andy entered it. Before he 
 left, it was overflowing. Soldiers hung in at the windows. 
 Some failed to force an entrance through their comrades at 
 the door or even to squeeze a head among the heads that 
 crowded the window-sills ; they had to go away. 
 
58 
 
 yiCTOKIOUS 
 
 He had feared that the task of chronicling the American 
 endeavor in France would numb his fingers before ever he sat 
 down to his little portable typewriter ; yet no sooner was he in 
 Paris, and in his green-curtained attic-workroom Blunston 
 had reengaged by cable his own old headquarters in the Palais 
 Royal for his protege than he fell upon his work and found 
 his enthusiasm performing it. The disorder of his impres 
 sions, which, it had occurred to him, might be the reflection 
 of a disorder among the things whence they were derived 
 that was gone, and order obtained: so, he said, would chaos 
 cease in our spheres of military activity. Andy wrote. 
 
 He stopped only because a trick of his fancy bade him open 
 his bedding-roll, which he had not opened on the transport. 
 He found there and ate the Dover-cakes that were very stale, 
 but that he must be able truthfully to tell his mother he had 
 eaten. 
 
 His mind whirled back to the camp and all he had seen. 
 He started writing again. The people at home hadn t the 
 faintest idea of what stupendous things were in progress ! 
 
 He drew up this list, and elaborated : 
 
 THE AMERICAN MILITARY EFFORT WILL CONSTRUCT: 
 
 The biggest staff training-school 
 
 The biggest system of military- 
 equipment warehouses 
 
 The biggest military seaport base 
 
 The biggest base hospital 
 
 The biggest locomotive round house 
 
 The biggest field bakery system J* IN THE WORLD ! 
 
 The biggest automobile storagehouse 
 
 The biggest gasoline storage plant 
 
 The biggest cold storage plant 
 
 The biggest junk shop 
 
 The (next to the) biggest aviator 
 training camp 
 
yiCTOKIOUS 59 
 
 It was afternoon when he began. He stopped once to light 
 his lamp and once to fill it before he had finished. Sometime 
 during his work there came something that sounded like the 
 shriek of the transport s whistle; later there were crashes in 
 the street that seemed to his subconsciousness bumping coal- 
 cars when a train was being inexpertly "made-up" in the 
 Americus railroad-yards. As, at last, he finished, he heard 
 the call of a bugle, ringing fresh, singularly joyous. 
 
 Later, he learned that this was the berloque, the "All Clear" 
 signal. He had written through an air-raid. 
 
 VI 
 
 From his workshop window, Andy could see the length of 
 the historic gardens of the Palais Eoyal. Children sailing 
 their toy-boats in the pool of the fountain; old men and 
 young blesses dozing on the benches under the sun-filtering 
 trees ; lovers lunching at Vef our s below the merry sounds of 
 military wedding-parties in the grandes salles and strolling 
 arm-in-arm along the pillared gale-ries. He revelled in the 
 repetition of names concerning the history of which his 
 knowledge was the haziest. Eichelieu had begun the build 
 ings as the Palais-Cardinal, died there and left them to the 
 thirteenth Louis; Anne of Austria Andy knew his Three 
 Musketeers lived in them, and he that was to be the grand 
 inonarque and his unhappy brother; the great Mansart, to 
 whom all Paris is a monument, enlarged the place, and in 
 Mansart s halls the Eegent held his scandalous revels. Here 
 John Law blew the Mississippi Bubble; Mirabeau knew the 
 Palais Eoyal with Madame Nahra; while the gamesters won 
 and lost in its salles de jeu, Philippe Egalite wooed, above 
 stairs, the Comtesse de Buffon or the English Mrs. Elliott; 
 Lamartine must here have nursed his tenderness for Elvire 
 the Creole. 
 
 There were evenings when the moonlight brought to Andy 
 visions of a Jeanne d Arc whose hair gleamed and whose 
 eyes were starry waters too deep for fathoming. There was 
 
60 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 one evening on which this inceptor in letters even attempted 
 poetry and began: 
 
 When all that hair is turning gray 
 
 Which now is Tuscan gold, 
 When faint asciculations say 
 
 That you are growing old 
 
 He never went on with it : he couldn t. He wanted to make 
 some use of "asciculations" because he had just that day dis 
 covered the word. 
 
 Yet this night his sleep conjured the vision that his pen 
 could not ordain. She was standing between the green hang 
 ings of the window with the moon full upon her; it gleamed 
 from her corselet, it shone on her casque and on the tendrils 
 of her yellow hair that, at her temples, escaped below the 
 vizor ; reflected from the curtains, it gave her face the appear 
 ance of a face chiseled out of ice. 
 
 She did not speak, but Andy conceived himself possessed 
 of a reckless eloquence. Feverishly convinced, he voiced the 
 meter of the heartbeats that he could feel at his tongue s tip 
 and in his finger-ends. The sense of miracle subjugated him. 
 He wanted to ask her what she would of him, but what he 
 said was that in the crystal of her soul he saw all innocence 
 and sweetness and truth. With unstudied surety, she extended 
 toward him a hand that was like moonshine upon water. He 
 wondered if he would dare to kiss it; he felt that he would 
 count life well lost were death the price of such homage-giving. 
 He knelt to kiss her hand, reverently she looked at him and 
 beyond him with a slight contraction of the dusky lashes that 
 was not a frown, but the faintest shadow of a cloud of per 
 plexity as at the half-realized spectacle, and wholly unbe 
 lievable, of a world less lovely than herself ; she looked beyond 
 him thus ; and then, still silent, before his lips had touched her 
 hand, she dissolved into the ancient moonlight. 
 
 The lad that dreamed such things was freckled, cheerful 
 Andy. Andrew McKinley Brown. Andy, the son of Sarah, 
 late reporter for the Americus, Pa., Daily Spy! 
 
VICTOKIOUS 61 
 
 He had seen notable people, had eaten luncheon at the 
 next to the last of six tables, to be sure, but as a guest, and 
 no mere chronicler at the Hotel Palais d Orsay, had been 
 to teas in a one-button afternoon coat that he had to buy at a 
 Parisian tailor s, and to dinners in evening-clothes. He was 
 taking French lessons; whole Gallic phrases came trippingly 
 from his tongue. He had seen all of Paris except that side 
 which Blunston and Colonel Eskessen and all the people back 
 home including his mother, had she known of its existence 
 would not have wanted him to see. 
 
 The autumn was approaching. It came on stealthily. It 
 played its hand like an expert whist-player that knows enough 
 tricks will certainly be his if only he makes the proper leads. 
 As it came on, so, Andy said, would come forward the might 
 of America. 
 
 He was confirmed in this by some of the phrases in a 
 chance conversation with an officer of the Chasseurs d Alpins, 
 whom he met at a diplomatic dejeuner. 
 
 "What do you think of our men ?" asked Andy. "Beally, I 
 mean/ he hastened to add. "I won t publish it ; I just want 
 to know." 
 
 Andy s honest brown eyes and smiling face could generally 
 gain him a Frenchman s confidence, but this black-bearded 
 Frenchman with the cross of the Legion of Honor on his 
 coat, although he was fresh from instructing American troops, 
 had little that he cared to conceal. 
 
 "They are almost as good as our own men/ said he. "Your 
 private soldier is quick to learn, and lean and hard and, oh, 
 very serious! I believe that you must all take your sports 
 like the English; and this business of fighting, you set about 
 it as seriously as your men of Wall Street go about their gam 
 bling." 
 
 "And what about our officers ?" urged Andy. 
 
 Ah," he said, "there is so much more to learn for an offi 
 cer than for a simple soldier. But I am glad for them both 
 that you will have the Grand Keview to-morrow." 
 
62! VICTORIOUS 
 
 VII 
 
 He had been at the camp yesterday and there met officers 
 of the American Army s press-division ; it was to be expected 
 that they must tell any correspondent in good standing of an 
 erent that would interest the public at home; but none of 
 them had mentioned the review. This morning, in Paris, 
 Andy, when he returned the pass that he had taken to camp, 
 had had to see Lieutenant Garcia; Garcia had made no men 
 tion of the review. 
 
 Could the French officer be mistaken? A general review 
 of the A. E. F. might indicate that the staff was thinking, 
 six months after it went to war, of going to fight. In any 
 case, a grand review would be news, and Andy must lose no 
 chance of describing it. 
 
 He looked at his watch. The last train toward the Ameri 
 can camp left in an hour. He bolted from the dejeuner forth 
 with and plunged into the nearest Metro station. He was 
 bound for the Hotel Ste. Anne, whither the censorship offices 
 had been removed, in order to secure a pass at once. 
 
 He stood on the subway-platform, stamping impatiently. 
 The afternoon crowd was beginning to go homeward, and the 
 station was filled. It seemed to Andy that he had to wait an 
 unconscionable time. 
 
 Came an approaching roar. He leaned over the edge of the 
 platform: the train that was coming was bound the wrong 
 way. 
 
 It banged into the station. Across the track-bottomed 
 chasm that intervened between that train and him, Andy 
 hurled his anger. 
 
 He saw a crowd push aboard. The train began to pull away. 
 It gained speed. Window after lighted window passed before 
 his flaming eyes. At one he caught sight of a person looking 
 across the narrow chasm. 
 
 It was the face of a girl of a superb creature whose glis 
 tening hair was drawn into heavy coils above her creamy 
 neck, whose eyes were like the skies of morning and whose 
 lips were like bitter berries. The thing happened so quickly 
 
VICTOKIOUS 63 
 
 that Andy s expression had not changed from that of im 
 potent anger at the fact of this not being his train. The 
 direct, clear-eyed gaze of the girl seemed to see this. Utterly 
 unconscious of herself, she smiled. The train shot ahead. 
 Some inward perplexity asserted itself: the girl s even brows 
 puckered, not into a frown, but as if in the shadow of a re 
 current cloud. 
 
 The train was gulped by the tunnel. 
 
 Andy wheeled, fought his way through the crowd toward 
 the subway s exit: that girl was Sylvia Eaeburn. It couldn t 
 be, but it was. 
 
 Andy madly resolved to get a taxi to the next station down 
 the line. What were all these dolts in his path that they 
 seemed blind to the vision vouchsafed him? He would over 
 take that train he 
 
 He stopped. Such a course was impossible. He could not 
 overtake the train. The whirlpool of the city had shown her 
 him and flung her far away. Then there was the review; his 
 duty lay there and his last chance for the day was now only 
 fifty minutes distant, at the Gare de 1 Est. 
 
 He was half-way up the exit steps. He turned back. 
 
 He went to the Hotel Ste. Anne. Nobody was there but a 
 military-clerk on the desk before whom lay a wire-basket. 
 Andy saw in that basket the pass he had that morning re 
 turned. It had not yet been handed over to the provost-mar 
 shal s office for cancellation. 
 
 "I want this," said Andy. "It was a mistake, my turning 
 it in this morning." 
 
 Before the clerk could determine whether or not it was 
 his part to protest, Andy and the pass had left the hotel to 
 gether. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 OF A GRACIOUS GRAFTER; OF A FRENCH MAID AND A DRAFTED 
 PRO-GERMAN, AND OF TWO PERSONS UNDER A PARISIAN 
 MOON; YET, WITHAL, OF THE ORDER AND DISORDER OF WAR 
 
 AT FIRST his tour along the corridors of the Express left 
 him with the belief that every carriage was full. French offi 
 cers, American Red Cross workers and Y. M. C. A. secretaries 
 seemed to occupy all the space. Then, as Andy retraced his 
 steps, he came upon a compartment that offered some small 
 hope. There were in it four men wearing the brilliant in 
 signia of the etat-majeur, one civilian and the one civilian s 
 huge suit-case. The civilian filled a seat by the window and 
 bulged over it; the suit-case filled the seat beside him and 
 bulged over that. 
 
 Andy resolved to have the suit-case placed on the overhead 
 rack, where it belonged, and to take for his own the seat it 
 now occupied. He entered the carriage. 
 
 Although the day was warm, the squat figure of the civilian 
 was swathed to its waist in a bright plaid steamer-rug. A 
 heavy overcoat rose above the rug. Two plump gloved hands, 
 coming out of fur-edged sleeves, held an old copy of the New 
 York Times before the face, and above the newspaper Andy 
 could see only a thicket of gray hair surmounted by a gay 
 tweed cap. 
 
 "May I have this seat?" asked Andy: the man must be a 
 fellow-countryman. 
 
 The civilian s grotesquely short arms drew the New York 
 Times toward his lap, leaving free to Andy s view hazel eyes 
 overtopping dark pouches of fat, an aquiline nose, a little 
 gray mustache that failed to hide a rosebud mouth, and a 
 placid double chin. There was something about the man that 
 the boy, generally so ready to like everybody, at first disliked. 
 
 64 
 
VICTORIOUS 65 
 
 This body wore its clothes not easily, but blatantly; it was 
 too comfortable, too sleek, and it seemed only a body. The 
 question flashed through Andy: Would he ever grow to 
 be like that? Would he some day become round and placid 
 and material? Was life, as this personality proclaimed it, 
 nothing but a satisfied progress away from the star of youth ? 
 
 "Thank God, an American!" ejaculated the comfortable 
 traveler. Most high voices are thin; this one was corpulent. 
 Its relief, moreover, was so sincere that Andy softened. 
 
 He acknowledged his nationality and repeated his question. 
 
 "Yes, take the seat," said the little man. "But you ll have 
 to get that suit-case out of the way for yourself : you see, I m 
 settled." 
 
 Andy s strong arms made short work of an excessively 
 heavy piece of luggage. He settled down in its place. 
 
 "Where you from?" asked his compatriot. 
 
 Andy told him. There had been so many to smile when he 
 mentioned his small town that he now mentioned it defiantly. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said the little man. He received the name of 
 Americus quite as if it were Baltimore or San Francisco, and 
 Andy was still more mollified thereby. "That s in Doncaster 
 County, isn t it? I handled a water-company contract in 
 Doncaster about ten years ago." 
 
 Andy wanted to talk about Doncaster County next to 
 speculating as to whether he had been a victim of hallucina 
 tion in the Metro, that was the most interesting subject he 
 could think of but the little man preferred a topic more 
 immediate. In his discussion of it there developed the fact 
 that he was one of those whose comfort is derived in large 
 measure from contrast with the things about them. 
 
 "The quickest way to get rich," said the little man, "is to- 
 get on a French train : you ll soon find you ll be better off." 
 He chuckled ; he moved his legs contentedly under the plaid 
 rug. "Isn t this country a bluff, though ?" 
 
 "Why, no," said Andy. "You see" He looked uneasily 
 at their neighbors. 
 
 "Oh, they can t speak English," the little man assured him : 
 "I tried them all first thing they came in. I think this coun- 
 
 
66 YICTOEIOUS 
 
 try s a bluff. It s a nation of advertising-agents; they re all 
 so busy writing prospectuses that nobody s had time to wring 
 the water out of the stock. Gay Paree we ve all heard 
 about that: well, it s about as gay as your mother s funeral. 
 The chic French girls : I haven t seen a really fashionably 
 dressed girl since I left Chicago. These people can t help it : 
 they just can t tell the truth. Take the ones that say they 
 can speak English. Can they? They can not. Every time 
 they go to bat, their English dies at second. Don t you ever 
 believe these Erench head-waiters that say they understand 
 you. I went into the Ritz restaurant last night and asked for 
 sweet-potatoes, and what do you think they brought me ? Sug 
 ared murphies ! They say they ve studied geography, and if 
 you tell em you were born in Seattle, but went to college in 
 New Haven, they ll ask you if you slept home nights. Have a 
 cigar?" 
 
 He uttered the question as if it were a piece with the speech 
 that preceded it. He offered Andy a silver-mounted morocco- 
 case filled with cigars wrapped in tin-foil. 
 
 The train was passing whitewashed villages: here a shop 
 and there a cottage, the high walls that shut off the sight of 
 a villa, and beyond that the balconied dwelling of a physician 
 or avocat whose name and profession were announced by an 
 oval brass-plate on the front door. Andy, looking across his 
 neighbor, saw not so much these, nor yet the small, symmetri 
 cal fields : he was thinking of the Metro station and what he 
 had seen there, or seemed to see. 
 
 The little man kept on talking. It was to be gathered that 
 lie made many patriotic speeches in America, that he had been 
 ,"over" for some time, that his home was in Chicago, that he 
 ,was a contractor and a childless widower. 
 
 "There s nothing as helpless on earth as the widower that 
 has spent all his married life wondering how his wife d man 
 age to get along without him if he died first," said the little 
 man. "My wife (bless her soul!) used to say she wondered 
 what kind of a woman I d marry if she died, and I used to 
 say, Some other kind, I guess. But she wasn t any sooner 
 gone than I knew I couldn t half get on without her and 
 
VICTORIOUS 67 
 
 couldn t get on at all with any other woman. I like the ladies ; 
 I like to be polite to em I hate to see a lady stand in a car : 
 that s why I always carry a newspaper but I d as soon think 
 of living in Europe for choice as marrying for it." 
 
 Something about the man stirred Andy s memory. 
 
 "Did you say you were from Chicago ?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes, sir/ said the little fellow : "and proud of it. I m a 
 Chicagoan born and raised. It is in Chicago that there are 
 all the loved spots that my infancy knew. D you remember 
 the story about the school-teacher? She asked her primary 
 class to make pictures about The Old Oaken Bucket illus 
 trate it, you know and one little girl made a circle, three 
 buckets and a line of dots. The kid said the circle was the 
 well; one bucket was the oaken bucket/ one was the iron- 
 bound bucket and the last was the bucket that hung in the 
 well ; the dots were the loved spots that my infancy knew. 
 
 "Are you a lawyer ?" asked Andy. 
 
 The little man pulled his gray mustache. "One time," he 
 answered, "I saw a drunk looking at an old tombstone in the 
 graveyard out in Medora that s down in Macoupin County. 
 The name was worn away ; all you could read on the stone was 
 the words, A Lawyer and an Honest Man. I asked the drunk 
 what troubled him. He points to these words and he says: 
 I was wonderin how they come to bury those two fellows in 
 one grave. No, my son, I m not a lawyer, but I belong to the 
 same lodge : I m a contractor. Just now I m a contractor in 
 aeroplanes." 
 
 "Your name s McGregor," said Andy. 
 
 "You ring the bell at the first guess : B. Frank McGregor." 
 
 "I have a letter to you," said Andy "in Paris. It s from 
 Andrew Blunston." 
 
 "Met him in Manila in 1901," said Mr. McGregor. "I was 
 the only white man that knew Aguinaldo was at Panalan 
 I d had a little deal with him once and I tipped off Blun 
 ston. Met him again on the Yalu when I took over a cargo 
 of rifles. Saw him in New York just before I left. He s the 
 best newspaper-man in the world, but he s so honest that the 
 world won t ever find that out." 
 
68 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Mr. McGregor had Andy haul down the big suit-case to 
 look for a snapshot of himself and Blunston, which the boy 
 found under carefully folded and heavily scented piles of silk 
 .underwear, silk pajamas and a flowered silk dressing-gown, 
 among which were wrapped bottles of hair-wash and face- 
 I paste, boxes of pomade, a mustache-brush and a manicure-set 
 j complete to the point of nail-polish. The picture strengthened 
 I the change in Andy s feelings: he did not approve of Mr. 
 [McGregor, but he admitted that he did not altogether un 
 derstand him. 
 
 On his part, Mr. McGregor took a liking to Andy immedi 
 ately. "Any friend of Blunston s a friend of mine/ He 
 seemed to have some mysterious, but extensive, powers in con 
 nection with the A. E. F., and, giving Andy his card with 
 "Hotel Kitz" engraved on it, he commanded him to call "when 
 ever I can do anything for you anything in the world." 
 
 II 
 
 One of the persons that McGregor knew was Lieutenant 
 Garcia. This censor, though Andy was unaware of it, was 
 aboard the Express, and it was so important for McGregor to 
 see him that he presently moaned his way out of his cerements 
 and sought Garcia in the corridor of another carriage. He lit 
 a cigar without offering one to the lieutenant. 
 
 "Any trouble so far ?" he demanded. 
 
 "Nobody s written a word about aeroplanes yet," Garcia re 
 plied. 
 
 They leaned against the metal rail before the window. 
 Their tones were low, but not muffled. Anybody observing 
 them would have supposed them discussing the landscape. 
 
 "Sure of it ?" this from McGregor, who pulled at his gray 
 mustache. 
 
 "I ve given orders that any aeroplane story s to be submitted 
 to me." Garcia s Latin face was sullen. "I m no fool," he 
 said. 
 
 "No ?" countered McGregor. "You re well disguised then." 
 
VICTOKIOUS 69 
 
 The lieutenant flashed him an evil glance. "Don t try that 
 sort of thing on me." 
 
 McGregor s responding laugh was sincerely pleasant. "My 
 dear young man, I ll try anything on you that I think ll fit, 
 and if you don t like it, I ll produce that little receipt you 
 signed for the first money I paid you. Meantime, let s be 
 agreeable. I want only my money s worth. If you double-cross 
 anybody else that s bought you, that s their lookout : all / want 
 kept out of the papers is aeroplanes, and I m not hurting any 
 body by having it done." 
 
 He seemed to feel a need of justification to himself, for, al 
 though it was patent that he cared nothing for Garcia s opin 
 ion of him, he continued : 
 
 "The people back home have to be educated up to these 
 things; they can t bear all the truth all at once. They think 
 they can clean up a war by Saturday night and be home in 
 their slippers reading about the Katzen jammer Kids Sunday 
 morning, while Caruso s singing to em out of the victrola. 
 Well, they can t. We re all human; we ve got to make mis 
 takes at first and learn by our mistakes, but the people won t 
 realize that, and so we ve just got to keep the mistakes quiet 
 till everything s fine again. Now, then, let s get down to busi 
 ness." 
 
 They got down to it and remained down for some time. 
 They had reached their station, and McGregor s servant came 
 from his second-class carriage to carry out the big suit-case, 
 before they were ready to arise. 
 
 in 
 
 That there was indeed to be a grand review Andy learned 
 as soon as he descended from the train at the outskirts of the 
 American camp. 
 
 He carried his gossip to the headquarters of the press-divi 
 sion and there received a grudging confirmation. Then he 
 went to Leonie s inn and dreamed of Metro trains and faces 
 at their windows, until dawn. 
 
70 VICTORIOUS 
 
 The sun came up in a golden haze. 
 
 The heavy mists of the night were breaking and retreating 
 in a disorderly rout of flying fleeces through the hollows of 
 the lower hills when Andy climbed to the tableland chosen 
 for the maneuver. 
 
 It was a countryside teeming with historic memories, but 
 one that, in all its centuries of war and rumors of war, had 
 not once, Andy felt as he looked out at it, seen a race prepar 
 ing for battle with so high a purpose as that which peopled it 
 now. 
 
 There was a far-off sound of trumpets. It drew nearer, and 
 following it, the rhythmic noise of marching feet. Looking 
 from the highest point of the plateau, it was possible to see a 
 spot at which several roads converged, and along these roads 
 was something moving : long lines of men in khaki were mov 
 ing, men under the peaked American service-hats, and over 
 them, fluttering in the kindly air of France, the Stars and 
 Stripes of America. 
 
 Again the flourish of trumpets. The plateau had been 
 ascended ; the entire first division, arrived from every point of 
 the compass, had fallen into one great formation, like the mul 
 titudinous pieces of a gigantic jig-saw puzzle miraculously 
 and instantaneously solved. 
 
 There they were, their bands blazing into an American 
 march, their wide American bayonets gleaming, their keen 
 American faces alight. 
 
 Here was the confluence of mighty waters ; the young river, 
 after a far and ever quickening journey, was rushing into the 
 bed, at last, of the older and more deliberate stream ; long as 
 some of our men had been on this side of the Atlantic, this 
 was the arrival of America in France. That was the meaning 
 to every man present ; not forgetting the gymnastics of months 
 past, the army then in the making at home, and the training 
 still here to be completed, one had on this spot visibly demon 
 strated the beginning of America s part in the World War. 
 
 Far up the plateau a little group of officers some in olive 
 drab and some in blue had appeared. They walked rapidly 
 toward the advancing columns and came to a pause on the 
 
VICTORIOUS 71 
 
 edge of the improvised parade-ground, half-way down the 
 length of the tableland. 
 
 For the first time Andy now noticed that two of the cor 
 respondents stationed at the camp had come to that point 
 of vantage which he had gained. To them he turned. His 
 eyes were dancing with excitement; he pointed to one of the 
 reviewing-officers. 
 
 "Who s the big fat fellow in red and blue?" he asked. 
 
 He was not answered, because just then another order 
 passed along the lines. They had been going forward in col 
 umn of squads; now the formation was "Company front." 
 Into this they swung. It is the hardest thing to do in all the 
 infantry drill-regulations that formation of marching men 
 from groups of fours into two long, perfectly straight and 
 perfectly uniform, lines to the company but they did it. 
 They did it without a break and, so formed, advanced down 
 the field, exactly one hundred and twenty paces to the minute, 
 toward the little group of officers. The lines stiffened. Col 
 umn after column they came, turning into company-front at 
 the parade-ground s edge, until the whole plateau swarmed 
 with the whole division. 
 
 "Eyes right!" 
 
 They went by the reviewing-officers by the men in khaki 
 and the fat man in red and blue, their forearms at an angle 
 of forty-five degrees, the heads of the rankers snapped side- 
 wise. 
 
 "Front r 
 
 The captains hands came down, the rankers heads faced 
 forward again as the reviewing-officers were passed. 
 
 At the far end of the plateau, the regiments were drawn up 
 into battalions, and were rapidly inspected; and then, sud 
 denly, that fat man in red and blue was speaking to them, and 
 everybody realized that he was Marshal Joffre. 
 
 Andy nearly killed himself in his run across the field to 
 hear that speech, but it was a military speech and therefore 
 brief. It was ended before he arrived. 
 
 The entire review was a matter of a relatively few minutes. 
 The great jig-saw puzzle was resolved into its components as 
 
72 VICTORIOUS 
 
 swiftly and as methodically as it had recently been assembled ; 
 the wide tableland, the hills and the valleys were apparently 
 empty again. 
 
 Andy, who was to take the evening train back to Paris, had 
 several hours before him. He was just turning in at the inn- 
 door when he saw one soldier point him out to another. 
 
 "That s him," Andy heard the first one say. 
 
 The other strode across to him. The oncoming young fel 
 low was in the thin uniform of all the men about him. His 
 service-hat sat well over eyes of which Andy could catch only 
 a sparkle and above hair of the military cut. To say that his 
 cheeks were bronzed and his shoulders square would be to say 
 but what was descriptive of every soldier within sight, yet 
 there was something in his gait, not yet eradicated by army- 
 training, which reminded Andy of home. 
 
 "You re Brown, ain t?" asked the approaching figure. 
 
 Modified as the cadence was by contact with speech from 
 other portions of his country, this was still the cadence, and 
 its form was still the form, of the Pennsylvania-Dutch. Andy 
 thrust out a ready hand. 
 
 "That s my name." 
 
 "I heard you was here. You re from Americus, ain t ?" 
 
 "You bet you," said Andy. 
 
 The large frame of the soldier straightened. Andy could 
 see that his eyes were brown and that his grin was undiluted 
 gladness. 
 
 "So m I. Least I m Doncaster County, an I tend market 
 still" the speaker s voice softened he added: "when I m 
 home. My name s Shuman." 
 
 Andy wrung his hand. 
 
 "Chrissly Shuman? I ve heard about you. Gee, this is 
 good! When did you come over? The th Infantry? 
 Where you billeted ? Come in and tell me all about yourself, 
 and all about the old town !" 
 
 They tramped from one end of that French village to the 
 other and back again, going over topics familiar to them both, 
 jecalling scenes that were to both intimate, repeating, for the 
 mere joy of their sound, names that they both knew. "Do you 
 
VICTORIOUS 73 
 
 remember the Blunston house?" "You know good old Col 
 onel Eskessen they say he always samples everything in mar 
 ket before he buys any." "Wouldn t you like to be walking 
 down Elm Avenue now?" 
 
 "When did you get a letter ?" asked Andy. 
 
 "I ain t got my letters a ready," said Chrissly. "None of 
 us fellows gets letters much. There s somesing wrong about 
 the army mails." 
 
 "I ve got one," said Andy. He pulled out his last letter 
 from his mother; the mere sight of the postmark was com 
 forting to Chrissly, and to this Andy added by reading ex 
 tracts that mentioned streets or names that the former farm- 
 boy had seen or heard. "Why, I ve got a copy of the Spy 
 somewhere," said Andy. He fished it out of an overcoat 
 pocket. "Colonel Eskessen sends it to me regularly, and some 
 times I get it." 
 
 "We take the Doncaster New Era at our house," murmured 
 Chrissly. His hands shook as he received the paper. "Can 
 I read it?" 
 
 "You can keep it," said Andy. 
 
 "Oh, Brown you won t mind, still?" 
 
 "Sure not. I m done with it. I tell you what I ll do : I ll 
 send you my copies as fast as I read them." 
 
 Big Chrissly choked in his gratitude. After a bit he asked : 
 
 "You re one o these here co-respondents, ain t ?" 
 
 Andy nodded. 
 
 <r Well, all us fellows we says as you fellows you just look on 
 an don t have to work an won t have to fight none, but we all 
 wants to get our names in the papers back home just the 
 samey. I guess you do a pretty good work." 
 
 Chrissly himself was here, it seemed, by one of the chances 
 common enough in those days. The Amish are conscientious 
 objectors, and later most of those drafted were set to the more 
 peaceful labor of the army; but, although his parents were 
 members of the Amish faith, this boy had not formally joined 
 the communion when his number was drawn, and a too-scru 
 pulous local draft-board had abided strictly by the blue let 
 ter of the existing law. Chrissly had been sent abroad after 
 
74 VICTORIOUS 
 
 comparatively little home training and was thrown, by one of 
 the many chances of this great war, into a regular army regi 
 ment filled up by volunteers as the old regulars were gradually 
 removed. 
 
 "Oh, yes/ said Andy, "I remember now. You were Amish. 
 Minnie Taylor used to tell me about you." 
 
 There was an alteration in Chrissly at the mention of that 
 name. An unmistakable uneasiness colored his face. 
 
 "This here France makes changes in a fellow, Brown/ he 
 said. "It makes lots 6 sings seem kind o different to what 
 they used to was." 
 
 Andy turned the subject. "They used to say you were a 
 regular pro-German in Americus," he said. "They" stood for 
 Minnie Taylor, but Andy felt it best to employ a deceptive 
 pronoun. 
 
 "Well, I was kind of," Chrissly admitted, "till I got talk- 
 in against rules to some o these here German prisoners on 
 the quiet still. I sought the Germans was the same people as 
 us Pennsylvania-Dutch, Brown." 
 
 "I see," said Andy. 
 
 "Well, they ain t." 
 
 "No ?" Andy wanted to hear more of this. 
 
 "No," said Chrissly. "Why, when I told em my name, they 
 says I d ought fer to spell it S-c-h/ an fer to put anozzer 
 n on the back end of it still ! Some French talk I m learnin 
 a ready, but a Pennsylvania-Dutch man, he can t effer half 
 unerstan wliat these here German men says, not the common 
 est words, even. Look at horseshoe : that s hoofeisa, but 
 these here fellows they calls it hufeisen/ Us Dutch, we says 
 watch just like anybody does, but these German fellows says 
 somesing sounds like taschen-lmhr an then they goes an 
 calls a wagon the same as you when we say woga. Why, a 
 boot s a f slidiiv f r wis us an a stiefel wis ? em. When they 
 come callin a ball-game a bolashbcla, you know, Brown 
 when they come callin that a battspiel/ I gif up. No," he 
 wagged his head, "they ain t the same as us, an I begin to 
 believe all they says about em s true still." 
 
 Andy thought there might be something in his new friend s 
 
VICTORIOUS 75 
 
 logic. He branched into his own difficulties with French as 
 indicative that a complete difference in language is less of a 
 bar to mutual appreciation than a merely seeming similarity, 
 and he was illustrating this point by reference to the troubles 
 he had encountered during his first journey to the American 
 camp when he mentioned the village of Mirande-la-Faloise 
 to which his bad French led him on that occasion. 
 
 "Mirande-la-Faloise ?" Chrissly interrupted; he spoke the 
 name glibly. "Was you there still ?" 
 
 "Yes," said Andy. "You know it, do you?" 
 
 "Did you see a big house there, like a hotel yet, wis lilies 
 f er a sign ?" 
 
 Andy remembered the substantial building very well. 
 
 "Why," said Chrissly, "that s her pap s ! There she lived 
 all her life till these here Germans they drove everybody out 
 o house an home !" 
 
 "Whose father s? Who lived there?" 
 
 "The girl what s waitin on table at the hotel in this wil- 
 lage." Chrissly stopped short. His face became crimson. "Her 
 name s Leonie," he finally added. 
 
 Then Andy remembered the waitress that had attended him 
 when he dined here with Evans, the dark full-bosomed girl 
 that had carried herself like a panther and walked as only 
 peasants walk and queens. 
 
 IV 
 
 Chrissly Shuman, too, had found romance in the land of 
 Jeanne d Arc. Until his regiment was moved to that village 
 in which he subsequently met Andy, he had been as homesick 
 as any of his fellow soldiers ; like them, he made his first ques 
 tion of every newcomer, "When do you think the war will be 
 over ?" ; he frankly wanted to get back to the farm-tasks that 
 had once seemed dull and onerous, and he wanted to see Min 
 nie Taylor. Now he was homesick, but it was homesickness 
 with a difference, it was mollified nostalgia, and distinctly the 
 thought of Minnie was not among its symptoms. This had 
 begun with his first sight of Leonie. 
 
76 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Early in the dusk of a summer evening, the big fellow had 
 happened to be cradling his disease by a stroll that led him 
 past the inn. Under a lamp at its courtyard-door the hand 
 some Leonie, returning from some errand, was in talk with an 
 American soldier obviously the worse for his visit to the tap 
 room. The soldier had stopped her and was detaining her. 
 He said something that Chrissly could not hear. 
 
 Chrissly saw that Leonie s only reply was a ripple of the 
 shoulders, which was her pantherine equivalent of a shrug. 
 Chrissly drew nearer. 
 
 Again the soldier spoke. 
 
 "Vdrt-en!" said Leonie. 
 
 Chrissly paused uncertainly. 
 
 The man that was confronting Leonie bent forward. She 
 picked him up bodily and set him to one side. She started to 
 move on, but the man caught her arm and kissed her. 
 
 Her free hand flew to her face to rub away the traces of the 
 insult. She blazed at him. 
 
 "Cochon!" she stormed. She broke free and raised an open 
 hand for a blow. 
 
 Before the blow could descend, Chrissly, the non-resister, 
 had leaped forward. He forestalled the girl s blow by one of 
 his own that landed nicely upon the point of the offending sol 
 dier s chin and curled him up in unconsciousness half-way 
 across the muddy street. 
 
 "Sank you." 
 
 Le"onie had employed one of the few English phrases that 
 her service here had taught her. She stood there with her 
 eyes ablaze, her broad bosom heaving, her hands clenched 
 at her sides, a wild thing without fear. Then she turned on 
 Chrissly a gaze friendly and admiring. 
 
 "C etait un Ion coup, $a" she said. "C a ete superbe." 
 
 That was the beginning of Chrissly s acquaintance with 
 Leonie. It was the beginning of his French lessons, too, and 
 of his education in many other ways. It included visits to 
 the inn-kitchen, where Leonie brought him whole suppers, 
 and when, as he tried to eat potatoes with a knife, she in 
 sistently thrust a fork into his hands, replying to his "Us 
 
VICTORIOUS 77 
 
 Amish don t hold by forks for such" with a laughing Gallic 
 volley that told him, plainly enough, that forks were the 
 proper implement and must be employed. It included at 
 tempts at conversation in unobserved corners and silent walks 
 about the village well before taps ; but it did not include open 
 love-making, because Chrissly had a conscience about Minnie 
 Taylor, and because Leonie had a laughter that kept senti 
 ment on guard. Chrissly thought he had never seen anything 
 like her, and he was right. 
 
 Not all of this did he tell Andy, but he told, in his awk 
 ward way, enough, and much of the rest Andy was able to 
 surmise. 
 
 "So," said Chrissly, "I guess that helped like to get me 
 over bein pro-German, an when she tol me how she was 
 chased out o her home still, an what worse sings them Ger 
 man men did in willages they wrecked wisout drivin the folks 
 out yet, why, I changed my mind effery ways. I tell you what 
 I m sinkin about now when I m sinkin about fightin : I m 
 sinkin about how they done to her folks in Mirande-la-Fa- 
 loise, and how it d be if them fellows effer got to Ameriky 
 an our farm an the rose bushes along the walk up to the 
 front-porch." 
 
 Andy was proud of his story. He had tried to write some 
 thing on which Blunston, who was sending him complimen 
 tary letters, would have to do less work than on any manu 
 script that Andy had yet submitted to him. The boy felt what 
 he had seen on the tableland at the American camp, and he 
 tried to convey his impressions to his reader. 
 
 Garcia tossed the manuscript into a wire-basket. 
 
 "If it s possible," said Andy, "I d like that to be censored 
 to-day. You see, the other fellows are cabling." 
 
 "It isn t possible," said Garcia. "Here," he continued, 
 "turn this pass into the provost-marshal s yourself, will you ?" 
 
 His clerk had told him of how Andy had recovered the 
 pass. Garcia was angry at what seemed to him a trick. 
 
,78 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 The doorway to the provost-marshal s office formed a frame 
 for the picture of those persons within it who stood along 
 the rail for registrants, military and civil, and civilian ap 
 plicants for passes. In the center of the group, Andy saw 
 the erect, pointed ears of a police-dog, its bushy tail droop 
 ing, its head close beside the ankles of a girl. The girl was 
 at pause before one of the clerks; she was dressed in a suit 
 of dark blue, or black, and something about her young pose, 
 her unstudied poise, set Andy s heart to pounding. 
 
 He traversed the rest of the corridor in three rapid strides. 
 
 She was puzzled as to her procedure. She half turned, and 
 the light from a window fell on her pure profile and showed 
 her slightly puckered brows. 
 
 She was the girl of the Metro: she was Sylvia Eaeburn. 
 
 Andy, to his utter amazement, found himself abreast of 
 her. He was facing her. Good heavens, what was this he was 
 doing? Was he speaking to her? 
 
 He was : he stood there, hat in hand, talking. Never before 
 in his life had he spoken to a girl he did not know. Even 
 now he scarcely knew what he was saying. Hard as it was 
 for him to realize the girl, it was a score of times more diffi 
 cult for him to realize himself. 
 
 "Can I help you?" he heard his own voice saying. It was 
 his own voice, he was almost sure of that, and yet it was so 
 charged with excitement that he would not have sworn to it. 
 
 Two or three officers that had been covertly looking at the 
 girl shifted envious glances to Andy. 
 
 For the fraction of a second the girl hesitated. 
 
 Andy saw a precipice of rebuff and mortification yawn 
 ing beneath his feet. He sought desperately to save himself. 
 
 "You see, I know I know the ropes here," he stammered. 
 "I m a correspondent. My name s Brown: Andy Andrew 
 Brown." 
 
 Oh, Paris was a city of miracles! Andy really expected 
 to be repulsed; his eyes and ears were slow to credit what 
 followed, and yet it did happen. 
 
 She was putting out a frank hand to him; it was white, 
 but almost boyish : the fingers of Aphrodite and the thumb of 
 
VICTOBIOUS 79 
 
 Hermes. She was laughing pleasantly, a low modulated laugh. 
 She was saying : 
 
 "Yes, I knew you were somewhere here. I should be aw 
 fully grateful if you would help me fill out the blank form 
 that these people have given me." 
 
 Andy felt his cheeks turn scarlet as his fingers closed 
 about the cool firm hand. It was all white magic the hand, 
 the whole episode. 
 
 "H-how how did you know me?" he gasped. 
 
 "I didn t until you told me. Some time before I left home, 
 I met Mr. Blunston in New York. I ve known him for ages. 
 He said he d come there to see you off." 
 
 Well, it was wonderful anyhow ! Andy did not know what 
 to say next, but he was saved the effort of making talk by 
 her statement : 
 
 "It seemed rather as if you knew me." 
 
 "I did," he said. "I saw you we saw you Mr. Blunston 
 and I at the theater that was in New York, too the it 
 was right before I sailed. He didn t tell me he knew you, 
 but of course I remembered you." His laugh was always in 
 fectious ; she echoed it. She could laugh, he noted, while her 
 blue-gray eyes retained all the wistfulness that he had ex 
 pected to see in them. "How long have you been here?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "Four days." 
 
 "Then I saw you almost as soon as you got here !" 
 
 That also was wonderful to him. He made it wonderful 
 to her: 
 
 "Where and when?" 
 
 "Day before yesterday. In the Metro the subway, you 
 know. I was going down to camp. I knew you right away !" 
 
 He became conscious, though because of no apparent aid 
 from her, that he was holding her hand. He dropped it re 
 luctantly, but hurriedly. 
 
 "Come over to this desk," he said, "and we ll fill out that 
 form." 
 
 She called the dog to follow. 
 
 "Isn t he a beauty? He was the mascot of a company of 
 
80 VICTORIOUS 
 
 marines that crossed on our boat ; he s a pure-blooded French 
 police-dog they were German police-dogs before the war 
 but these men got him in Hayti. We had some theatricals 
 for them, and they insisted on presenting him to me." 
 
 They stood by the desk, not attending to the form that the 
 clerk had given her and wholly oblivious of the interested 
 faces around them. Her boyish hand stroked the dog s fur, 
 and the dog gratefully wagged his tail without raising it. 
 
 "When I asked them his breed," she said, "they told me 
 he hadn t any; they called him just dog. But I find he 
 really has first-rate points, and he has been dresse : if you 
 gave him your handkerchief to smell and then hid it in the 
 pocket of any man in this room without his seeing you 
 and then if you told him to look for it, he would find it in 
 two or three minutes." 
 
 The dog was beautiful : anything that was hers would have 
 to be. Andy inquired his name. 
 
 "There seems to be some doubt about that," Miss Raeburn 
 told him. "When I asked the marines, they said something 
 that sounded like Onawaminthy. I wanted to know how 
 they spelled it, but they said they didn t. It was their way 
 of pronouncing the name of the place where they found him. 
 I decided to call him Toussaint, but Toussaint has contracted 
 into plain <Tac. " 
 
 Miss Raeburn remembered the form first. She would not 
 let him see all the answers that she set down some of the 
 questions must have been intimate but Andy was permitted 
 to help with others. They showed that she was one of many 
 players who had volunteered to come abroad and make a the 
 atrical tour of the Y. M. C. A. huts throughout France ; they 
 showed, too, that she was living in a hotel near 1 Etoile. 
 
 VI 
 
 He walked there with her. They went up the Avenue de 
 1 Opera to the Louvre, under the sandsack-protected arch 
 commemorative of Napoleon s Teutonic victories and so 
 through the Tuileries Gardens and across the Place de la Con- 
 
VICTOKIOUS 81 
 
 corde. A crimson sun was setting somewhere behind the Troc- 
 ade"ro; through a light mist, risen from the Seine, the gilt 
 dome of the Invalides shone yellow; against the rosy sky the 
 Ferris Wheel stood out in silhouette, and the web-like fila 
 ments of the Tour Eiffel wavered upward to the pale zenith. 
 
 Andy found it amazingly easy to talk to her. She had a 
 modesty not always to be found among members of her pro 
 fession; she spoke little of the stage and less of herself, but 
 there glowed from her those soft fires of youth which melted 
 reserve: he told her all about his work; he gave to this new 
 acquaintance shy glimpses of an idealism that he had never 
 knowingly vouchsafed to any friend, save Blunston. 
 
 "I m afraid about my French," she said. "I ve never been 
 over before, and I learned all the French I know in New 
 Orleans and at school." 
 
 "This is my first trip, too/ laughed Andy, "but I don t 
 have any trouble with my French; it s the Frenchmen s 
 French that bothers me." 
 
 She smiled. He thought her smile entrancingly strange, 
 because, sweet as it was, it left untouched the depths of her 
 eyes. 
 
 They had climbed the leafy Champs Elysees, crossed 
 1 Etoile and left the glory of the white Arc upon their right. 
 Miss Eaeburn stopped before the entrance to her hotel; the 
 last beams of the sunset lingered in her hair. 
 
 "Good night," she said. 
 
 She put out her white hand again, and he took it and bent 
 over it. 
 
 "Good night," said Andy. 
 
 It was the hand to salute which he had dreamed of death 
 as a price not too dear. He hesitated, then bent lower above 
 it. It had the fragrance of blossoms. 
 
 Ever so slightly, her fingers tightened upon his. It was 
 her sign of dismissal. He released the hand unkissed, bowed 
 again and turned away toward the Arc de Triomphe. 
 
 Soon he saw that he seemed to be treading the pavements 
 of the rue du Faubourg St. Honore. But he knew that, really, 
 he was walking on the clouds. 
 
82 VICTORIOUS 
 
 yn 
 
 They saw many places together, but liked best the incense- 
 laden hush of the old churches, where Andy always lingered 
 before a newly sculptured Jeanne d Arc : the echoing quiet of 
 St. Germain-l Auxerrois, the lofty vaulting of St. Etienne- 
 du-Mont and the ancient nave of St. Germain-des-Pres. 
 There were intimate little luncheons at queer little restau 
 rants, where they regarded themselves as the only aliens 
 entitled to places, and where the lad glowered at any uni 
 formed American or Briton that, entering, cast a casual 
 glance toward Sylvia. In brief, while winter unobservably 
 drew nearer, and the player waited for the arrangements for 
 her work, and while the correspondent wrote articles and 
 letters home every night before turning to bed in his Palais 
 Eoyal garret, both were happy, and neither, most likely, 
 knew why. 
 
 Andy s attitude was one of reverence only: lie was alto 
 gether unaware that he was perilously progressing toward 
 love-making, and Sylvia, it is to be supposed, set down his 
 shining gaze and often trembling voice to the enthusiasm of 
 a young man sharing the delights of his first Paris with an 
 equally inexperienced traveler from his own country. He 
 would have told you if he did not, indeed, knock you down 
 for asking an impertinent question that he was as far be 
 neath the radiant being at his side as any male human being 
 could be, and that he would no more think of saying he loved 
 her than contemplate throwing dice on the high-altar of Notre 
 Dame; his companion would have declared that there was 
 still room for friendship in a very puzzling world. 
 
 Anybody familiar with the Americans in France would 
 have seen nothing remarkable in Andy s state of mind any 
 American, that is, who was of sufficiently philosophic temper 
 to be an observer of his compatriots and not a participant in 
 their mood. 
 
 "What had happened to Andy was only what had hap 
 pened, in fact, to most of the men that the war for 
 ideals had brought overseas; it was a schesis of exalta- 
 
yiCTOEIOUS 83 
 
 tion common to nearly all the arrived volunteers and to 
 many of the conscripts that were to follow, and like other 
 forms of exaltation, it was ready to be turned in any of a 
 dozen ways. Sending him across the ocean and keeping there 
 the light in his eyes and the fire in his heart, it was a spir 
 itual possession, and there was scarcely an American abroad 
 that could not have passed through Andy s especial experi 
 ence, as hundreds did pass through it, had the opportunity 
 ever so hesitantly offered. Left in America and Americus, 
 such men would have pursued their even ways with their 
 Minnie Taylors, but the meaning of the world-struggle had 
 come to them, and the days of the Minnie Taylors were pass 
 ing. No Minnie could have symbolized what Sylvia symbol 
 ized to Andy ; seeing her first as he was about to sail, dream 
 ing of her here and here recovering her actual presence, he 
 found her become to him what his flag, glimpsed always for 
 ward, is to the fighting soldier; she was what once was the 
 Cross in the crusaders skies. Our men in France were again 
 as little children; they believed in all those things in which 
 all men far from the familiar features of home believe in 
 angels and in fairies, in the simple and the primitive 
 they were ready to believe in anything: yet that was their 
 secret; not confessed to one another, hidden beneath rough 
 words and homeric laughter, concealed behind grumbling en 
 durance and heroic bravery, it was the reaction of their souls 
 against the too horrible materialism of Bellona. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Late one afternoon, Andy, looking for a new restaurant to 
 which to take Sylvia next day, happened into a quiet eating- 
 place that place was the Restaurant Laperouse, no less on 
 the Quai des Grands-Augustins. Passing the humble hall, he 
 was about to climb the stairs when he saw an open doorway 
 to a small private dining-room : there was a table heaped with 
 the impedimenta of an hour s liqueurs and coffee, and before 
 it a somewhat unsteady American officer embracing a slip 
 of a girl. 
 
84: VICTORIOUS 
 
 The laughing girl peeped around the officer: she was 
 swarthy, but brilliantly rouged. Her hat was awry, her black 
 hair tumbled and her black eyes and thin cheeks aflame; her 
 lips were vermilion. She gave the officer a smacking kiss, 
 and then darted by his protesting figure, flicked past Andy 
 and disappeared into the street. For all her merriment, she 
 bore with her, revealed, an old sorrow. 
 
 The officer, guffawing, started to follow her. Face to face 
 with Andy, he came to an abrupt stop. He was Lieutenant 
 Garcia. 
 
 "Wha sort o hell you tryV raise here?" he thickly de 
 manded. 
 
 There was a touch of unhealthy pink in his face. 
 
 "I m not raising any hell," Andy said. "Are you?" 
 
 Garcia saw the awkwardness of his position; he attempted 
 mollification. 
 
 "Jus a good time/ he said. He smiled ingratiatingly. 
 "Fel s wife clear cross ocean has t enjoy self once in a while, 
 don t he?" He fumbled his arm around Andy s shoulder. 
 "An I m the candy-kid can pick the peaches, Brownie. I ll 
 put you next, you want to." 
 
 Andy drew himself free. 
 
 "I m busy," he said. 
 
 "But look here." Garcia stumbled toward him. "Look at 
 these, Brownie." His admiration for his powers of conquest 
 overcame, in the rapidly shifting moods of the drunkard, his 
 fear of exposure. He drew a crumpled packet from his blouse. 
 "Tha girl s crazy bout me got her crazy bout me. Lemme 
 read you letters she sent me when I was Neufchateau." 
 
 "No, thanks," said Andy. 
 
 He wanted only to get away. He turned to the door. 
 
 His withdrawal reawakened Garcia s fears. 
 
 "Keep t dark, Brownie," he said. 
 
 "All right," said Andy. 
 
 "Won do make talk. Of cer an gen man, y know. You re 
 good fel , Brownie. Mum s word." 
 
 "I ll keep it dark," said Andy, and got away. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 TELLS OF A LITTLE TOWN THAT GOES TO WAR; OF A WOMAN 
 WITH A RED CROSS ; OF A GIRL WITH CHINA-BLUE EYES, AND 
 OF A MOTHER THAT DID NOT HAVE A SERVICE-STAR 
 
 BLUNSTON, installed in the old house on Second Street, 
 found at least a certain comfort there. He loved every room : 
 the wide hall, running the width of the building, from which 
 rose the seventeenth century stairway; the prim parlor with 
 its saddle-back chairs; even the austere bedrooms overhead, 
 and the attic, the floor-boards of which had been left unnailed 
 by the builders those two hundred and sixty-odd years ago. 
 He liked to work on the back-porch that had been meant for 
 a front one, where, after he had been wakened by the break 
 fast-chatter of the sparrows in the ivy around his window, he 
 was sure to hear a red-headed woodpecker tapping at the 
 smokehouse apple-tree and, if he was early enough, to catch 
 sight of the green back and white belly of a tree-swallow. 
 
 He did not want to see many people. His cousins he chatted 
 with daily, and he listened to their father s reminiscences of 
 the early sixties that, stirred by the present war, were directed 
 at the old soldier s wife. Sarah he called on, because one of 
 the reasons for remaining in Americus was the vague one of 
 "looking after" her; but he knew the Tollens pride too thor 
 oughly to offer any practical assistance, and whether she was 
 not beyond the desire for social help he could not yet de 
 termine. 
 
 He was seated on the front-porch that used to be a back- 
 porch when Minnie Taylor turned off the street and up the 
 graveled path and stood there ogling him with her china-blue 
 eyes. 
 
 "Are you Mr. Blunston?" she asked, and then lowered her 
 eyes. She knew very well, of course, that he was, but she had 
 
 85 
 
86 VICTORIOUS 
 
 been taught that it is not polite to begin a conversation by 
 touching upon that conversation s purpose. 
 
 Blunston bowed. "And you are Miss Taylor," he said. He 
 wondered what in the world she was doing here. "Let me 
 get you a chair." 
 
 "Isn t it warm?" said Minnie. She fanned her pink face 
 with a damp handkerchief. 
 
 He admitted that it was. 
 
 "I don t know when I ve perspired as much as this sum 
 mer," his pretty caller continued. 
 
 Blunston wanted to say something. The only thing he 
 could think of saying was: "Indeed?" 
 
 "No. It s perfectly dreadful. But I guess it s good for the 
 soldiers." 
 
 "Yes," said Blunston. "Oh, yes." He was afraid that he 
 might seem rude to her. "The very thing," he said. 
 
 Minnie gave him her full face. She smiled; he saw that 
 her dimples were delightful. 
 
 "And that ought to hurry things," she said. "At least, I 
 hope it will. I so want us to win soon. I just loathe those 
 Germans, don t you, Mr. Blunston ?" 
 
 "Quite." Blunston found his hand passing over his weather- 
 beaten face. It was late afternoon^ he wondered if the iron- 
 gray stubble showed. But he wondered more what she was 
 here for. 
 
 "Still," said Minnie, "I don t think it s going to be long, do 
 you?" 
 
 "Long? . . . Oh, the war?" 
 
 "Yes, but I think it s going to be dreadfully hard for us. 
 They say food will be dear because we ve got to send it all 
 over there. And there s hardly any farmers at market any 
 more hardly any young ones, anyhow. And now even 
 Chrissly Shuman s gone. Did you know Chrissly Shuman, 
 Mr. Blunston?" 
 
 "I m afraid I never . . / 
 
 WHAT was she here for? 
 
 "Was it about Mr. Shuman that you wanted to see ... ?" 
 
 Minnie s frank laughter discovered good teeth. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 87 
 
 "Oh, no, Mr. Blunston. Chrissly s a regular hay-seed. His 
 family s Amish ! I " She drew the toe of one trim shoe in 
 ward and made marks with it on the floor of the porch. She 
 watched the toe intently. "I saw in the Spy where it said 
 Andy Brown had arrived safe over there." Minnie was 
 blushing ! 
 
 What Blunston did not know about her in particular was 
 that, finding Andy become a local hero, she wanted to recap 
 ture the boy. What he correctly surmised was that her present 
 emotion, whatever else it might be, was sincere. He wished 
 to heaven that it possessed any quality but that. Andy ! He 
 had feared something of this sort. Sentimentality ; calf-love : 
 of course the relationship had been quite pure; had it been 
 less so, it had, perhaps, been less dangerous. But this 
 
 His consternation held him silent. 
 
 "I d been well, been meaning to write him, only I wanted 
 to make sure whether he d want me to, and besides, I didn t 
 know his address." 
 
 To look at her was one thing, to hear from her was another. 
 Blunston had a terrible vision of what her letters would be: 
 their chronicle of the weather, of the minor happenings of the 
 minor town that Andy would of course be glad to get, of the 
 record of the secretions of Minnie s heart could it be that 
 Andy would want to hear about them? There had long been 
 growing a good deal of the father in Blunston: it assaulted 
 her now: 
 
 "If he didn t himself tell you Ms address . . ." 
 
 "You see" again the diagrams with the boot-toe "I and 
 Andy were friends. We were real good friends." She looked 
 up quickly but more quickly down. "We d been going to 
 gether for most a year." The blush deepened. She visibly 
 struggled, but she brought forth at last the reason of her mis 
 sion. "You went to New York and all with him. Mr. Blun 
 ston, I was wondering if he told you he was mad at me." 
 
 Blunston felt only the need of gaining time. 
 "Because I wasn t there when he came to say good-by," 
 she went on. "It wasn t my fault, really. How was I to know 
 he was going right away ? But Andy was always so sensitive." 
 
88 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 Blunston looked down into the round, china-blue eyes. 
 
 "I think you might tell me," said Minnie. "I feel kind of 
 responsible for Andy s being over there, anyhow." 
 
 "You feel a responsibility?" echoed the amazed Blunston. 
 
 "Yes. I d been kind of uppish with him, and I thought, if 
 I hadn t been, along toward the last, maybe he wouldn t have 
 gone." 
 
 Looking at it from one point of view, Blunston could be 
 sorry that he had to say to her what he must. Still, here was 
 no time for weakness : he had to think of the boy. 
 
 "From the moment we left here until I saw the last of him 
 at the dock, Andy never once mentioned your name, Miss 
 Taylor." 
 
 "Is that right ?" asked Minnie. She had risen. 
 
 Blunston, rising, bowed assent. 
 
 "Poor Andy," Minnie said: "he took it too hard to talk 
 about it. Well," she added, "I guess I must be going." 
 
 Tm sorry . . ." 
 
 "And you were pretty thick with him?" 
 
 "Pretty thick." 
 
 "Well," said Minnie, "good afternoon." 
 
 He watched her undulating back. She went jauntily. She 
 was a good loser. 
 
 Misunderstanding the true inwardness of the situation, 
 Blunston was troubled. Yet he couldn t write to Andy^ about 
 it, and he wouldn t talk about it to Sarah. 
 
 n 
 
 Americus wilted under the late heat; like other towns, it 
 strained its ears to catch each rumor from Washington, 
 its eyes to pierce those heavy mists of man s own making 
 which the War Department hung between the people and 
 the American zone in Prance. The iron-mills, after long 
 suspension in the days of peace, were working again at full- 
 time; one by one, the local industries were receiving govern 
 ment orders for finished products, and if taxes and the cost 
 of living continued to rise, at least there was more money to 
 
VICTORIOUS 89 
 
 pay the piper, and expenses were always a week behind raises 
 in wages. 
 
 Gossip dealt largely with the boys in training. Americus 
 had seen its drafted men march to the station behind the Sil 
 ver Cornet Band : awkward, but earnest lads, setting out first 
 to the Georgia that seemed almost as far away as France. For 
 that first queer draft-day had come and gone, when suddenly 
 serious men stood in restless groups like men on trial that at 
 tend the return of the jury, and waited, before the Spy office, 
 for the pasting in the window of the sheets of paper on which 
 cabalistic numbers were scrawled. 
 
 "I m ready enough," had said little Harry Kurtz, as he saw; 
 his number go up; "only I m kind o worried about my ter 
 rier, Fan: she s goin t have puppies inside of a month, an 
 nobody likes Fan at home, cept me." 
 
 Some of the boys wouldn t "set for their photographs" be 
 cause of a superstition that most men who were killed had left 
 at home pictures of themselves in uniform. Already in many 
 a window was the placard announcing that "A Man From 
 This Home is in the Service of His Country"; and service- 
 flags began to appear like stars in a cloud-clearing sky. 
 
 The Greek bootblack inadvertently inserted in his phono 
 graph an old disk that turned out to contain I Didn t Raise 
 My Boy to Be a Soldier, and the town boycotted him. A! 
 German-born minister was heard speaking, on Hickory Street, 
 the language of his native land, and the high-school pupils 
 waited on him and compelled him to display the Stars and 
 Stripes above his doorway. Doctor Dawson, the Episcopal rec 
 tor, was torn by doubt as to whether, since St. Michael fought 
 the Dragon in Heaven, God s clergy should not now take up 
 material swords against the "old serpent" upon earth, caused 
 a large board to be placed on the wall of St. Paul s just above 
 the font, and had inscribed thereon the names of his flock that 
 were in the army or navy; and pretty Mrs. Bolingbroke or 
 ganized and vigorously led a series of what she called "Com 
 munity Sings." 
 
 Indeed, Mrs. Bolingbroke took the reins of most of the lo 
 cal war-activities. Things called "drives" were made for the 
 
90 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 Y. M. C. A. and afterward for War-Savings Stamps, which 
 that young lady energetically drove. A chicken corn-soup sup 
 per for the benefit of the Serbian sufferers Mrs. Ealph G. Bol- 
 ingbroke directed. She rather tactlessly gave, on prayer-meet 
 ing night, a "Subscription Street-Dance and Carnival" for 
 the Soldiers Library Fund; and the parade of players to 
 a baseball game, arranged to raise money for French orphans, 
 was headed by Mrs. Kalph G. Bolingbroke; but her sacrifice 
 of conservative sentiment was obviously only with the purpose 
 of keeping the town to its straight path of duty. 
 
 "We ve got to have a headquarters," she informed her hus 
 band, on the evening when the idea of a Red Cross chapter 
 occurred to her, and the dimples in her pretty merry face did 
 not blunt the sharpness of her glance. "Why don t you lend 
 us that old brick place opposite the Opera House ?" 
 
 They were sitting on the porch overlooking their lawn, with 
 its mass of foreign trees and its Victorian statuary separating 
 them well from the passers-by. 
 
 To put it across the other, Ealph picked up one long lank 
 leg in both hands: "The Tidd house?" 
 
 " Tisn t the Tidds . You know well enough it s yours." 
 
 "People by that name used to live there. Father always 
 called it the Tidd house." 
 
 "Well, will you lend us that ? It didn t cost you anything," 
 Mrs. Ralph snapped. 
 
 "Father got it from the Tidds for a bad debt, and they d 
 got it by the right of adverse possession." 
 
 "I don t care how anybody got it: will you lend it for our 
 iRed Cross?" 
 
 This was the house which Blunston had noted as displaying 
 one of the marked changes in Americus. It stood in what 
 was now the business-center of the town, among a group of 
 prosperous shops; but Ralph, who could find no tenant that 
 wanted to make his home there, had not thought it wise to 
 remodel and let it as a store : he wanted to sell it and, never 
 receiving what he considered an adequate price though some 
 of the offers were high he permitted it to fall into disrepair. 
 His wife, who hated all old things, disliked the Tidd house ; 
 
VICTORIOUS 91 
 
 but it had fair-sized rooms with large open fireplaces and 
 would well serve her present purpose. 
 
 She got most of the things she wanted in life, and by the 
 means that she got others she got this. Ealph lent the Tidd 
 house, and Mrs. Bolingbroke superintended its overhauling. 
 Within a fortnight, the local chapter of the Bed Cross was 
 busily installed. The band stood outside on the opening night 
 and, after Ralph s speech of presentation, played, very well, 
 too, Juaniia, in subtle honor of the fact that Mrs. Ealph was 
 by way of being a bride. 
 
 The chapter, in spite of inevitable drawbacks, prospered. 
 The townswomen responded to Mrs. Bolingbroke s call, as 
 Americus always did respond to calls for service: there was 
 really a good work to be accomplished, and there was a lovely 
 uniform to be donned. Mrs. Ealph s motor-mind, her hearty 
 domination and boundless energy at starting movements, 
 achieved much : these and the uniforms. The necessary humor 
 was supplied by an impulsiveness as quick to anger as to kind 
 ness and rising from the same source. A member that touched 
 a chair resented being publicly told to wash her hands before 
 proceeding to roll bandages, and a resignation and a broken 
 friendship resulted. Minnie Taylor wore her uniform out-of- 
 doors, probably because she rightly thought it becoming, and 
 Mrs. Bolingbroke reprimanded her in a manner that made 
 her cry. 
 
 Miss Hattie Lloyd severely knitted socks in her own home 
 and sent them to the Tidd house by the little girl that lived 
 next door. She had regarded Mrs. Ealph s married activities 
 as trespass ab mitio. The first Mrs. Ealph though dead, poor 
 woman was the only one Miss Hattie would recognize. Be 
 sides, hadn t she known the second Mrs. Ealph s father only 
 too well as a dentist, who had extracted a perfectly good 
 tooth for a decayed one? 
 
 m 
 
 Prom France, Andy s letters, crowding upon one another s 
 heels, showed him in a rapturous delight and in a curiosity; 
 
92 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 no less rapt. There were so many "firsts" to record : his first 
 sight of the ocean ; his first sight of Paris, his first apprehen 
 sions of France. "Just the ocean/ he wrote : "I went on deck, 
 and where there d been the land there was the ocean, and 
 nothing else, all the way to the sky. It s old to you, but it s 
 all new to me. A lieutenant that s censoring letters told me 
 one of the men, a fellow from Kansas, wrote to his mother 
 that the ocean is just like Bellows Creek, only bigger/ and 
 I guess he s about right." 
 
 He wanted, later, to know why the French did so many 
 things differently from us, but in some points he found rural 
 France not at issue with Americus. "An army-doctor down 
 at the camp," he said, "had fits because the villages have open 
 drainage said it was so bad and so French and when I told 
 him it was American, too, because we had it in my home 
 town, he had worse fits: he was one of those New York fel 
 lows that haven t ever been where there weren t porcelain tubs 
 to every room." Andy, it developed, had always thought of 
 the Grands Boulevards as one street and went searching for it 
 from the Boulevard des Capucines to the Place de la Ee- 
 publique. 
 
 Blunston said to himself that here, at all events, was no 
 lovesickness for Minnie ; but there was also no mention of the 
 war. Was Andy entirely carried away by these "firsts" en 
 joying them at the expense of his work ? 
 
 Then came the first article, and it set Blunston s mind at 
 rest. It was so unassuming that it was well done. Blunston 
 thought that it might almost go without rewriting. He 
 changed it, however, to conform with his own style. 
 
 Although she had snown it to nobody, and least of all to 
 Blunston although she would have gone to the rack rather 
 than show it Sarah, whatever her grief at parting from her 
 boy, had been even prouder of Andy s going to France than 
 of any other event in a career that had always been a source 
 of gratification to her. She secretly liked, too, the reflected 
 
YICTOEIOUS 93 
 
 glory of Andy s local distinction in being the first lad from 
 Americus to go to the war. It reached her, to be sure that 
 reflection only through her immediate neighbors for the 
 ultramondinists of the town had always stopped their liking 
 for Andy at Andy; but it had produced a cheering glow in 
 slumbering embers, and the glow had risen to a pale flame 
 when her boy s postcards and letters began to arrive, marked 
 "Passed by Censor" for anybody to see, and dated by her 
 own son, too ! "Somewhere in France." She saw the service- 
 flags go up in the windows about her little house and wished 
 that she could hang out a service-flag, too ; but about this time 
 she began to fear that a flag would make for comment from 
 mothers whose sons were in the ranks, and then, treading on 
 the heels of this doubt, came Mrs. Bolingbroke s organization 
 of a Eed Cross chapter and the fact that Sarah was not asked 
 to join it. 
 
 There was no reason why she should be asked : for that good 
 work people are supposed to volunteer. Nevertheless, Sarah, 
 in the course of a rare daylight excursion to the shops on Elm 
 Avenue, saw Mrs. Bolingbroke s limousine stop and heard Mrs. 
 Bolingbroke call out an invitation that was phrased like a 
 demand to three shopping housewives whom she audibly knew 
 by name, but with whom she patently could not be socially 
 intimate. People that have been long avoided come to the 
 conclusion that they should be sought: Sarah went home re 
 solved never to join the Eed Cross and never again to dream 
 of a service-flag. 
 
 It is only in cities that the descent to Avernus is easy; in 
 a small town it is a painful thing to pursue that process which 
 Miss Hattie had spoken of as "coming down in the world." 
 Scarcely had she made it before Sarah Tollens knew her mar 
 riage to Phil Brown was a mistake. She would gladly have 
 borne its vicarious effects had its direct cause been worth, but 
 Phil was an outrageous waster and lost little time in proving 
 it. She was relieved when she heard of his death, and yet his 
 death did not relieve her of what his life had done. 
 
 Her punishment for the alliance had been immediate and 
 cruel. The consummation of her romance led disillusionment 
 
94: VICTORIOUS 
 
 by the hand, and social obliteration hung upon the skirts of 
 disillusion. There were no post-nuptial calls on the Browns 
 and no invitations. The people she used to know still bowed, 
 to her when they passed her on the street, or after service as 
 she left St. Paul s Church, but it was only on the street, or 
 in connection with some church activity that she met them. 
 It was not long before, mistaking embarrassed greetings for 
 intended patronage, she gave up the church. 
 
 Years ago oh, just at the first! she was wheeling little 
 Andy in his baby-carriage along Hickory Street when one of 
 her former friends met her. 
 
 "Why, it s really quite a nice baby I" 
 
 Into that revelation of her expectations Andy s unlooked-for 
 favors betrayed the well-meaning woman. It told Sarah much. 
 
 Instead of conquering the disease by moving to another 
 town, Sarah s pride kept her in Americus. It was, like most, 
 illogical; it could keep her face to her enemies without; it 
 would not save her from deterioration within. She became a 
 seamstress that would not accept work from those best able to 
 pay well for it ; she lost her chance of social regeneration ; she 
 saved her air of reserve and the appearance of not feeling the 
 pangs of her trouble : her pride, in other words, saved her pre 
 cisely itself a doubtful treasure, as one grows older. 
 
 Toward Blunston, while continuing to care for him, she had 
 nevertheless nourished a certain resentment. He stood at 
 home in her mind for all the pleasant things that had been 
 denied her; Blunston away from home she would hear of 
 through a casual street-word from Miss Hattie Lloyd, who 
 told others she "never saw her," yet ever had for Sarah some 
 word of Blunston s material success. She was glad that he 
 was now in Americus, but she did not love him ; she liked the 
 friend, yet mistrusted the situation that made his friendship 
 possible. 
 
 Andy s blindness to her faults kept him only vaguely con 
 scious of the social decline; seldom seeing the inside of bet 
 ter houses, he did not realize the condition of hers ; she never 
 complained, and her continual reserve gave him the impres 
 sion of a vast strength behind it; he loved her for the best 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 95 
 
 of all love-reasons : because she loved him. On the other hand, 
 her love for him was the passion of her life; he was all that 
 she had left, and she gave herself unstintingly. 
 
 Yet her own reflected glory always came to her as a sur 
 prise. On a summer afternoon, the Reverend Doctor Dawson, 
 of St. Paul s, called at her house. 
 
 "You seem to have given us up, Mrs. Brown," he said, "but 
 your name was on the books of the church when I came here, 
 and of course I ve never removed it. They tell me, too, that 
 Andy used to sing in the choir. Now, we have a service-flag 
 in the church with a star on it for every one of our boys in 
 his country s service, and we have a board on the wall with 
 their names on it. Andy s doing one kind of work for Amer 
 ica, and a dangerous work it will be, too. I m going to put 
 up Andy s star and Andy s name." 
 
 Sarah s sallow cheeks became pink. 
 
 "I wouldn t," she said. 
 
 "I m going to," said Doctor Dawson. 
 
 He did not bring Sarah back to services, but one week-day, 
 seeing the church-door open, she stole inside and stood, a 
 weary, black figure, long looking at that list of names : 
 
 IN THEIR COUNTRY S SERVICE: 
 ANDREW MCKINLEY BROWN 
 
 She wondered which star in the flag that hung overhead 
 was Andy s. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TAKES ANDY BROWN" TO THE TRENCHES; PURSUES LOVE, AND 
 PLEDGES FAITH TO A HIGH BUT DIFFICULT CAUSE 
 
 ANDY was rising disconsolately from a dinner at the cor 
 respondents inn when he heard a mighty howdydo in the 
 office. He strolled thither. 
 
 Madame la proprietaire, who had received generals with 
 tranquillity, was reduced to a lump of agitated jelly. Jean, 
 the most ancient of the inn s superannuated supernumeraries, 
 was swaying under the weight of two great handbags slung 
 by a strap across his emaciated shoulders; Raoul, a lad of 
 seventy years, staggered behind him with a big suit-case and 
 a plaid steamer-rug that seemed familiar to Andy; back of 
 Raoul came Georges, aged fourteen, who supported a small 
 toilet-box, and in the shadow of Georges stood an empty- 
 handed American, plainly a servant, who carried himself 
 with a dignity and besides himself carried nothing at all. 
 
 "Important?" asked all the maids. 
 
 "Of an importance the highest," shrilled Madame la pro- 
 prietaire. "He himself has declared it and in a telegram, 
 my faith !" 
 
 "An American?" asked the maids, fluttering. 
 
 "From Washington," said Georges. 
 
 "From the president," said Madame, conclusively. "I be 
 lieve well from M. le President Vilson." 
 
 Out of the rear of the excited group there paced forward 
 a pudgy little man enveloped from ears to heels in a fur- 
 edged, and patently fur-lined overcoat. A fur hat was pulled 
 down over his brows, and Andy knew him at once for his 
 former train-fellow, Mr. B. Frank McGregor, of Chicago. 
 
 96 
 
VICTOKIOUS 97 
 
 Andy came to his rescue in the role of a welcome inter 
 preter. He saw to it that Mr. McGregor s importance lost 
 nothing through interpretation. 
 
 "You ll have dinner with me, young man/ said McGregor, 
 after he had shaken Andy s right hand in both of his own. 
 
 "I ve just had mine," said Andy. 
 
 "Then you ll have another," said McGregor. 
 
 He was a long time in his bedroom before Andy was sum 
 moned to the chamber next door, which McGregor, a French 
 colonel having been dispossessed, had ordered converted into 
 a private dining-room. He came in immaculate (he was all 
 but in evening-clothes, thought Andy) and, when he had ex 
 pressed his frank opinion of French village-inns, he grew 
 amiable to the point of allowing Andy to forego eating. 
 
 "Now, then," he said, as he uncorked a bottle of vin, de 
 marque and made a face at it (he would not suffer a French 
 waiter to uncork his wine), "you look as if you d lost your 
 best friend. You know the story about the little boy: his 
 mother asked him if he d been fighting, and he told her No, 
 mama; I ve been fought/ What s wrong?" 
 
 Andy was so full of his trouble that it easily overflowed. 
 The Americans were in the trenches; that is, a few of them 
 were there for practice-work, and the press-division had that 
 afternoon told him it was not going to issue any correspond 
 ents passes. 
 
 "Can t get a pass to the trenches ?" repeated McGregor. 
 "Then come along with me." 
 
 He was going there. He was down here mapping one of the 
 mysterious back-waters of his deep stream of contract-placing 
 and had decided that he would like a picnic-excursion to the 
 front line. 
 
 "You ll go along as my private secretary," he said. "You 
 are my private secretary: I appoint you now for the day." 
 
 "They ll never let me go," said Andy. 
 
 "Leave it to me." McGregor called for his servant and 
 gave him a card. "Take that over to the press-division s head 
 quarters," he ordered. "Now, Mr. Brown, you needn t be 
 present at the interview, but you needn t worry, either. 
 
98 VICTORIOUS 
 
 There ll be a car ready for us at eight no, eight s too chilly : 
 at nine-thirty in the morning/ 
 
 McGregor was depressed hy the ruin of the villages close 
 to the front. On the roads there were no peasants and only 
 a few soldiers; the fields were lifeless, now dun-colored, and 
 again retaining some of the recently fallen snow; the sky 
 was gray, black clouds of smoke rising here and there from 
 the horizon-line ; and the rattle of their breathlessly charging 
 car drowned other noises. The visitors swung at last into a 
 muddy street running among a clump of battered houses 
 that gathered under the skirts of an old church. 
 
 "This is the headquarters town/ 7 their military-chauffeur 
 informed them: all military-chauffeurs are talkative persons. 
 "It wasn t shelled while the French held this sector, but our 
 fellows have stirred the Boche up some. We d better put 
 on our tin hats, I guess." 
 
 "This helmet makes my head ache," said McGregor, almost 
 before he had it on. 
 
 "You gotta wear it anyhow," the chauffeur told him. 
 
 They had pulled up at the edge of the village beside the 
 garden-wall of a chateau. On the gate was a sign announcing 
 that this chateau was a general s headquarters. . . . 
 
 An explosion nearly tossed them from their seats. 
 
 At a short distance down the street the front of a house 
 bellied over the roadway and then fell in a slow cloud of 
 dust. Just at the edge of the dust-cloud a soldier lay very 
 still. 
 
 "Good God!" exclaimed McGregor. 
 
 Andy said nothing. It was his first shell and his first sight 
 of injury in war. He drew his lips into a tight line. Then 
 he leaped from the car. 
 
 "Hi! Don t go out there!" cried McGregor. 
 
 Andy hurried to the ruin. The soldier lay in a welter of 
 blood, his face blotted out by it. Andy seated himself in 
 the road placed the soldier s head in his lap began to mop 
 
VICTORIOUS 99 
 
 the blood with his handkerchief began also to call for hos 
 pital-orderlies. 
 
 There was no alarm sounded. Not until several minutes 
 had passed did the military approach the wounded man. 
 Then an officer came out of the chateau. 
 
 "Where s the litter-squad?" he demanded. 
 
 An enlisted man had followed him. 
 
 "What s a litter?" asked the enlisted man. 
 
 "A stretcher!" shouted the officer. "Where s a stretcher?" 
 
 "Hurry/ said Andy, "this man will die if you don t 
 hurry!" 
 
 A stretcher was found at last. It was in one of the houses, 
 where it had lain behind a door, rolled up. By the time it 
 reached Andy, the man whose head was in the correspondent s 
 lap had given a little shiver and died. 
 
 A very white Andy walked back to the car. 
 
 "You ve got blood all over you!" said McGregor. He was 
 as white as Andy. 
 
 "What sort of show is this?" asked Andy. "The town 
 looks as if it were shelled every little while, but they haven t 
 any stretchers ready. Look at the men coming out to see 
 what s happened, and that officer hasn t the sense to order 
 them into the cellars." 
 
 "Why?" McGregor half rose. "Do you think there ll be 
 another?" 
 
 McGregor dismounted from the car. He held his steamer- 
 rug by one end, but let the other trail in the mud. 
 
 "Here," he said, "you take these passes and go ahead if 
 you want to, but I advise you not to. I m going in here to 
 talk to the general. I want to see him anyway." 
 
 in 
 
 The car, now holding only Andy and the chauffeur, ran 
 madly along more muddy roads, the brown water flying out 
 in spreading rays behind them. They came to a slight emi 
 nence. 
 
 The gray light revealed below a vast semicircle of drab 
 
100 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 open country. In each of three directions nothing broke the 
 monotony, save here and there a group of trees that seemed 
 to have been ripped by lightning, a wall of shattered stone 
 like the ruin of some castle worn away by time. The only 
 thing at once remarkable about the landscape was its barren 
 ness; it might have been a slice of the Dakota Bad Lands; 
 but Andy knew that, three years ago, this was all dotted 
 with farms; those ragged trees were a forest then; that sin 
 gle chimney marked the place where a village stood. 
 
 The chauffeur pointed to some zigzag yellow lines that 
 resembled clay thrown up by the burrowings of many moles. 
 
 "Those," said he, "are our trenches." 
 
 Down there, under the ground, were men at war; down 
 there, in a gigantic rabbit-warren, men waited but the sign 
 of command to spring out and deal death and receive it. 
 As yet, to Andy s unaccustomed eyes, there was not anywhere 
 a token of life, but all the while that landscape teemed with 
 the life that kills. 
 
 Out of nowhere something rolled into Andy s vision of 
 the sky a huge floating sausage. Another and another fol 
 lowed. Broken nets, on which fluttered bits of green rags, 
 lined the roadway, suspended between saplings. The} came 
 to an unprotected stretch of road at the entrance to which 
 was a sign: 
 
 ATTENTION! 
 
 L Ennemi Vous Voit! 
 
 Farther on, under a canopy of intertwined twigs, was a 
 battery perfectly aligned, its day s ammunition tidily piled 
 close by. The car passed a dreary line of walking-wounded 
 hobbling to the rear. Occasional shells splashed earth and 
 fire and iron around them. 
 
VICTORIOUS 101 
 
 When the next elevation was gained, Andy could see the 
 Germans ridge more clearly than before. He pointed to 
 sparks that flashed there. 
 
 "Heliographing ?" he wondered. 
 
 "German artillery," corrected his companion. 
 
 There was a whining and rushing in the vibrating air like 
 the cry of tigers and the flight of antediluvian bird s-of -prey. 
 With Andy s ear close to his mouth, the chauffeur roared 
 gossip of the front, but, though his ear was for the speaker, 
 Andy s eyes were bent toward the battle-field. That was No 
 Man s Land down there. In front of twenty miles of already 
 thrice-filled cemetery, there lay an open-air slaughter-house 
 twenty miles long. Overhead, an observation-balloon, tug 
 ging querulously at its rope, must have borne an observer, 
 who, glasses at eyes, telephoned his reports to some artillery 
 officer behind the ridge. Toward the close horizon there were 
 those sparkles which marked the firing Boche guns. Andy 
 could scarcely believe that, ahead of him in the German lines 
 and nearer yet to him in the American positions, artillerymen 
 were sweating over blistering guns whose huge projectiles 
 were these, crisscrossing in the sky. 
 
 The automobile came to the remnants of a village, scarce 
 a house of which now rose higher than a single story. It 
 was quieter here. The chauffeur pointed to an old barn. 
 
 "We ll get out," said he. "An American communication- 
 trench runs out o the back door of that barn. It s a hell of a 
 mess the whole business." 
 
 He said that the French had been justified in choosing as 
 their headquarters the chateau that McGregor had entered, 
 because of the tacit understanding which reduced bombard 
 ments to a minimum during the French occupation of this 
 sector, but he scoffed at our folly in using the same head 
 quarters. The Germans were on a hill overlooking it, yet 
 we had not constructed a dug-out or piled two sandbags 
 together. 
 
 "It s an easy mark and a peach of a gas-trap," said the 
 chauffeur. "There are a lot of casualties, too, and it s all our 
 own fault for not taking decent care." 
 
102 VICTORIOUS 
 
 As he piloted Andy through the barn, he went on explain 
 ing: 
 
 "The Algerians used to hold these trenches, but all we ve 
 done in the way of sanitation s to sprinkle around a little 
 chloride of lime. And there are eight lines of wire there for 
 communication with headquarters, and we ve left em all un 
 covered : one lucky shell d ruin the lot. What do you know 
 about that?" 
 
 iy 
 
 Andy saw that he was crouching in a long pit that ended 
 in sharp turns, one to the right, the other to the left. The 
 pit was so narrow that he could not stretch his arms to their 
 full length; it was higher than his head and rose for a few 
 feet above the surface of the earth in a hodge-podge pile of 
 sandbags and tin cans. Rotting revetments supported the 
 oozing sides, and there was a step along the forward side on 
 which a man might stand to shoot. Some broken boards ran 
 down the bottom ; they splashed up sprays of noisome liquid 
 if the occupant trod on them ; if he did not tread on them, he 
 sank ankle-deep in abominations. 
 
 Two shivering American soldiers were in sight. Both men 
 were so caked with mud that it was difficult to tell where 
 their blouses ended and their throats began. One of these 
 soldiers leaned from the firing-step and peered through a 
 bottomless tin can placed in the rampart to give a view of 
 the land between the opposing lines Andy noted that this 
 man s boots were broken and that his toes protruded the 
 otker squatted in the ooze and, having tossed his boots away, 
 nursed his swollen feet, on which only the rags of stockings 
 remained. 
 
 "You look cold," Andy yelled against the roaring guns. 
 
 The man on the step did not remove his eyes from their 
 duty ; the man in the muck looked up with eyes that were like 
 holes burnt in a blanket. 
 
 "Cold?" he repeated. 
 
 His overcoat had lost a button. Through the opening, 
 Andv could see the blouse of a summer uniform. 
 
VICTOBIOUS 103 
 
 "Do they make you wear those cotton things ?" called Andy. 
 
 "There ain t no others come over yet." 
 
 The horror of the place, and of the plight of the men in 
 it, bit into Andy s soul. He saw the filth in which he per 
 force wallowed ; his nostrils, even while thick with the effluvia 
 from explosives, could not bar the stench; he received the 
 evidence that here, where there could be no decency or reserve 
 not daily violated, all those delicacies which every man pos 
 sesses, and tries to pretend he lacks, rose in sickened revolt. 
 
 "I bet you ll be glad when the relief comes/ he said. 
 
 He did not shout this ; but the man in the muck must have 
 read his lips, as men learn soon to read lips in modern battle. 
 That man leaped to his frost-bitten feet. Through his mask 
 of dirt, his face burned. 
 
 "Don t you run away with any idea like that!" he thun 
 dered. "We came here to fight, an there s not a fellow but 
 what wants to stick till he gets a go at it!" 
 
 The other man twitched Andy s sleeve. 
 
 "Want to take a look?" he inquired. 
 
 On the way back, they passed a little group of prisoners, 
 captured while venturing too far on a reconnaissance the 
 night before. They had been for almost a month in the 
 trenches and for three days of that time cut off, by American 
 fire, from all food and supplies. They were more like the 
 beasts of the mountain-caves than men. 
 
 At a first-aid station one of the rough-and-ready dressing- 
 stations nearest the firing-line wounded Americans were 
 feeding these captives cigarettes; when the captive had been 
 shot in the hands, the American even placed the cigarette 
 between the Teutonic lips and applied a match to it. 
 
 These Americans were formed voluntarily in a long line 
 before the first-aid station ; there was no distinction of rank ; 
 the rule was first come, first served. 
 
 One there was who seemed to Andy especially in need of 
 
104 VICTORIOUS 
 
 attention. He swayed from dizziness, and blood dripped from 
 the bandaged bulk of his left hand. 
 
 Andy looked about for help. He said to the wounded man : 
 "Come out of line, and I ll get you attended to." 
 "I ll wait my turn, thank you," the wounded man re 
 sponded. 
 
 He was a colonel, and there were only enlisted men ahead 
 of him. 
 
 VI 
 
 "Well," said Andy, as he rejoined the chauffeur, "I ve seen 
 a battle, anyhow." 
 
 "Battle?" gaped the chauffeur. "What you talkin about 
 battle ? This has been what they call a quiet day : nothin 
 to report. If it hadn t been goin to be, d you suppose 
 they d ve left visitors out here?" 
 
 A roar of artillery interrupted him. 
 
 So the day that had begun with death and the pounding 
 of guns ended with the pounding of guns and death. To 
 morrow would so begin and so end. And another to-morrow 
 and another. 
 
 VII 
 
 Yet Andy felt there was something wrong. The immensity 
 of our projects had dazzled him a few months ago. Now, 
 though his faith in the ultimate triumph of American demo 
 cratic effort was not lessened, he felt that there were at work, 
 somewhere in democratic America, forces that would exploit 
 patriotism for the increase of their own power. 
 
 VIII 
 
 In Paris, precisely at seven P. M., at the corner of the rue 
 des Petits Champs and the Avenue de 1 Opera, Sylvia, with 
 outstretched hand and Tac at her heels, came into the light 
 that fell from a shop- window. She reminded Andy of a gray- 
 eyed child just released from school. 
 
VICTORIOUS 105 
 
 "You re back," she said : "I m glad." 
 
 She wore a short skirt. About her slim neck fur nestled, 
 and, between its darkness and that of her fur turban, golden 
 tendrils clustered about her face. 
 
 "So am I/ said blushing Andy. Tac sniffed at him, 
 wagged a low but increasingly certain tail, received the hearty 
 pat of recognition. "But I hear you re going away. 77 
 
 "Just for a little while. 7 She fell into springing step be 
 side him. "That doesn 7 t matter. The important thing is: 
 how did you make out? 7 
 
 "Fd rather know how you re making out, 7 Andy vowed. 
 
 "Oh, well enough. I 7 m going to be afraid of my audiences : 
 they will be such a new kind. The sketch is silly; I don t 
 want you to see it. But I 7 m doing well enough. Now tell me 
 about yourself. 77 
 
 "We re going to Foyot 7 s. Shall I get a taxi ? 7 
 
 "You couldn 7 t get a taxi at this hour ; and you know I love 
 to walk. Now 77 she shook her gloved hands in laughing 
 suspense "do please tell me about your trip. 77 
 
 He was full of it, of course, but the chronicle was inter 
 rupted by frequent twists and turns through the home-going 
 crowd, and in front of the Theatre Frangais they brushed 
 against McGregor s servant, returning to his masters limou 
 sine from the box-office. Comfortably muffled McGregor 
 leaned forward the least bit in the world and in his high 
 voice, called to Andy. 
 
 "I motored up, 77 he said. "I wish you 7 d waited for me. It 7 s 
 more com 77 Then he saw that Sylvia was with the young 
 correspondent: he unswathed himself and, bowing, stepped 
 with a wheeze to the curb. 
 
 Andy presented him. 
 
 "You 7 re an American girl? 7 asked McGregor. 
 
 Sylvia straightway confirmed the impression. 
 
 "I tell you what/ 7 chuckled the contractor: " our girls are 
 going to do as much fighting in this war as our boys are. 
 Nursing, Miss Raeburn ? 7 
 
 "I wish I could/ 7 she said, "but I 7 m so useless. 77 
 
 "She s not useless/ Andy declared: "she s given up a big 
 
106 VICTORIOUS 
 
 engagement in New York to come over here. She s an 
 actress." 
 
 Above their darkened pouches, McGregor s hazel eyes 
 brightened. 
 
 "An actress ?" He asked her a half-dozen quick questions. 
 He rattled off the names of many players, inquiring whether 
 she knew their owners, but was not disconcerted when most of 
 her replies were negative. "Well, I m afraid my theatrical 
 acquaintance isn t the best, Miss Raeburn." 
 
 "And are you here on war-work ?" wondered Sylvia. 
 
 "I should say I am," McGregor replied. "She d have 
 thought so if she d seen us two in the trenches, wouldn t she, 
 Brown?" 
 
 Andy looked at him quickly, but McGregor did not give the 
 expected wink: it seemed that he considered the word 
 "trenches" as synonymous with "front." 
 
 McGregor made light of the favor, but much of the peril. 
 Then Sylvia asked : 
 
 "May you tell what sort of war-work yours is ?" 
 
 He had rather avoided the subject, but, now that she re 
 turned to it, appeared to meet it fairly enough : 
 
 "I sell aeroplanes. At a loss." 
 
 "Where s Tac?" inquired Andy, almost glad suddenly to 
 miss the dog, because he somehow felt that they trod delicate 
 ground. 
 
 Tac was no pet for a leash ; up the avenue, he had been fol 
 lowing them through the crowd with his nose not half an inch 
 behind Sylvia s glinting heels. Now their sudden turn to the 
 curb must have separated him from them. 
 
 "Tac?" echoed McGregor. "A friend of yours, Miss Eae- 
 burn?" 
 
 "Yes," she said ; "a dog. But he won t be lost : he has the 
 most wonderful scent in the world." Nevertheless, she looked 
 about her with some anxiety. 
 
 Andy plunged into the throng of passers-by. 
 
 McGregor s eyes first followed Andy, then, and steadily, 
 returned to Sylvia. 
 
VICTOBIOUS 107 
 
 "That s a nice boy," he said. 
 
 Sylvia assented. "He s been awfully nice to me." 
 
 "But he s impulsive/ McGregor pursued. 
 
 "I like impulsiveness, Mr. McGregor when it s in the right 
 direction." 
 
 "Yes, it s all right; but it s liable to be dangerous in war 
 time in wartime and among strangers." 
 
 Her brows puckered. "I don t think Mr. Brown is afraid 
 of danger." 
 
 "He s too much the other way, Miss Eaeburn. He don t 
 look where he s going : he just starts out. That s what I think, 
 but maybe I don t know him well enough. Have you known 
 him long?" 
 
 "Only since I came to Paris." Her grave eyes did not flinch. 
 "He s a friend of a man I know at home." The pucker had 
 been deepening, but it went no farther: Tac came bounding 
 out of the crowd, scattering people to right and left. "Mon 
 vieux loup!" she cried: "Vous etes tres intelligent!" 
 
 McGregor looked on. "He s got good points. He ought to 
 be the very guard for a lady over here." 
 
 "I don t need a guard, and he doesn t speak a word of Eng 
 lish," said Sylvia, glancing up with a face from which all in 
 dications of embarrassment had disappeared, "and my French 
 accent is almost too much for him ; but if I tell him to" she 
 lowered her always low voice "to attack" the dog tilted his 
 head toward her "You see, I have to be careful how I say 
 it even in the middle of a sentence : if I tell him to do that, 
 he ll fly at anybody I point to." 
 
 "Will he?" asked McGregor. "How do you say it in 
 French?" 
 
 "Why, of course, the word sounds the same in French as in 
 English," said Sylvia. 
 
 McGregor s servant was tinkering with the front of the car 
 as no car-lover ever loses a chance to tinker. The contractor 
 said "Look out, George," to him, then touched the dog, and 
 called "Attack !" 
 
 There was a brown flash through the air, and George was 
 
108 VICTORIOUS 
 
 seen falling backward with the dog in his arms. Tac had 
 leaped across the car s nose and, fixing his teeth in the serv 
 ant s collar, thrown him. 
 
 "Good God !" said McGregor. "Call him off." 
 
 But Sylvia had already done that. 
 
 "Halte! HoUte, la I" she had cried, and Tac had instantly 
 stopped with one spread paw upon the servant s throat. 
 "Viens id!" she supplemented, and Tac came back to her, 
 licking his chops. 
 
 It took some time until Andy s return, in fact for Sylvia 
 to assure herself that the servant was not hurt and for Mc 
 Gregor to explain to everybody, including a little mob of per 
 sons innocent of English which immediately gathered, that he 
 had had no idea how literally Tac would obey orders. They 
 were rather relieved to separate. 
 
 Through the opened door of the restaurant, down the steps 
 and across the red room with its comfortable compartments, 
 Maurice, the head-waiter, first, and then Sylvia and Andy, 
 Tac closely following, they passed, and as they went, the ro- 
 setted senators of France and the American majors stopped 
 their eating and drinking to look at her. Andy noted it and 
 triumphed: the cessation of talk, the noise of cutlery, sud 
 denly died down there were involuntary tributes to the girl 
 at his side. 
 
 Theirs was a corner compartment. Tac curled, at a word 
 from his mistress, at her feet, and was no more seen. Sylvia 
 took the cushioned bench, and Andy, his back to the room, sat 
 in the chair opposite and looked at her, over the table. He 
 wanted to sit beside her, but did not dare. 
 
 "Let s begin all over again" she cupped her chin in her 
 hands and gave him the wonder of her blue-gray eyes. "I 
 want to hear all you did down there." 
 
 Though with the genial assistance of smiling Maurice, he 
 ordered that dinner, what they ate Andy could never after 
 ward remember. He was carried too far away by the sight 
 of her sensitive face respondent to his story, by her eyes that 
 became all shades, and tints behind tints, as she listened; by 
 her intimate sympathy and the sound of her voice in wise 
 
VICTOEIOUS 109 
 
 council. He knew but that he told her everything and that 
 she and there was an added glory approved all that he had 
 done. 
 
 "Only," she said, "you mustn t be too discouraged." 
 
 As if he could be that while she was there to encourage him ! 
 
 "I mean," she explained, "you mustn t think the cause is 
 wrong just because it s mismanaged, or that the army isn t 
 a good one just because a few of the officers in it are trying to 
 cover up the politicians mistakes." 
 
 "Of course I won t," Andy asseverated. "Why, you ought to 
 see those enlisted men ! you will be seeing them soon. Most 
 of the officers are all right, too: but you just can t look at 
 those enlisted men and not believe in in America and the 
 flag and and in just everything." 
 
 "And that," said Sylvia, "is what makes it all the worse for 
 anybody to cheat them. I know." 
 
 "I know you know," said Andy. 
 
 She gave him added strength ; he told her so. 
 
 "I wish I could," she answered. "I wish I had the chance 
 that you have. Oh, you men don t know how hard it is to be 
 a woman when there is a war !" 
 
 The flowerlike mouth was parted, the swiftly intaken breath 
 made a little hissing sound as it passed over her small white 
 teeth. Her eyes were at once flashing stars and bottomless 
 pools. If there had been moments, since he first met her, 
 when she seemed a child, she was now another Maid of Or 
 leans to him. 
 
 IX 
 
 They walked slowly down the rue de Seine and so along 
 the river and past the outline of the Invalides toward the 
 Pont de 1 Alma. There were no artificial lights save, now and 
 again, an electric street-lamp, hazy behind a globe of blue, 
 but a clean moonshine painted the old thoroughfare with 
 silver. The cool crisp sky was a sky of stars; Scorpio was 
 still master of the heavens, and, with Cassiopeia almost di 
 rectly overhead, they could look across the water and see the 
 
110 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 dragon pursuing Ursa Minor toward the retreating wheels of 
 the Charioteer. 
 
 "I don t know one of them by name/ said Andy, a sweep 
 of Ms right arm indicating every visible luminary "and of 
 course you know them all." 
 
 She had not resumed her gloves. Her white hand that 
 hand which he had longed to kiss was on his arm. He felt 
 it tremble there as a bird on a bough trembling in the cold. 
 
 "I m not at all a wise woman, you know/ she said. 
 
 He was trying to remember something from The Merchant 
 of Venice, which he had been forced to read in the Americus 
 high-school. Something about 
 
 "in such a night 
 Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls," 
 
 and about Troilus, whoever he was, sighing "his soul out 
 toward the Grecian tents" where his sweetheart slept: it had 
 been very dull reading then, but he wished he could recall it 
 now. However, he knew that, if he could recall it, he would 
 lack the courage to repeat it, and so he took up her own 
 words, which were, after all, poetry enough for him : 
 
 "You are a wise woman. You ve just been proving it. You 
 kind of see through I guess, it s over: yes, over all the mean 
 little things that get in between me and the big things and 
 hide them from me." 
 
 "If I only deserved that !" said Sylvia, 
 
 Prom behind closed shutters in a window of one of the 
 houses blindly facing the river, there came the low notes of a 
 piano meditatively played. 
 
 On a common impulse, they paused to listen. Perhaps be 
 cause of some connotation born of that phrase about the Gre 
 cian tents, the music made Andy think of a grove in a vast 
 valley, with sunlight filtering through the green of ancient 
 trees and, far off, the flash of a nymphic body vanishing to 
 the reed-pipes of an unseen god. 
 
 "What is it?" he whispered. 
 
VICTORIOUS 111 
 
 Her answer was almost as much a whisper : "It s Gounod s 
 Au Printemps. I used to play it years ago at boarding-school 
 in Virginia." 
 
 She was not Joan of Arc to him now; soon in another 
 moment, perhaps she would be; but just now she was that 
 careless nymph, vanishing among the trees, glad and im 
 mortal. "I ll never hear it without thinking of you," he said. 
 
 There was a slight pressure of his arm, where her hand 
 lay. "We must go on." 
 
 They moved forward with reluctant feet. Behind them the 
 reedy calls of the pipes of Pan grew fainter and fainter until 
 lost in the grove that never was. 
 
 She firmly brought the talk back to practical matters, ad 
 vised him, assiduously fanned the fires of his militant pa 
 triotism, held intently before him his old ideal. In the clear 
 moonlight, he could see the soft flush of her cheeks, the even 
 brows, the sweet mouth and the eyes of steady faith. He must 
 return to the camp and there either verify or dissipate his 
 fears of mismanagement. A few paces back, he had wondered 
 how much longer he could resist asking the impossible ; again 
 the violet ray in his spectrum, here she was the saint offering 
 him a sword. 
 
 "Your tour isn t to anywhere but the camp?" he asked her. 
 
 No, she said, it wasn t; and Andy breathed relief. He had 
 had, fleetingly, a red picture of her somewhere near the front. 
 He wondered, when they reached the hotel, whether some 
 such danger would overtake him there whether he should 
 ever see her again. 
 
 "When do you go?" 
 
 "To-morrow." 
 
 He had guessed as much. He almost guessed why she had 
 not told him sooner. 
 
 "I don t know," he said, "just when I ll be off again." 
 
 Her eyes were full upon him : "You were telling me," she 
 said, "that you didn t count that you were only one. You 
 do count. Don t forget that." The notes of her voice were the 
 wood-notes of the stopped diapason s bourdon. "Perhaps you 
 
112 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 can get the word to these boys fathers and mothers that will 
 make the politicians give the boys a a square deal." 
 
 He took her hand. 
 
 "I know/ he said. 
 
 "Try I" 
 
 It was as if she handed him the sword. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 CONCERNS SOME EXPERIENCES, PSYCHOLOGICAL AS WELL AS 
 PHYSICAL, OF A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR; AND TELLS A 
 GOOD DEAL ABOUT DEMOCRACY IN THE DOLDRUMS 
 
 The Amish are a peaceable and thrifty farmer-folk, a pe 
 culiar sect, the descendants of Palatines attracted to the 
 limestone plain of the Great Valley by the prospectuses of 
 that best advertiser of the seventeenth century, William Penn, 
 since whose time they have "kept themselves to themselves," 
 intermarried, remained where the Quakers put them, and, 
 thanks to their industry and the most fruitful soil in Amer 
 ica, grown rich. They wear homespun clothes held together 
 by hooks and eyes, because they consider that "buttons is a 
 wanity" ; they hire few servants, but help one another in till 
 ing and harvesting ; they will not go to law ; they regard the 
 census with suspicion, and many of them refuse to vote. A 
 cardinal principle of their religion holds that war is murder. 
 
 In that principle Chrissly had been reared. When the local 
 draft-board seized him on the ground that he had not been 
 formally received into the faith of his fathers, his parents 
 permitted him to go without a struggle because of the Pauline 
 injunction of submission to constituted authority ; but he was 
 sent away from home with advice that warned him against the 
 evil of willing participation in conflict, and he hated the 
 thought of battle as sturdily as his father and mother had 
 taught him to hate all other forms of sin. 
 
 The cantonment-life in America did not serve to lessen 
 this aversion; his homesickness, which increased with his ar 
 rival in France, served only to intensify it. Then Chrissly 
 had his interview with the German prisoners. Next he met 
 Leonie and heard her story. At the Y. M. C. A. huts, he 
 
 113 
 
114 VICTORIOUS 
 
 listened to lectures on the causes and progress of the war, 
 and, in order to improve his English, which was already alter 
 ing through daily contact with men from various sections of 
 the United States, he began to read the Bible for himself: 
 he began, systematically, with Genesis and paid special at 
 tention to Joshua and the more belligerent of the Psalms. 
 He often turned back to the words of Nehemiah : "Eemem- 
 ber the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your 
 brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and 
 your houses"; and he was impressed by the message brought 
 from Jehovah by Jeremiah to Zedekiah : "I myself will fight 
 against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, 
 even in anger and fury and in just wrath/ 3 Then came a day 
 when he used to imagine the Song of Deborah issuing from 
 the lips of Leonie. 
 
 Chrissly decided that this war was not murder, but execu 
 tion: the killing of mad dogs. His neighbors at home were 
 right in most things, but concerning the present business un- 
 instructed. If he did not attempt to teach them, that was 
 because, in his letters, he avoided points of controversy. 
 
 In such a mind he was when there had come the rumor 
 that his unit would soon complete its training by a course 
 of lessons under fire. 
 
 Chrissly was not soon to forget those last few days in camp. 
 He had grown nearer to Leonie : whereas he spoke an English 
 more or less peculiar, his French came without a trace of 
 accent and with increasing fluency, and in his teacher he 
 found a subject that possessed his thoughts. About his des 
 tination his unit had, when the rumor came that they were 
 to march, no delusions. He sought out Le"onie in the inn-yard 
 and there told her. 
 
 There had been times when, through the dignity bequeathed 
 her by her past sufferings, the light of earlier and happier 
 days would peep and when childhood returned on her lips to 
 mock precocious maturity; but now she heard him with a 
 face like that of some statue hewn to symbolize the brave 
 agony of France. Her lips were compressed, her large eyes 
 were neither black nor brown, but like a mirror reflecting 
 
VICTOEIOUS 115 
 
 far-off events that he might not understand and that she 
 would not explain. 
 
 "Ad au revoir" she said. 
 
 "II vous faut dire a bientot, mon amie" said Chrissly, quite 
 as if he were speaking his native tongue. 
 
 "J espere que oui" said Leonie. 
 
 He would have answered that, but a perverse image of 
 Minnie Taylor flashed into his head, and he left the inn-yard 
 awkwardly. 
 
 II 
 
 Chrissly s battalion slopped and slid on and on. Some of 
 the men were singing: 
 
 "Good-by, Ma ! Good-ky, Pa! 
 Good-by, Mule, with yer old hee-haw ! 
 I may not know what th ? war s about, 
 But you bet, by gosh, I ll soon find out ! 
 An my sweetheart, don t you fear, 
 I ll bring you a King fer a sou-ve-nir ; 
 I ll git you a Turk an a Kai-ser, too, 
 An that s about all one feller can do." 
 
 They swore at the weather, at their bad boots, at the muddy 
 roads ; but more often they joked. Nothing was sacred against 
 their humor. They joked because they knew that they were 
 going, and because they wanted to go, where death was. 
 
 "I wisht we could hear cannons or somesing," said Chrissly. 
 
 The twilight deepened. 
 
 They passed a roofless building that must have been a hos 
 pital. Into it men were staggering with a stretcher on which 
 lay a figure with its head so swathed in bandages that Chrissly 
 thought it had no head at all. Chrissly saw a faint move 
 ment of its chest where the tunic had been torn open. 
 
 There was a scream the scream as of a gigantic hound 
 that had been wounded. It came from overhead. An explo 
 sion followed, and, in a field some hundred yards away, tons 
 of earth leaped heavenward. 
 
116 VICTOK10US 
 
 "There s your cannon, all right," said a man at Chrissly s 
 side. 
 
 The descending earth pattered about them like hail. It was 
 nearly night. A barn loomed ahead of them. 
 
 Every little while there was a noise like the snapping of 
 whips. Chrissly wondered what it meant. 
 
 "Who-o-o-o-i-s-s-s-h \" 
 
 Metallic reverberations shook the barn. Men glued them 
 selves against the wall. The air became heavy with odors 
 sulphurous and suffocating. 
 
 "It s only Fritz s evening prayer/ said the soldier next to 
 Chrissly. "It won t last long. . . ." 
 
 A dark form came along and pushed Chrissly and his com 
 panion against the clammy farther wall of a communication 
 trench. 
 
 "Stop there and don t stick your head up," said the dark 
 form as it disappeared. 
 
 An acrid smell, indescribably nauseating, hung heavily on 
 the still air. 
 
 There came a blare of light ahead of them, and both men 
 disobeyed the order they had just received. A star-shell had 
 burst and was exposing to them a circle in No Man s Land. 
 
 Chrissly saw, bathed in white light, the top of a great ash- 
 heap ; torn earth, barbed wire, broken wheels, rusting and rot 
 ting accouterments. Figures, too the grotesque figures of 
 motionless men, fantastically contorted: Chrissly wondered 
 if they had been thrown there from aeroplanes. Clenched fists; 
 stiff upraised arms ; legs bent in the wrong direction. A face 
 grinned at Chrissly horribly, as if with spectral recognition. 
 All this in the flash of a moment. 
 
 Darkness followed. It was hideous now because of what it 
 concealed. 
 
 "There ll be flies to-morrow," said a veteran near Chrissly. 
 "So thick you can t brush em off. Sticky. They breed out 
 there. Up near Wytschaette, I tried to brush the flies off a 
 stiff : when I touched his nose, it came off in my hand." He 
 spat into the trench. "Gee, but they stink," he said. "One 
 time" 
 
VICTOEIOUS 
 
 He was interrupted by a rattle of bullets. Both men drew 
 their heads sharply below the parapet. 
 
 "Sharpshooters," said the veteran. "They spotted us by 
 that star-shell/ 
 
 "Chrissly understood now what it was that sounded like the 
 cracking of whips. 
 
 in 
 
 He had imagined trench-warfare a continuous round of 
 gas, hand-grenades, machine-gun fire and high explosives. As 
 time wore on, he thought it chiefly a test of patience in which 
 day and night were singularly alike. Yet variation finally 
 came with little preamble. He found, one night, that he was 
 as if on a hill over which the clouds piled darkly and the thun 
 der roiled, while all the bolts of lightning from a tremendous 
 storm knifed down into the valley behind. 
 
 "Vas is los?" he cried. 
 
 "That s a barrage !" cried the veteran. 
 
 "What next, anyways ?" said Chrissly. 
 
 They were ordered into the dug-outs. 
 
 "What next ?" echoed the veteran, after he had flung him 
 self upon the pile of questioning men heaped in the narrow 
 cave. He recovered his breath. "This means a raid, this 
 does!" 
 
 For a long while the storm continued, smashes, shrieks, 
 crashings all sounding at once in a demoniacal overture. 
 Then, as the din lessened ever so little, there sounded above it 
 the soul-shaking notes of a siren. 
 
 "Gas !" 
 
 With incredible speed, the pile of men had disentangled 
 itself, and each man threw before his face the grotesque mask 
 that, at any distance less than two miles from the front line, 
 each soldier must wear suspended and ready, dangling against 
 his chest. The order for fixed bayonets was passed by signals, 
 for a masked man can not speak and they hurried to their 
 stations like so many hooded divers scurrying along the floor 
 of the sea. 
 
 Across the vast ash-heap of No Man s Land, it was coming : 
 
118 VICTORIOUS 
 
 the gas. It rolled toward them silently, but without halt, 
 curving a blue-gray cloud, stealthy yet swift, sure of itself, 
 malign, deadly. It was here. Could the gas-masks really do 
 all that the officers said they did? The gas enveloped the 
 whole line of trenches. 
 
 The violence of the bombardment recommenced. Shells 
 fell near now and still nearer. They made flashes of fire di 
 rectly overhead. One appeared to rip itself in two above 
 Chrissly and to die screaming. A portion of the trench leaped 
 inward, and in the blast of flame that accompanied its fall, 
 Chrissly had a glimpse of flying arms and legs. 
 
 The men had been formed closer together. They were 
 poised for leaps. The gas-cloud had passed, but its fatal 
 fumes remained, and the men retained their masks, so that, 
 standing ready for action, they resembled hooded cobras, bal 
 anced to strike. Nobody could speak; every man watched his 
 nearest officer. 
 
 Then a row of running soldiers became visible across the 
 ash-heap, men in uniforms of greenish gray. The Germans 
 were charging. . . . 
 
 The Americans were over, were running toward the advanc 
 ing enemy. 
 
 Chrissly was running with his comrades. Into his gas 
 mask he was trying to shout curses upon the Germans. 
 
 They were about to meet. An instant more now 
 
 They met. 
 
 In the shock of contact, Chrissly s mind was yelling 
 "Cochon! Va-t-en, coclion!" It was an unconscious repeti 
 tion of the first words that he had heard Leonie utter, and it 
 was in part the result of the feeling that, since these aliens 
 understood neither Pennsylvania-Dutch nor yet English, they 
 must be familiar with the only foreign language that Chrissly 
 knew anything about. . . . 
 
 He came out of the raid untouched. When at last his unit 
 was relieved and ordered back to the village whence it had 
 started for the front, he sought out Leonie as soon as he had 
 bathed and scorched the lice from his clothes with a hot iron 
 
VICTORIOUS 119 
 
 tHat the company-barber had somehow got hold of. He tried 
 to tell her how he had remembered her. 
 
 Leonie was a phial of emotion tinctured by a sturdy dis 
 trust of man. Her eyes glowed at the sight of him, but she 
 heard him with laughter. 
 
 "It will be a fine thing to write to your wife," she said. 
 
 "I haven t any wife," Chrissly protested. 
 
 "Oh, la, la, Id!" laughed Leonie. "All these Americans 
 have wives. Come into the kitchen, and I shall give you some 
 
 IV 
 
 Chrissly and the other men that had been to the front kept 
 themselves, and were kept, almost as much as might be in 
 view of the less fortunate soldiers billeted in their village. 
 Each was the willing center of a group of eager questioners 
 and listeners. These fighters had been the first of their ardent 
 little army to see real warfare, and they were as proud of it 
 as their fellows were curious. 
 
 There had been times when Chrissly found it hard to steal 
 away to Leonie, and there was another reason why he felt 
 that he ought to walk with circumspection : letters from home 
 were beginning slowly to filter through the congested military 
 mail-service of the A. E. F., and all this served to bring the 
 Amishman-born closer again to Minnie Taylor. He was rap 
 idly developing into a thorough soldier, occasionally he un 
 consciously assumed an air of trooper-sophistication not un 
 becoming; but he was troubled. 
 
 Leonie delighted to add to his troubles. She seemed to 
 realize that she baffled him by her ignorance of many arts 
 with a ready-made knowledge of which he thought American 
 girl-babies entered the world; inviolably she raised that ig 
 norance between them as if it were a subrisive mask, and 
 from behind it she launched again and again the disquieting 
 postulation of a Mrs. Chrissly at home. 
 
 Andy came upon him as he was leaving, reluctantly, one 
 
120 VICTORIOUS 
 
 of his soldier audiences, and Chrissly engulfed the corre 
 spondent with gratitude for the forwarded newspapers and 
 with undisguised joy at reunion with a man from his own 
 countryside. The young giant grew voluble over his trench- 
 experiences. 
 
 "It s fine, fightin ," said Chrissly: "you feel like s if you 
 was at las doin somesing ; but them there org shells ! Why, 
 Brown, it gits so s it seems your insides of your ears can t 
 stand no more noise." 
 
 It was only practice that the Americans were doing, as the 
 communique had said. They would go up, a battalion or two 
 at a time, and then return to the old grind at camp ; perhaps 
 in January they might begin to be a geim-wine army by tak 
 ing over a small sector for keeps. 
 
 "All us fellows," said Chrissly, "we come here to fight, 
 an we want to fight, still ; we don t want, when we git trained 
 a ready, to be held back; but the commandin chincral, I 
 guess he s afraid if we go in under the French like the French 
 want we should go, why, where s his job? Things ain t right, 
 Brown," said Chrissly, with a slow head-shake. "0 course 
 no common soldier don t dare say so still where any offcer 
 could hear him, ner yet write his folks nothin but Sunny 
 France f fear o court-martial, but you d ought fer to know 
 the troos about the close an the ammunition all us fellows 
 is talkin about it on the quiet an you d ought fer to go to 
 Tours and Issoudun an git fer why there ain t aeroplanes 
 to pertect us when we re down in them there trenches, an 
 most of our casualties was because we hadn t no aeroplanes. 
 An you had ought to get a piece in the papers home still 
 about it." 
 
 Tours and Issoudun? Andy had not heard that there was 
 any news at these places. He remembered that one of Gar- 
 cia s first warnings to him was to dwell on the infantry. 
 
 "But there s one sing s fine," said Chrissly, "an that s the 
 men. They re cold an they re wet, Brown; they don t git 
 their letters like they d ought; an their folks presents to 
 *em, they re robbed in our own army-mails; they re livin 
 here in a pneumony part of the country an sleepin over the 
 
VICTORIOUS 121 
 
 cows ; they ain t got good shoes er winter uniforms, an most 
 of em ain t got no socks at all; but they ain t quitters, an 
 they re goin to be the best fighters this here war s ever saw." 
 
 Having an appointment with Leonie that he dared not 
 break and did not want to break, but that he thought it safer 
 to make a meeting of three, he conducted Andy to the rear 
 of the inn and took him, by passages through which Chrissly 
 himself had often delightfully adventured with his French 
 acquaintance, to a stone-flagged outer-kitchen, long disused, 
 where Leonie spread them a splendid luncheon of her own 
 cooking and brought them from a secret cellar a bottle of 
 old Mousigny, with tremendous precautions against detection 
 at the hands of M. le Proprietaire. 
 
 For days Andy worked quietly and hard. He began with 
 the desperately clutched hope that his own fears and Chriss- 
 ly s declarations were mistaken; he ended face to face with 
 confirmation. The training was not properly progressing. 
 Housing and clothing conditions were such that only the ex 
 cellence of the medical-service had prevented an alarming 
 death-rate. 
 
 "And we re getting mighty little help from the War De 
 partment," medical-officer after medical-officer told him. "I 
 don t know what we d do without the Red Cross. They even 
 lend the camions that the army can t supply; there isn t a 
 splint or a bandage in any of these hospitals that came 
 through the War Department: the Red Cross gave us every 
 last one of them. Over a month ago we had to buy a billion 
 francs worth of medical supplies from the French and the 
 bill s still unpaid." 
 
 The doctors were working in a maze of enormous perplex 
 ity. Their quarters were makeshift, their supplies deficient, 
 their corps of assistants numerically inadequate; the assign 
 ment of rank and the management of promotions put men of 
 executive training into practical surgery and practical sur 
 geons into executive positions ; a young doctor with friends in 
 power was commissioned and sent abroad to make an imme 
 diate report on "Surgery in the Zone of Advance" when there 
 was no advance, while an officer of ten years experience as a 
 
122 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 hospital-administrator in the Canal Zone remained a power 
 less lieutenant: the system had less regard for individual 
 training and qualification than for preserving its own in 
 tegrity. 
 
 The only disease widely prevalent was homesickness. A 
 runaway boy with whom Andy made friends was a rough 
 young soldier from Cincinnati. He had quarreled with his 
 father and vowed never to communicate with him; but, once 
 the dreary life of the winter camp secured its effect, he wrote. 
 Andy was with him when the answer came, that boy s first 
 news from his home since he left it, many months before. 
 
 "It s pop s writing, all right," he said. 
 
 He tore the letter open and began joyously to read it aloud. 
 Then he crushed it between his great hands : it contained the 
 news that his mother had died twelve weeks ago. 
 
 "I m on guard-duty to-night," he said dully. That was 
 all he said : "I ve got to do guard-duty to-night." 
 
 Andy s eyes filled. "I know I can fix it with your captain 
 to get you relieved." 
 
 The soldier faced him. "No, thanks. I m going through 
 with this thing with the whole damned business: that s 
 what I m here for." 
 
 "Isn t there," asked Andy, thinking of his own home 
 "isn t there anything I can do?" 
 
 The soldier emptied his pockets of their contents: five 
 hundred francs in dirty, half-torn notes. 
 
 "Well," he said, "I had a little run of luck at craps to-day. 
 I d be glad if you could get me a money-order for this, or 
 something. I guess the old man can use a little now." He 
 turned away, but not before Andy had heard him gulp: 
 "God! When are they goin to let us fight?" 
 
 The lesser officers that Andy talked with tried to turn their 
 homesickness into a joking commentary on their life here: 
 "Siberia hasn t got anything on Somewhere, " grinned a 
 lieutenant "except for whiskers and salt-mines. I ve got a 
 gasoline-lamp that explodes ten times for me, a mere lieu 
 tenant, and I can t guess how many times for a general, but 
 when the gas runs out and sets fire to the room, everything 
 
VICTOEIOUS 
 
 is warm and comfortable until the regimental fire-department 
 butts in. Then the only way to keep near blood-heat s to drink 
 this brunette liquid that the angels call le noir." 
 
 Andy saw one soldier exhaust his flash-lamp watching a 
 Red Cross woman canteen-worker on a night when the camp 
 lights failed, yet never approach her. He heard another ad 
 dress some comrades: 
 
 "Damn it, there s a damned sign up there says there s goin 
 to be one o those damned church-services in the damned town- 
 square Sunday morning with our damned sky-pilot presidin . 
 I used to go to the damned things at home sometimes, and 
 Fm damned if I m not goin to this one here." 
 
 Ankle deep in the mud of a village street and huddled un 
 der the eaves of a dripping cottage were three men, of a late 
 afternoon, to whom Andy listened. 
 
 "I ve been up to Paris," said the first, "an I got out tudy- 
 sweet. Heard a hell of a lot about Paris before I went 
 there; but you take it from me, kid, it s old Philadelphia has 
 the prettiest women in the world." 
 
 The second man snorted. "Philadelphia ?" he said. "How 
 about Denver, old top?" 
 
 The third man demanded: "Say, you fellows, speakin o 
 real folks, was either of you guys ever in my home-town? 
 I come from Kansas City, I do." 
 
 When Andy moved on, there was every prospect of a fight 
 over the question of what American city produces the highest 
 degree of beauty. 
 
 These and many other men in the army were in a purgatory 
 of unremitting discomfort. The billets were seriously over 
 crowded; a shipment of boots, overcoats and other articles of 
 clothing proved to be of odd sizes; instead of feeding itself 
 the Expeditionary Force was compelled to consume enormous 
 quantities of French supplies, and the short-rationed French 
 peasants knew it and grumbled. 
 
 There were all sorts of stories current, some reflecting on 
 the good manners of American generals, others on the fairness 
 of the Frenchthat they gouged our men on everything they 
 
124: VICTOKIOUS H 
 
 bought. Among these asseverations, the patent one was thati 
 French officers acting as instructors at the camp were dis 
 placed by untried Americans, and there was a general belief 
 that the staffs of the French and American armies were, be 
 cause of this and other disconcerting events, upon only the 
 most formal terms. 
 
 Letters and papers from home distressed Andy with their 
 assertions that no decision had yet been reached on field guns, 
 and that contracts had been awarded only recently for ma 
 chine guns. In the meanwhile the men in the various can 
 tonments were getting their training from blue-prints and 
 wooden models of the gun that was yet to be manufactured. 
 
 Andy felt desperately the urge to do something, something 
 to make the folks back home understand the terrible neces 
 sity for haste, and yet at the same time he realized how futile 
 his efforts would be, how ineffectual his pen against the com 
 placent crust of a vast, slow-moving, highly-organized govern 
 mental department. 
 
 The further Andy sought and the more he thought, the 
 greater was his bewilderment. For some of the conditions, 
 at home as well as abroad, more or less valid excuses might 
 be found ; he made due allowance for the fallibility of human 
 judgment, for the bigness of the task, for our unpreparedness, 
 and for our lack of military experience. And yet when the 
 discounts were made and excuses all registered the unex 
 plained totality was, to Andy, overwhelming. All authorities 
 agreed that artillery was the vital essential in trench warfare, 
 that unless the infantry was adequately supported by artillery 
 it could mean only one thing slaughter. Yet ! Andy threw 
 up his hands in despair. An expeditionary force made up of 
 men as fine and brave and young and exalted as ever went forth 
 in the cause of righteousness, asking only that they might 
 strike a blow for their precious democratic ideals, these 
 men Andy s brothers from home were they to be needlessly 
 sacrificed? That was what it would mean if they went in 
 unsupported by adequate artillery. Such a situation was un 
 believable ! 
 
VICTOKIOUS 125 
 
 We had been buying aeroplanes from Italy, but to add to 
 Andy s distress, he was told that Italy could sell us no more. 
 He made a visit to one of our chief aeroplane schools, and to 
 his amazement learned that there were so few planes that a 
 lesson in practise flying was limited to ten minutes. It didn t 
 require an expert to know that at this rate it would take 
 many months to develop an ace. 
 
 Andy was as nearly hopeless as he had ever been in his 
 young life ragingly, desperately hopeless, for while we 
 muffed and muddled, Germany was preparing for her greatest 
 offensive. 
 
 Andy sought the barn in which Chrissly was quartered. It 
 was a low stone building with a slit for a window in the low 
 damp loft where men were billeted and whence they descended 
 by a ladder, to the ground on which the owner s cows had 
 their home. Into the muddy street, from the dark doorway, 
 there rolled the smell of housed cattle. All the human dwellers 
 in the place were lined up outside under such protection from 
 the rain as was afforded by the sodden eaves. They stamped 
 their broken boots; they flapped their arms; their faces and 
 fingers were blue with cold, and their thin clothes fluttered 
 about them. Somebody was always coughing: an infection 
 they called "Trench-throat" caused recurrent spasmodic con 
 tractions of the larynx. Some of the hardier had taken off 
 their jackets and were hunting in the seams for lice. 
 
 All up and down the curving village street were similar 
 groups. 
 
 "It s true," he said to Chrissly "what you told me is true." 
 
 Chrissly blew a visible blast upon his aching hands. "Sure 
 it s true, Brown," he said. He stamped his feet, bending his 
 body from side to side, and trying to drag over his wrists the 
 too short sleeves of his blouse. "We don t mind the trenches ; 
 we all want to fight still ; but f er why, if they re not goin to 
 let us fight, don t they send us winter clothes?" 
 
126 VICTORIOUS 
 
 There was a wiry little man beside him, in whose eyes 
 burned the fire of fever. 
 
 "An why don t they give us our pay?" he demanded. "We 
 ain t seen a cent for months, we ain t." 
 
 "The folks at home is all right," said Chrissly "the real 
 folks but you d ought to let them know the troos, Brown. 
 Somebody s got to do it; and the brass hats over here can t 
 make the brass hats at home do nothin or else they don t try 
 none." 
 
 "Cheese it \" hissed the wiry man. "Provost !" 
 
 His fevered eyes had caught sight of an officer, the local 
 provost marshal, coming through the mud. The officer passed, 
 his chin up, his eyes fixed before him. He wore heavy boots 
 and a warm overcoat. 
 
 Heels clicked. The men came to soldierly attention; they 
 stiffly saluted. The officer, still looking rigidly ahead, made, 
 in response, an abortive upward movement with his crooked 
 right hand. 
 
 Not a word of any sort was uttered until he was out of 
 earshot. Then the men gathered about Andy and told him 
 over again the things he already knew. 
 
 VI 
 
 One night, by a candle, in an uncarpeted inn-room, he 
 wrote to Sylvia: 
 
 "I am going to do my duty, as you saw it and as I saw it ; 
 but it s a hard duty. If I could only fight! . . . 
 
 "We weren t ready. And after all these months of being 
 in the war, we aren t ready now. The few men we ve got here 
 want to fight enlisted men and line-officers; but whatever s 
 responsible for the A. E. F. s clothes and food and arms and 
 ammunition somebody or something must be responsible ! 
 hasn t turned a hand to get these things over here. It s all a 
 terrible muddle. 
 
 "I ll write, if one fellow s writing can help. . . . 
 
 "I believe I couldn t do it if it wasn t for you. You re like 
 a sort of Joan of Arc to me. You are Joan of Arc. . . . 
 
VICTORIOUS 127 
 
 You have such faith, and you re so brave. You don t seem 
 ever to doubt. That makes me brave and faithful; if I were 
 more worthy of you, it would make me so as I d never doubt, 
 too. I think about you as if you were the whole spirit of 
 France and America the Spirit of Democracy. I ve always 
 wanted to tell you this and never had the nerve. But I can 
 put it in a letter, anyhow. . . ." 
 
 He placed the missive in a stamped envelope and addressed 
 it to her. But he did not send it. He carried it with him, next 
 his heart. 
 
 VII 
 
 He went to the aviation-stations and met the head of our 
 aviation-service in France. A tall, broad-shouldered, black- 
 haired man with an aggressive jaw and the brow of an eagle, 
 this officer had been goaded beyond the last limits of military 
 reticence. He had given up his hardly-won position as counsel 
 to a great corporation for a colonelcy in the expeditionary 
 forces, and, since he had a life-long knowledge of flying, was 
 placed in his present position ; but he was checked by superiors 
 with but little knowledge of the air, and the red tape of the 
 regular army was killing him. He put his case with the 
 blunt frankness of the hopeless: 
 
 "I have to answer for the A. E. F/s aviation-service: the 
 staff won t give me the power to demand improvement, and 
 the War Department s aircraft-management won t give me 
 the material. Every day lost means a loss of American lives 
 and American money and the prolongation of the war. The 
 other day I cabled Washington: For God s sake, let me see 
 just one of your promised 25,000 planes that will probably 
 cost me my place." 
 
 Andy had never seen a face so full of heartbreak. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Garcia was in the anteroom of the press-division s offices. 
 He was trying to talk to a thin, excitable French journalist 
 Ferlet, the same man that had been with Andy at the siU 
 
128 VICTOBIOUS 
 
 of the assemblage-plant, along the projected lines of com 
 munication. 
 
 "Here, Brown," said the lieutenant, "tell me what this 
 lemon wants, will you?" 
 
 Ferlet, with a hail of gestures, repeated his request. 
 
 "He says," Andy interpreted, "that the French newspapers 
 want to know what to call our men." 
 
 "Call em? Call em Americans. That s what they are." 
 
 "But he means a nickname. He represents a sort of French 
 press-club. He says the French people must have a sobriquet 
 for us a term of affection, he calls it. They have poilu for 
 their own fellows, he says ; Tommy* for the British and jasse 
 and What s that? Oh, yes! and piotte for the Belgians. 
 He says our men don t like Sammee. " 
 
 "They don t," nodded Garcia. 
 
 "And then," pursued Andy, "he says" Andy questioned 
 the Frenchman to corroborate his memory of something that 
 Ferlet had just told him; Ferlet nodded "he says of 
 course, I don t believe he s correct, but he says the French 
 newspapers were told in a very high American quarter 
 those are his words not to use Teddy. He says that s the 
 word the people had adopted, but a higE American quar 
 ter" 
 
 "That s right," said Garcia. He was blinking into space, 
 in the way he had, when hurrying over rough places. "Tell 
 him to call em Americans." 
 
 "But what s the objection" 
 
 Garcia was standing by a desk. He brought the palm of 
 a hand upon it with a bang. 
 
 "We re not here to pick fancy names for the French peo 
 ple," he cried. "Tell him to call us Yanks, then." 
 
 "He says the French can t pronounce it," Andy reported. 
 
 "Then tell him this is my busy day," said Garcia. 
 
 Andy made a polite version of the dismissal. When the 
 Frenchman had left, disconsolate, Garcia asked: 
 
 "Now, what s your trouble, eh?" 
 
 "I d like to see Major Curtis." 
 
 Garcia drew together suspicious brows. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 129 
 
 "He s tied up in a conference." 
 
 "I ll wait." 
 
 "He can t see you." 
 
 "Isn t he the chief of this bureau ?" asked Andy. 
 
 "I m in charge of it. What do you want to see him about ?" 
 
 It was difficult to be propitiatory, but upon propitiation 
 Andy was determined : 
 
 "I want to see him about a lot of things a clothing-story, 
 and an ammunition-story and an aviation-story." 
 
 The lieutenant s florid face stiffened. "Have you been to. 
 Tours?" 
 
 "Tours and Issoudun." 
 
 "How d you get a pass?" 
 
 "The provost marshal at the camp extended the one I had 
 here." 
 
 Garcia put out a clawlike hand. "Let me see it." Andy 
 surrendered the rubber-stamped paper. "Come in here," said 
 Garcia, as he looked at it. He led the way to his office and 
 carefully closed the door. "If any one comes, tell em to 
 wait," he commanded the orderly that he left outside. Then, 
 with disconcertingly unusual heartiness, he asked Andy to 
 sit down. "Now, then," he said, cocking his feet on the desk, 
 "tell me all about it, old man." 
 
 "It s a fact," stipulated the cautious Andy, taking the in 
 dicated chair, "that you represent Major Curtis?" 
 
 "Sure it is. I m in charge to-day, and what I say goes." 
 
 "Well, then," said Andy and poured out his entire story 
 of the American camp. He had determined to play his game 
 openly. 
 
 Garcia picked his teeth and listened. His face gave no 
 indication of either approval or disapproval. 
 
 "Then what?" he asked. 
 
 "Then what?" Andy echoed. 
 
 "Then you went to the aviation-stations, didn t you?" 
 
 "Yes," said Andy, "and here s what I found out there; it 
 wouldn t be fair to quote my authority, but it was the best : 
 I found out that there isn t a trace over here of the $640,000,- 
 000 for aircraft construction that Congress appropriated away 
 
130 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 last June. I found out that the automobile manufacturers, 
 the fellows given complete control of production, are trying 
 to build planes around this Liberty motor, instead of copying 
 approved types, and won t have developed one solitary fight 
 ing-plane by the end of next summer." 
 
 He paused, but Garcia remaining silent, he went on: 
 
 "By the end of next summer we won t have a single Amer 
 ican-made chasse in France, and not a single heavy bomber. 
 They say they re going to make six hundred De Haviland 
 Fours, and I got it from the best sources that we wouldn t 
 have seventy-five of them by August. One or two machines 
 are said to be on their way here, sent uninspected because 
 of an overseas order. We re going to try to buy from the 
 French and English, who can t afford to sell. The whole 
 thing looks bad, and there s evidently some one over here 
 who s business it is to see that nobody makes a fuss about it." 
 
 That deeper flush which was a danger-signal had entered 
 into Garcia s cheeks. He moved his toothpick. 
 
 "We haven t got the men," Andy continued. "What men 
 we have got are not equipped and are not regularly paid. 
 Their home-mail s held up, they re poorly clothed, and their 
 training s virtually stopped. There s not a department that s 
 not in nearly as bad a fix as the aviation. We ll lose out to 
 the Boche unless these things are remedied. If the public 
 learns the facts, it will bring Washington round in time to 
 win the war. I m going to tell the public the facts." 
 
 Garcia s feet were jerked from the desk-top. "That s in 
 formation of value to the enemy !" 
 
 "If the American people don t get it, they ll be licked," 
 said Andy calmly. 
 
 Garcia snapped his long fingers. "How do you think you ll 
 get it across? You know well enough we won t pass a line 
 of it." 
 
 Andy rose. "That s what I wanted to get your decision on," 
 he said. He started for the door. 
 
 "Wait a minute !" 
 
 Andy looked back. Garcia s gaze was almost white. Over 
 His prominent cheek-bones the skin was twitching. 
 
VICTOEIOUS 131 
 
 "You know we can send you home/ lie said. 
 
 "And you know/ said Andy, "that I can take my story in 
 my head along with me." 
 
 "Wait a minute!" Garcia for a second time commanded. 
 
 "Do you understand that what you re going to try to do is a 
 violation of army regulations?" 
 
 There was a row of books on Garcia s desk. From it Andy 
 drew a copy of the blue-bound manual of field service. He 
 opened it at its eighth section. 
 
 "That s my authority/ he said. 
 
 Garcia s restraint shattered from him. With a sweep of 
 his right hand he knocked the little book to the floor. 
 
 "To hell with that!" he cried. "I don t give a damn 
 for that ! I tell you once and for all : if you try this thing 
 on, I ll get you and get you right! Mind you, now" 
 he raised a prophetic fist "I ve had trouble enough with 
 you, and I m gettin tired talkin . You can t do this thing 
 if you try, and if you do try, I ll get you !" 
 
 "Good afternoon," said Andy. 
 
 IX 
 
 Who were truly representative of the war-meaning of Amer 
 ica : the private soldiers, eager to forget their undeserved and 
 unnecessary hardships and to give their lives for democracy 
 they, or the secret forces for which Garcia spoke? Those 
 would face death gladly, these would watch the sacrifice with 
 cynical laughter. Was democracy a lie ? Was all this muddle 
 the true expression of civilization, was this man "the reason 
 able creature" at his highest development? The instalment- 
 plan Universal History on the center-table at home taught 
 how England went to war with Spain because of Jenkins ear ; 
 were we at war for less idealistic reasons than Andy had sup 
 posed when he left Americus, and was Garcia an agent of cor- 
 ruptionists ? 
 
 After all his efforts at growth, Andy had not added a cubit 
 to his stature ; he was still much of the boy that most of those 
 soldiers at the camp were, and it was toward them that, like 
 
132 VICTORIOUS 
 
 calling unto like, he swung. His religion was the boy s re 
 ligion, something accepted with faith so unquestioning as 
 rarely to demand any thought about religion once the accept 
 ance had been accomplished; but now he began to see these 
 two phases of the American effort, the great and good side 
 and the side small and evil, as creating an issue essentially 
 religious, the ancient gnostic issue between right and wrong. 
 
 It would be so much easier for him if he could only fight. 
 Doctors were fallible. . . . 
 
 Still boyishly, he that evening wrote and posted a long let 
 ter containing all the information that he had gathered con 
 cerning conditions in the A. E. F. It suggested that these 
 were ills that should be known by the persons in power in 
 order to bring about correction, yet ills that could easily be, 
 and probably were, hidden from the notice of the officials, 
 concerned with so vast plans as to have small time for details. 
 This letter he addressed to the general commanding the 
 American forces in France. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 DEVOUTLY DEVOTED TO TROUBLE 
 
 ANDY wrote that letter in his character of a correspondent 
 representing the free press of America and officially accred 
 ited by the War Department to the United States Army. He 
 wrote out of the sense of a dual duty : to help win the war and 
 to secure fair treatment for the private soldiers upon whom, 
 in the last analysis, must rest the burden of battle. In what 
 he believed to be the joint cause of America and of America s 
 enlisted men, he drew a brief that ought, he felt, to necessitate 
 an investigation. Then, having thus appealed to Caesar, he 
 realized that there was nothing to do but wait Caesar s decision. 
 
 It was no easy task. Sylvia s tour lengthened itself, and 
 she did not write : he had to be content with distant dreams 
 of her. Blunston cabled him, "Do your duty," which Andy 
 conceived himself as already doing, and sent a letter, develop 
 ing that phrase, which did not reach its destination until after 
 the duty, as both agreed in seeing it, was done. Andy was 
 aware that, from so busy and exalted a personage as him to 
 whom the appeal had been made no reply should be expected 
 soon, so he expended his young enthusiasm in compositions 
 addressed to Sylvia, but never sent, and in epistles to his 
 mother, in which he recanted from all his early ideals of 
 woman as a creature of idleness and exalted the figure of the 
 woman that works. 
 
 Owen Evans grew daily more pessimistic. When Andy, still 
 too timid to tell of his appeal, would seek to find comfort by 
 hinting at the good points of the person to whom that appeal 
 had been directed, Evans would snort skepticism. 
 
 "I think he d be all right," said Andy, "if the War Depart 
 ment would only hurry men and supplies." 
 
 133 
 
J34 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 The mysterioiis and magnificent McGregor was more of a 
 comfort in every way. His optimism was tonic, in spite of 
 Andy s doubts and mental reservations. His friend from 
 Chicago knew the most expensive dining places, as well as the 
 old and out-of-the-way ones, though he declared them much 
 inferior to those of the city of his enthusiasm. He enjoyed, 
 immensely, taking Andy from place to place, to the obvious 
 cafes de la Paix and de Paris, to Paillard s, in the house 
 where Eossini used to live, and to Cairo s and the Volney and 
 the Ambassadeurs. They dined seldom at the Eitz because 
 McGregor had a prejudice against eating in the hotel in which 
 he slept, a prejudice that many men who travel much, share 
 with him. He knew what to order and took great pride in 
 making an artistic as well as an ample selection, with the 
 result that his dinners were always as good as they were long. 
 
 Andy was too young and too healthy not to enjoy them 
 fully and uncritically. Indeed, he enjoyed them and his 
 host s never-failing, though sometimes ancient anecdotes, so 
 much that he first fell to describing to McGregor, with back 
 ward-looking fondness, Americus- and the home-life there, 
 and thence passed easily and happily to more than a mere 
 mention of Sylvia : except in matters of business, Andy always 
 had to talk of what was nearest his heart, and when the elder 
 man admitted that his meeting with Sylvia had created an 
 honest admiration for her beauty, the younger replied by 
 praises of her character that could not fail to betray more than 
 Andy would, as yet, wholly admit to his inner consciousness. 
 The contractor encouraged his talk, said that he was a re- 
 newer of youth and a companion among strangers, received 
 a full picture of his guest s past and present and, respecting 
 the boy s pride, even submitted to be himself an occasional 
 guest at such dinners as Andy could provide by way of return. 
 Something, however, kept Andy s lips sealed upon all that he 
 feared about affairs in the A. E. F. : he rarely spoke of the war 
 to McGregor and then, though he could not have told why, 
 only in the most guarded terms. 
 
 So passed a Christmas unlike any within Andy s experience ; 
 
VICTORIOUS 135 
 
 so passed a lonely and homesick New Year s Day, and still 
 more days, and still there was no echo from the appeal that 
 Andy had written. The Foreign Office told the correspond 
 ents, in more and more details, of German plans for a stagger 
 ing offensive, which had come into French possession, but 
 which France would be in a hard plight either to frustrate or 
 repulse; evidences of democracy s muddle increased as an ink- 
 drop spreads upon blotting-paper; the strain on the military 
 liaison was serious ; it was growing daily more difficult to con 
 ceal American delays from a French populace daily growing 
 more suspicious; at camp there was, for encouragement, only 
 speculation upon the irrefrangible spirit of the line-officers 
 and enlisted men. 
 
 The time came when Andy felt he could bear no more in 
 silence. It came in Paris, at five o clock of a January after 
 noon, when he was seated with Evans between a bock and the 
 windows of the Cafe Napolitain, dully watching the endless 
 boulevard-procession of new officers and old reformes and of 
 women wounded in the women s way and never to be cured. 
 He blurted out the bare statement of what he had done. 
 
 Evans was at first incredulous ; then he burst into laughter, 
 but he had not meant it for unkindly laughter, and, when he 
 saw the hurt in Andy s frank eyes, he apologized. 
 
 "Why, you couldn t have hoped for an answer!" Evans 
 nevertheless insisted. "What was in your brief, anyhow ?" 
 
 Andy told him, beginning with conditions at the camp and 
 ending with the ominous prophecy about the aeroplane sit 
 uation. 
 
 It was the latter that especially interested Evans. "Some 
 body over here to hush up the aircraft scandal ?" he repeated 
 when Andy had concluded with an expression of his fears in 
 that matter. "Well, I just guess there is, and he s the orig 
 inal Mr. Fix-it: the American people haven t the ghost of a 
 chance to hear the truth about aeroplanes. I ve run into the 
 man a couple of times, and I think he s the pleasantest crook 
 I ever met. You know him : I ve heard you speak of him often 
 lately, but it wasn t any business of mine to put jou wise." 
 
136 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Who is it?" asked Andy, but he knew the answer with a 
 sudden clarity. 
 
 "B. Frank McGregor/ said Evans. 
 
 Swiftly Andy recalled his first distrust of the contractor. 
 He recalled how McGregor had always admitted his interest in 
 aviation. 
 
 "I don t like to think it" he said. He felt himself look* 
 ing guilty. "He s been a regular prince to me." 
 
 "Sure he is : the prince-business is his business. That s how 
 he lives. Besides, I guess he likes you : crooks are human be 
 ings. But don t you make any mistake about it : I ve got it 
 from half a dozen sources, only nobody can get it printed: 
 McGregor s the man." 
 
 Andy was beleaguered by both mortification and the sense 
 of betrayal. He had failed of being the keen-sighted journal 
 ist of his ambition, and his kinder impulses were imposed 
 upon and flouted by a man that had approached him in 
 friendly guise: McGregor s motive, as thus seen, could have 
 been nothing but a general desire to keep him, as a reporter, 
 unsuspicious. 
 
 "You mean the man is over here just to keep things quiet ?" 
 
 "Just that. It s his game to be pleasant to everybody. But 
 I don t mean he isn t pleasanter to some fellows than to others. 
 If he s been extra pleasant to you, it was probably for your 
 own sake." Evans smiled. "Why shouldn t he be? I like 
 you myself." He would have said more; but his eye was 
 caught by one of the passing pedestrians. He waved his hand. 
 "Hello !" he cried. 
 
 A girl answered him. She was a swarthy slip of a girl with 
 lips vermilion. There was about her something that struck 
 an unfinished chord in Andy s memory. 
 
 Evans rose. 
 
 "Come here," he invited her, cap in hand. To Andy he 
 whispered from a corner of his mouth : "You have to do these 
 things sometimes, my son, in our business. That s Garcia s 
 girl. I met her with him, once. She s got him all tied up, 
 and she talks for a drink." The girl was edging toward them 
 among the sidewalk-tables. "Maybe we ll get some good dope." 
 
VICTORIOUS % 137 
 
 She was beside him now. Prom a great muff she drew one 
 slim hand and offered it to Evans. Her profession was un 
 mistakable, but she was very pretty. Andy remembered her 
 at last : she was the girl that he had seen with Garcia at the 
 restaurant on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. 
 
 "Jacquette," said Evans, speaking his easy inaccurate 
 French, "this is Mr. Brown. Sit down. What will you have ?" 
 
 Red to his eartops, Andy felt that he discovered himself as 
 unaccustomed to this sort of company and was the more po 
 lite because he feared his consequent awkwardness might ap 
 pear as discourtesy. The fact that such women received so 
 little deference seemed to him to make deference incumbent. 
 Still agitated by Evans matter-of-fact accusation of Mc 
 Gregor, the boy was unprepared for novel society : he saw her 
 confident assumption of a place at their table, saw her order 
 and sip a bock, heard her chatter laughingly with his compan 
 ion ; but he realized little of what was passing until Jacquette, 
 skilfully directed by Evans, was saying: 
 
 "Ah, that poor man, M. Garcia! He loves me so much. 
 Attend : I shall read you the letter that he sent me the other 
 day." 
 
 She drew a big purse from her big muff and an envelope 
 from the purse. She read to them with delighted giggles and 
 extravagant gestures that mimicked a buffoon lover of the 
 burlesque-stage. It appeared that Garcia had written for an 
 appointment and that she was even now late for it. 
 
 Andy felt that this was a keyhole-performance. It was 
 presently evident that Evans shared, in his degree, the feeling, 
 for he soon interrupted : 
 
 "You ought not to read us those things. They are confi 
 dential/ 
 
 Jacquette only giggled. "What matter ? A man like that !" 
 
 "But you will keep the appointment?" 
 
 "Puff !" The girl tightened her mouth and tilted her nose. 
 "When I am so disposed. There is no hurry : he always waits." 
 She ordered another bock. "And now the news that he writes 
 to me. Attend again, messieurs." 
 
 She resumed her reading of Garcia s letter. In a single 
 
138 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 sentence, he informed her that the American Expeditionary 
 Force would, on the morrow or the day following, end its 
 period of training and take over, in real earnest, a sector of 
 the trench-line northeast of Toul. She giggled still more as 
 she read the appended afterthought: 
 
 "But of course you must not tell this, for we have orders 
 that it is to be known to nobody, and I tell you only to show 
 you how much I love you/ , 
 
 Probably never in her life was Jacquette dismissed so sum 
 marily as she was dismissed by Evans as soon as she com 
 municated this unexpected piece of news. 
 
 II 
 
 In the utter darkness before the next day s dawn, Andy, 
 cloaked from chin to heels in his raincoat, and looking twice 
 his natural bulk under the layers of jerseys, shirts and under 
 clothes that wrapped him, tramped along the empty streets 
 to the Gare de TEst. 
 
 That was a strange Paris which lay about him, an empty 
 Paris. The rue Yivienne was like a prison-corridor ; in front 
 of the corner-cafes, the chairs and tables were piled head-high ; 
 he was the only living thing that moved along the Grands 
 Boulevards. Here and there, a street-lamp nickered wanly 
 like the gutting candle in a sickroom. The great gray walls 
 tossed back the noisy echoes of his hobnailed boots; had he 
 spoken, it would have been in a whisper. Everywhere there 
 brooded the spirit of expectancy. The very shutters of the 
 closed shops on the Boulevard de Magenta suggested to Andy 
 the eyelids of a man that veils his sight when he holds his 
 breath. It was as if all France, exhausted by forty months of 
 war, leaned, half-fainting, against her ramparts in wait for 
 such help as America could at last supply. 
 
 All the way down in the train that spirit of tense expectancy 
 prevailed. Andy and his two companions Evans and Innis, 
 a writer who had for some time been the representative in 
 France of a well-known magazine thought it could be read 
 even in the faces of old farmers as they looked from their 
 
VICTORIOUS 139 
 
 work to the racing engine, in the eyes of muddy pollus crowd 
 ing the way-stations. It was evident that, overnight, the news 
 had somehow spread; on the lips of their French fellow- 
 passengers it at length became articulate: 
 
 "Is it true that the Americans are going into the trenches 
 at last?" 
 
 The Americans themselves knew it the soldiers that were 
 first to be moved to new villages and then marched forward 
 for fifteen miles and into the fighting-line. By the time of 
 the correspondents arrival at Neufchateau, groups of these 
 men were saying good-by to the comrades that they were to 
 leave behind them and the French folk among whom they had 
 lived. What most struck Andy was how thoroughly they knew 
 it. There was no brag in their words, and yet there was no 
 weakness in their hearts. The conversation was casual; it 
 broke with an abrupt: 
 
 "Well, I guess I gotta be getting along. Good-by / 
 
 In the muddy street, men in khaki shook hands with men in 
 khaki, as they might have parted a year since, after a busi 
 ness trip together. An American soldier would clasp an old 
 householder on the shoulder, or bow gravely to the house 
 holder s wife. Not a few tossed French children into the air, 
 and laughed into their faces, and tried to say ff Au revoir" 
 and hid the fact that they were thinking of other children in 
 another land that they might never see again. 
 
 The correspondents looked the other way. They hurried to 
 the press-bureau. 
 
 Here, around a stove in the center of the room, sat three 
 censors. 
 
 "Now, then," said Innis, "are you going to let us see this 
 show?" 
 
 A momentary pause succeeded that question. The officers 
 looked at one another, embarrassed. Then they let fall a lit 
 tle hail-shower of apologies. The American troops, they said, 
 were going in under the French, and the French commanding- 
 general would not allow correspondents to accompany them 
 to the trenches. 
 
 Evans stormed; Innis argued; Andy, whom these gave no 
 
140 VICTORIOUS 
 
 chance to speak, grew redder and redder. It was no use: 
 There was only one appeal. The correspondents must go to 
 Chaumont and lay their petition before Lieutenant-Colonel 
 O Malley, chief of the Military Intelligence. 
 
 "Fine mess, isn t it?" fumed Evans. "The American free 
 press under the control of a bunch of detectives !" 
 
 But, as Evans put it, they got as much material that after 
 noon and evening for their newspapers as could be furnished 
 next day were the limitations of the censorship to remain in 
 force. 
 
 ill 
 
 It was a calmly smiling O Malley that received them in his 
 barnlike quarters, early next morning after their cold thirty- 
 miles ride, but the smiles preceded only an expression of 
 hopelessness. It was granted that the petition asked nothing 
 save justice, but it was reiterated that, though an effort was 
 being made to arrange matters, the Americans were going in 
 under a French general and that this general s will must be 
 law. 
 
 "But this is history!" pleaded Innis. 
 
 "I know it," the chief agreed. 
 
 "Then," Evans assumed, "the status of our men under the 
 French is to be precisely that of the Portuguese under the 
 English?" 
 
 He repeated a story to the effect that the Portuguese had 
 recently tried a raid and that some of them were captured. 
 Presently the captives came back with a German note ad 
 dressed to their English general : "Thank you, but when we 
 need any of these, we ll come and take them." 
 
 It was clear that the chief of the Intelligence Department 
 did not like the comparison. He said he would see what he 
 could do. 
 
 After tedious hours he sent for them to say that the French 
 had changed their minds : the American newspaper-men were 
 to have a sight of the start of the march of the American 
 troops from a point about nine miles behind their destination : 
 more might not be asked. 
 
VICTOEIOUS 141 
 
 "That for us," said Innis to Evans, as the party left the 
 office "to you and me that were in trenches and under fire 
 before the censors smelt salt water east of Atlantic City! 
 What do you know about it, anyhow ?" 
 
 "I know this/ Evans answered : "I m going back to Paris 
 to-night. All we could see to-morrow d be a little more of 
 what we saw yesterday at Neufchateau. I ve got all I need for 
 my story. If these sap-heads think they can keep me down 
 here for a parade, they re mistaken, that s all. Come on over 
 to the station. We ll eat there : then, if you fellows want to 
 stay and be suckers, you can see me on my train at least." 
 
 Andy and Innis had decided to remain and see what could 
 be seen of the march-out. Both held to this resolve through 
 dinner, and Innis never altered it. It was something that 
 happened immediately after the meal which changed Andy: 
 two or three staff-officers were on the station-platform; they 
 said they were arranging for a special car to be attached to 
 the Paris train and to carry with it the general to whom Andy 
 had addressed his still iinanswered report. 
 
 "Do you suppose," asked Andy, as the three reporters 
 walked off : "that he would go away the night before his men 
 went into action?" 
 
 Evans shrugged. "You heard what they told us," said he. 
 "He might have some conference on with Petain." 
 
 Swathed in their raincoats, they paced the platform.. Pres 
 ently, in a shadowed doorway, Evans detected Garcia. 
 
 "What do you suppose he s skulking around here for?" 
 asked Innis. 
 
 "Keeping an eye on us," said Evans. "We ll let him know 
 we re on to him anyhow." He waved to Garcia almost de 
 risively. 
 
 Realizing himself observed, the lieutenant beckoned : 
 
 "Brown, come here a minute. I want to see you." 
 
 "More trouble for you, Andy," said Evans. 
 
 Andy feared so, but he obeyed the summons. Garcia, led 
 him to the farthest end of the platform. 
 
 "Going back to Paris ?" he began. 
 
 "I might," said Andy, cautiously non-committal. 
 
142 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 It was dark on the platform, save at such spots as were di 
 rectly tinder the few electric-lights. Garcia s face was there 
 fore not easily read,, but there was a snarl in his voice as, with 
 a monosyllabic command, he produced from his pocket several 
 pieces of paper and thrust them toward his victim: 
 
 "Here !" 
 
 Andy took the papers. "What s this ?" 
 
 "If s your letter to the general." Garcia gave vent to a 
 short laugh. "I told you you couldn t go over our heads. You 
 poor boob, you didn t think you d get an answer, did you ?" 
 
 He turned on his heel. A moment later, he was lost in the 
 night. 
 
 Andy walked slowly to the nearest lamp and looked at the 
 crumpled sheets. They were indeed the hard results of his 
 investigations : somehow, his petition must have got no farther 
 than the headquarters of the Military Intelligence. 
 
 IV 
 
 There was one more chance. The general would be aboard 
 this night-train to Paris. Should Andy remain and see the 
 march-out, or take the train and see the general in person ? 
 
 The choice was hard. He had come to France to see 
 America in the war; through long months, which darkened 
 into a week s-long night of despondency, he had waited, and 
 now the event was at hand. He was at the age when the ap 
 peal of adventure reaches its strongest, and when adventure 
 means physical action at the age when it is hard to turn 
 one s back on marching men. He ought to see the march-out 
 for his papers sake. He could see the general some other 
 time: he could try to see the general when that personage 
 came to the station. Perhaps nothing would result from an 
 interview anyhow ; Garcia had secured the letter : why not let 
 the matter end there ? Andy felt himself only a reporter, and 
 a poor one : how could a single boy hope to prevail against the 
 will of vast political forces and the workings of a great or 
 ganization the powers of which were dictatorial ? Why should 
 
VICTOKIOUS 143 
 
 he be expected to attempt what none of his companions con 
 templated ? 
 
 Yet he could not excuse himself from the task to which he 
 had set his hand. Now that it appeared his letter had been 
 intercepted, to see the general was more important than to 
 see the march-out. Having had more tastes than one of army- 
 delays, he thought that no formal appointment could be so 
 favorable as this chance meeting. He could not reach such a 
 personage on his passage, surrounded by servants, across the 
 platform : to be reached, he must be sought on the train. If 
 nothing came of it, Andy would at least have done the right 
 thing. That he was one against many could not lessen the 
 justice of his cause or the need for serving it : he ought to go 
 forward precisely because nobody else was going. 
 
 He thought of his mother and of Blunston and, most of all, 
 of Sylvia : he knew what they would counsel. Never doubting 
 that he would at least, as a bearer of War Department cre 
 dentials, be given an interview, he realized that he must do 
 all that one man could for the good of his country. He had 
 a healthy dread of scenes, but he saw himself going to the 
 general as petitioners broke through Roman crowds to gain the 
 ear of Caesar, heard himself argue and plead and explain 
 even began to compose and learn the terms of his appeal. No 
 man has done his duty until he has done all that he can do : 
 until Andy had tried to see the general, he would not have 
 tried his best to do what the best that was in him declared, 
 with unequivocal voice, to be right. 
 
 "Evans," he said when he had rejoined his companions and 
 parried their joking questions about Garcia, "I guess I ll 
 I ll go long with you and see him on the way." 
 
 "Him?" said Evans. "Who?" 
 
 "The general. I ll see him about that letter of mine, you 
 know." 
 
 Evans said he would be glad to have Andy s company. "But 
 I advise you to keep away from his nibs," he added. 
 
 With decision, however, Andy s confidence had revived. 
 
 Innis readily agreed to see them on his return and give 
 
144 VICTORIOUS 
 
 them any details of the march-out of which their immediate 
 journey might deprive them. 
 
 On the train to Paris, an orderly barred Andy from the 
 general s car. 
 
 "He hasn t got no time to talk to reporters," said the or 
 derly. 
 
 Andy scribbled a note. It was a respectful, hopeful, young 
 sort of note. It described its writer as the holder of the War 
 Department appointment that made him an accredited corre 
 spondent, recalled his letter and said that it was about this 
 that Andy wanted to speak. 
 
 The orderly took it grumblingly in. He was gone but a mo 
 ment, during which, however, Andy made desperate efforts to 
 recall the opening words of his speech. 
 
 Then the orderly came back. He was grinning: 
 
 "The general says he needn t see you. And the other fellow 
 says your letter didn t go to the general but to him, and was 
 referred to the press-division for action . . " 
 
 "What did I tell you?" said Evans. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 OF SARAH BROWN, AND OF A YELLOW LETTER FOUND IN A TRUNK 
 
 MINNIE did not write to Andy. She told herself that she 
 had "turned Andy down"; when she passed Sarah Brown on 
 the street, she always inquired for him, but always inquired 
 commiseratingly. Instead of being pleased, she was only 
 piqued by the occasional postcards that he sent her. 
 
 Sarah found herself very lonely, in spite of the boarders 
 now established in her house, but she showed to the world 
 of Americus neither her loneliness nor the pain that she suf 
 fered when inquiries such as Minnie s pricked feelings that 
 none knew she possessed. 
 
 She showed nothing except a sterner face and a little more 
 abstraction in the management of her house. 
 
 There were several letters from Andy now. She began 
 smolderingly to resent that stamp "passed by Censor," which 
 meant that her boy s messages of love must all be revealed to 
 an army officer before they were permitted to go on their way 
 to the eyes for which they had been written ; but she was un- 
 feignedly glad to get them, come how they might. 
 
 He sent money home Andy could not afford to live at the 
 camp, but there had never been a time when he could not help 
 his mother and urged Sarah, since he was doing better than 
 he had expected, to "fire the boarders" ; but Sarah did not fol 
 low this advice. It was in one of these gift-bearing missives 
 that there appeared this paragraph : 
 
 "Tell Mr. Blunston (I haven t time to write two letters to 
 day) that nobody will ever convert the French people to any 
 high-flown ideas about raising the Boche to higher things 
 after this war, or by means of this war. There are a whole 
 lot of things about all sorts of conditions that ought to be 
 
 145 
 
146 VICTORIOUS 
 
 told, but won t be passed, and the French don t see how any 
 good can be done except just whipping the enemy. They 
 think of the Germans as a lot of criminals some must be 
 shot and the rest sent to jail for life. Our enlisted men are 
 splendid just splendid. There s really a great deal more 
 that I d think it well to tell, but can t. Show Mr. Blunston 
 this letter." 
 
 Sarah felt that here was a strange mission, but she regarded 
 its execution as a duty. Blunston, who made punctilious calls, 
 would surely come to see her within a few days. Nevertheless, 
 she decided to brave calling on him with Andy s letter. She 
 dressed with unusual care, but made amends with herself by 
 changing back from a becoming to an unbecoming hat. 
 
 The veteran war-correspondent, somewhat relieved of his 
 doubts concerning the attitude of his protege toward Minnie, 
 had never regretted his sacrifice and had been delighted with 
 Andy s story of the grand review, suffering, indeed, pangs of 
 conscience when he appended his own name to it and sent it 
 forth to its newspapers, after the manner in which he sent all 
 of Andy s copy, as coming, for manifolding, through an agent 
 in this country. He amazedly saw Sarah walk up the flower- 
 bordered walk to the old house, and came out to meet her. 
 
 "We both ought to be proud of Andy, v he said easily: he 
 felt that there might be need of ease. "He is doing excellent 
 work. I only think I oughtn t to take any of the credit for 
 what . . ." 
 
 Sarah showed him the letter and indicated the mysterious 
 paragraph. Blunston read it twice over. 
 
 "It is," he admitted, "a little ... But probably the boy 
 was only in a hurry. He wanted you to bring this to me be 
 cause he hadn t time . . . You see, he says he hadn t." 
 
 In his heart he understood that Andy was beginning to 
 doubt, or would soon begin to doubt, whether all was well with 
 the management of the A. E. P., to know that the censorship 
 would not pass a record of the facts giving rise to any such 
 doubt, and to have taken this means of slipping some hint of 
 the situation under censorial eyes prone to examine only the 
 first and last lines of paragraphs. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 147 
 
 Were there, ahead of Andy, troubles that, though Blunston 
 might have adumbrated them, he had never really foreseen? 
 How, if there were, would Andy meet them? He was, after 
 all, only an inexperienced lad. Suppose that he defied them : 
 how could he win his way through, and how, if he could not, 
 could Blunston feel that he had done Andy aught but an ill 
 turn through the sacrifice of his own ambitions in sending 
 Andy abroad ? Suppose it had to be supposed suppose that 
 Andy succumbed: then, by surrendering his post, Blunston 
 would have betrayed his journalistic trust, have failed in his 
 duty to the public that had a right to information which might 
 thus be suppressed. 
 
 Blunston himself had been seriously wondering about Wash 
 ington s conduct of the war. Andy s message left him won 
 dering. 
 
 II 
 
 Sarah was a little uneasy. She felt that, though the cir 
 cumstances were of one of those masculine sorts which no 
 woman might understand, all was not quite well with her son, 
 and, on her walk home, she sought refuge from the vague pres 
 ent in the certain past. 
 
 She was thinking, as she crossed her threshold, of Andy s 
 earliest days. It was time, she saw by the hall-clock, that she 
 begin to prepare the evening meal for her lodgers, yet she 
 took a candle and climbed to the attic storeroom. There it 
 was that, in the trunk her mother had packed for her daugh 
 ter s wedding- journey, Sarah kept a pasteboard box bound 
 with faded blue ribbon and labeled, in the girlish hand she 
 had forgotten : "Andy s first short dress." 
 
 The light was poor. Her fingers fumbled the snow of dust ; 
 the key that she half-blindly selected from her household 
 bunch grated in the lock to which she applied it. Not until 
 she had lifted the resisting lid did she discover that she had 
 opened the wrong receptacle and that what she was looking 
 into was one of the never examined trunks which previously 
 belonged to her father. 
 
 It was full of letters and the topmost one was endorsed : 
 
148 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Wm. R. Bolingbroke re Tidd house." 
 
 Sarah was reading it before she became aware of her inten 
 tion to do so: 
 
 ". . . and you have been entirely too kind to that shift 
 less family, letting them live there rent-free. They have 
 shown their gratitude by calling the house their own, and if 
 you let them stay much longer without any payment, it will 
 become theirs by what our law calls the Right of Adverse Pos 
 session. ... I can tell you that if Tidd doesn t shake a leg 
 and pay what he owes me, I will proceed against him. . . ." 
 
 The writer, she knew, was Ralph s father, dead these many 
 years. Had her own father, then, been owner of the house 
 now lent to the Red Cross by that younger Bolingbroke whose 
 wife had not asked Sarah to become a worker there? It 
 would have been characteristic of her father s careless gen 
 erosity to let such a piece of property slip through his fingers, 
 and characteristic of his pride never to mention its loss; it 
 was characteristic of her father s daughter this afternoon to 
 bear no resentment because of her deprivation and yet to find 
 silent satisfaction in the knowledge that the place she was 
 barred from had once been her family s own. 
 
 She turned to another trunk. She found the pasteboard 
 box and took out the little pale-blue shoes with pearly but 
 tons. Her needle-roughened fingers smoothed timidly the tiny 
 lace frock that lay beside them. She raised a bit of lace frill 
 ing and laid it against her sallow cheek. . . . 
 
 in 
 
 It was eleven o clock the next morning when she thought 
 that perhaps Ralph Bolingbroke might like to have the let 
 ter: it was useless to her, but he might care for it because, 
 antedating the common use of typewriters, it was in his 
 father s hand. So again she put on her rusty best and went 
 into the business-center of the town. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 149 
 
 Ralph was not in the office of his umbrella-factory; his 
 head-clerk thought his employer might be found at the Red 
 Cross headquarters. Thither Sarah proceeded. 
 
 Only Mrs. Bolingbroke, bursting through her white uniform, 
 was in the Tidd house. There was a fire in the grate of the 
 big workroom and into this the pretty young chairman of the 
 Americus chapter was tossing, by handsful, the contents of a 
 just-arrived packing-box. 
 
 She was raging. She had ordered Minnie Taylor to be here 
 this morning and do some expected unpacking, but Minnie, 
 afraid even to telephone, had sent word by a boy that she felt 
 she ought to go into Doncaster to see the moving-pictures of 
 Mr. Gerard s My Four Years in Germany : Mrs. Ralph rapped 
 the unfortunate messenger s ears. Then, as if it were not 
 enough to have to do the unpacking herself, this box sent 
 in by the Juneville branch, and supposed to contain many- 
 tailed bandages, had been labeled, by some impudent person 
 who should surfer for it, "Freak Bandages," and contained 
 swathings with odd numbers of tails. It was these that Mrs. 
 Bolingbroke was flinging to the flames when Sarah entered. 
 
 For quite a second the caller stood unnoticed in the door 
 way. Then she uttered a conventional cough. 
 
 Mrs. Ralph looked up. "Well, Sarah," she said, "what do 
 you want?" 
 
 At this use of her Christian name by a woman so much 
 younger than herself, who, besides, scarcely knew her, Sarah s 
 frame stiffened. 
 
 "I was looking for your husband, Mrs. Bolingbroke," she 
 said. "They told me " 
 
 "Well, he s not here. Look at these bandages: they re all 
 wrong. Come on and get busy and help me burn them up." 
 
 It was, Sarah reflected, only Mrs. Ralph s way of speaking. 
 She stooped to help and in so doing laid the letter on the floor 
 beside her. 
 
 "What s that?" asked Mrs. Ralph. 
 
 "It s a letter I wanted to show your husband." 
 
 Mrs. Bolingbroke picked it up. "I ll do just as well," she 
 
150 VICTORIOUS 
 
 said : "I don t allow Ralph to have any secrets from me." She 
 read it. Instantly she was on her feet. "What s all this 
 about ?" she demanded. 
 
 Sarah rose more slowly, but she rose. "It s just a letter 
 that I thought" 
 
 "That you thought you could threaten my husband with ?" 
 Mrs. Ralph s face was blazing. "A letter you thought d make 
 you out the owner of this house ? What do you think we are, 
 anyway ?" 
 
 "Mrs. Bolingbroke," began the dumfounded Sarah, "how 
 can you suppose " 
 
 With a swift movement, the infuriated Mrs. Ralph flung 
 the letter upon the fire, where it leaped into instant flame. 
 
 "There!" she shrieked. "That s how much I care about 
 your old letter. Now, what are you going to do about it ? Tell 
 it if you dare, and I ll say there never was such a letter, and 
 we ll see whose word they ll take !" 
 
 Sarah made no reply. She turned her back on the still 
 raging Mrs. Ralph and left the Tidd house. 
 
CHAPTEE X 
 
 HATS OFF: THE FLAG! 
 
 THE nineteenth of January, 1918, is a date that America 
 will remember, for it is a date on which American history 
 was made. 
 
 For some time the hint of what was coming had run back 
 and forth through the camp with waxing imperativeness. That 
 camp had always been a maneuver-field for rumors, but those 
 other rumors were generally short-lived, whereas this contin 
 ued and grew. There were chance words that filtered down 
 ward from general and divisional headquarters, which could 
 mean but one thing; there were preparations, premonitory 
 movements of supply-trains and a gathering-together of im 
 pedimenta, which could have only a single significance. From 
 the farthest huddle of damp huts on a sodden hillside to the 
 last leaking loft in the last muddy village, the word passed 
 among the enlisted men. They were shivering; they knew, 
 as well as their no less neglected line-officers, what had hap 
 pened to their uncertain training; yet, with the increasing 
 assurance that they were finally to fight, eyes brightened, 
 hope was renewed and that unflinching purpose on whose 
 wings they had come to France blotted out the memory of 
 every error of which they were the victims. 
 
 Early on the evening of the eighteenth, Chrissly found 
 Leonie waiting for him in the shadow of the inn-yard s bulg 
 ing wall. Excitement burned in his brown eyes and made hie 
 ruddy cheeks more ruddy; it partially stunned his recently 
 acquired French. 
 
 "There is I have a minute only there is a thing that it 
 is necessary to say to you," he began. 
 
 Nobody was near; the cobbled yard, surrounded with its 
 tiled and mossy buildings, was, save for this man and woman, 
 
 151 
 
153 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 empty. In the last pale light of the winter s day, he devoured 
 with hungry gaze her sinuous form; he saw her level eyes, 
 but noted, too, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts that 
 marked a breathing she could not control. 
 
 "I know it/ she said : "to-morrow you go to fight ; this time 
 it is final/ 
 
 He nodded. "Our outfit s sure to go." 
 
 "And you," she asked: "you want it?" 
 
 "Last year/ said he, "I did not think that I should ever be 
 glad to fight." 
 
 "But now you are glad, hein?" 
 
 "I am glad, Leonie." 
 
 A glint of mischief had remained in her. As it now leaped 
 forth, it bent her red lips into a smile. 
 
 "Glad to leave your French friends that are here, is it not ?" 
 
 "No, no !" Chrissly s hands wanted to go out toward her ; 
 he had to clench them at his sides. "My friends here they 
 are the one thing that makes me want to stay." 
 
 "More than does that Madame Chrissly in the United 
 States?" 
 
 His hands darted toward her, then were stiffened again, 
 with an effort, at his sides. "Please!" he begged. "I want 
 to tell you" 
 
 She had hurt him; she saw that. The smile disappeared, 
 and, in its stead, her face was illuminated by a wonderful 
 tenderness. She reached out and took his tight hands; her 
 cold fingers uncoiled his, which were burning. When she had 
 opened, she clasped them. 
 
 "You are my friend," she said; "all Americans are the 
 friends of France, but of me you especially are my honest 
 friend, and I am yours. Friends must not question each 
 other, and they will not listen to explanations." 
 
 "But, Leonie " He was possessed by the idea that he 
 ought to tell her about Minnie Taylor. 
 
 She released one of his hands and commanded silence by 
 putting pink fingers on his mouth. 
 
 "It is enough," she said, "that we are friends." Confusion 
 lowered his glance, and so he could not see the high sorrow 
 
VICTOKIOUS 153 
 
 that was in her steady gaze. "That is enough," she continued. 
 Somewhere a bugle sounded through the raw twilight. 
 "Go," she concluded, "and fight for France." 
 
 Before he could answer her, she had disappeared. 
 
 It happened as he had said. Next morning he was march 
 ing, and half the soldiers of the wide-flung camp. 
 
 To see those villages and the folk in them was to see a 
 poignant demonstration of what, in that crisis, her western 
 sister meant to France. As Chrissly s regiment swung out of 
 the hamlet in which it had been billeted, the people they 
 were only old men and children and women packed the nar 
 row sidewalks in a solid mass from curb to cottage-walls. 
 Long crepe veils there were, which mourned relatives or lovers 
 sacrificed to the common cause. In timid hands, little boys and 
 girls waved tiny American flags. Back of them were time- 
 twisted gaffers, their gnarled fists shaking their hats high in 
 air; their faces were transfigured as by youth miraculously 
 returned. Housewives and young girls, some bare to the 
 weather, others with only shawls or knitted black capes about 
 their fragile shoulders, raised tremulous fingers that would 
 shut out a picture recalling the memory of those marches 
 from which their own menfolk had never returned; yet the 
 fingers paused before their hearts, and their eyes, through a 
 haze of tears, glowed with exultation. There was not a closed 
 mouth in all the tossing crowd : their voices the piping treble, 
 the broken bass, the sobbing soprano merged in a continuous 
 cheer. 
 
 Chrissly tried to obey orders and walk with eyes front, 
 but he did not succeed. As the regiment swung rhythmically 
 up the street, he looked from side to side. He was looking 
 for Leonie. 
 
 She was not in the laughing group at the entrance to the 
 inn, but he said to himself that she would be beside the inn- 
 yard gate. 
 
 She was not at the gate, and his heart failed him. 
 
154 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Then, a hundred yards farther on, he saw her. 
 
 She had sought a place alone. She was the last -of the 
 crowd, standing at the door of a deserted house. She stood 
 erect, with her splendid head high: he could see the straight 
 line of her tawny throat above her short cape, her firm chin. 
 Her lips had the smile of yesterday, and, though her face was 
 pale, in her eyes shone triumph. 
 
 She waved her hand. . . . He had a quick flash of her 
 whole figure, full-bodied and well-corseted, the black apron 
 over her short skirt, the slightly reddened hands, the deep color 
 in her mobile face, the thick coils of her black hair neatly piled 
 high and held with large shell pins, her luminous eyes shining 
 with sorrow : was the sorrow for him or for France ? 
 
 She was gone. The relentless march had left her behind. 
 
 But he knew now what her heart was saying. It was saying : 
 
 "Somehow for whatever reason you came here and whoever 
 else may elsewhere claim you you are marching for me !" 
 
 in 
 
 It was a gray land on a gray day. The barren fields 
 stretched eastward under a bleak and humid sky. From out 
 that way, fighting through the dense atmosphere, came now 
 the rumble of the endless battles guns. Behind the soldiers 
 the road ran straight and slushy between its miles of poplars ; 
 forward, it entered the very gates of death. 
 
 Gun-carriages crawled along, the steel tubes of the field- 
 artillery dull in the scanty light, the wheels heavy with clog 
 ging masses of blue clay, the wagon-tongues creaking, the 
 mules straining, the drivers cracking whips and curses. The 
 infantry, at route-step, marched with feet mud-shod, their 
 American faces at odd variance with their English helmets, 
 the steam rising in clouds from their soaking uniforms. 
 
 Whenever they passed through a village, cottagers crowded 
 about them. These later villages were in partial ruin; they 
 had been under fire: the old men cheered and stamped their 
 wooden shoes, the women seized the soldiers hands ; girls ran 
 out to embrace them ; children brought them bunches of ever- 
 
VICTOKIOUS 155 
 
 greens ; babies in arms were held up for a kiss ; what remnants 
 of food were left these people, these they pressed upon the 
 passing men. 
 
 At every halt the soldiers showed their nationality. It was 
 evident in their ready laughter, in the ingenuity with which 
 they found the best modes of resting themselves against the 
 efforts they were eager to renew; it was most evident in the 
 leanness and keenness of their youth, in the high cheek-bones 
 that predominated, and in the tight American mouth, at once 
 humorous and brave. Here, as back there, was no bragging 
 when they came to pause, no rude assurance: only a very cer 
 tain, though very quiet determination. They talked to one 
 another and rolled cigarettes, just as their doubles used to 
 do at home before a sham-battle at a National Guard en 
 campment. 
 
 In every village the world over there are loose women; in 
 every regiment of every army there are blackguards ; but here 
 and now, in these villages and in these regiments, the civilians 
 that were grateful were simply grateful, and the young sol 
 diers that looked like tattered heroes behaved like gentlemen. 
 
 iy 
 
 For a long time, Chrissly s head was too full of thoughts for 
 any one to develop. He thought of his short, previous endur 
 ance of the trenches; of the farm at home and how pleasant 
 it would be to be there ; of his father and mother a thought 
 that he tried not to dwell on; of Minnie Taylor a thought 
 that he endeavored to expel; he thought of the religion in 
 which he had been reared, and how it taught that any war 
 was a work of the devil; he thought of the great cause now 
 at stake and the sacrifice that, if necessary, he would make 
 for it, and he thought a good deal more than he thought 
 right of Leonie. There was not much order to his thoughts, 
 but they served to barricade him against the comments of the 
 veteran again marching beside him, of whom he had grown 
 weary. 
 
 At the rests, on that latter day, he learned things about the 
 
156 VICTORIOUS 
 
 men of his company that he had never, even on their trial- 
 trip to the trenches, heard from them before. In a quiet way, 
 they became more talkative than the intimacies of the camp 
 and that shock of their first brief trench-experience had made 
 them. Their feet were on the ultimate threshold, and they 
 spoke, without regret it is true, but with a new freedom, of 
 things concerning which they had been silent. 
 
 Here was a lad that had been working his way through 
 Harvard, starving himself in a garret, waiting on table in a 
 students boarding-house, because he wanted to be a teacher ; 
 the brutal fist of Berlin had descended, its fingers uncoiled 
 and then closed upon American prerogatives, and the boy for 
 ever forewent his dream, put aside his ambitions, sacrificed 
 what he had sacrificed so much to gain and volunteered. 
 His frugal life, his years of self-denial, even his conscious 
 meannesses and skimpings they seemed to Chrissly s slow 
 eyes to form a visible halo about him; and yet it was a halo 
 of which he stood in patient ignorance. Chrissly regarded 
 him now with a sort of awe; why, he called the Harvard lad 
 "Dickie," and there was no difference between them! 
 
 There* was an older man, the husband of a wife, the father 
 of a family in New Jersey. He had closed up a business that 
 he had just succeeded in clearing from debt closed it because 
 he knew his country needed him. Somehow, in spite of all 
 that Chrissly knew to the contrary, he felt as if the virtue of 
 what this older man had done, and the love of those he had 
 left at home, must surely now go forward with him and form 
 about him a bullet-proof network must do so, or else there 
 was no justice in the eternal scheme. 
 
 There was every type that was to be seen back home in 
 Americus. Chrissly heard a boy that looked like the youthful 
 Baptist tell, without bitterness, a story: 
 
 "They say a fellow that came out here in the commissary 
 department as a major, got sick and went to a Paris specialist. 
 The specialist said: 
 
 " Tour brain needs cleaning. It needs a regular house- 
 cleaning, and that ll take two weeks. 
 
 "So the doctor took out the man s brain and scrubbed it 
 
VICTORIOUS 157 
 
 and oiled it and got it goin fine. And then he went after 
 his patient and found him down here at camp. 
 
 " Here s your brain/ said the specialist. I ve got it all 
 fixed up fine for you now, and it ll work just right. 
 
 "But the owner of that brain, he just gave one look at it, 
 and he says: 
 
 " Oh, that! he says. I don t need that; you see, I m a 
 general now/ " 
 
 He laughed at his own joke, this boy, and he nudged his 
 companions ; but Chrissly wondered how he could laugh now. 
 Out there, just a few miles away, across the lines, there 
 might, at this instant, be waiting, in some soldier s belt, a 
 steel-tipped bullet that was destined perhaps a week hence, 
 perhaps to-night to find its way into this lad s heart. . . . 
 
 Among all his comrades Chrissly heard only one that com 
 plained, and his was a complaint not for the speaker s own 
 sake, but for his country s honor. It came from a man in 
 whose dark hair there were already streaks of gray, a solid 
 man, clearly,; in civil life, a man of slow but sure mental 
 processes. 
 
 "Well," he said, as he looked at such of his fellows as were 
 visible, "there aren t many of us. After we ve been at war for 
 nine months, we ve got this many ready for fighting. I call 
 it a pretty cheesy effort." 
 
 "I know I ll get mine," another man contended. "It s out 
 there somewhere." He nodded toward the darkening east, 
 whence came a rumble of unseen guns. "I know I ll get mine, 
 but I don t care, so long as I get it right an ain t just a 
 cripple." 
 
 He was an unemotional man, but the moment was one for 
 confidences. 
 
 "You see," he presently added, "there s a girl back there in 
 Bellows Falls. She said I wasn t any good. I want to be 
 some good and I just want her to know I was, after all." 
 
 Momentarily, during the last hours of waiting, there 
 waxed in Chrissly, and no doubt in all, the horror of conjee- 
 
158 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 tnre as to the fate before them. Once a white-haired villager, 
 who must have remembered 1870, looked at them and mur 
 mured "Mes pauvres enfants" and shook his head. 
 
 "What s that guy callin us ?" asked Chrissly s nearest neigh 
 bor. 
 
 Chrissly was prompt : "He s sayin we re brave a ready." 
 
 yi 
 
 Sturdy boys with resolute faces; mature men who had 
 shut up shop to come here: here they were, their idealism 
 rekindled, their purpose reinvigorated, because they were at 
 length to have the chance to fight. 
 
 The January darkness grew suddenly deeper. The bugles 
 sounded. The men approached their destined positions. A 
 moment later and there came, from two directions, the ad 
 jutant s call. 
 
 A great anger rose to Chrissly s once rural brain: anger 
 against a sham civilization that permitted a Prussian mili 
 tarism and made possible this slaughter called war. What was 
 this poor bank-clerk from St. Louis to the kaiser? Why 
 should a von Hindenburg demand the life of that truckman 
 from the Boston docks ? What part in the Welte politik could 
 yonder puddler from Pittsburg possibly play ? 
 
 Somehow he could not help detaching his own thoughts from 
 himself to dwell on those of his comrades. He knew whither, 
 tnrough the glow of the winter twilight, their thoughts had 
 gone. They had gone to mothers, wives and sweethearts in 
 quiet American towns, to American homesteads and American 
 ways, to the great, bungling, busy, loving, erratic chaos that 
 we cherish and will die for and that we call the United States 
 of America. . . . 
 
 Again the bugle shrilled into the dark. 
 
 "Fall in!" 
 
 They were already there the double lines of them, the 
 long narrow packs on their backs, two lines of them rising 
 out of the night and passing into it again. 
 
 "Eight dress right dress right dress !" 
 
VICTORIOUS 159 
 
 The order passed along. The men shuffled in the mud, the 
 lines straightened, stiffened, the soldiers stood erect and still. 
 
 "Front I" 
 
 Well, for them and him, it had come to this. All their 
 love and longing, all their business deals and drudgery and 
 economies all their hopes and fears had come to this night 
 in France, to the mud, the wet and the cold and the trenches, 
 and not a man of them was visibly sorry. 
 
 It was ghastly; it was horrible. But it was heroic, and it 
 was splendid. 
 
 "Beport !" 
 
 Corporal after corporal responded for his squad. Every 
 soldier was present or accounted for. 
 
 There came a horrid pause. 
 
 Then, far up the line, an indistinguishable order sounded. 
 It was repeated a little nearer at hand. It was repeated still 
 nearer. It came to Chrissly s own company, clear at last 
 and challenging. Then it passed on in echoes down the ranks 
 until it was engorged by the night : 
 
 "Squads right march !" 
 
 Their rifles went to their shoulders. They turned by rows 
 of four they turned and swung off eastward toward those 
 distant growling guns swung off on their way to fight. 
 
 yn 
 
 Innis and a little group of correspondents stood there 
 watching them squad after squad, platoon after platoon, 
 company after company until these, too, like the order that 
 started them, had been swallowed by the dark. 
 
 The newspaper-men thought of what they had seen in Flan 
 ders and upon the Somme; they thought of all the incompe 
 tence and brutality of war. 
 
 Away over there in America, across the night-swathed sea, 
 in hundreds and hundreds of houses, houses rich and houses 
 poor, old women and young were dreading this moment and 
 praying for those men who had just now passed by. Did 
 they know that the hour had come, these women ? Did some 
 
160 VICTORIOUS 
 
 mental current bring them the message over the trackless 
 leagues ? 
 
 Here, in a cottage kitchen, a French woman was singing at 
 her work. Some one said that of her four sons three had 
 been killed in this war and the fourth driven mad. It was to 
 be wondered how such a woman could sing how any woman 
 could sing now. And then there came clearly the words of 
 her plaintive refrain : 
 
 "La guer-re, 
 C est la miser-e!" 
 
 The song ceased. There was no longer any sound of march 
 ing men. The place knew them no more. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 HOW POLITICIANS CAN EAT THEIR CAKE AND HAVB IT 
 
 said McGregor, "I m as comfortable as a man 
 can be in a European hotel. I struck a sort of deputy-manager 
 here that used to work at the Annex : he learned a lot there, 
 and he s open to instruction." 
 
 McGregor looked very comfortable indeed. The vast pink- 
 and-gilt parlor of his suite, which he used as a sitting-room, 
 warmly overlooked a chill Place Vendome and was all the 
 more pleasant because of the contrast with its prospect. His 
 armchair, stuffed with cushions, was drawn beside a window, 
 and at his elbow was a table laden with the morning s papers, 
 scarcely ten days old, from America. McGregor was in slip 
 pers and his flowered-silk dressing-gown, it being not yet 
 noon; the sleeves of the dressing-gown reached to his knuck 
 les, and its open collar climbed, on each side, almost to his 
 pouched eyes. 
 
 Andy, pale and nervous, sat uneasily opposite. From the 
 cigar that McGregor had given him by way of welcome, he 
 was trying to flick ashes more rapidly than they accumulated. 
 
 Although a telegram at his rooms had informed him of 
 Sylvia s brief return to Paris, the boy came first to the Ritz. 
 There was still duty to be done, still one more assurance to 
 make doubly sure : he meant to act frankly and directly, but 
 he found it exceedingly hard to dislike his sybaritic acquaint 
 ance, and harder still to expose the suspicions that should 
 have made dislike imperative. Therefore, he had begun his 
 conversation by asking McGregor a wholly unnecessary ques 
 tion as to how he fared. 
 
 "You look as if things were pretty easy," said Andy. 
 
 "Thanks again," said McGregor. His little eyes regarded 
 his caller reflectively. "That pretty Miss Raeburn s back," he 
 added. 
 
 161 
 
162 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Andy blushed. "So I hear/ 
 
 "Yes," McGregor resumed. "I had a pleasant talk with her 
 yesterday. Met her near your press-headquarters. You don t 
 mind, do you?" 
 
 Andy flicked at his cigar. "Me ? Why, no. Why should I ?" 
 
 "I dunno," eaid McGregor. "I just thought you might, 
 that s all. I rather like the little lady. You see, I m a lonely 
 kind of a fellow, especially in Paris, my son. What have you 
 been doing?" 
 
 "I ve been down at the camp. We re in, you know." 
 
 "Yes," said McGregor. He puffed two slow columns of 
 smoke. 
 
 "They wouldn t let us see anything but the march-out." 
 There was annoyance in the tone. 
 
 "Oh, well, I wouldn t worry. They know their business." 
 
 And/s whole face was on fire. "That s just what I m not 
 so sure of." 
 
 "I guess they don t want anything printed," said McGregor. 
 His eyes never left Andy s face. 
 
 " Why don t they?" challenged Andy. 
 
 "Well, they don t want the Germans tipped off." 
 
 "It s not that. One side always knows these things as well 
 as another." Andy took a great breath. "My last trip down 
 there, I looked into conditions pretty carefully. Let me tell 
 you what I saw." 
 
 He told it all up to his visit to the aviation centers. He 
 piled fact on damning fact, McGregor watching him the while 
 without blinking. 
 
 "That s what s been going on at the camp and back home," 
 Andy concluded: "waste. We ve wasted time and money. 
 Now, if we re not careful, we re going to waste lives." 
 
 "Well," said McGregor, "this is war, my son." 
 
 "Then all the more reason why we shouldn t be wasteful. 
 If we re going to throw everything away, we ll be whipped." 
 
 McGregor lit a fresh cigar from its unfinished predecessor. 
 When he now spoke, it was from behind a gray cloud : 
 
 "Everything s wasteful, if you look at it one way. They 
 say Nature isn t, but just look at the way she made the ele- 
 
VICTOBIOUS 163 
 
 pliant: practically two tails and yet a skin so thick it can t 
 feel the flies." 
 
 "I " Andy gripped the arms of his chair. "I was at Tours 
 and Issoudun, too," he said. 
 
 The smoke-cloud grew thicker. McGregor did not answer. 
 
 "The aviation centers," said Andy. He was pale again, now. 
 
 Still McGregor did not reply. 
 
 "You said you were interested in aviation contracts, didn t 
 you?" asked Andy. 
 
 "This cigar don t draw," McGregor s high voice complained. 
 He bent to examine the mischief. "Yes, I m interested in 
 aviation. But I m not actively looking for work, if that s what 
 you mean. You know what the tramp said when the lady 
 asked him if he was looking for work : he said, Oh, it s not so 
 bad as that ; I m just wmtin for it. " 
 
 He chuckled. To Andy s suspicious ears, the chuckle did 
 not ring clear. An anger seized the boy. 
 
 He spoke of American flesh and blood at that moment the 
 more exposed to German shells and gas because the Americans 
 had no aeroplanes to drive away the scouting planes of the 
 enemy. He asked how long, by our aircraft s inactivity, we, 
 the richest and least hampered of the warring nations, were 
 to continue adding to the heartbreaking load of our Allies. 
 He forgot his embarrassment and his inveterate liking for the 
 man before him, and demanded a knowledge of what had been 
 done with the $640,000,000 appropriated for aerial work. 
 
 "Half the casualties that happen in the Toul sector will be 
 due to the fact that we haven t got a plane of our own. Any 
 body that s seen a little bit of this war knows that," he de 
 clared. "And anybody that knows how things are over here, 
 knows there s been failure, somewhere and probably dishon 
 esty." 
 
 McGregor s eyes were again on duty. They watched Andy 
 firmly through all that he said. 
 
 "Well my son," the contractor asked, when Andy had 
 made an end, "supposing all this is true, what are you going 
 to do about it?" 
 
 "I m going to get it home, and get it printed." 
 
164 VICTORIOUS 
 
 McGregor gestured with a plump hand toward a japanned 
 humidor on the table. "Your cigar s out; have another/ 
 
 The cigar in Andy s fingers was not only extinguished; it 
 was broken. "No, thanks," he said: "not now/ 
 
 McGregor settled himself more deeply in the cushions. His 
 face became as concerned as it was possible for such a face to 
 become. 
 
 "I wouldn t try to print all this stuff," he said. "Honest, I 
 wouldn t try it, Brown." 
 
 Andy s anger had expended itself in utterance, and, though 
 his purpose was fixed, his incongruous liking for McGregor 
 returned to conscious force. 
 
 "Why not?" he asked. 
 
 "Well, in the first place, if the M. I. got wind of it, they 
 wouldn t let the papers print it, and if the papers did print 
 it, it wouldn t ever get over here anyhow : they d just stop the 
 papers in the mails." 
 
 "It isn t getting the thing over here I care about," said 
 Andy. 
 
 "I thought you might be wanting to please somebody in 
 the French government." 
 
 "I guess the French government knows all about it already 
 and is sick enough over it. Haven t we been trying to buy 
 planes from them? The people I want to tell this to are the 
 American people." 
 
 McGregor shook his head. "You ll just get yourself in 
 wrong with the censorship." 
 
 "I don t care about that. They ve treated us to a good deal 
 of rough-house. I don t mean all the fellows in it some of 
 them are as white as anybody. I mean the whole censorship. 
 It s un-American. It s I don t care how wrong I get in 
 with it." 
 
 "You d ought to. You ve got to get on in the world. What s 
 the use of spoiling everything at the start ?" 
 
 "I don t care about that, either," said Andy "not when 
 such a thing as this is concerned." 
 
 "But you ll be sent home in disgrace and where ll be 
 your usefulness then ?" 
 
VICTOEIOUS 165 
 
 Andy swallowed a lump that was in his throat and an 
 swered : "There ll be plenty of men to take my job. 3 
 
 "And nobody ll make a hero of you, son." 
 
 "I hadn t supposed anybody would I" 
 
 "Then" McGregor was plainly puzzled "what s your 
 game, anyhow?" 
 
 "My game ? Why, I want to help win this war. I want the 
 people to know what s wrong, so s they can stop it." 
 
 "Oh !" McGregor showed relief. "And do you really think 
 you d get that across if you printed this news?" 
 
 "I think it would help." 
 
 "My boy, you ve got a lot to learn. I ve been making Amer 
 ican public opinion, or bucking it, all my life. We re a people 
 of change; we change all we have, and as soon as we ve 
 changed everything, we change our minds. The folks back 
 home would be hot about this for a week, then the baseball 
 season d open, or we d take a German trench, and nobody d 
 remember to ask what had been done about aeroplanes." 
 
 Andy squirmed a little. 
 
 "Excuse me," said McGregor. He took a pad from the table 
 and scribbled with the gold pencil attached to it. "Just a lit 
 tle business matter," he explained. He asked Andy to ring 
 and ordered the answering servant : "Send that message." 
 
 "Am I taking too much of your time ?" asked Andy, when 
 the man had gone. 
 
 McGregor moved his shoulders still deeper into the cush 
 ions. "You haven t taken half enough." He tossed his cigar 
 into a convenient ash-tray and put the stubby fingers of his 
 right hand tip to tip with those of his left. "You. haven t 
 really brought the fellow I m most interested in into your 
 conversation yet." 
 
 "Who do you mean?" asked Andy. 
 
 "Your friend: myself. Go on. Shoot." 
 
 Andy bit his lips. 
 
 "It s hard?" 
 
 "Yes, it is," said Andy. "You ve always been so decent 
 to me " 
 
 "Never mind that. I never let business interfere with 
 
166 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 friendship, or friendship with business. There s no reason 
 why anything you think you ve got to write should hurt our 
 personal relations. Go ahead." 
 
 "Well/ gulped Andy, "how are you mixed up in all this ?" 
 
 McGregor chuckled, and this time there was no doubt of 
 the chuckle s genuineness. "When seen at his palatial resi 
 dence in the Ritz," he continued, "Mr. B. Frank McGregor 
 said that he had nothing to say." 
 
 "I had to ask you," said Andy. 
 
 "Sure." McGregor lit a third cigar. "So that s settled," 
 said he. "Now, I want to give you a few pointers." He pulled 
 at the cigar. "Andy, how old are you?" 
 
 Andy felt his blushes return. "I m over twenty-one," he 
 said, defensively. 
 
 "Are you ? Well, you wouldn t guess it, but I m over fifty. 
 Thirty years makes a difference, son." 
 
 "Perhaps," said Andy, "sometimes." 
 
 "Certainly and always," said McGregor. "Now, I ve seen 
 a little more of life than you, and I want to give you some 
 advice just like your father might. I m not talking for my 
 sake. I can take care of myself, whatever you do ; and what 
 ever you do, I m going to be your friend. So I m talking for 
 your sake. Very well. I won t try to tell you how you ll hurt 
 yourself if you go ahead on all this exposure stuff, because 
 you say you don t care; I don t believe you do. D you ever 
 hear about that little boy whose Sunday-school teacher asked 
 him what kind of little boys went to Heaven? He said the 
 kind of little boys that went to Heaven were dead ones and 
 I guess you d be willing to die if you had to die to do right; 
 but what I want to show you is that what s right for one day 
 may be wrong for the whole year !" 
 
 "I don t understand," said Andy uncomfortably. 
 
 "Well, you re an accredited correspondent of the army. 
 You can argue it any way you want to, but if you get over 
 with a story the censorship don t approve, you ll not be play 
 ing fair with your credentials." 
 
 "The censorship hasn t played fair with me." 
 
 "Does it matter ?" asked McGregor, looking at him steadily. 
 
VICTORIOUS 167 
 
 Andy considered this. "No, I don t suppose it does." 
 
 "Well, then?" 
 
 "Then then I can resign." 
 
 "You can resign ? Ye es. But anyhow, you ve got to look 
 at the bigger things. We re the biggest country on earth, and 
 the richest and the bravest ; and we re fighting for democracy. 
 I used to tell my audiences that every time I made a speech 
 before the draft, and I stumped most all Illinois and Indiana, 
 too. We ve got our faults and we make mistakes, same as 
 anybody; but our faults don t keep us from being big and 
 rich, and it won t make us any braver, or fight any better, to 
 call attention to our mistakes." 
 
 "I think it will," said Andy. He believed it would, and he 
 had to say so. 
 
 McGregor went on : 
 
 "You ve seen a few things, and they re bad. None of this 
 is for publication, mind you." 
 
 "Certainly not," said Andy. 
 
 "You ve seen a few bad things, then, but maybe, if you were 
 my age, you d see more that weren t. That s the way with 
 everything. I ve put up office buildings in my time: there 
 was never one I didn t find mistakes being made by the ma 
 sons, the steel construction men, the plumbers especially the 
 plumbers. We d get poor material, skimped work. Even the 
 architect d make errors in fact, he always did things like 
 putting a staircase where no staircase could be. But I never 
 expected the thing to be built as if it was a kid s house built 
 out of blocks. It was all along going to be an office building, 
 and it always ended by being an office building and not a 
 stable. Well, it s the same here. Just exactly. We re fighting 
 for democracy, and we won t win for autocracy. We ll come 
 through quicker if we don t stop to quarrel over details. It s 
 the big things that count, Andy : you keep your eyes on them, 
 and you ll be giving the best help you can to yourself and 
 your country, too. I tell you this with my hand on my heart" 
 McGregor put it there "that what we ve got in view, we 
 people on the inside, is something that s larger than the sum 
 of its parts. Just give America a chance." 
 
168 VICTORIOUS 
 
 He got up, pillows slipping to the floor around him, and 
 Andy understood that he was at last to go. There was no 
 leisure granted for the answers that seemed ready to this 
 appeal. 
 
 "Think it over/ said McGregor, patting the boy s shoul 
 ders. "Just think it over a bit." 
 
 "Fll do that, Mr. McGregor; but I know I won t change 
 my mind." 
 
 "Maybe you will. That s one thing no man can be sure of 
 till he s dead like the kind of little boys that go to Heaven, 
 you know. Whatever you do, we ll stay friends, you and me, 
 personally. But just you take a day or two more to think 
 it over." 
 
 He had not long been reseated before Garcia was announced. 
 The lieutenant looked tired and harried. 
 
 "Your man just telephoned for me," he said. 
 
 "I haven t seen you for three days," returned McGregor, 
 letting his caller stand. "Where ve you been?" 
 
 "Down at the camp, Mr. McGregor. You remember I told 
 you I d have to go down there that our men were going in." 
 
 "You didn t say there were going to be any reporters there." 
 
 "I didn t think there would be." 
 
 "Humph. Well, they ll keep on getting the better of you 
 till you learn how to treat them, Garcia. I don t know which 
 is a worse failure r that Hello, Bill pose of yours that don t 
 fool anybody, or the rough stuff that only makes you enemies. 
 When d you get back?" 
 
 "Only a couple of hours ago." 
 
 McGregor looked at him, but this was not at all the sort 
 of McGregor that had contemplated Andy. "Hear of any 
 aviation stories lately?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "Yes, you did!" 
 
 Garcia s protruding eyes were those of a wild animal, cowed, 
 but malevolent. "I did hear " 
 
VICTORIOUS 169 
 
 "There s an aviation story that ll go out, if we aren t care 
 ful," McGregor interrupted. "Young Brown s got the goods." 
 
 "That damned boy s been everywhere, the " 
 
 "Don t call him names: he put one over on you,, all right. 
 Why didn t you tell me he d been to Tours?" 
 
 Garcia could not understand why he was not permitted to 
 abuse Andy: "He sneaked it." 
 
 "There you are ! I said he put one over on you. You re 
 not working very hard to earn my hard-earned money, Lieu 
 tenant. Now" McGregor half rose from his chair: "you 
 know I don t cry over spilled milk, but you know the pull I ve 
 got, too. You ve got to fix this thing up, see ?" 
 
 Garcia visibly quailed. "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Don t try any more rough stuff with Brown unless you 
 have to he s a nice kid, and he s smart : I like him. Smooth 
 him down somehow." 
 
 "How shall I smooth him, Mr. McGregor?" 
 
 The contractor thought of his own failure in that direction ; 
 but he did not tell Garcia why he chuckled. A second later 
 he was more serious than ever, frowning like a fat, but none 
 the less terrible, Zeus. 
 
 "That s what I hire you to know," he said. "This is my 
 last word on the whole subject. If anything of this sort hap 
 pens again, by the Lord God, I ll see to it you go back to the 
 line and into the trenches. Good morning." 
 
 ill 
 
 Andy was nearly heartbroken. There was not much 
 left of the pride, the soaring hopes and the heroic enthusiasms 
 that he had brought with him to France and once thought a 
 part of his being. The cynical joke of his "credentials" and 
 the press-division s derision of the press; the neglect prac 
 tised on the enlisted men, the strain upon the liaison, the 
 collapse of the air program, the failure to reach the general, 
 and now the virtual confirmation of Evans charges against 
 McGregor : any one of these things might not so much have 
 mattered, but the cumulation of the symptoms indicated the 
 
170 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 presence of a fatal disease and from that disease how was 
 the American cause to recover? A miracle of reenforcements 
 and then a second miracle of open fighting: such twin mar 
 vels could alone hear the chance of a cure. 
 
 Innis came to town that day, and Andy and Evans saw 
 him. He gave them such details of the march-out as they had 
 missed, and all three wrote their accounts and turned them 
 in to the press-division s offices. They were promised word 
 of the date when the manuscripts would be mailed to America. 
 
 Only then did Andy allow himself to see Sylvia, and to her, 
 almost as a child to its mother, and certainly as a boy to his 
 patron saint, he told of everything that he had seen and ex 
 perienced since their separation. He did it as they walked 
 far out into the Bois. 
 
 She heard him with that dear familiar pucker of her pure 
 brows : the world was not all as it should be. 
 
 "What will you do?" she asked him. 
 
 "Write it, of course : I ve got to." 
 
 "Yes, that. But about what Mr. McGregor said to you ?" 
 
 "Thinking it over? That s what we re doing now! But I 
 told him I wouldn t change my mind." 
 
 "No ; I meant about your credentials : it mightn t be quite 
 fair to do something the military censorship wouldn t approve 
 of, so long as you had War Department credentials." 
 
 "I guess I ve done some such things already." 
 
 "But now you know; and you ve had time to consider." 
 Her eyes showed the clarity of her moral vision. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "that s kind of the way it struck me when 
 McGregor mentioned it. What would you do ?" 
 
 "Oh," she smiled wistfully, "please don t ask my advice !" 
 
 Andy s glance was a wide appeal. "I ve got to." 
 
 "Please," pleaded she. 
 
 "Please," he pleaded. 
 
 "Well," she said, "if I were in your place of course, I m 
 not, and so I don t know half so much about it as you do " 
 
 "You see things straight." 
 
 "Then I d resign the credentials and write the article and 
 then go on with my work without credentials." 
 
VICTORIOUS 171 
 
 He still valued them. It had been so much to him to get 
 them that they still retained something of their shallow glory 
 that made them difficult of surrender. 
 
 "I guess you re right," he nevertheless said. "McGregor 
 I just can t help liking him, but he can somehow think one 
 thing and act another. I can t. I ll do as you say." 
 
 "Oh, not because I say it I" she hurriedly interposed. 
 
 "No," said Andy, with a heavy sigh "only because it s 
 right. But it was you showed me it was right really," he 
 smilingly added. "I didn t feel it so much at McGregor s. 
 No, I ll do it because it s the decent thing. I ll write to the 
 censorship this evening." 
 
 She patted his arm by way of congratulation, and Andy 
 felt that, great as was his sacrifice, it was paid far beyond its 
 deserts. 
 
 "I knew you d do it," she said. Then she thought. "But 
 you don t have to give the censorship here any warning ; you 
 don t owe them that." Since she was to be an adviser, she 
 would advise in full. "The credentials came from the War De 
 partment in Washington, didn t they ?" 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "Then I should think the resignation ought to go to the 
 War Department in Washington, too." 
 
 So, that night, Andy dropped into a French post-office in 
 the rue Vivienne his resignation. It was addressed to the 
 secretary of war. 
 
 IV 
 
 Then, about the correspondents articles telling of the fact 
 that America was really fighting, nothing happened. Nothing 
 happened for days. 
 
 Innis made inquiries and reported to Andy and Evans the 
 result. He met them of an afternoon at the Napolitain : 
 
 "They say nobod/s story s to be released not even the 
 cabled stuff till the official communique s issued." 
 
 Andy thought this seemed reasonable. 
 
 Evans sniffed. "Too reasonable to be the real reason," 
 said he. 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Garcia says lie wants to see you about something, Brown," 
 Innis continued. "I don t advise you to go." 
 
 They agreed to wait and to act in concert. 
 
 In his account of the march-out, along with reflections 
 that he haltingly permitted himself and glimpsing records of 
 the feelings inspired in him by what he saw, he had made 
 some references to conditions; it was about these, he fan 
 cied, that Garcia wanted to see him. Meanwhile his duty to 
 write and send all the hard facts was slowly acquitted. In his 
 Palais Royal garret he passed long hours, pounding his type 
 writer, composing, revising, correcting. He wanted to be fair, 
 and yet he wanted to be thorough : it was hard work and un 
 grateful. When it was finished, he consulted Evans about 
 sending it safely to America, and that correspondent, with the 
 go-to-hell stare in which he performed all his many kind 
 nesses, offered to send it by a messenger. 
 
 "Six or seven of us use one whenever we hear of anybody 
 going home," he said, "and this fellow s taking stuff for the 
 crowd." 
 
 Thus Andy sent his report to Blunston. 
 
 All France was saying that the Americans were in the bat 
 tle-line but the correspondents stories of the entry were 
 not released. One day the Paris papers printed the statement 
 that the news had been told by a French general to his troops 
 in Salonica but the correspondents still waited. 
 
 "What s wrong?" Evans demanded of Innis. "Here s old 
 Colonel Gaedeke writing about it in the Bremen Zeitung. 
 All the people in the world know the Americans are in except 
 the people of America. Our Allies are told, our enemies are 
 told, but the United States must not be told." 
 
 Then came the news that the Germans had raided American 
 trenches and still no American communique appeared. 
 
 This last was too much. Evans dragged Andy and Innis 
 from their work, and the three of them assaulted the bureau 
 
VICTORIOUS 173 
 
 in the rue Ste. Anne. A new and unknown lieutenant was at 
 Garcia s desk when they entered. At a desk at the other end 
 of the room sat another lieutenant busily reading proof, a 
 monkish-looking man whom Andy had likewise never seen 
 before, but who, Evans whispered, was Tarnow of The Stars 
 and Stripes. The three correspondents stalked up to Garcia s 
 desk. 
 
 "When are you going to release our stories?" demanded 
 Evans. 
 
 The new lieutenant leaned back in his swivel-chair and 
 clasped one trim knee with both hands. He had thin red 
 wrists. 
 
 "I haven t heard any orders about it, gentlemen," said he. 
 He smiled. Perhaps he should not have smiled. 
 
 "When the Last Day comes," said Evans, "Gabriel ll have 
 to give an extra toot for the American censorship. Everybody 
 knows we re in except our own people back home. Why are 
 you holding it up?" 
 
 "I m obeying orders," said the new censor. 
 
 "A nice mess you ll get us into with our papers." 
 
 "That isn t anything in my young life." 
 
 Andy thought that Evans was going to strike the fellow. 
 Tarnow, he noticed, did not lift his eyes from the proof he 
 held. 
 
 "Why are all you censors going around here in mental 
 mother-hubbards and intellectual slippers down-at-the-heel ?" 
 Evans shouted. "I want my story back : I m going to send it 
 wi-censored !" 
 
 "I can t give you back your story," said the lieutenant. 
 "It s locked up in the safe, and I don t know the combina 
 tion." 
 
 "Of course not," said Evans : "they wouldn t let you know 
 so much. Don t know the combination this sure is some In 
 telligence Section!" 
 
 Over at the farther desk, Lieutenant Tarnow dropped his 
 proofs and noisily rose. Andy saw that he was a middle-aged 
 dark man with a pale face and deep-set eyes. His thin dark 
 hair was cropped close and, with his face now turned toward 
 
174 VICTORIOUS 
 
 the correspondents, he had even a more monkish appearance 
 than when he had been sitting at the desk. 
 
 "What s the matter, anyhow?" he asked. 
 
 "That s our question/ said Evans. Innis plucked at his 
 sleeve, but was shaken off. "Why aren t you going to let the 
 American papers tell the American people that their boys are 
 fighting?" 
 
 Tarnow disregarded him and spoke to Innis : 
 
 "We ve done the best we could for you but no commu 
 nique s to be issued." 
 
 It was unbelievable : the news "was not to go to the papers 
 until the communique appeared" and no communique was 
 to appear ! 
 
 Tarnow had come forward to the flat-topped desk and stood 
 behind it by the side of the new lieutenant. Andy was oppo 
 site, ready to seize the hard-breathing Evans. Innis took two 
 steps forward. 
 
 "Here," said he, "is a cable for my magazine." He held 
 out a slip of flimsy paper to Tarnow. "Bead it. It calls on 
 the editor to make a protest direct to the president and not 
 any secret protest, but a public one. I m through. I m going 
 to send that message, and nobody dares stop me." 
 
 As if mechanically, Tarnow picked up the paper. It rattled 
 as he did so. He did not read it. His somber eyes were fixed 
 on Evans, and Andy, whose attention had been distracted 
 from his friend by the production of the cable-message, now 
 saw that there was need: Evans was purple with rage. He 
 leveled a finger at Tarnow. 
 
 "You re* a bunch of dirty crooks !" he cried. 
 
 Andy seized him as he lurched forward. The new lieutenant 
 hopped to a window and became intently engrossed in the 
 prospect of a roof and a blank wall. Innis barred Evans 
 progress with an outflung arm. 
 
 "Leave this to me, Owen," he said, over his shoulder. 
 
 "Keep quiet, Evans!" whispered Andy. 
 
 But Innis was now in nearly as great need of restraint. 
 He leaned over the desk. He protruded his chin, and, as he 
 spoke, his thick-set frame shook. 
 
VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "I m going to send that," he reiterated, nodding toward the 
 cable-message, which still fluttered from Tarnow s hand. 
 "You tell us there isn t going to be any communique, and 
 we know there wasn t ever one that said our boys came out 
 of the trenches in the autumn. Do you mean your gang s 
 keeping the American people in the dark? You mean you 
 want the folks at home to think American soldiers have been 
 fighting ever since their experimental experience at the front 
 last November ? Is your game to make our public think there 
 hasn t been any gap between that step in training and this 
 real beginning ?" He raised his fist. 
 
 Andy laid a firm hold of Evans. 
 
 Innis took a fresh breath and went on : 
 
 "It is plain what you fellows are after. You announced to 
 the American public that we had such-and-such fighting men 
 in France ; you meant the term fighting men to be interpreted 
 as f men that are fighting and to back this up you are now 
 pretending that we ve been fighting continuously ever since 
 last autumn." He shook his fist. "Tell me now : isn t that the 
 game?" 
 
 Andy almost loosed his hold of Evans. Innis s words rang 
 deafeningly in his ears ; they dazzled his eyes by their astound 
 ing revelation. If it was true, as Andy was convinced it was, 
 then it explained much that had heretofore been inexplicable 
 in the affairs of the A. E. F. 
 
 "You ve all all put up bonds or your papers have," 
 Tarnow said. "If you aren t careful, you ll forfeit them." 
 
 He was answered by a volley. 
 
 "Then we ll buy the truth cheap !" said Innis. 
 
 Evans tugged against Andy s restraining arm : "To hell 
 with the bonds !" 
 
 "You can t touch mine," panted Andy, between struggles 
 with his prisoner. "I ve resigned my credentials." 
 
 "Give me back that cable," said Innis. "I m going out to 
 send it." 
 
 Tarnow glanced toward his subordinate; but that officer 
 remained intent in his contemplation of the roof. Then some 
 thing else became immediately manifest: Tarnow saw that 
 
176 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Evans was secured by Andy and that Andy was secure by 
 reason of his restraint of Evans. On these two, then, his wrath 
 descended. He answered Innis s demand for the cable-mes 
 sage by dropping that on the desk, the preceding accusation 
 he evaded by firmly attacking in words the men that, he was 
 assured, could not attack him with their fists. 
 
 "A. lot we care for your resignation I" he shouted. " We ll 
 get your money anyhow. We ll get you we have got you. 
 Don t either of you try anything." He stepped back toward 
 his desk with every phrase he uttered; but with every phrase 
 his voice rose higher. "We ve got your last stories locked up 
 in our safe. They read just as if you saw that march-out, and 
 we can prove you took the night-train to Paris. If you two 
 try to make any trouble, we ll get the Committee on Public 
 Information, back home, to blow you up for fakers." 
 
 As he finished, he hurriedly sat down at his desk and buried 
 his face in his copy, as a signal of dismissal. At that moment 
 the door opened and Garcia s woolly head appeared. 
 
 "Eeenf orcements !" shouted Evans. 
 
 They forgot Tarnow, against whom they had nothing per 
 sonally; they forgot the lieutenant at the window, and di 
 rected their entire anger against the newcomer. Garcia, see 
 ing the rage in their faces, sprang back in a panic. He 
 banged the door shut after him. From the room beyond there 
 came the click of a key. 
 
 He was none too soon. Andy released Evans, and both 
 charged forward. 
 
 Tarnow did not lift his head. The new censor turned round 
 with upraised arms: 
 
 "Gentlemen I Gentlemen !" 
 
 "Oh, shut up I" said Evans. 
 
 Innis was regaining his composure. 
 
 "Come on, Owen," said he. "What do you care?" 
 
 "I don t care." He glowered at Tarnow s motionless back. 
 "Nothing they can do to Brown s story or mine can make 
 fakes of em: they re legitimate newspaper-stories, both of 
 em." Wholly balked by the amazing exit of Garcia, Evans 
 
VICTORIOUS 177 
 
 was himself somewhat calmer. "But I d just like to tell that 
 skunk what I think of him/ 
 
 Andy s anger died in a smile. "Well," said he, "you know 
 what happens to you if you try to talk to a skunk." 
 
 "Look here" Innis was addressing the new lieutenant now : 
 "tell headquarters we ll give it twenty-four hours to issue a 
 communique and release our stories. If it doesn t come across, 
 I ll send this cable" he picked up his message "and we ll 
 all of us get the news over anyhow. They can t jail us till 
 .we ve done that." 
 
 The lieutenant bowed acknowledgment and relief. 
 
 "You re going?" he asked. 
 
 "We sure are," said Evans. 
 
 "I think Lieutenant Garcia wants to see Mr. Brown." 
 
 "Then," said Andy, "let Mr. Garcia come to my rooms: 
 he knows my address." 
 
 But he went out in a daze. . . . How, surrounded by such 
 quacks, could democracy ever triumph over the disease that 
 their ministrations fostered? 
 
 VI 
 
 In the hallway, Evans walked to a door that they knew must 
 communicate with the room into which Garcia had fled. Ev 
 ans seized the handle. 
 
 "I ll just give him an extra scare. Of course the careful 
 man s locked himself in." He tried to turn the handle. "It 
 is locked !" he grinned. He gave the thing a parting shake. 
 
 yn 
 
 Going toward the provost-marshal s office was an orderly 
 with several sheets of paper in his grasp. They were, he said, 
 in answer to Innis s question, the lists of the recently killed 
 and wounded at the American front. He would not give them 
 up, but Andy and Evans looked over his shoulder while Innis 
 argued with him. Andy saw the words : 
 
 "Wounded in action. . . . Degree undetermined. . . . 
 Christian Shuman. . . ." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHRISSLY HEARS THE NEARER WATERS ROLL 
 
 IT HAD been as if they were shivering in the cleft of an ice 
 berg. Ice varnished the clay-cemented logs that walled their 
 narrow trench; when either man crouched a little lower into 
 the freezing mud of the floor, a thin crust of ice crackled and 
 rang under him ; from the roof of the gulley which was a con 
 tracted strip of star-spattered sky, the planets that seemed 
 close enough for picking hung like so many icicles. Every 
 time Chrissly and the storekeeper from New Jersey stretched 
 their stiffened arms, they touched something colder than even 
 themselves; every time they raised their aching eyes, they 
 saw ice or hoar-frost; a film of frost had formed on their 
 ragged overcoats. The cold gradually ate inward; it left 
 the surface of their bodies without sensation and settled, a 
 dull pain in the bones of their skulls and in their innermost 
 organs. They breathed lightly and with care, because to 
 breathe was to suffer. For an hour there had been no sound 
 save the occasional glassy tinkle of breaking ice: they might 
 have been afloat alone on their berg in an arctic sea. 
 
 Between his chattering teeth, which clicked distinctly at 
 the period, the man from New Jersey whispered: "There 
 w-weren t any sh-shells in my trench when I was out here in 
 N-November. Fd kind of 1-like to know what it s 1-1-like 
 when a shell explodes in your t-t-trench." After five o clock 
 in the morning, one always whispers on the front line. 
 
 WHANG! 
 
 The night burst into flame about two hundred yards to 
 their left. Then darkness, blinding because there had been 
 light. 
 
 178 
 
VICTOEIOUtS 179 
 
 chattered Chrissly, "y-you ve c-come to a g-good 
 p-p-place to f-f-find that out a ready." 
 
 The man was close beside him, but only just discernible 
 only just discernible and scarcely to be recognized as an 
 American soldier. In any conscript-camp, from the one at 
 Ayr, Massachusetts, to that at Anniston, Alabama, the newest 
 reserve-officer would have censured him. His uniform had suf 
 fered the sea-changesj that every American uniform sooner or 
 later suffered in France; on him, and on Chrissly also, the 
 rakish service-hat had been replaced by a fore-and-aft cap 
 pulled far over his ears; a muffler knitted in some warm 
 American home swathed the head from brows to chin; crude 
 shears had raggedly amputated the overcoat at the line of 
 the knees ; there was the sound of water sucking through the 
 straw-wrapped boots, whenever either man wriggled his swol 
 len toes to keep up the circulation of the blood. 
 
 "Th-that," continued Chrissly, evidently nodding toward 
 the scene of the explosion, "must V been one o th-them there 
 trench-mortars : m-m-minenwerfers they calls em. Some one 
 s-says, daytimes you kin s-see em c-comin ." 
 
 "I know/ said the man from New Jersey. "Ever w-watch 
 a football-game? Those things look 1-like a spiral k-kick- 
 off " 
 
 Another concussion put the period to his concluding sen 
 tence, a concussion different from its predecessor and followed 
 by a sound for all the world like the first drops of a rainstorm 
 on autumnal leaves. It was shrapnel, and this, as both occu 
 pants of the trench were aware, meant that the unseen enemy 
 was finding a range for his larger guns. 
 
 "Now for the b-big show," said the man from New Jersey. 
 
 Chrissly, who had been thinking first of Leonie and then of 
 the quiet little farmhouse at home in summertime, intended 
 to make a polite reply. Perhaps he made it. He didn t know. 
 Later he did not even remember the tremendous bang that 
 must have succeeded when the star-spattered sky split open 
 and came tumbling down upon his head. . . . 
 
180 VICTORIOUS 
 
 II 
 
 Somebody wearing a just-visible brassard was bending over 
 him. 
 
 ". . . he s all right. ... It fell in the next 
 trench. . . 
 
 "JSTo, look here ;" it was another man with a brassard that 
 now spoke "shirt s sopping. He s got his." 
 
 Chrissly realized that it was of him they were talking. He 
 caught shattered phrases about a broken left arm and an ab 
 dominal wound, a request for a first-aid pouch. As yet he felt 
 no pain ; he felt only very numb and very tired. He heard one 
 of these newcomers say something about "nineteen years old" 
 and the other add: "And fifty years experience in the last 
 few days." They seemed excessively busy with him, but one 
 of them said that the man from New Jersey was dead. Then 
 came the crisp order: 
 
 "Stretcher this way !" 
 
 Chrissly fainted. 
 
 in 
 
 Out of the communication- trench, in the noise and 
 flying lumps of frozen earth scattered by a fresh explosion, 
 two more men trotted with a stretcher. On it they placed the 
 inert thing that had been Chrissly and with it they staggered, 
 stooping behind clay mounds, log-buttressed, slipping and 
 stumbling through ice and mud, now and then another shell 
 blazing and bellowing close at hand. 
 
 Of old, army medical-corps waited for the wounded to be 
 brought to the rear; in modern warfare, those corps stretch 
 one saving hand up to the first line. The injured man is 
 taken direct to a regimental dressing-station ; if his hurts de 
 mand it, he is carried thence to more elaborately equipped 
 stations, and therefrom, when the need arises, to the farther 
 field-hospitals, or "evacuation-hospitals," where delicate op 
 erations may be performed, and where, often, there are two 
 thousand beds. Miles behind these, in the safety-zone, are 
 the large base-hospitals at which "long cases" are cared for 
 
VICTORIOUS 181 
 
 until the patients are fit to be sent to seaside convalescents 
 camps. On such a progress Chrissly was now embarked. 
 
 IV 
 
 The bearers stopped before a large dug-out where, carefully 
 protected flash-lamp in hand, a regimental surgeon was rap 
 idly inspecting several forms on so many stretchers. 
 
 "Quick, sir please !" said one of Chrissly s bearers. 
 
 The surgeon never looked up from his rapid work. 
 
 "Quick, sir please!" pleaded other bearers for other bur 
 dens. 
 
 "First come, first serve," said the surgeon. 
 
 Finally he reached the unconscious Chrissly. He injected 
 a serum, applied a rough splint to the broken arm, applied 
 a temporary dressing to the torn abdomen. He was deft and 
 quick, but there were three new stretchers waiting before he 
 had finished with Chrissly. 
 
 "Field-hospital," he decreed. "Get orders there." 
 
 Chrissly s bearers bore him away. . . . 
 
 The field-hospital was like a circus-tent illuminated for a 
 night-performance. There were rows of narrow tables bathed 
 in light ; on the tables lay wounded men, and along each TOW 
 a surgeon walked with an orderly on one hand and a nurse on 
 the other. At every table, the inspection-party would pause. 
 There was the gleam of a knife, the ripping of cloth as the 
 nurse cut shirt or drawers away from the wound; there was 
 a brief direction from the surgeon. Then the orderly would 
 tie a tag to the patient s blouse, and the party would move on. 
 
 Chrissly s eyes were open now. 
 
 "Pain?" asked the surgeon when he reached Chrissly. 
 
 Somehow he neither nodded nor spoke Chrissly signified 
 assent. 
 
 The surgeon examined him, readjusted the splint and told 
 the nurse to devise a new dressing. 
 
183 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Can lie stand a hypodermic ?" asked the nurse. 
 
 The surgeon nodded. 
 
 The orderly he was a third-year medical-student pro 
 duced the needle. The nurse bared Chrissly s right arm and 
 bound it with a tight thong just above the elbow. 
 
 "Make a fist/ said the surgeon. 
 
 Chrissly s eyes had become glassy. He had not yet uttered 
 a sound. He uttered none now, but he clenched his right 
 hand. 
 
 In the crock of the arm, the veins began to swell. The 
 nurse wiped the skin above them with a bit of cotton soaked 
 in iodine. 
 
 "Be careful not to go clear through the vein," the surgeon 
 cautioned. "Now !" 
 
 The orderly nodded. He hooked the curved needle into the 
 skin. The nurse loosened the thong. An index-finger slowly 
 pushed the piston of the syringe pushed until the well was 
 empty. 
 
 "That doesn t hurt/ said the surgeon: "you only think 
 it does." 
 
 The nurse again applied the iodine. 
 
 Within five minutes, a sleeping Chrissly, tagged with the 
 number of the base-hospital for which his baggage of flesh 
 was destined, had been lifted into one of a row of waiting 
 ambulances. 
 
 VI 
 
 There were three bunks placed lengthwise in the ambulance, 
 two swinging high along the sides and one down the center. 
 The side ones had each its silent, motionless patient when 
 Chrissly was carried there. A lantern, suspended from the 
 roof, shed a faint light over chalky faces and bandaged heads 
 strangely unhuman: already the bandages were stained with 
 red. A flap of canvas and a high board separated the driver s 
 seat from the interior. A private of the hospital-corps clam 
 bered in and took his post, in a crouching position, at the 
 edge of the open rear, where he would be in readiness for 
 rough-and-ready care of the inert passengers. 
 
YICTOEIOUS 183 
 
 "Your first trip to-night?" asked the chauffeur. 
 
 The other man said that it was. 
 
 "Pretty busy out your way?" 
 
 "Pretty busy." 
 
 "I haven t had any sleep for forty-eight hours," said the 
 chauffeur. The tired mask that was his face smiled a little : 
 "but HI be all right to-morrow night they re going to al 
 low me six hours in a real bed. So long : see you at the next 
 rest-station." 
 
 He disappeared in the darkness. He cranked the motor. 
 The ambulance snorted, shook, lurched forward. 
 
 They began their long drive. 
 
 VII 
 
 For some time occasional shells burst in the ruined fields 
 beside them, or howled like vaulting hyenas ; once the dimmed 
 headlight of the ambulance showed them, just in time, a vast 
 crater, newly made, directly in their course. Then, gradually, 
 the external noises ceased, and they were alone in the cruel 
 cold and the tangible night with no other noises than the clat 
 ter of the motor, the flapping of the canvas and the relent 
 less roar of the rushing wind. 
 
 The ambulance pitched like a narrow ship in a head-on 
 sea; it rolled like a dory in the trough of the waves; its 
 movements sickened. One of the wounded men vomited ; the 
 second babbled deliriously about a woman, grew violent, tore 
 off his bandages : the orderly, dashed from side to side, cleaned 
 up, did his best at replacing the disordered lint and linen. 
 Chrissly remained silent. . . . 
 
 The orderly crouched at the rear and clung there. A puff 
 of cold air extinguished the lantern. Groping to relight it, 
 his fingers touched something wet and sticky : the face of the 
 man that had been delirious, but now silent and still. By the 
 first flicker of the relighted lamp, he saw that this man was 
 dead. 
 
 Once there came a cold glow ahead. A benumbed driver, 
 an orderly, two desperately wounded soldiers and one lifeless, 
 
184- yiCTOKIOUS 
 
 they drew up at a canteen, where Red Cross women served hot 
 soup and coffee. Chrissly had not stirred. Then, whole, 
 wounded and dead, the little party lumbered off again into 
 the night. 
 
 They hurried. The cold became more intense. Cramped 
 on the floor, the orderly looked out at the white road racing 
 behind them; its bordering trees stretched appealing arms 
 heavenward. Only after an interminable time did it seem to 
 be growing clearer. They began to pass other ambulances, 
 portable kitchens, supply-camions, going whence this ambu 
 lance had come. 
 
 At last, the winter sun rose. . . . 
 
 VIII 
 
 It was two hours beyond the meridian when they passed a 
 sentry and entered a large gateway. 
 
 "Say, is this a hotel?" 
 
 It was Chrissly s voice that was speaking. He must have 
 been conscious for some time. 
 
 "No," said the orderly. "And you mustn t talk/ 
 
 They didn t look unlike the grounds of a summer-resort 
 hotel, the grounds of this hospital. Up on a hill stood a 
 handsome old chateau with its gardens stretched, acre after 
 acre, all around it. But a close glance showed that the 
 war had converted it to a more useful purpose. Fifty new 
 buildings had sprung up around the old ones, and buildings 
 still newer enough for a thousand more beds were in process 
 of construction just beyond the farthest wall. 
 
 Other orderlies carried Chrissly into a receiving-ward. For 
 the past week he had lived with rats and death in mud and 
 filth ; he was half -frozen, he was caked with dirt, he was crawl 
 ing with a dozen different kinds of vermin: nurses in crisp 
 white uniforms took away his clothes for fumigation; he was 
 carried to the bathroom next door and shaved and washed 
 in the luxury of warm water. Then they wheeled him into a 
 third apartment for diagnosis. . . . 
 
 An important surgeon was complaining: 
 
VICTORIOUS 185 
 
 "What another ? This isn t right : the number of patients 
 is changing all the time. Here it s jumped from four hun 
 dred to seven hundred in two days without warning. And 
 you can t count on orders. I get word to be ready for one 
 hundred and sixty, and along come ambulances with two hun 
 dred and one." 
 
 Still grumbling, the overworked man looked at Chrissly 
 and ordered an immediate operation: "Too weak for chloro 
 form. Nitrous oxide." 
 
 IX 
 
 Chrissly lay on the operating table a clean Chrissly, very 
 white and with that refinement of face which loss of blood al 
 most invariably produces. The nurses were grouped around 
 him, surgeons and assistants already at work with the fluoro- 
 scope. 
 
 Above the lad s upturned feet and about a yard away stood 
 an X-ray apparatus. Its flesh-piercing light fell on a disk 
 of metal that an orderly held over his bared waist. The violet 
 rays passed through the disk and into the patient s abdominal 
 cavity: the surgeon s eyes followed them through the metal 
 and into the flesh, his knife-plying fingers worked under the 
 disk and deep in the wounded man s belly. He cut with that 
 solid plate for a window : he could see what he sought before 
 he set out for it, and, if he overlooked any shell fragments, 
 there was a magnetic contrivance that sounded a buzzer when 
 he got near them. . . . 
 
 X 
 
 It would be all right, they said to one another. The broken 
 arm, of course, was nothing; nor the superficial wounds on 
 it; as for the abdominal wound, the operation had been suc 
 cessful, and the patient had survived the shock. A stay here 
 under treatment, then a vacation at one of the convalescents 
 camps by the seaside, perhaps a furlough home, and he might 
 even be well enough to fight again by March or April. 
 
 So they clothed Chrissly in the cotton-wool pa jama-suit 
 that is the military-hospital uniform. They took him to 
 
186 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 the surgical ward and put him to bed among a row of other 
 wounded. Outside, on a special shelf bearing his hospital- 
 number, had been placed his "Patient s Equipment 5 : bed- 
 linen, socks, bathrobe and towels. Now beside his cot was 
 hung a Red Cross "Comfort Bag." 
 
 He opened his eyes upon the pretty nurse that was tucking 
 the covers about him. He was still uncertain as to his where 
 abouts, and something that had happened in the trenches to 
 himself, to his captain or to the man from New Jersey; he 
 could not make out which had wiped every word of French 
 from his memory. 
 
 "Oh, miss," he asked the nurse, in the heavy accent of his 
 childhood, "kin you speak English still ?" 
 
 She smiled. "Of course. I m an American." 
 
 "Are you an American, miss?" 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "Well," whispered Chrissly, "then might I ask you some- 
 sing, like one American to anuzzer?" 
 
 The nurse bent her head. "Yes. What is it?" 
 
 He fixed his weary glance on her face. His thin white face 
 worked for a moment. "Ain t this climate hell a ready ?" was 
 what he asked her. 
 
 She didn t laugh. She said it was indeed hell. Then she 
 attempted to turn to the man in the next cot : one of the last 
 week s patients with a shell-scooped thigh. 
 
 "An just one sing more, miss," insisted Chrissly, a help 
 less hand fluttering to detain her. "They say this here place 
 ain t a hotel ?" 
 
 "No, no," the nurse answered. "It s not a hotel, but you 
 really mustn t talk any more." 
 
 Chrissly was very weak, but very persistent. He turned 
 his eyes, since he could not turn his head, to his neighbor. 
 
 "Well, mister, if it ain t a hotel, is it one o them there org 
 idressin -places ?" 
 
 The man in the next bed comforted him : 
 
 "Naw, this here ain t one o them way-stations on the road- 
 back. Not much. This is a base-hospital, this is. You can 
 go to sleep safe, sonny; you re home at last." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 A SHORT ONE, SHOWING, HOWEVER, THAT FRANCE IS NOT THE 
 ONLY PLACE WHERE FATE GATHERS THREADS FOR HER IN 
 TRICATE WEB 
 
 IT WAS hard for even the Tollens pride to keep the tears 
 from overflowing Sarah Brown s eyes when she left the Tidd 
 house under the lash of Mrs. Ralph s misunderstanding in 
 sults, and there was a traitorous moisture in the glance that, 
 a few minutes later, encountered Miss Hattie Lloyd s on Elm 
 Avenue, which Miss Hattie was quick to perceive. The town- 
 gossip gave herself a hug of anticipation. She planted herself 
 directly in the other s way. 
 
 "Why, Sarah," she said, "aren t you feeling well?" 
 
 Sarah replied that she was never better. 
 
 "You look run down or worried" perhaps it was Andy ! 
 "What do you hear from Andy?" Miss Hattie inquired. 
 
 "He s well." 
 
 "You hear right often, don t you?" 
 
 "He writes twice a week." 
 
 "And he s getting along all right?" 
 
 "Very well indeed." 
 
 Miss Hattie cocked her head: "I don t see anything with 
 his name to it in the newspapers." 
 
 "He doesn t put his name to what he writes, Miss Hattie, 
 and he doesn t write for any of the Philadelphia papers." 
 
 "Oh, doesn t he? Have you joined the Red Cross?" 
 
 Sarah shook her head. 
 
 "I thought I saw you coming out of the Tidd house just 
 now." 
 
 It struck Sarah that perhaps Miss Hattie, who knew every 
 thing about Americus and remembered most, might throw 
 some light on Mrs. Ralph s astounding assertions. 
 
 187 
 
188 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "I was just in there looking for Mr. Bolingbroke. I . 
 By the way, Miss Hattie, did my father ever live there ?" 
 
 Had she intended it as such, Sarah could have devised no 
 better diversion. An appeal to the past was the one means of 
 distracting Miss Hattie s attention from the present. 
 
 "That house?" She cocked her head again and munched 
 the quid of recollection. "Hum. Why, let s see. Hum/ She 
 had forgotten, and she always felt forgetfulness to be shame 
 ful. "He surely did live somewhere near here, for a while, 
 right after he was married. Of course, your people s, your 
 grandfather s, was the old place on Hickory Street: Mount 
 Horeb they used to call it, though I could never see why 
 you were born there." 
 
 "I know that," said Sarah. "I was just wondering, some 
 how, whether we ever lived in this one." She made a quick 
 circuit of her interlocutor. "It doesn t matter," she added, 
 and meant it. "I was only wondering." She made ofi, down 
 Elm Avenue. 
 
 If she had not said that it didn t matter, Miss Hattie might 
 have thought no more about it, but Miss Hattie s rule of judg 
 ment was that nobody ever told the truth. There she stood 
 looking after Sarah with speculation in her birdlike eyes. 
 
 "I wonder what s back of all this ?" she pondered. 
 
 ii 
 
 Blunston had got and, after some debate, published, as 
 Garcia noted, Andy s ridicule of the censorship ; got also some 
 of Andy s warnings, and shared, in consequence, his fears 
 when the longer memorandum came safely through, Blun 
 ston replied: 
 
 "This is war, and because all wars are bad, even the best of 
 wars must have its errors. Nevertheless, there is a limit be 
 yond which errors are inexcusable. Use your judgment, do 
 your duty and fear nobody." 
 
 Then, deep in the winter, came some work from Andy so 
 well written that Blunston s conscience would no longer rest. 
 He signed to it Andy s own name. He confessed to his papers, 
 
VICTORIOUS 189 
 
 and his papers not only printed the articles under the new 
 signature, but wrote him that they would continue the service. 
 
 The Spy reprinted the first of the signed articles and headed 
 it "Honor to a Son of Amerieus." The next day, Mrs. Boling- 
 broke stepped out of her limousine before Sarah Brown s house 
 and rang the bell. 
 
 Sarah had been in the kitchen. She opened the door with 
 one hand and untied her apron with the other. 
 
 Mrs. Ralph nodded. "Hello, Sarah," she said. She 
 spoke as if their last meeting had never occurred. "That s 
 fine work Andy s doing in France." 
 
 If her involuntary hostess was surprised, she gave no sign 
 of it. If she saw the expectation that she would admit her 
 caller, she gave no sign of that. She stood there, a tall drab 
 figure, her apron in her kitchen-damp hands, and yet a figure 
 newly dignified. 
 
 "Thank you," she said. 
 
 Mrs. Ralph wondered whether she ought to feel nettled. 
 "We think you ought to be doing as much here as your son is 
 over there," she said. "We think you ought to come into the 
 Red Cross." 
 
 Sarah said : "Thank you." 
 
 It was inconceivable ! "We d be glad to have you," said Mrs. 
 Ralph. 
 
 "Thank you," said Sarah. 
 
 Mrs. Ralph s temper was never long. She first fell back a 
 step in amazement and then came forward a step in rising 
 anger. 
 
 "Do you mean you ll come, or do you mean you won t?" 
 
 Sarah stood firm. Her voice did not rise and did not falter. 
 
 "I mean I ll do what work I can outside and send it in, but 
 I won t join. And I mean I m much obliged to you." 
 
 She began to readjust her apron. It was a token of dis 
 missal that Mrs. Ralph, for the first time in a long while at a 
 loss for words, accepted in silence. 
 
190 VICTORIOUS 
 
 in 
 
 That was the day when, while Andy s credit in the town 
 temporarily remounted, the parents of Harry Kurtz, the lad 
 who had hated to leave his terrier Fan behind, learned that he 
 was in France. They learned it by a telegram from Wash 
 ington: 
 
 "Deeply regret to inform you Private Henry C. Kurtz, G 
 Company th Machine-Gun Battalion, reported seriously 
 wounded in action, January 30th." 
 
 It was the first message of the kind to come to the little 
 town. It was the forerunner of many that soon were changing 
 service-stars to gold. 
 
 Sarah went to Mrs. Kurtz, and Mrs. Kurtz wept brokenly 
 on Sarah s thin shoulder. 
 
 "If he only could a gone for a correspondent like- your 
 Andy," sobbed Mrs. Kurtz, "our Harry d a been safe now !" 
 
 IV 
 
 Miss Hattie was just then calling on Blunston s cousins 
 black-haired Cousin Flora, red-haired Cousin Mollie and red- 
 haired Cousin Becky and Andrew Blunston was there. Law 
 yer Dickey had happened in, and the girls father beckoned 
 him and Andrew Blunston out of the great hall and into the 
 dining-room, with some smiling excuse about "estate busi 
 ness" that did not at all deceive Miss Hattie, whose pricked 
 ears presently caught the tinkle of glass. When the three 
 men reappeared, she cocked her head at the youngest. 
 
 "Andrew," she said, "your namesake s doing well these 
 days, isn t he?" 
 
 Blunston was lighting a cigarette. He looked at its end as 
 he answered: 
 
 "Yes. It s very gratifying when you come to think. . . ." 
 
 Had he intended to finish, he never would have done so, 
 for Miss Hattie, embracing herself and responding to the ca 
 ress with a coquettish leer, turned on Mr. Dickey. 
 
VICTOBIOUS 191 
 
 "Jim, I guess that old Tidd house Ralph Bolingbroke lent 
 his wife s Eed Cross must be worth quite a little money." 
 
 Lawyer Dickey had known Miss Hattie all his life and so 
 knew the impossibility of knowing her goal before her ar 
 rival. Nevertheless, he suspected here some belittling of 
 Ralph s generosity, and, though he disliked the Bolingbrokes 
 even more than he disliked Hattie Lloyd, he decided to de 
 fend the absent enemy for the sake of frustrating the enemy 
 present : 
 
 "Just after Ralph turned it over, there was a fellow came 
 to town from a five-and-ten-cent store syndicate and offered 
 him ten thousand for it, and Ralph said he wouldn t sell BO 
 long s it could be useful to the Red Cross. 5 
 
 "Hum," said Miss Hattie. "Ralph told you so himself, I 
 suppose ?" 
 
 The girls laughed. 
 
 "Of course he did," said red-haired Cousin Becky; "Ralph 
 never hides his light under a bushel." 
 
 "I know that," Mr. Dickey admitted, "but it was the truth. 
 The stores agent retained me to keep an eye on it for him." 
 
 "Well, if he s going to get the money sooner or later any 
 how, all Ralph loses is the interest," said Miss Hattie. The 
 reflection was worth another hug. "What makes me think of 
 it : Sarah Brown did a queer thing a while ago ; she asked me 
 if her fathered ever lived in that house." 
 
 "And you couldn t remember?" asked black-haired Cousin 
 Flora. 
 
 "Well, no," said Miss Hattie shamefacedly, "I couldn t." 
 
 "Why, Miss Hattie" it wag red-haired Cousin Mollie this 
 time "I thought you never forgot anything!" 
 
 "Don t, generally." 
 
 The girls father had to rescue their guest. "Joe Tol- 
 lens?" said he. "Seems to me he did live there, right after 
 he was married, for a couple of years, till his father died. 
 How about that, Jim ?" 
 
 Mr. Dickey was uncertain. Wasn t it old Doctor Ireland 
 or the Kents? He rather thought it was the Kents. Doctor 
 Ireland s brother John built- it, somewhere in the forties, but 
 
192 VICTORIOUS 
 
 he didn t live there very many years, and there was surely a 
 better sort of owner than the Tidds before it fell to their level. 
 
 "It was Joe Tollens," said old Mr. Blunston. "I remem 
 ber now. I remember one evening he had a party there, and 
 somebody made a punch out of Jamaica rum from Philadel 
 phia. Who was that, now?" 
 
 "Joe Tollens himself," said the girls mother. "I remember 
 the time you mean." 
 
 "But how did Ealph Bolingbroke get it?" Miss Hattie de 
 manded. 
 
 "I don t recollect." Mr. Dickey was tiring of the subject: 
 he differed from most people of his age by a lack of interest 
 in things gone by. "It hasn t come to the point of looking up 
 the deeds and won t while this war lasts. It was his father 
 that bought it, but I don t think he paid cash, for nobody ever 
 heard of the Tidds getting ready money from anybody; their 
 only legal tender was promissory notes, and they generally 
 went to protest." Mr. Dickey had several of them in his office- 
 safe to that day, but he did not say so. 
 
 "Hum," said Miss Hattie. She was hugging herself warm 
 preparatory to departure. "It might be worth looking up, 
 mightn t it?" 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 
 
 SHOWING, AMONG DIVERSE STARTLING MATTERS OF IMPORT TO 
 ANDREW BLUNSTON, ONE THAT SHOULD LONG BE OF IMPORT 
 TO ALL HIS FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN: TO WIT, THE EARLY 
 AMERICAN FRONT 
 
 FORTY-EIGHT mute hours followed Innis s threats to the 
 press-division. Andy and Evans took the precaution of mak 
 ing numerous copies of their suspended stories, of which they 
 had carbons, and of dropping these in out-of-the-way post- 
 boxes about the city, with the hope that at least one copy 
 would be overlooked by the censorship, going over them with 
 the utmost care first to see that they in no way could give mili 
 tary information to the enemy ; Innis, whose material was to 
 be sent, if ever, by cable, sat in the Napolitain and consumed 
 his heart, together with an occasional export Curasao. What 
 went on behind the reticent curtain of the Intelligence De 
 partment, they could only guess : they imagined telephone- 
 conversations between the rue Ste. Anne and Chaumont, un- 
 derseas messages to Washington. 
 
 Further word of the wounded Chrissly, Andy, try as he did, 
 could not secure. He endeavored to go about his work as 
 usual, wrote some unobjectionable matter, which, evading 
 Garcia, he turned in after the old fashion, and he sent off 
 to his mother a letter that he was at pains to make sanguine. 
 He especially noted a queer little man with a cap down over 
 his eyes and a scornful mouth, who sat on a doorstep across 
 the rue de Valois Andy saw him at each coming-out and 
 going-in and who seemed uncompromisingly antagonistic to 
 the American uniform. 
 
 Two days passed thus. Then the Paris edition of the Few 
 York Hewld and, presently, the newspapers at home, pub 
 lished this : 
 
 193 
 
194 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 "American officers have been authorized to state that the 
 sector of the Western Front taken over by the United States 
 Army is in Lorraine, to the northwest of Toul." 
 
 Officially, that was all. 
 
 "And they call it a communique !" Evans snorted. 
 
 "You ll notice it is so worded as to let the American people 
 think we ve been there since November," said Innis. 
 
 "Anyhow," said Andy, "you ve forced them to release our 
 stories." 
 
 II 
 
 On his way from Evans and Innis at the Napolitain to his 
 Palais Eoyal garret, Andy, for a moment, could have sworn 
 that one of the two figures walking a hundred yards ahead of 
 him was Sylvia. Only the absence of Tac at first made him 
 uncertain; then he dismissed the surmise as unworthy when 
 he noticed, from a turn of his body, that the man was Louis 
 Garcia. He felt his face flush as he saw Garcia, rather too 
 solicitously insist on helping his companion into a taxi-cab. 
 
 Hie mind was all on the communique, but had he been able 
 to catch a glimpse into that cab and listen to the conversation 
 that followed, he would have had strange and new misgivings. 
 For this was what he would have heard : 
 
 "Of course I m going to see you to your hotel. Think of 
 me meeting you here in Paris !" 
 
 "It was nice of you to hurry the pass : I d have had to wait 
 hours." 
 
 "You can do something in return if you will." 
 
 The young woman studied Garcia s face. He took her 
 steady look for acquiescence. 
 
 "You re a clever girl as well as a pretty one, Miss Eae- 
 burn." Garcia paused. Finally he said: "You must be meet 
 ing a good many of these war-correspondents we have to put 
 up with." 
 
 "Is that the way you feel about them ?" she laughed. 
 
 "If you only knew what lengths they go to, every one of 
 them, to get around our regulations ! They look like a bunch 
 
VICTOKIOUS 195 
 
 of enlisted men, I know, but the way they behave, and talk, 
 you d think they were all field-marshals." 
 
 "I ve met only one or two of them." 
 
 "You know young Brown: A. McK. Brown. I saw you 
 talking to him one day, only I wasn t quite sure it was you 
 till I saw your name registered on our list. I can trust you, 
 can t I?" 
 
 "I ve always been considered trustworthy, Mr. Garcia." 
 
 "I ll make it worth your while. And just between ourselves, 
 Brown s a trouble-maker. I ll be glad if well, if you d keep 
 an eye on him and any of the other correspondents, too, for 
 that matter and report to me once in a while as to what 
 they re up to." Her clear gaze made him add: "You d be 
 doing a real service to your country, you know." 
 
 As he helped her out of the cab, he said : 
 
 "How about taking dinner with me sometime soon?" 
 
 "I m awfully busy" 
 
 "Here, too. Still, how about next Wednesday night, just a 
 nice quiet dinner at Paillard s?" 
 
 "It sounds lovely but I daren t accept. I m going on 
 tour any day now. Thank you ever so much just the same." 
 
 "Well, some night soon." 
 
 "Perhaps." She seemed in a hurry to be gone : "I left my 
 dog with the concierge, and I think he hears me." 
 
 "I don t see why all actresses have to have dogs," Garcia 
 complained; but he added: "Don t forget you re in my em 
 ployment now." 
 
 "Oh, I ll come and report," she laughed, as she ran up the 
 steps. 
 
 "About that dinner?" 
 
 "I ll let you know sometime if I m free !" 
 
 "That s a promise," he called, as he closed the door of the 
 cab. 
 
 in 
 
 The Americans were "in" ; but were they there in strength 
 enough to matter? On the afternoon of the day on which 
 the evasive communique appeared, Andy heard news that 
 
196 VICTOKIOTJS 
 
 compelled him to doubt. Evans took him to a government 
 office and introduced him to a grave French official. This 
 was a personage that spoke with authority not a little en 
 hanced, in Andy s eyes, by the ribbon of the Legion of Honor 
 and a vast black beard out of which came a statement precise 
 and prepared: 
 
 "You must tell your people to be quick. "We must have 
 more men. There is no more time to be spared. We are in 
 possession of important information: somewhat delayed by 
 the breaks in the Russian negotiations, but now hurried by 
 the internal unrest in Austria, which has informed Berlin 
 that it can not fight a year longer, the great offensive of the 
 Central Empires will surely be launched before the end of 
 March. "We shall be attacked at three points: two on the 
 French and one on the British front. Paris and the channel- 
 ports and a rupture of the liaison between the French and 
 British lines will be the objectives. I tell you in confidence, 
 gentlemen, that unless we have reenforcements for a counter- 
 offensive, the war will be lost." 
 
 "If we say that in our papers " began Andy. 
 
 "You must not put the words in my mouth." 
 
 "But if we can say it " 
 
 "If you can do anything to make your country hurry troops 
 Here if you can do anything to end the delays, you may 
 save us. If not " He flung his arms wide and concluded the 
 interview. 
 
 IV 
 
 Sylvia, when Andy at last permitted himself to see her, 
 was a sober nun in a Y. M. C. A. uniform. He called of an 
 evening at her hotel, and she met him in a gray-blue skirt 
 and a dark green cape and a hat of gray-blue with the in 
 verted triangle of her order upon it. Only rebellious tendrils 
 of her hair, escaped and shining against the hat-brim, denied 
 her severity. 
 
 "How did it go? Of course it was a success and of course 
 you weren t afraid of your audiences and of course 
 
VICTORIOUS 197 
 
 they thought you were just great/ Andy was sure of all that. 
 "Gee., but I wish I could have seen you there I" 
 
 The tour had been fortunate and another was soon to fol 
 low, but Sylvia was in serious mood. Her eyes were not only 
 beautiful : they had been made to use, and she had used them. 
 She was enthusiastic when she spoke of the enlisted men in 
 the camp ; she made no mention of Garcia, or of her encounter 
 with him ; but when she spoke of the tardiness of the officials 
 in charge of the American effort, she despaired. 
 
 "We ve only a handful," she said. "Nobody at home could 
 imagine how dreadful it is. And I was at Brest oh, our navy 
 is wonderful: they re doing wonders, and the French love 
 them but what sort of troops do you suppose are coming 
 over in the transports? Whole companies of lens-grinders 
 and laundrymen. In the hotel I heard an American captain 
 talking to a French colonel : the captain said he ran a laun 
 dry in New York and was sent to run one here." 
 
 She was never more lovely than when in distress. The 
 slightly drawn-together brows were dark against her white 
 skin; a pulse beat in her temples; her red mouth drooped a 
 little and her gaze was sorrowful. He felt that this hotel- 
 parlor was henceforth to be a holy place. 
 
 "I ve written the truth," he said. 
 
 He told her what had happened, she listening with hands 
 clasped, her supple body bent toward him beside her. When, 
 he had finished: 
 
 "Don t mind about their rules," she said, with splendid 
 feminine scorn of legal prohibitions: "Get all that home." 
 
 "It s gone," said Andy. He was looking between her eyes. 
 Without knowing that they said it, his fascinated lips added : 
 "You re the most wonderful girl in all the world." 
 
 She drew back; she was more serious than ever now. 
 "Don t call me that. I m not at all wonderful, and as for 
 being young, if I wasn t old enough before, this war is mak 
 ing an old woman of me." Then she gave him one of her 
 sudden smiles that were always like sunshine after rain. 
 "Would you like to go to the British front?" she asked. 
 
198 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Would he like it ! Andy s freckles were drowned in a crim 
 soned delight : "Gee, can you fix it for me ?" 
 
 She could; she had. She had met, if appeared, a former 
 stage-friend, English-born and now turned Waac, who had 
 an uncle on one of the British staffs, and this uncle had ar 
 ranged everything. Andy was to go in a fortnight. He was 
 to go to the British Embassy and sign a lot of papers. 
 
 He fell into raptures of expectation and talked until all 
 hours. He left his goddess more her worshipper than ever 
 and more than ever resolved to pursue his thorny bypath of 
 duty to America all the way to the general goal. He came 
 out of the hotel with his head so far among the stars that he 
 nearly fell over some earth-crawling creature who looked as 
 If he might be the sneering observer of the rue de Valois. 
 
 Evans had suggested that Andy might find trace of his 
 wounded friend through the American Eed Cross, which was 
 establishing a bureau for just such inquiries, and the lad was 
 about to go to the headquarters in the Place de la Concorde 
 next morning when he was further urged there by a letter 
 from America. It had come all the long road from Pennsyl 
 vania and lay at last upon his crowded desk in Paris a few 
 laborious lines in pencil upon a single sheet of blue-ruled 
 pulp paper, torn from a note-pad. It was a timid little let 
 ter, hesitant, imperfectly articulate. Andy could not look at 
 it without wondering how it had ever braved the journey and 
 how it had ever survived: 
 
 "Dear Sir," it ran, "I take up my pen in good health hop 
 ing it finds you the same to ast a favor because you remember 
 our Harry. He was in C. Co., th inft. when he enlisted and 
 wrote often at first from camp but maybe he s in France now 
 anyhow he doesn t any more. He was always a good boy and 
 wrote regular, Mr. Brown, and we are worried and can t find 
 out. Will kindly ast you can you do anything to find out which 
 
VICTOBIOUS 199 
 
 we will be very grateful for. You know his name is Henry C. 
 and then the same as mine. He was always a good boy. 
 
 "Yours truly, 
 
 "MRS. KURTZ. 
 
 "p. g. Have just got word wounded but not how bad. 
 Please Mr. Brown do something." 
 
 Andy had to blink a little as he read it. He seemed to see 
 the old familiar town again, one street lined by pleasant two- 
 story frame houses, and in one of them, exactly like the oth 
 ers, a tiny parlor: the bunch of immortelles under glass on 
 the mantelpiece, the crayon-portraits on the wall, the marble- 
 top center-table bearing a tremendous gilt-edged family-Bible 
 interleaved with pages headed "Marriages/ "Births" 
 "Deaths." And he saw a woman at the table, a woman in 
 appearance not unlike his own mother; there was more gray 
 in her hair; her face was angular. Because her hands were 
 stiffened by hard work, this woman held the pencil awk 
 wardly. . . . 
 
 VI 
 
 "Well," said a man at a desk in the Red Cross offices a 
 man with a round face and eyes at once businesslike and 
 kindly "about Privates Henry C. Kurtz and Christian Shu- 
 man. This woman may have written before the War Depart 
 ment could get details, or the boy may have been sent to a 
 French hospital and lost track of." 
 
 To Andy it seemed incredible that this could happen to a 
 soldier bearing an identity-disk; but it appeared that the 
 suggested event was not uncommon. No army kept a perfect 
 record. Reports followed a man until he was registered as 
 "Sent to Base-Hospital," and then they stopped. Which of 
 the many base-hospitals he was directed toward it was the 
 hospital s business to tell, and there were often rushes of 
 wounded so great that record-taking became impossible. 
 
 The man at the desk went to work. He gave orders: a 
 clerk was telephoning to the army s statistical division; a 
 goggled stenographer was sending a telegram of inquiry to 
 
200 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 the chaplain of Harry s regiment ; a second stenographer was 
 wiring every army divisional Bed Cross agent and every Red 
 Cross hospital-searcher in France. 
 
 "How long will it take ?" asked Andy. 
 
 "Ten minutes or two days/ said the man at the desk. 
 
 Andy hoped that it would take only ten minutes. He 
 thought about Harry s mother: she had already waited long. 
 He thought of Chrissly. . . . 
 
 "Of course/ said his informant, "if we don t get an im 
 mediate reply, we wait, and then, after six months, why, the 
 soldier will be reported as " 
 
 Andy did not want to hear the end of that sentence. He 
 tried to think of something else. Presently : 
 
 ". . . till the government can permanently mark them, 
 the job s ours. We re having designs made for a temporary 
 metal-marker that can later be removed and sent to the sol 
 dier s family." 
 
 What was this? Something in his tone had recaptured 
 attention. 
 
 "Mark?" Andy repeated. "Mark what?" 
 
 "Their graves: the graves of American soldiers that die 
 in France. You see, they often have to be buried where they 
 fall, and the place might be forgotten, so we mark it and send 
 the family a photograph of the grave." 
 
 Andy recalled something that he had seen, but, in the 
 manifold horrors of the time, scarcely noticed, during his 
 latter visit to the front: it was a military-cemetery close to 
 the front line ; the shells were falling there ; there French and 
 American soldiers had been buried side by side and, as he 
 stood in the gateway, he saw bodies dug out and tossed aside 
 by explosions. The big shells were grave-robbers. . . . 
 
 The telephone rang. Andy s cicerone looked up from the 
 receiver. 
 
 "Here s luck," he said. "Both of em found. It took us 
 just" he consulted his wrist-watch "just forty minutes. 
 Pretty good work, eh?" 
 
 "Where is he ?" demanded Andy. He thrust into his breast 
 pocket the letter from Harry s mother. 
 
VICTORIOUS 201 
 
 "Both at base-hospital No. , French/ answered the man 
 at the desk. "That s only an hour s ride out of Paris. Take 
 the first one of our cars that s at the door. The driver will 
 know the roads. Phone us if we can do anything. Good-by." 
 
 VII 
 
 Andy sat beside the chauffeur. The Champs Elysees was 
 only a blur of bare trees and white-streamered nourrices as 
 the car scorched along it. They leaped the Rond-Point to the 
 Porte Maillot. They crossed the curving Seine at the He du 
 Pont. 
 
 That chauffeur also knew something about the work in 
 hand: 
 
 ". . . women go every day ... see the man s taken care 
 of ... write letters right there, beside his bed letters to 
 his folks back home, you know." 
 
 The car careened around a sharp road-turning. 
 
 ". . . stay till the man s dead," the chauffeur remorselessly 
 pursued "or till he gets well . . . writes a mother what 
 her son s last words were . . . look up his pals . . . get 
 their stories about him . . ." 
 
 The rush of the wind would jerk the words from his mouth 
 and fling them a hundred yards behind. The letter burned 
 in Andy s pocket, against his heart. 
 
 The suburbs had given place to villages. Now there fol 
 lowed flashing stretches of open road. And at last the car 
 slowed down. It was only an hour s ride for an express- 
 train. 
 
 "The soldier Kurtz is here. He was shot through the lungs 
 in a trench-raid. He is strong, and we have added to his 
 strength the best that we could; but now Monsieur is only 
 just in time," said the nurse. 
 
 VIII 
 
 One of the beds was shut from its neighbors by a pair of 
 screens. Another nurse was there, and a doctor, and from 
 something on the bed a whisper came: 
 
203 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "You re the American, ain t you?" 
 
 Andy thought he said "yes." He knew that the word caught 
 in his throat. 
 
 "An* you ve come all the way from Paris?" 
 
 Andy answered: 
 
 "I ve come all the way from home." 
 
 The doctor caught his eye. His silent lips formed one 
 word: 
 
 "Vite!" 
 
 Andy bent over the bed. It was Harry Kurtz who lay 
 there : a boy that had been boy with him. Andy remembered 
 their days at school, their days of truantage. They had gone 
 swimming together. There was one winter night of hare-and- 
 hounds. . . . He had never seen a finer face or braver than 
 this. And never a calmer. 
 
 "Gee, if it ain t Andy Brown !" 
 
 The eyes were big with gratitude. 
 
 "It s me, all right," said Andy. 
 
 Harry lay very still. The fingers of one hand plucked at 
 the army-blanket that covered the bed. 
 
 "I never guessed it d be you. I ain t seen you since I 
 ain t seen you for a long time." 
 
 Andy swallowed a lump in his throat. "I wish I d looked 
 you up before," he said. 
 
 "That s all right." The pale lips made the words slowly. 
 "D you remember my dawg, Fan, Andy ? She s dead. Andy" 
 The wide calm eyes sought his. "I m goin after her." 
 
 Andy s answer was only to produce that letter. Somehow 
 he managed to read to the lad what the lad s mother had 
 written. Dying, Harry gave him the strength to read it with 
 out faltering. 
 
 When that was over, Harry spoke again; already his voice 
 was perceptibly weaker. 
 
 "Thanks," he said. "You ll give her my love her and 
 pop?" 
 
 "I ll cable it." 
 
 "An you ll explain why it was I didn t write? You see, 
 I always wrote reg lar, an I wouldn t want her to think " 
 
.VICTORIOUS 203 
 
 "She ll know to-night, Harry." 
 
 His features relaxed. He smiled. 
 
 "Thanks," said Private Harry Kurtz. "So long." 
 
 IX 
 
 The Eed Cross would take charge of the burial, and Andy 
 would be there. He caught the nurse s hand. 
 
 " Shuman," he said : "it s not the same with him, is it ?" 
 
 "The same ? I do not understand." The nurse indicated a 
 near-by door. "He is in that ward." 
 
 Andy brushed her aside and darted forward. He was 
 through the doorway; he was in another ward, and there, 
 propped on the first cot, a gaunt Chrissly was vacantly re 
 garding him. 
 
 "Say, you re an American, ain t ?" asked Chrissly. "Well, 
 kin you speak French? If you kin, I wisht you d let these 
 folks know I want a pen an paper still. I been tryin t git 
 some fer more n a week yet. I want to write my pop while 
 I m a wounded hero, an I gotta hurry, fer they re goin to 
 make me git up to-morry a ready, an then I ll want to git 
 back an fight." . . . 
 
 From his first sleep in that American hospital to which he 
 had been taken, Chrissly had wakened with the sense that 
 some great change was come over the world. At first he 
 thought it was the pain from which he suffered, the warmth 
 of the bed, the quiet of the vast room in which he lay a 
 quiet wholly different from that in his trench preceding the 
 barrage. Then he found himself repeating: 
 
 Tf Wie ojt, wann ich in Druwel lin, 
 
 Derik ich an selli Euh, 
 Un wott, wann s nor Gott s Wille war, 
 
 Ich ging ihr schneller zu 
 Doch wart ich bis mei Schtindle schlagt, 
 
 Nor d sag ich Welt, adj u!" 
 
204: VICTORIOUS 
 
 It had something to do with that, the change; in some 
 wonderful way, he was nearer home. 
 
 He remembered that he was a soldier, but he remembered 
 nothing of France except the trench. He had been in the 
 trench, and it was cold. There was somebody with him. . . . 
 And now he was not in the trench. . . . 
 
 Thinking made him dizzy. . . . 
 
 He lay very still. . . . 
 
 XI 
 
 What mistake of orders moved him, he was never to learn. 
 Some confusion there must have been, for there was much 
 confusion in those days some mistaken shuffling of the cards 
 that were men in the great game that was war. When Chrissly 
 returned again to consciousness, he was not where he had 
 been : one of a procession, he was being carried out of a rail 
 way train and toward a long white building, and his bearers 
 wore blue-gray uniforms. 
 
 He was taken into a room already crowded with cots. Here 
 and there, soldiers were laying straw on the floor, and on 
 that straw other soldiers were laying wounded men. Sudden 
 movements brought forth sharp cries of pain; something was 
 breathing stertorously, with a nerve-tearing sound ; a horrible 
 odor of putrifying wounds sickened him. 
 
 There came a doctor, who looked him over, and asked ques 
 tions out of a jungle of whiskers. Chrissly could not under 
 stand a word. 
 
 XII 
 
 "We was doin a little patrollin . They was three of us. 
 We was crawlin on our bellies, tryin to spot a listenin -post. 
 They spotted us fore we spotted them. That s how I got 
 mine. The other two was killed." 
 
 It was a man in the next cot that was talking. He was 
 talking to somebody on the other side of him. Chrissly asked : 
 
 "What fer place is this?" 
 
 His neighbor answered without moving: "It s a French 
 hospital." 
 
VICTOEIOUS 205 
 
 "French?" 
 "Yep." 
 
 "You re American, ain t?" 
 
 "Betcher life." 
 
 Chrissly thought it over. "Then why are we in a French 
 hospital a ready ? Last thing I knew, we was in an American 
 hospital !" 
 
 A voice from beyond, the voice of the "other fellow," an 
 swered. "You can search us," it said. 
 
 It was here that Andy found him. 
 
 sin 
 
 He had forgotten Leonie, but he was vividly conscious of 
 Minnie Taylor. No effort of Andy s availed to restore the 
 broken piece of memory, and the attending doctor advised 
 against further endeavor. 
 
 "You got me mixed wis somebody else, Brown," said 
 Chrissly, and, when Andy would have insisted: "What we 
 know not burns us not." His former accent had returned. 
 He wrote a fervent letter to Minnie and to his home a letter 
 blurred with homesickness. 
 
 When, in the late afternoon, Andy returned from Harry 
 Kurtz s hurried funeral a funeral with a French chaplain 
 officiating and a squad of invalided French soldiers, in their 
 bright blue hospital uniforms, in attendance Chrissly had 
 been officially located by his own army. An officer was there 
 and had made the Amish man happy with the suggestion that 
 he would perhaps be given leave and sent to America to make 
 speeches for a Liberty Loan campaign. 
 
 On Hs part, !Andy Had time on his Hands before the date 
 set for his trip to the British front, and was resolved to visit 
 the Toul sector again. He wrote to Harry Kurtz s mother, 
 said good-by to Sylvia and then, it being impossible to secure 
 a pass, started away without one. 
 
206 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 He amazingly did not need it. So far as his experience 
 went, nobody needed credentials to reach the American front. 
 He went, by way of Nancy, to Toul. It was midnight when 
 his train reached that city, then a bare twelve miles behind 
 the lines. At the station nobody asked to see his pass, nobody 
 asked even for his railway -ticket ; to the sentries at the city 
 gates he gave no more than a shouted "Good night," and, at 
 the hotel to which he groped his way through a darkened 
 town, he was not required to make so much as the formal 
 registration that, throughout the rest of France was, even 
 .in times of peace, exacted for the information of the police. 
 
 Nevertheless, after she had led him through a room in 
 which a couple of officers were drinking Niersteiner, the red- 
 cheeked chambermaid babbled, as she showed him to his room, 
 .of massacre. 
 
 "Monsieur will do well," she said, "to sleep with some 
 clothes near him warm clothes for the dirty Boche planes 
 come frequently, and then it is necessary to descend into the 
 cellars. Oh, but we have beautiful cellars under this hotel, 
 but a little damp. The sirens call so soon as the enemy 
 avions cross the lines: then monsieur will do well to clothe 
 himself. When the onions, approach the town, the tocsin 
 sounds, and then you will at once descend. Take the rail 
 well in the hand, for the stone stairs, monsieur sees, are well 
 worn." . . . 
 
 It seemed to Andy that he did hear sirens that night, but 
 lie was too tired to get up and make certain, and the last 
 sound that he could surely identify was only a bang of artil 
 lery muffled by comfortable distance. 
 
 xv 
 
 An overcast morning found the city undisturbed; it took 
 him to the beautiful cathedral where the relics of Toul s first 
 bishop are enshrined and where the devout have for long years 
 implored that saint s good offices to keep their countryside 
 "safe from the devastations of war," the cathedral whereat 
 the Maid of Orleans was received into the faith that was one 
 
VICTOBIOUS 207 
 
 day to canonize her. Andy bowed his head before her statue 
 and fancied that the armored figure resembled the figure of 
 some one he knew, perhaps a little because he wanted it to 
 resemble her. It was on coming from the cathedral that he 
 encountered a Y. M. C. A. camion and hailed it. The driver 
 was taking supplies to huts behind the front line ; that done, 
 he was to carry tobacco and chewing-gum in a pack on his 
 back into the trenches. In return for help, he would give 
 Andy a lift, and the help Andy cheerfully guaranteed. 
 
 The course lay along what were, at first, excellent highroads 
 and through the now familiar, widely-rolling country so 
 formed that a village nestling on the shoulder of a hill com 
 manded large miles of territory. The new roads, the military 
 short-cuts hewn with a Roman sense of time-salvage tempered 
 only by the modern soldiers appreciation of strategical values 
 and twentieth-century gunfire, were of almost equal quality. 
 As apparently no ingenuity of mortal man could stop 
 them from being, were the lanes and bypaths, now ankle-deep 
 in slime and again knee-deep with sucking ooze. Behind the 
 American front, as in the American camp, the heaviest curse 
 of the soldiers was the mud mud that took of every step the 
 toll of energy paid but by the score on dry ground, g?aj mud 
 that crept into the boot and up the leg, mud that entered the 
 food one ate and caked in the blankets when one rolled into 
 them at night. 
 
 "We re getting pretty close to things now," said the "Y" 
 man he was a grizzled chap with a cheerful word for every 
 soldier they passed; he had been, he explained, a paint-sales 
 man in Denver. "Guns are getting kind of loud." 
 
 They were. In a clump of woods a few hundred yards away, 
 which Andy remembered from his previous visit, German 
 shells were falling. They burst with a tremendous clatter 
 and sent into the rain-soaked air roots of trees, and branches, 
 and bits of rock. Yet just here, by the roadside, was a "Y" 
 hut and a woman in it. 
 
 She was short and practical and American. She had pieces 
 of court-plaster on her face useful, not ornamental and 
 her sleeves were rolled high, and she was washing dishes for 
 
20S VICTORIOUS 
 
 her "boys." She had always been with this division ; she had 
 "trailed along after it" from the port at which it landed. 
 
 "Hard work?" she said. "Of course, but then just think 
 how much harder work these men are doing." 
 
 She jerked her tousled head toward the muddy soldiers 
 that thronged about her. They called her affectionately by 
 her Christian name, with the "Miss" before it that is a con 
 cession to convention, and she sold them cigarettes and choco 
 late and served them tea and sewed on buttons by the very 
 gross. 
 
 "And I ve got a daisy room to sleep in," she told him. 
 "It s over there in the village. A big double bed. When I get 
 home, nights, the French woman whose house it s in, always 
 has a fire going for me, with my nightgown warming before 
 it, and something hot to eat. I m almost as well off as I used 
 to be in Passaic, New Jersey." 
 
 "She s got it," said the grizzled "Y" man as he cranked 
 his motor "what you ve got to have to make good in this 
 work over here: the spirit of Jesus Christ. You ve got to 
 think of just helping, helping, helping and of nothing else. 
 And that s the sort she is." 
 
 They plunged into the soggy woods. The ground was one 
 tremendous sponge gorged with water. A wide American rail 
 way ran up to the outlying trees, where it met the narrow- 
 gauge relic of the French occupation; thence, through all the 
 hours that precede the dawn, long trains of ammunition- 
 wagons daily crawled. The road, now empty save for Andy s 
 camion, twisted agonizedly among the thick timber and 
 breathless underbrush. Shells fell every little while; in a 
 gully lay a body, its arms extended. Andy thought that noth 
 ing could live here, and yet, at a quick turn, they found an 
 entire artillery-camp and a band that played Over There, 
 to which hundreds of soldiers sang the chorus. 
 
 The afternoon had darkened when the lightened camion 
 again struck into the open country, but a sign warned them 
 "Lamps out beyond this point." It was in deepening twilight 
 that they visited an immense chateau of the fourteenth cen- 
 
VICTORIOUS 209 
 
 tury, still full of old furniture, but housing several hundred 
 American men. 
 
 "Ain t it a grand old place?" one of them appealed to 
 Andy. "An they s a kind of attic, way up-stairs, that s all 
 sealed up, an they s vaults an vaults in the big cellars sealed 
 up, too, an the fellows say they re full o pictures, oil paint- 
 in s and things, what the old masters done." 
 
 A more cynical soldier, who was standing near by, sniffed. 
 
 "Old masters?" said he. "More like it s old brandy. 
 Trench cog-nac brandy, that s what it is." . . . 
 
 There was night on the road. How Andy s driver knew 
 the way without lights was a riddle ; for Andy it was just pos 
 sible to make out that the buildings which here and there lined 
 it were not, properly speaking, buildings at all; were only 
 gaping ruins raked and reraked by a three years bombard 
 ment. 
 
 In one such group of ruins the camion drew up before a 
 house in which a single room remained habitable. An old 
 mother and her daughter lived there, all that was left of a 
 formerly prosperous family of farmers. The farm was now 
 in No Man s Land ; the father, two sons and a younger daugh 
 ter had been killed by German shells and were buried in the 
 village churchyard under the crumbling church-tower; two 
 other sons had fallen in the French ranks ; the young woman s 
 fiance was blown to bits in the first attack on Verdun, thirty 
 miles away; yet, when the government ordered the civilian 
 population of the hamlet to withdraw, these two begged to 
 be allowed to stay they feared the outside world more than 
 the Boche shells and somehow their prayers were granted. 
 Among our soldiers, they were of all the French alone to 
 remain. 
 
 "Were you here," asked Andy, "when the Germans came ?" 
 
 The older woman nodded. 
 
 "Until they came," she said. "Then we hid in the woods." 
 
 "You lived there?" 
 
 "Lived after a fashion, monsieur." 
 
 "But how?" 
 
210 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 "The good God knows. We are very thankful to be back 
 here, monsieur" she looked at the tottering walls of that 
 single room "back here in our home." 
 
 The American officers, the "Y" man said, were good to 
 these people. There was food from the officers mess sent 
 them the white bread of luxury and sometimes there was 
 money sent, too, though money was of small use out here, 
 except at the "Y" canteen in a stable from which an emer 
 gency secretary had dug the manure on the morning pre 
 vious. . . . 
 
 A mile or more down the road they called on a lieutenant. 
 His quarters were in a not uncomfortable cottage. 
 
 "The kaiser slept in this room," he laughed. "I hope he 
 enjoyed it less than I do." . . . 
 
 There were no civilians now not even old widows. As the 
 camion went along, there seemed to be nothing but roofless 
 houses, through the blackened rafters of which, as the weather 
 cleared, the stars began to shine. The cottagers had gone, and 
 even their dogs were gone with them; but the cats remained 
 and had reverted to the wild state of their first forefathers 
 it was dangerous to enter a ruin unprepared for attack 
 from one of them. Silence and darkness and oppression that 
 settle on a place deserted and in ruin, but once alive and pop 
 ulous the weight of these was a weight that became almost 
 physically sensible as one moved along that strip of pale road. 
 Over there very close over there now the guns were roar 
 ing, yet here it seemed that they had already done all that 
 guns can do. 
 
 Nearly, but not quite. Andy saw, close to the ground, a 
 thread of radiance. Toward it his companion conducted him. 
 They went down an unexpected flight of steps to it. Overhead 
 was a house quite shot to pieces. Underneath the guide 
 opened one curtain and then another and so discovered a 
 vaulted chamber, perhaps fifteen feet square, in which, by 
 flickering candlelight, a group of American soldiers were 
 crowded to hear a phonograph that was playing Sweet Gen6* 
 vieve. 
 
 They were fresh from the trenches. The horror of deatft 
 
VICTOBIOUS 
 
 was even yet pursuing them,, but they hent before that phono 
 graph as if it were some master instrument. 
 
 "Say/ said one man, "did you come in an automobile ?" 
 
 Andy confessed as much. 
 
 "Well, would you mind givin me some o your gasoline? 
 I want it for my graybacks : they re gettin the better o me." 
 
 He knew all about graybacks from experience. "They 
 ain t so bad in the trenches/ he said, "but these here deserted 
 villages is full of em." 
 
 As Andy got him the gasoline, the Germans guns began to 
 direct their attention that way. They could see the shells fall 
 ing along the road down which they must soon proceed. One 
 came so close that its explosion shook stones from the build 
 ing above and sent them crashing over the cellar where the 
 phonograph was still playing Sweet Genevieve. They had not 
 wholly changed their direction when the pair set out again. 
 
 Flashes began to come from the other side while the camion 
 purred along streaks of angry red and there was a rush 
 and whining in the sky as of monsters closing on their prey. 
 
 One two three four ! 
 One two three four ! 
 One two three four ! 
 
 "That s pretty good," said the "Y" man. "They re aver 
 aging six shots in about four seconds with the hundred-and- 
 fifty-fives to-night." 
 
 "Who are?" asked Andy. 
 
 "We," he answered. "That s our artillery." 
 
 They had reached a spot where there was not even a ruin 
 to obstruct the view. From somewhere on the left a great ball 
 of light tore its way through the canopy of darkness. It was 
 as if a shooting-star should fall from the nearer heavens in 
 a constricted arc and break with sudden effulgence on the 
 earth. It lit, for what seemed miles around, a stretch of 
 brown swamp-land drawn away from a pair of hunching 
 hillocks and, beyond these, a little chain of hills a study in 
 sepia. 
 
212 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Those," said Andy s chauffeur, "are the American trenches 
 down there in the valley. Hereabouts, the Germans are on 
 the side of the hills." 
 
 XVI 
 
 Twenty minutes thereafter Andy was in a front-line 
 trench for the second time in his life and, hating it as much 
 as on the former occasion, was getting his first night-sight of 
 No Man s Land. 
 
 If, at this point, one looked over the top, which was a 
 dangerous business, because, as he was warned, "the Boche 
 snipers were everlastingly at it," and if one then waited the 
 fall of a star-shell or the rise of a rocket, what he saw was 
 much what one might see anywhere along the great line in 
 Prance. Just here, the horizon was blocked by dun hills, 
 behind which were the German batteries and over which rose 
 the rain of their shells. In front of these hills, and some 
 times down their sides, ran the enemy first-line trenches, all 
 but invisible to any eye save the eye military. Then, between 
 that line and Andy stretched a field that was brown earth, 
 pock-marked by craters, now shot bare of even the hardiest 
 vegetation and again rank with blood-fed weeds rooted in 
 carrion. 
 
 "That s No Man s Land," said one of the soldiers at Andy s 
 back. "What do you think of it?" 
 
 "It looks like nothing at all," said Andy. 
 
 "It looks like hell," said the soldier. "And it is," he added. 
 
 A second soldier said : "It looks like the mountains in the 
 moon." 
 
 The men wanted to know whether Andy had ever been in 
 their home-towns, whether he had any news from "up the 
 line," and when he thought the war would be over. 
 
 "These trenches are pretty bad right now," said one sol 
 dier, "and in real wet weather, when you try to sleep, 
 you can hear the water slosh every time you turn over. But 
 you just hear it : you don t feel it, after the first day or two. 
 Yes, they re pretty bad now, but you had ought to see them 
 when we took them over." 
 
VICTORIOUS 213 
 
 They were here, these men, for a week s stay. Then they 
 would have a week of "rest" in one of the ruined villages 
 through which Andy had recently passed. Once in four 
 months, they were each to have a seven days leave. 
 
 "We ve got more men in the front line than the Dutch," 
 Andy s informant told him, "and yet, right here, you have 
 to walk quite a ways between men; this here barbed wire is 
 good enough to fill the spaces. The other night a bunch of 
 us crawled over to a German trench to pay a little call, and 
 when we got into it, it was a case of nobody home. We just 
 gathered up a few helmets and things for souvenirs and came 
 back." 
 
 "I guess ours is the nastiest work," an engineer explained, 
 with a hopeful eye on Andy s correspondent s brassard "espe 
 cially when we have to go over the top and repair the 
 barbed wire out there. We have to work in circles, so nobody 
 can wriggle up behind us; you see, the Boche have a trick 
 of sneaking on you while you re stooping over a busted wire 
 and reaching around, pulling up your head and cutting your 
 throat. It can be done by one motion of each hand. They 
 do it because it s so quiet; the fellow that gets his is dead 
 before he can holler, and then the German can sneak on to the 
 next man. The Boche send soldiers on the job that have got 
 in wrong for some little offense against discipline ; it s punish 
 ment for them, and they re armed only with a knife and a 
 revolver and told not to shoot unless they have to." 
 
 Andy learned that with nearly every company of infantry, 
 when it was in the trenches, there lived a lieutenant of ar 
 tillery. He was a liaison-officer and was just as necessary 
 as the liaison-officers that were detailed to keep things smooth 
 between the allied armies; for the infantry preserved its 
 traditional dread lest the supporting artillery "shoot short," 
 and the liaison-officer had to be on hand as a sort of hostage 
 and to tell the doughboys what the big guns could do for them. 
 
 One heard all sorts of things even ghost-stories. Andy 
 listened with ears grown strangely credulous. A single room 
 of what was once a farmhouse stood, or rather crouched, out 
 there in No Man s Land. Recently some Americans had crept 
 
214 VICTORIOUS 
 
 to it for observation purposes. They found a bundle of straw 
 on the floor. "This straw s warm/ declared one soldier the 
 day was cold, and his hand detected easily the difference in 
 temperature. "Somebody s been here before us." They 
 smoothed the straw and left. Returning next day, they found 
 that the straw had been disturbed in their absence. Then 
 their French neighbors in the trenches told them that the 
 house had long been known to be haunted. The superstition 
 spread ; it was dissipated only when a party of Americans went 
 out by night to see the ghost and found him in the shape of 
 several pigs once tame, now wild that had either been 
 brought there when the Germans occupied that strip of land, 
 or else survived from a still earlier epoch : the distant epoch 
 when the farmhouse had a farm. 
 
 "Our barrage cut off a Boche raiding-party a few nights 
 ago," said this man, "and then we turned our machine-guns 
 on them. We d killed a third when the rest tried to run in 
 and surrender, but one of our lieutenants just yelled to us to 
 give it to em, so we kept the gun going and wiped out the lot. 
 I guess we got about three hundred ; some of the other fellows 
 say they got four hundred the same way a few nights later, 
 but maybe they were just trying to tell a big one. You see, 
 the Germans made a mistake when they sent back the first 
 two Americans they d captured with their tongues cut out." 
 
 Andy talked with every one, from colonels down. He 
 leaned against the greasy ironwork of a cold field-store and 
 asked an amiable cook about food. 
 
 "Food?" the cook repeated. "Oh, sometimes the fellows 
 get enough and sometimes they don t. The thing s uneven. 
 That s what s the matter its unevenness. I guess the trans 
 portation s to blame. There seems somehow to be something 
 wrong with the War Department s tonnage-calculations. 
 
 "Of course, them at the bases are all right, and of course 
 all the hospital-corps get theirs you never see a hospital- 
 orderly that doesn t look like a We re-advertised-by-our-loving- 
 friends sign. But with these line-regiments it s different. 
 They work a fourteen-hour day and a seven-day week, and 
 they need, generally speaking, more than they re getting. 
 
VICTOEIOUS 215 
 
 "Taking the average, we give them a breakfast of bread and 
 coffee, a dinner of slum or beans in the middle of the day, 
 and a supper of beans or, once in a long while, beef. 
 
 "Feeding ourselves? Our army? Don t make me laugh! 
 I know where our vegetables come from they come right here 
 from France. Our preserves are put up in American tin- 
 cans, with American sugar, but most of the stuff that s pre 
 served is French stuff. I guess 1 ought to know. 
 
 "Take even the beef what there is of it. I haven t seen 
 any real U. S. beef since I don t know when. For even as 
 long as up to last week, we were getting frozen Argentine and 
 Spanish beef we fellows that cook for the line-regiments. 
 Then that gave out, somehow, and we got French beef, not 
 frozen. The change from frozen to unfrozen was a little hard 
 on a lot of the fellows insides." 
 
 Yet the morale was excellent and excellent, too, the disci 
 pline. The army-relationships were, in many instances, estab 
 lished on a new basis. 
 
 "You can t consider as the dirt under your feet," a slim 
 lieutenant told Andy, "the soldier that jumps into the same 
 shell-shelter with you to get away from the same shell." 
 
 Common dangers bred fellow-feeling. 
 
 One day German guns opened on an American outlying 
 battery and cut off relief. They cut also the connecting tele 
 phone wire. An artillery private volunteered to go to the 
 edge of the scene, carrying wire and instruments, and then 
 crawl up as close as was necessary for a report. By and by, 
 he began telephoning to the captain whom he had left at the 
 far end of the wire : 
 
 "I m at the edge of things and starting in." 
 
 "I m getting there. The shells are falling between me and 
 the battery, but only about a hundred yards off." 
 
 "I m in it now." 
 
 "They re all right. I ve fixed up the connection. What 
 shall I do now ?" 
 
 The captain s answer was instant : 
 
 "Stay, or come back whichever s safer. And be sure to 
 take good care of yourself." 
 
216 VICTORIOUS 
 
 XVII 
 
 Good or bad, it was democracy in arms. Somehow, 
 Andy s heart cried out to him, all the way back to Paris : If 
 only the Germans would give us time ! 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 WHEEEIN THE DRAGON SWALLOWS THE SUN 
 
 ANDY returned to Paris. He reached the Gare de FEst and 
 passed through the crowd of waiting women at the barrier, in 
 midafternoon. 
 
 He had seen nothing of the reporters stationed at the camp, 
 and, heing hungry for talk with his kind, he tried, before go 
 ing home, to find Evans and Innis. There was, however, no 
 trace of them about their usual haunts : Andy, anxious to un 
 burden himself of what he had seen, went to the office of the 
 French official that had warned him of just how desperate 
 matters were. 
 
 He sat in a third-floor room overlooking a little garden and 
 the Cours-la-Eeine. Across the river, long lean clouds of 
 gray were racing, like charging legions, toward the meager 
 sunshine. They seemed to him to be the massing forces of 
 the enemy of which his host told him. 
 
 "You have done what you could," that official concluded : 
 "You and the other journalists of whom I have made confi 
 dants. You have sent to your country the word that she must 
 make haste, that what we, exhausted, must have is men. You 
 have risked much to do this; more you can not do. On our 
 part, we are bringing what pressure we dare to make your 
 commanders see how they must allow all their troops to 
 fight at once, and under us or the British. Your secretary of 
 war is even now in London ; there Mr. Lloyd George says to 
 him what I say to him. All of us together, perhaps we may 
 prevail; yet I tell you again that, unless we do prevail, this 
 war is lost." 
 
 TEe muddle was too much. Andy choked a sob. 
 
 "I wish I could fight," he said. "I wish oh, I wish I were 
 
 217 
 
218 VICTORIOUS 
 
 a million men! They told me I had something the matter 
 with my heart. I don t believe there s anything wrong with 
 my heart. I wish I could fight !" 
 
 In the next room a telephone-bell tinkled shrilly. 
 
 Andy s host smiled. "A few of us must do harder things 
 than fight/ said he. "You have had to incur the enmity of 
 some of your own people. Before I asked it of you., I am in 
 formed, you had gone the way that, later, I urged you to go. 
 If that avails, France will not forget you and your brave col 
 leagues ; if it does not avail, you will know that, though every 
 American journalist in France joined the colors, it would not 
 have helped at all and alas, you can not be a million men !" 
 
 There was a sound of excited voices in the next room, but 
 Andy, so young as to be just then chiefly concerned with him 
 self, scarcely heard it. He walked rapidly to the window ; he 
 was afraid to let his face be seen. 
 
 "I know," he answered his host; "but I m thinking I m 
 kind of thinking about my own soul." 
 
 The door to the next room opened, and a whispered message 
 came through. 
 
 "A moment," said the personage. "You will pardon me?" 
 
 Without turning, Andy nodded. He knew that he was left 
 alone, and that was relief. He stood there, watching the gal 
 loping clouds that mounted, that leaped, toward the frightened 
 sun. He stood there for some minutes. 
 
 Then he felt on his shoulder the hand of the returned offi 
 cer, wheeled and found himself looking into a face from which 
 every vestige of color had fled. Out of stiffened lips, the man 
 was speaking: 
 
 "It has come," he was saying: "the great offensive. They 
 are attacking on a seventy-five-mile front." 
 
 II 
 
 Half an hour later, he was before a popular cafe. The 
 pavement-tables were crowded with their usual guests : officers 
 that listened to the chatter of women, men of business that 
 talked trade to other men of business. None of them knew. 
 
VICTORIOUS 219 
 
 Andy sat down and bought the latest papers, but there were 
 in them no tidings of the thing he knew to be happening. The 
 clouds had achieved the zenith and were charging the western 
 horizon, the oppressive atmosphere seemed big with the por 
 tentous event, and yet, of all the people about him, Andy 
 must have been the only one aware of what impended. He 
 was a helpless anthropomorphic god, knowing and grieving 
 for his ignorant people, yet impotent to warn them. 
 
 Garcia was of these people : Garcia and the impudent Jac 
 quette. Andy, as he tossed aside his third newspaper, saw 
 them at a near-by table, but the somber lieutenant might have 
 been none the wiser had not his black-haired slip of an Egeria 
 willed otherwise. She gave Andy a glad nod and then, with 
 a vermilion smile of malicious mirth, called Garcia s atten 
 tion to the correspondent. 
 
 Garcia nodded sulkily. He was about to resume his con 
 versation with Jacquette when he seemed to remember some 
 thing. He stood up and began to edge his way toward Andy. 
 
 "Brown/* he said, "there s something I want to see you 
 about" 
 
 in 
 
 Andy staggered to his feet, with the crash of the explosion 
 still deafening him. He knew, for a moment, only that some 
 thing had fallen from heaven and burst and wrecked the cafe. 
 
 Tables and people lay overturned amid a clutter of broken 
 glass. Women were shrieking. The wide front window of 
 the restaurant gaped through jagged points of crystal. The 
 officers and business men lay on the pavement, tangled among 
 the bedraggled skirts of their companions. The street was 
 full of people running. 
 
 "Les avions!" yelled somebody. 
 
 "Mais non!" retorted a soldier, his face covered with blood. 
 "C est un canon, ga!" 
 
 Andy, his hearing returning with his other senses, reeled 
 to that mass of people out of which he saw rising the tousled 
 figure of Jacquette. Her hat was awry, her hair streaming. 
 Save that she was pale under her rouge, she looked as she had 
 
220 VICTOBIOUS 
 
 looked on the afternoon when he saw her struggling out of 
 her lover s embraces at Laperouse. He lifted her bodily free. 
 
 "Come away I" he shouted. "You must get out of this !" 
 
 In his excitement, he spoke English, but the circumstances 
 would have made any language intelligible. Jacquette looked 
 wildly about her. 
 
 "Mais M. le lieutenant !" she gasped. 
 
 Then she saw him: Garcia, without a glance behind him, 
 was darting into the crowded street. As well as he could, he 
 began to run away. 
 
 Jacquette shook her little fists. "Cochon!" she screamed. 
 "Quel soldat! Quel gallant! Cochon!" 
 
 She turned to Andy. 
 
 "Monsieur is kind/ she said. "Take me away before an 
 other bomb falls. There is an abri at the corner. Take me 
 there." 
 
 All that part of Paris was seeking the abris. This was a 
 Metro station. By the time Andy deposited her there, she 
 had miraculously repaired the recent damage to her toilette. 
 Amid the frenzied outcries of her jostling neighbors, who 
 concluded that this was a daylight air-raid and that daylight 
 raids on Paris were against the rules of the game, she raised 
 her voice and took his hand : 
 
 "I shall not forget. You have perhaps saved my life. I 
 shall repay." 
 
 IV 
 
 Sylvia was not at her hotel, whither he hurried, and she 
 had left the place of her rehearsals long before. Andy, un 
 able to find her, walked the streets until darkness fell there 
 were explosions every twenty minutes. He dined at a little 
 Italian restaurant in the Passage Vivienne. Then he read 
 the last edition of the Temps, which said that from an in 
 credible distance, a long-range German gun was bombarding 
 Paris. 
 
 On his way home, the siren sounded. The cannonading of 
 the day was to be followed by an air-raid by night. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 TREATS OF LOVE AMOXG THE RUIN S 
 
 MCGREGOR, in his gilt sitting-room at the Ritz, turned 
 Sylvia s card about between his fingers and whistled softly. 
 
 "Tell her to come up," he said. 
 
 He walked to one of the many mirrors and straightened his 
 black bow-tie. With a complacent hand, he smoothed the folds 
 of his dinner-coat over the generous curves of his torso. 
 
 She found him thus engaged. 
 
 "Hello," he cried. 
 
 For her the past days had not been easy: there was a se 
 ries of performances at the Foyers du Soldat within a fifty- 
 mile radius of Paris, and there was beginning another series 
 of rehearsals. These, and perhaps something more, had pro 
 duced strain ; only last night, arrived home after entertaining 
 soldiers at a Paris "Y," she had burst into tears when the icy 
 flow from both taps in her tub reminded her that that was 
 not the hotel s day for hot water: she cried herself to sleep. 
 And now there had come a letter 
 
 All this, nevertheless, McGregor could not have conjectured : 
 Sylvia was none to let depression long continue; though her 
 even brows flew their signal of perplexity, she took comfort of 
 hope from the higher artistic possibilities evinced by the new 
 sketch that she was rehearsing, and in an important message 
 received when, to compliment her work, a great French gen 
 eral gave her a confidential interview and thanked her for 
 what she was doing in the Foyers. Tried and distressed as she 
 was, she bore a rekindled radiance. 
 
 Well, this is mighty good of you: to come and see me." 
 McGregor, as if to demonstrate the sincerity of his words, 
 
 221 
 
222 VICTORIOUS 
 
 held her hand an instant longer than a formal greeting re 
 quires. 
 
 "I didn t know" she released her hand "whether it was 
 all right to call on you " 
 
 "I guess yes !" 
 
 "But Andy Mr. Brown happened to say you lived here, 
 and there was something I wanted your advice about." 
 
 "I guess I know what that is," McGregor chuckled: "My 
 advice is Go. " 
 
 Sylvia s pucker deepened. "I don t think I understand." 
 
 "Go. Get out of Paris. That wasn t an air-raid to-day : it 
 was a gun. They ve started the big offensive." 
 
 "Oh/ said Sylvia. "Yes, I know ; but I wasn t thinking of 
 leaving." 
 
 "What ?" McGregor could not appreciate such an attitude ; 
 besides, he preferred his surmises to be proved correct. "But 
 you ve got to. They may have a revolution here Bolshevik 
 or royalist anything. There s a good chance the line won t 
 hold : I ve got it straight. Paris isn t a fit place for a woman." 
 
 "I m not afraid," said Sylvia. 
 
 "Then you ought to be. I ll go myself, if it gets much 
 worse. We re all packed up and the tickets bought to Bor 
 deaux." The wave of his short arms indicated the adjoining 
 apartment as a veritable baggage-room. 
 
 "Yes," said Sylvia, "but it s different with me. I suppose 
 you re just here for yourself. I m under orders." 
 
 He drew up a chair, and she took it. 
 
 "Orders? What do they amount to? You re not in the 
 army." 
 
 "I m in the <Y/" 
 
 "But the Y can t make you obey orders." 
 
 "I know. You see, that s just why I have to obey them." 
 
 He didn t see it at all. Sylvia s eyes that told Andy of high 
 visions told McGregor only that they were clear and bright ; 
 Sylvia s face, in which Andy saw the reflection of all that was 
 best in himself, showed McGregor but a pretty, if puzzling, 
 woman. 
 
VICTORIOUS 223 
 
 "Then come to this hotel. We ve got the safest cellars in 
 Paris here : the man that built the place" McGregor winked 
 "said he was a Swiss. I ve been down there nearly all after 
 noon." 
 
 "I couldn t afford to change, and really" she smiled denial 
 of his idea to the contrary and thanks for his kindly interest 
 "really, I m not at all scared." 
 
 "Where are you stopping now?" he demanded, and, when 
 she had told him, began: "Look here, Miss Raeburn, if you 
 need any money, you know " 
 
 "Oh, no!" Her protest almost brought her to her feet. 
 "It s the other way. It s about sending some money that I 
 came to see you." 
 
 "Any friend of young Brown s " 
 
 "No, really. Thank you, but I ve got lots. I want to send 
 some to America. I ve just been to the American Express 
 Company, and there was a letter there " Her fingers inter 
 laced. "I must send some money, and I didn t read the letter 
 until I got opposite this hotel. The express-offices are closed 
 by now, and I have to rehearse the first thing in the morning 
 and there s reason for hurry. So I thought of you." 
 
 He said he would be very glad to attend to the whole mat 
 ter. Above their dark pouches, his hazel eyes gazed at her 
 very steadily. 
 
 "Just give me the money, and the name and address," he 
 explained, "and I ll send you the receipt first thing to-mor 
 row. You want this to go by cable, I suppose ?" 
 
 "Why, yes," said her lips. Her eyes said: "How did you 
 know?" 
 
 It was her eyes he answered : "I thought you would." 
 
 He showed her to a desk, and she wrote a check on her 
 Paris bank. McGregor folded the bit of paper, and, without 
 a glance, put it into a waistcoat pocket. 
 
 Reseated, he poised his gold pencil above a morocco mem 
 orandum-book. 
 
 For the fraction of a second, he read hesitation in her eyes. 
 Then, in a lowered voice, she said : 
 
224: .VICTORIOUS 
 
 "The first name is "Ainslee. The last name the last name 
 is the same as mine, but spelled with a y instead of an f e : 
 K-a-y-b-u-r-n." 
 
 There was perhaps a slight tightening of McGregor s lips; 
 his gray mustache hinted at some movement there, but his 
 face, as he wrote the name, did not alter. 
 
 "And the address?" 
 
 She gave him a number in St. Charles Avenue, New Or 
 leans. 
 
 "There you are," he said, chuckling. "You needn t bother 
 any more. It ll be in America by two o clock to-morrow after 
 noon. Now, I tell you what you do : you stay here and have 
 a little dinner with me." 
 
 "Oh, no, thank you. I couldn t." 
 
 "Any friend of Andy s " he encouraged her. 
 
 "No. It s very kind of you, and you re very kind about the 
 money " 
 
 She had remained standing after she rose from the desk; 
 he, perforce, rose also. "Oh, that s all right," he said. 
 
 The faintest of flushes mounted to her creamy cheek. 
 
 "I know; I m so sorry, Mr. McGregor, but I have an 
 other engagement: I have, really." 
 
 She was final. He saw her to the lift. Like a good Amer 
 ican, he used the lift for descent as well as ascent wherever 
 Paris authorities permitted. As the elevator slowly ascended, 
 he said: 
 
 "D you ever hear the story of the husband that talked in 
 his sleep, Miss Eaeburn ? His wife heard him muttering. It 
 was near Easter-time, and she d been asking for a hat. She 
 heard him say Jennie, and says she to herself: That s me, 
 and she listened. Jennie, she heard him say, has just got to 
 have that new hat, even if I have to fire the second bookkeeper, 
 though it s hard, because he s got the t-b., and is the only sup 
 port of his widowed mother. An the wife, she says to her 
 self: He s just as mean as he can be: I don t believe he s 
 asleep at all. Married life s a funny thing, Miss Raeburn, 
 isn t it? Here s the elevator at last. Some day they ll wake 
 up and get real American elevators over here. Sure you can t 
 
VICTORIOUS 226 
 
 stay to dinner? "Well then, good-by and don t worry any 
 more about the money " 
 
 When he had returned to his sitting-room, he looked at the 
 check. It was drawn for two thousand five hundred francs. 
 
 "St. Charles Avenue," he reflected. "That s a good old- 
 fashioned part of the town." 
 
 II 
 
 Her engagement was with herself at the Theatre Frangais. 
 Here, as she had done at the Ritz, she left Tac in the 
 care of an attendant and contented herself with a fauteuil 
 d orcJiestre. Her seat, without its war-tax, cost her eight 
 francs, and the tip to Tac s guardian cost her ten, but the 
 chance to profit by either expenditure was brief. She had not 
 heard the first scene of Le Misanthrope when the shriek of an 
 air-raid warning abruptly ended the performance. 
 
 The house emptied with an ordered quickness eloquent of 
 practice ; but Sylvia, hunting through the crowd in the lobby, 
 could find no trace of the man to whom she had entrusted her 
 dog. She questioned the agent who stood stolidly by the 
 box-office : he knew nothing. She sought to detain hurrying 
 attendants : they shook her off. From the street came the long 
 yell of the siren, ear-piercing. The crowd, surging outward, 
 bore her with it. 
 
 Somebody cried : "This is a bad one ! You know well that 
 the offensive has begun I" 
 
 Soldiers and civilians, men and women, made a rush for 
 the doubtful shelter of the Metro station in the Place du 
 Palais Royal. A glance from the nearest stair-top showed Syl 
 via that it was filled to overflowing. She fought her way into 
 the dark Galerie d Orleans. She had no fear; she had the 
 common sense to know that to remain out-of-doors during a 
 raid was mere foolhardiness, and it occurred to her that the 
 cellars of this building, being old, must be heavily vaulted. 
 Nevertheless, she did not want safety at the price of Tac, and 
 she was about to return to the theater when there came the 
 swift pad of running paws behind her, the scrape of suddenly 
 
226 VICTORIOUS 
 
 arrested feet, and the dog thrust his damp cool muzzle into 
 her palm. 
 
 She hugged him. Somehow, he had escaped his keeper and, 
 trailing his leash, found her out. Sylvia seized the plaited 
 thong, made her way through a narrow passage into the rue 
 de Valois and started for Number 43. Andy might have re 
 turned; he might he there. Even were he not, she could 
 doubtless gain admission to the cellar by declaring herself 
 his acquaintance. 
 
 She ran to the last entrance before the street s end at its 
 juncture with the rue de Beaujolais. Tac, preceding, ran into 
 and upset a man that crouched there : the sky was bright, and 
 Sylvia could see that he wore a cap pulled far down over his 
 face, but before she could apologize, he had leaped to his feet 
 and darted around the corner. Then Mme. Lafon, Andy s 
 concierge, answered her ring and, upon her explanation, con 
 ducted her to the cellars. 
 
 Ill 
 
 At tEat time, one Had twenty minutes between the sounding 
 of the siren and the beginning of the air-barrage : the news of 
 the enemies advance was flashed to Paris as soon as German 
 planes crossed the lines, and the alarm sounded forthwith. 
 Sylvia s delay had, however, been none too brief ; the sky rat 
 tled as she descended below-ground, and a little later began 
 the reverberation of the bombs. 
 
 The cellars of the Palais Royal, dimly lit by candles in im 
 provised sconces and already floating in a faint haze of cig 
 arette smoke, were really a series of deep and heavily vaulted 
 tunnels, with many cubicles opening off them, doubtless orig 
 inally devised for wine-bins. In these cubicles, furnished with 
 hastily brought carpets, chairs and tables, huddled wrapped 
 figures like those which line the docks of a channel-steamer 
 during a nasty crossing: shop-keepers of the neighborhood, 
 well-to-do bourgeois and their servants, waiters and dishwash 
 ers from Vefour s, all reduced to a common level and all ex 
 changing opinions as if they had been lifelong acquaintances. 
 
VICTORIOUS 227 
 
 In the best corners, permissionaires lay sleeping among their 
 blankets: knowing best what bombardments might be, they 
 were the first to seek shelter. In the cubicle nearest the street, 
 a stout woman knelt before a candle that, Mme. Lafon whis 
 pered, had been blessed and was preserved by its owners against 
 just such occasions as the present. 
 
 Sylvia, received as a matter of course, sat for a while, with 
 Tac curled dutifully at her feet, in a row of fugitives. A cou 
 ple of men, before her, were playing cards on the flagged floor. 
 The other occupants of the cubicle speculated on the length of 
 the raid and its intensity; children ran in from the corridors, 
 laughing at a game of tag. Whenever the dulled sound-waves 
 of an explosion penetrated the cellar, they were echoed in a 
 chorus of long-drawn ah-h-h s, the people shivering and cross 
 ing themselves and declaring that this last bomb was nearer 
 than any of its predecessors. 
 
 An hour passed. Sylvia, despite the wraps of which kindly 
 fellow-sufferers dispossessed themselves in order to warm her, 
 felt cold. For all that they were so securely walled, the cel 
 lars were not dry, and everybody was soon coughing. Some 
 property of the air made her very drowsy. Once, a laughing 
 child ran up to her. 
 
 "Vous etes americaine, mademoiselle?" he asked. 
 
 She told him that she was. "And you ?" she inquired. 
 
 "A little French soldier/ he assured her. He was not more 
 than five years old ; probably he had no recollection of a Paris 
 that was not at war. "But when I grow up," he added, "I m 
 going to be the man that sounds the siren." 
 
 She fell asleep. Waking, she feared that she might take a 
 cold that would interfere with her work. She would have 
 started at once for her hotel, but to such a proposal good Mme. 
 Lafon would not listen. The concierge at last compromised 
 with M. Brown s friend by conducting her to Andy s garret 
 workroom "For he is en voyage" she said and leaving her 
 alone there with the dog. . . . 
 
228 VICTORIOUS 
 
 IV 
 
 Andy had been caught by the air-raid much as was Sylvia ; 
 like her he wearied of his abri; but Andy, when tired of it, 
 walked through the streets emptied by terror, straight home. 
 In the excitement of the attack, Mme. Lafon must have for 
 gotten to latch the street door after admitting Sylvia : he found 
 it standing half open, brushed against somebody crouching in 
 the darkness and, accounting this unseen as a frightened neigh 
 bor, ascended without pause to his rooms. 
 
 He entered quietly, yet he had no sooner done so than a 
 silent something flew at his throat. His arms clutched a hairy 
 figure, and he crashed against the passage-wall. 
 
 It was over in an instant. The animal he realized now 
 that it must be a dog had him at its mercy, and yet surren 
 dered its advantage as quickly and as silently as it had 
 achieved it. Andy s hand, seeking his coat pocket for matches, 
 was given a shamed caress. 
 
 He struck a light. 
 
 "Why, Tac !" he cried. 
 
 The dog circled him, cringing ever so little by way of apol 
 ogy and wagging a tail held low. 
 
 Andy bent toward his recent assailant. It must be Tac 
 it was : the collar said so. 
 
 "Come here," said Andy. 
 
 Tac leaped toward him but, when he put out his hand 
 again, jumped a few paces forward, stopped abruptly and 
 looked back. It was a plain invitation to follow. 
 
 The match burning his fingers, Andy accepted. He passed 
 by his kitchen through the dining-room and bedroom and, at 
 the door of the workroom, tossed the match away. 
 
 Both the windows were unshuttered which looked over the 
 stone balustrade and up the length of the Palais Royal gar 
 dens. Through them poured the pale silver of the clear night, 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 and curled in an armchair beside the farther was a girlish 
 figure, before which Andy came almost to his knees. 
 
 The barrage had momentarily lessened, but there sounded, 
 as if close overhead, the whirr of French planes and the 
 pump-pump of Gothas ; a dull explosion, followed by the long 
 noise of falling masonry, told of another bomb successfully 
 dropped in the Quarter; yet there, her hands lying loose in 
 her lap, her golden head drooping to one side, Sylvia, relaxed 
 and unconscious, slept like a child. 
 
 Tac woke her. He knew Andy for a friend, but he plainly 
 demonstrated that he would permit no nearer approach until 
 he had awakened her. He trotted to her, raised one paw and 
 quietly pressed it against her knee. 
 
 She got up and stood facing Andy, for a moment with eyes 
 wide but not yet fully conscious. Tinted by the green cur 
 tains, the night-light of the sky bathed her, intensifying her 
 virginal radiance, making her seem a statue wrought of ice. It 
 was his early dream come true: he thought her armored, he 
 looked for a casque upon her head ; hers were the lips of high 
 adventure, her glance the glance of excellent duty ff un lis 
 d une beaute admirable." 
 
 Then she comprehended : 
 
 "Andy! You re back? I was in the cellars. I d been 
 caught by the raid I ll go." 
 
 Another bomb fell in the Quarter. It restored realization. 
 
 He came to her and took her hand. "You must go. You 
 must go back to the cellars. It s not safe here." 
 
 But she would not listen to that. "It was too stuffy. I 
 should take cold. I ll go home," She drew her coat about 
 her. 
 
 "You ll not do anything of the kind !" He thought he saw 
 her cut by some tossed fragments. "The streets are twice as 
 dangerous as the houses. They re full of flying glass." He 
 had been helping her with her coat; his arms were around her. 
 He thrilled at touching her waist. "Sylvia !" 
 
 She darted away. She opened the folding window and, Tac 
 at her heels, gained the balcony. 
 
 "Sylvia !" He started after her. 
 
230 VICTORIOUS 
 
 She reopened the window from the outside, ever so little, 
 and smiled into his face not six inches from her own. This 
 was a new Sylvia : a roguish one ! 
 
 "I have a piece of news for you/ she said. "If you prom 
 ise" 
 
 "Come in." 
 
 " not to make me go down-stairs " 
 
 "Come in!" 
 
 " I ll give it to you and then let you walk home with me 
 after the raid s over; but " 
 
 "Do come in !" 
 
 "If you won t, I ll stay out here and " 
 
 "I ll come through the other window !" 
 
 " run on down the balcony and not let you drag me 
 back!" 
 
 "But, Sylvia" 
 
 "It s important news, Andy." She was very serious now. 
 "It may mean the winning of the war." 
 
 VI 
 
 Of course she had her way with him. He brought her in ; 
 he closed the shutters to protect the glass, already slightly 
 protected by its strips of paper pasted diagonally like lattice 
 work there was little glass left for repairing in Paris and 
 drew the curtains to hide the light. Then he started a fire in 
 the grate and bundled her up in an armchair beside it. Only 
 after all this was accomplished, among the recurrent noises 
 of the raid, and after he had moved his lamp and writing-table 
 to the hearthside, did he let her tell him her news. 
 
 She had met a great French general through her work at the 
 Foyers, and been guaranteed through intimate friends. The 
 soldier had let fall a word plainly indicating his doubt of as 
 sistance, now desperately required, from American troops: 
 the American enlisted men were excellent, but their general 
 staff, itself unready, would not enter the fight and would not 
 let its forces enter under any other staff; to save the world, 
 this decision, if decision, must be overcome and the United 
 
VICTORIOUS 231 
 
 States made aware of the immediate need of more men and 
 still more; etiquette forbade the general a direct appeal to 
 the American public, and yet that was now the single hope. 
 Sylvia mentioned Andy ; she gave parts of several days to per 
 suasion and to securing assurances of Andy s reliability. At 
 last, the general dictated to her the notes for an interview ex 
 pressing his opinions. These she carried always with her. If 
 Andy would write from them and submit the result for the 
 general s approval, the French Foreign-Office would see that 
 the interview was cabled, uncensored, to America. 
 
 Andy could not think it true, but she proved it. 
 
 "It s splendid !" he cried, his eyes running over the papers 
 still warm from her bosom. "It s the biggest story since 1914, 
 and, what s more, it ll be doing a big thing for America!" 
 Suddenly, he looked up at her. "And you did all this for me !" 
 
 "I did it," she said, "because I want us to win this war !" 
 
 "Gee," said Andy, "you re a a regular There isn t any 
 body as wonderful as you are not anywhere, there isn t !" 
 
 The fire leaped in the grate. It showed his worshipping 
 eyes, his trembling lips. 
 
 She shook her head. "I m not wonderful at all," she said. 
 "Don t tell me so. You hurt me when you do. I m at the 
 best of times, I m only commonplace." 
 
 He laughed at that. "Why, who else in all the world " 
 
 "Write," said Sylvia. 
 
 He sat down to obey her. On the table were some letters 
 that Mme. Lafon had put there during his absence. Only one 
 would he now pause to open, but the envelope of that bore the 
 seal of the British Embassy. 
 
 "Look here !" he cried. His glance betrayed consternation 
 as he handed it to her. 
 
 She read : " ( I beg leave to inform you that I have this day 
 been informed by the British Military Intelligence that they 
 are unable to arrange for a visit at the time suggested for 
 you, and it is regretted . . . What does it mean?" 
 
 "It means more than it says," Andy choked. "It means 
 they re never going to let me take that trip you fixed for me." 
 
 "But they told me it was all right." 
 
232 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Somehow the picture of Garcia swung into Andy s brain. 
 "Somebody s been after me. Somebody s set them against 
 me !" He sank into the chair beside the table. "I ll find out 
 about this," he vowed. 
 
 "Garcia, perhaps/ said Sylvia. 
 
 "They ll try anything. They told me so Garcia did." 
 
 Her eyes sparkled indignation, but what she said was: 
 
 "Write." 
 
 VII 
 
 He wrote rapidly, tossing the notes into the fire page by 
 page, as he finished with them. Aeroplanes and the barrage 
 sounded overhead; bombs burst in the city. Neither Sylvia 
 nor Andy heeded them. 
 
 VIII 
 
 As the work finished, there came that hopeful hush which 
 fell always between the last explosion of an air-raid and the 
 bugled assurance of its ending. In it, Andy, having weighted 
 his completed manuscript upon the table, drew his benefactor, 
 with Tac following, through the now reopened window and on 
 to the stone balcony. 
 
 The old gardens swung below them like a silvered fairyland 
 seen from the basket of a languidly moving balloon; above, 
 a million stars shed their white radiance out of an indigo 
 heaven. For any sound that climbed to the balcony, the quiet 
 that followed the recent dreadful clamor might have been the 
 quiet of a city slain. Only from some fortification far beyond 
 the left bank of the river, the seeking finger of a searchlight 
 hovered over the pages of the sky. 
 
 Sylvia looked at the stars, and Andy looked at Sylvia. 
 There, her white hands touching the ancient balustrade, her 
 face upraised to the eternal canopy, she seemed more than 
 ever the Jeanne d Arc of his eaj-ly dreams, more than ever 
 worshipful and so more than ever remote. A broken breath 
 trembled from his lips. 
 
 "It s over," he said. "There isn t any danger now." 
 
VICTOKIOUS 233 
 
 The jangle of a bell set a period to his sentence. Toward 
 that sound, Tac darted noiselessly. 
 
 Sylvia was at once a woman. She shot him a startled 
 glance. Her fingers closed upon his nearer wrist. 
 
 "What s that?" 
 
 "My bell. I guess it s Mme. Lafon looking for you." He 
 stepped inside. 
 
 She followed him. "Be careful." 
 
 "What of ?" laughed Andy. He had struck a match and, as 
 he held it in his cupped hands, the red light shone over his red 
 hair. "You don t think a pair of Boche aviators have landed 
 on the roof of the Palais Eoyal?" 
 
 "I don t know what to think." With one hand, she was re 
 straining the quietly recalled Tac, the other she put toward 
 Andy s back, as he preceded her through the dark room. 
 "That note from the Embassy has made me nervous." 
 
 Lighting the gas-jet in the tiny hall, Andy was too pre 
 occupied to attend to her. He next drew back the deadlatch 
 and flung wide the door. 
 
 "Well," he said in French, "what do you wish, monsieur?" 
 
 He was addressing a stooped man whose face was hidden 
 by a cap drawn far over the nose. 
 
 "Pardon, monsieur," the visitor replied. He took one step 
 across the threshold. "I regret that I have deranged you" 
 he craned his neck "you and madame." 
 
 "Madamoiselle," Andy corrected. "You have not deranged 
 us. What do you want ?" 
 
 "A thousand pardons." The man edged inward. "I 
 thought that I was ringing at the apartment of a friend." 
 
 "This is my apartment," said Andy. 
 
 "I have a friend that lives in this house," the stooping man 
 went on, but somehow Andy felt that those eyes, shadowed by 
 the visor of the cap, were intent on other matters "and I 
 mistook in the darkness your room for his. Perhaps I have 
 come one flight too high. I was confused by the noises of 
 the raid." 
 
 He edged yet another step into the hallway, but there Andy 
 placed himself so as to bar farther progress. 
 
234: VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Then you climb slowly/ he said. "It has been very quiet 
 for some time. Good night, monsieur/ 
 
 Evidently, the fellow realized an impasse. Though with an 
 ill grace, he retreated. The instant that he cleared the door 
 way, he was merged in the gloom of the hall. Out of that his 
 voice came mockingly: 
 
 "Good day!" 
 
 Andy closed the door. With his back against it, he looked 
 at Sylvia, puzzled : 
 
 "What do you think of that?" 
 
 "I passed him when I came down the rue de Valois. Tac 
 ran into him." 
 
 "He lives around here. I ve noticed him before." 
 
 "He s not a Frenchman," said Sylvia. She was breathing 
 quickly. "Didn t you notice. He put a g* on the end of his 
 Ion." 
 
 Andy laughed. "Oh, well, I guess he s just a nosy neigh 
 bor." 
 
 "I don t know. You ought to be careful, Andy. You know 
 what Garcia said to you." 
 
 At that Andy laughed more heartily. "What could this 
 have to do with that ? You don t think he d hire somebody to 
 murder me in bed?" 
 
 Her eyes, always fathomless, contained an answer. It 
 floated almost on the surface. 
 
 "Not that," she said. 
 
 "Well, then?" 
 
 She looked away, her brows puckered : 
 
 "I I don t know." 
 
 It was wonderful to be able to reassure her, to be for a quick 
 moment the masculine protector of his guardian angel. "Of 
 course you don t. There isn t anything to know. It s all 
 right. You re just nervous." 
 
 As if to confirm his declaration of safety, there came from 
 some street the distant notes of the glad berloque: the bugles 
 sang the news that the raid was indeed over. 
 
 "There," he said; "that s the all-clear signal." The bugle- 
 notes drew nearer. "Back home," he said, "they have a band 
 
VICTORIOUS 235 
 
 that plays in the tower of one of the churches just before sun 
 up every Christmas morning. It s like that, this is." 
 
 IX 
 
 She encouraged him to talk more of Americus, as they 
 went, with the delicious intimacy of darkness, down the worn 
 old stairs; and he kept it up while, she having thanked Mme. 
 Lafon, who welcomed Andy, they walked along the Galerie 
 de Beaujolais and looked, between the iron bars, into the gar 
 den. He told her of "Babe" Campbell, the solitary but mili- 
 tanf policeman of Americus; of the social life of Ladies Aid 
 Societies ; how the raising of a church-mortgage used to seem 
 as long a struggle, and as momentous as the war seemed now ; 
 of how the elder people had always been elderly and how the 
 younger never grew old ; of Blunston, and of his own mother : 
 of her especially. 
 
 Tac padded beside them, with a guarding nose against all 
 things strange. He showed them that a careless guard had 
 left one of the gates open, and they slipped through it and 
 made a tour of the garden. It was almost morning, and they 
 had a long walk ahead of them. The glory of the stars had 
 not yet paled, and in it he could see her face. 
 
 "Some day you ll go back there," she said. "But you ll al 
 ways have had your part in the big world, after this." 
 
 Andy fetched a sigh. "After this! God knows when this 
 war ll end or how. Of course, there s still a chance from 
 publicity; there s this interview: if the people only learn the 
 truth" 
 
 She stopped short. "You forgot to give it to me," she said. 
 
 "The interview ? I didn t forget : I left it up there because 
 I want to revise it and get a clean copy for the general. I ll 
 bring that to your hotel by the time you re getting up. How 
 are you going to get it to him ?" 
 
 Some one in the French Foreign-Office, it appeared, was to 
 attend to that, and so they talked rather of the interview s 
 effect. 
 
 "I don t know," said Andy. "You can never tell. It might 
 
236 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 stir up the whole country, and yet it might have no effect at 
 all. I don t see how we ll ever come through I" 
 
 For a bare instant, she took his fevered hand in her cool, 
 firm grasp. 
 
 "The men are going to win," she said ; "they ll win through 
 their sacrifices, no matter how badly they re capitalized : that s 
 how it will end. And something or somebody will make us 
 send the men/ 
 
 "If France and England can hold out that long " 
 
 "Oh," she cried, "don t you see? It s got to come out all 
 right, because the thing we want to fight for is so much big 
 ger than all the politicians and profiteers put together !" 
 
 Her earnestness, the innocent certitude of her faith these 
 and, no less perhaps, the childlike appeal of her mouth, the 
 beauty of her face, the direct gaze of her triumphant eyes 
 conquered him. The vitality of her loveliness suffused the 
 night. He felt, in this minute, that righteousness must win 
 because she was on its side. 
 
 He came back from her hotel in the gray dawn, knowing 
 at last that he loved her and that she was too wonderful for 
 him ever to attain. He might not even tell her. . . . 
 
 When he reentered his rooms, he saw that, during his ab-- 
 sence, they had been robbed. The manuscript of the inter view 
 was missing. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PROVES THAT GRATITUDE MAY WARM THE BASEST BOSOMS, AND 
 GIVES ONE RECIPE FOR A COMMISSION IN THE CENSORSHIP 
 
 HE WOULD not go back to Sylvia s hotel until she would 
 have had some chance for rest after such a night; but the 
 sound of the big gun s morning salutation to Paris found him 
 in the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honore, waiting the opening of 
 the British Embassy. Nearly all of his papers had disappeared 
 out of the attic in the Palais Royal, including some of the let 
 ters that he had addressed, and never sent, to Sylvia; the let 
 ter he had written, by candlelight, in the uncarpeted inn-room, 
 and carried next his heart: he had put it tenderly with his 
 other letters to her ; now that was gone, too. Of the interview, 
 not even a trace remained, and he realized that, having de 
 stroyed the notes and being thus unable to rewrite it in the 
 general s words, the great opportunity was probably forever 
 lost : if, as he suspected, the American censorship had inspired 
 the theft, to bear the tale of it to the French would avail noth 
 ing and the general himself would now be away at Grand 
 Headquarters, bending every energy to withstand the offen 
 sive. Mme. Lafon had been innocent and ignorant: nobody 
 had entered by the street-doors during his absence ; but some 
 body could have entered one of the neighboring houses and 
 come to Andy s rooms by the balcony that ran behind them 
 all, or the man in the cap, of whom the concierge knew noth 
 ing, could have hidden on the stairway after Andy dismissed 
 him. 
 
 The man that he waited Dakyns, the English officer, with 
 whom he had made the necessary negotiations for the trip to 
 the British front was the first of its officials to arrive at the 
 office. He had taken an immediate liking to the lad. Andy 
 produced the letter from the Embassy. 
 
 237 
 
238 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Why, yes/ said Dakyns, "I can tell you a bit about this 
 affair. The trip was canceled as a result of information about 
 you sent us by the American Military Intelligence." 
 
 "What sort of information?" 
 
 Dakyns flushed a little. "Well, as to that, you know, I d 
 better leave you to guess, hadn t I?" 
 
 "That I d broken censorship-rules ?" 
 
 "Oh, no. Everybody breaks them." 
 
 Andy had felt sure of his guess. Now his imagination 
 failed him. 
 
 "Well, it was all confounded rot, of course. I knew that, 
 knowing you. Only, you see, the etiquette of the service 
 makes us observe any caution sent us by our allies. It s purely 
 formal." 
 
 "But what was it?" 
 
 "Really, I ve said a lot more than I ought to. You ll have 
 to ask your own people, and you mustn t say just who it was 
 told you. It s only some mistake in identification. They ll 
 straighten it out soon enough ; then you drop me a line, and 
 we ll get you down to our front any time you say." 
 
 II 
 
 Andy stopped at a cafe and wrote to the chief of the Amer 
 ican Military Intelligence. He said that he was informed 
 that information against him had been lodged with the Brit 
 ish. "As a matter of fair play, I ask you," he concluded, "to 
 let me know what you condemned me for without giving me a 
 hearing." 
 
 Then he inquired at one boulevard cafe after another until, 
 having expended some ten francs in tips, he found a waiter 
 that knew Jacquette s address. He found her abed in a 
 squalid back-room in a maison meublee that faced the Passage 
 de 1 Industrie. She sat up among the rumpled pillows, a very 
 tousled Jacquette, and expressed a desire to embrace her pre 
 server. 
 
 The preserver replied that he would prefer some informa 
 tion. He had never before entered any woman s bedroom 
 save his mother s, and his cheeks were scarlet. 
 
VICTORIOUS 239 
 
 "Eh ~bien." She shrugged her thin shoulders tinder the 
 soiled nightgown. "You were very gentil and very brave. I 
 hope well that I can help you, my little friend, and I shall be 
 tres contente if I discommode that cowardly pig of a lieuten 
 ant: he ran away from the obus and, besides, he owes me 
 ten louis." 
 
 "Did he ever talk to you about me ?" asked Andy. 
 
 "Very often." She leaned alarmingly far out of bed, se 
 cured a hand-mirror from the dressing-table and began, with 
 implements brought out of the bed-clothes, to redden her lips 
 and cheeks. "Very often and never well. It was that which 
 made you so interesting." 
 
 "Somebody robbed my rooms last night," said Andy, "and 
 took a valuable paper." 
 
 Jacquette s head was tilted to one side. Her lower jaw was 
 drawn far down while she rubbed at a cheek. "Then you may 
 be well certain that paper is now in the rooms of my Lieuten 
 ant Pig." 
 
 Andy had not seated himself. He drew nearer her. "How 
 do you know?" 
 
 "He has often said that some day he would have you 
 robbed." 
 
 "Where does he live? Tell me that, please." 
 
 "But of course I shall tell you !" She put aside the rouge 
 and produced a powder-puff. "It is on the first floor over the 
 little bureau de tdbac at the corner of the rue Cambon and the 
 rue Mont Thabor." 
 
 Andy offered, awkwardly, to shake hands. "I I m very 
 much, very, very much obliged to you/ 
 
 "But it is nothing !" laughed Jaequette. "In fine, it pleases 
 me. Go there and pull his nose this very evening." She gave 
 Andy a sudden jerk toward her and kissed him. "There, do 
 not have fear of me. It is well understood that you have a 
 sweetheart of your own, young monsieur !" 
 
 Tor celerity, Andy s retreat rivaled that of Garcia. 
 
240 VICTORIOUS 
 
 in 
 
 Perhaps the young man was learning the practice of guile 
 from experiencing the effects of it. Certainly, whatever he 
 might decide to do later, it seemed best that he first meet 
 Garcia in a manner calculated to lull the flames of the lieuten 
 ant s suspicion and reveal the bed-coal of his purpose. Andy 
 accordingly presented himself at the press-division s quarters 
 in the rue Ste. Anne wearing his most boyish manner and, 
 being immediately admitted to Garcia s office, entered it de 
 corously. 
 
 Garcia was alone, his feet on the flat-topped desk, a tooth 
 pick between his lips. He pushed his caller a lacquered box. 
 
 "Morning," he said. His smiles had always seemed difficult ; 
 when the toothpick was in its accustomed place, they were 
 seldom attempted : nevertheless, he now achieved one. "Have 
 a cigar, and sit down." 
 
 "Thanks," said Andy. He sat down opposite Garcia; he 
 took a cigar and lighted it. 
 
 "Put another one in your pocket. Take a couple." 
 
 "I will/ said Andy. He took three. 
 
 "That was a close shave we had yesterday," said the lieuten 
 ant. 
 
 Andy agreed. "I see you weren t hurt. Was the lady ?" 
 
 "Not a bit. A cat always falls on its feet." 
 
 "What became of you ?" Andy ventured. 
 
 "Me?" Garcia elevated his black brows. "Oh, I got the 
 girl out, and then we saw some women d fainted across the 
 street, and so I walked over to see if I could do anything for 
 ? em. Where ve you been all this time? You haven t been 
 around here lately." 
 
 "I ve been busy with another kind of work." 
 
 Garcia grinned knowingly. "Well, you know I said I 
 wanted to see you." 
 
 "Yes. I m sorry now I was so long getting here." 
 
 "I thought you might be. Now, lemme tell you what it 
 was I wanted to see you about " 
 
 "Just a minute, and I will." Andy knocked the first ash 
 
VICTOKIOUS 241 
 
 from his cigar. " After the raid last night, somebody robbed 
 my rooms/ 7 
 
 It was apparently to make his smile the more sour that 
 Garcia temporarily removed his toothpick. "Hard luck. Lose 
 much?" 
 
 "Some papers/ 
 
 "Personal?" 
 
 "And business." 
 
 "Did you go to the police ?" 
 
 "The French police?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I didn t think it was a case for them." 
 
 "Well," said Garcia he replaced the toothpick and ran his 
 fingers through the jungle of his hair "did you think we 
 could do anything for you?" 
 
 "I knew/ said Andy, trying to make Garcia s eyes meet his 
 own, "that your division was under the Army Secret Service." 
 
 "It sure is. We ve got all kinds of people working for us 
 men and women. Generally, though, the women don t pull 
 off the tricks : they just get things ready." 
 
 This struck Andy as a strange aside. "I thought you might 
 be useful." 
 
 "We might be." Garcia did not change his position, but he 
 just noticeably paused before he added : "To our friends." 
 
 It was Andy s turn to pause. When he spoke, however, it 
 was evenly. "You don t consider me one ?" 
 
 "What s your game ?" asked Garcia. "Why won t you work 
 with us ? What have you got it in for us for ?" 
 
 "I ll give you an example. I ve been down at our sector, 
 and didn t have to have a pass to get there. I saw a lot of 
 things, but I heard one that ll do. You had a little raid on 
 the Boche down there. It cost you three million dollars, and 
 you lost a third of your men. You sent four hundred men 
 over the top, and a hundred would ve been plenty. I m against 
 that sort of waste." 
 
 "We ve got to learn." 
 
 "And we haven t any men to speak of in France, and aren t 
 sending any, and yet the war s going to be lost if we don t. 
 
242 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 Oh," he had to check himself "I m against all that sort of 
 thing : the lies and the bad clothes and the lack of planes and 
 guns and ammunition all of it! I m against all Innis said 
 he was against, and Evans, the last time I was in here." 
 
 Garcia heard him without moving a muscle. 
 
 "Well, now," he said in a matter-of-fact manner, "I know 
 we ve had our little rows, you and me ; but I haven t got any 
 thing against you personally, and I believe you could be of 
 some use to your country, if you d only begin by being sensi 
 ble. You want to be of use to your country, don t you ?" 
 
 "Do you think I d run the chances I m running with your 
 people if I didn t want to be?" 
 
 "Then you ought to understand, Brown, that this is a war 
 an that people ve got to get killed in it." Garcia was at 
 tempting a palliative tone. "You ought to understand that 
 there s got to be some things that look bad for a while, because 
 they re big, and there are big interests involved interests of 
 the country that make em necessary." 
 
 " Such as shoes nobody can wear ?" 
 
 "Exactly that. "We can t tell everything we know, Brown/ 
 
 Andy s brown eyes narrowed, but almost imperceptibly. 
 
 "Well," he said in a smooth voice, "suppose I did under 
 stand that?" 
 
 "You know the newspaper-game." 
 
 Garcia relieved the desk of his feet and slowly rose. "You d 
 make a good lieutenant in the press-division, Brown." 
 
 Andy cleared his throat. "The army turned me down once." 
 
 "What for?" 
 
 "Something about a heart-murmur. Oh, but I m perfectly 
 strong." 
 
 "We could get around that." 
 
 It was a plain offer of what Andy had once so desired. He, 
 too, rose. 
 
 "What would I have to do?" he asked. 
 
 "You d be useful in the censorship. You could make things 
 easier for the newspaper-boys and explain em to the army." 
 
 "I d want to fight." 
 
YICTOKIOUS 243 
 
 "You " Garcia s eyes were round in unbelief. "You, 
 what?" 
 
 "I d want to fight." 
 
 "Well, I guess that could be fixed easy enough." 
 
 "But what would I have to do first?" 
 
 "And I might find those papers for you." 
 
 "But what would I have to do first?" 
 
 Garcia licked his lips before replying. "Just one thing. 
 Understand, like I said, that these mistakes you ve made such 
 a fuss over are excusable if you only knew what s back of em 
 just that and writing a couple of articles that say so." 
 
 "Then the little fellow in the cap who hung around my 
 rooms was a Secret Service man ?" 
 
 "He might a been, Brown." 
 
 "There ve been charges lodged with the British." 
 
 "I d call them off." 
 
 "And I ll get a commission a commission and my papers 
 if I take back all I ve written?" 
 
 "You ll get a commission an all your papers except the in 
 terview." 
 
 "How do I know I d get the commission ?" 
 
 "You needn t hand me your denial till I hand you the com 
 mission." 
 
 Andy turned toward the door. "Good-b) T ," he said. 
 
 "You ll do it ?" Garcia came eagerly after him. 
 
 "Do it?" Andy wheeled back. His freckled face flamed, 
 his eyes snapped fire, his red hair seemed fairly to bristle. 
 "Do it? What do you think I am? Do you think I m what 
 you are ? I only wanted to see how far you d go. Get out of 
 my way !" 
 
 Garcia, his cheeks livid, had slipped between his caller and 
 the door. With the ruin of his expectations, his old manner 
 was returned and with it a more venomous anger. 
 
 "You don t know what you re up against !" he whispered. 
 "I know it s not the army. I know it s only a gang of 
 dirty politicians, in uniform and out. But if it was the whole 
 earth, I wouldn t take your rotten bribe !" 
 
244 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "You ll be fired/ 
 
 "I told you before I resigned my credentials long ago." 
 
 "What do we care for that? Your bond ll be forfeited. 
 You ll be fired anyhow. You ll be sent home under arrest." 
 Garcia, his back to the door, had flung out his arms to bar 
 Andy s passage. His head, thrust toward the correspondent, 
 writhed like an adder s. 
 
 "If you don t get out of my road," said Andy with regained 
 composure, "I ll put you out." 
 
 "I ve got you framed every way, this time," Garcia threat 
 ened. "Don t go thinkin you can get away with one thing." 
 
 "Move out, now," said Andy. 
 
 "And another thing," Garcia said between his teeth, "an 
 accredited correspondent s an officer. We can prefer charges 
 of immoral conduct against you. You had a woman in your 
 rooms last night, an we know who it was !" 
 
 Andy uttered no word of reply. He stepped slowly back, 
 his clenched fists at his sides. 
 
 Then, throwing all his force into it, he shot out his right 
 arm. His whole body was behind it. 
 
 It struck on the point of Garcia s drooping jaw. 
 
 The censor crumpled to the floor. 
 
 Andy stepped over the body and out of the room. 
 
 "The lieutenant needs attention," he said to the military 
 clerk at the typewriter outside. 
 
 As he proceeded toward the Place de la Concorde, he me 
 chanically wiped his knuckles with his handkerchief. He felt 
 that they must be dirty. Presently, he tossed the handkerchief 
 away. 
 
 IV 
 
 On what might happen to him as punishment for his de 
 fiance of power and assault upon power s vice-regent he was 
 too young and too very angry to reflect; how the vast oppor 
 tunity of the interview was doubtless ruined an opportunity 
 that Andy conceived of national, or even world-wide, import 
 he quite frankly dared not consider; but this last insult from 
 Garcia and its more than probable bearing upon Sylvia rose 
 
VICTOEIOUS 245 
 
 like the genie from the bottle and darkened all the sky. Had 
 he been an older, and therefore less brave, man, he might have 
 wondered whether physical restraint had not been, in the clear 
 interests thus involved, more expedient; being what he was, 
 he saw only that, since the presence of Sylvia in his midnight 
 rooms became facilely explicable to a suspicious world solely 
 when not involved with the presence of sacredly intimate let 
 ters and verses addressed to her, he owed her, first, a certain 
 warning, and, next, some still further bold advance directed 
 toward reconquest of the stolen manuscripts. Somehow (he 
 had as yet no conception how) he would make forcible recov 
 ery; meantime, he ought to warn her of the present danger. 
 
 Yet, in the hotel drawing-room, whither she brought the 
 very spirit of the morning on the face and in the hands of a 
 girl that seemed to have enjoyed the fullest night s rest, he 
 was no sooner confronted with her dewy presence than he 
 confessed the impossibility of complete confession. To tell 
 her what the missing letters were would be brazenly to tell 
 her that he loved her, and she, looking at him so straight from 
 her wide eyes, was still a deity to whom to own earthly love 
 was to offer sacrilege. 
 
 He had told her, immediately and in the fewest words, of 
 the theft of the interview. That done, he was at an abrupt 
 termination. 
 
 She asked him, was he sure? There could be, he said, no 
 doubt of it. 
 
 "Garcia/ 3 she said : "this is his work. I knew that man at 
 the door wasn t a Frenchman." 
 
 "He was a Secret Service man," said Andy. He added no 
 word of how that had been so recently confirmed. 
 
 "Yes, of course. Well, there isn t time and there isn t a 
 chance of getting a fresh interview. They don t think you 
 have a copy?" 
 
 "They cleaned out the whole place." 
 
 "But you might have carried one with you or the notes." 
 
 "I used a pencil, and they could have seen pieces of the notes 
 lying around in the grate." 
 
 "So they know they have it all, and they know, with this 
 
246 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 offensive going on, we can t get another. We must get this 
 one back." 
 
 "The French daren t send it now." 
 
 "Not" she bent and patted Tac, curled on the floor before 
 her "not if they don t know that our censorship knows ?" 
 
 "They ll be told." 
 
 "We mustn t cross that bridge till we come to it. The thing 
 is to get back the manuscript." 
 
 "That s what I thought at first but how?" 
 
 She picked up, from her sofa, his cap and began, abstract- 
 edly to pluck at it. He thought her strong fingers would tear 
 the lining. Her brows puckered. "Give me a day to think 
 about that." 
 
 "Garcia has it," said Andy : "I can t tell you can t tell you 
 how I know it, but I do. He has it in his rooms." 
 
 "You haven t been there?" she quickly asked. 
 
 "No, but I m sure of it." 
 
 "You mustn t run that risk. He d not want anything bet 
 ter than to catch you there and call you a thief." 
 
 "I know that; but" Andy nodded a determined head; he 
 drew resolution from her sublime practicality. "I ll get this 
 somehow. Don t worry : leave it to me." 
 
 She smiled at him, but, for all her calm, she had, indeed, 
 torn a bit of the lining from his cap. "Wait a day. Perhaps 
 we can think of something. We re sure to." 
 
 This iteration brought back acutely the other danger. "But 
 there there are other things." 
 
 Her quickness followed close: "Other things stolen?" 
 
 "Yes. There were were some letters." 
 
 "Letters to you?" 
 
 "No." All his blood was in his cheeks. "Letters I d writ- 
 ten and never posted crazy letters." 
 
 She looked at him almost sharply. "Not " There was a 
 catch in her throat. "Not about this muddle ?" 
 
 "No. They oh, I guess they were silly letters! I never 
 really meant to post them." 
 
 He could not more plainly have told her that they were writ 
 ten to a woman. He had bowed his head ; across her face there 
 
VICTORIOUS 247 
 
 was drawn the rapid knife-blade of pain. It would have been 
 evident that a quality she had not before dreamed of owning 
 was wounded. She looked at her hands lying in her lap 
 those hands which were in part so boyish but when she looked 
 up and met his recovered gaze, she was smiling. 
 
 "I suppose they wouldn t hesitate to use them against you, 
 but we must just get them back, too." 
 
 "It isn t so much that they d be used against me," said 
 Andy: "they ve got plenty against me without them; but" 
 his gaze fell again "there s there s her." 
 
 "Oh!" Sylvia closed her eyes for a second. "Well," she 
 said as she reopened them, "nobody can be blamed for letters 
 that are written to her." She crushed the piece of cap-lining 
 in her pink palm ; she laughed, and there was in this laughter 
 a sound it was almost a hint of hardness that made him 
 gape at her. "I ve been on the stage long enough to know 
 that." 
 
 Andy winced. "Don t !" he pleaded. He also had his rev 
 elation. 
 
 Her answer was to consult her wrist-watch, rouse Tac and 
 dismiss Andy with perfect serenity. "You mustn t bother. 
 Wait for a day. There is that much time. My life has made 
 me resourceful: I ll think of something. Now I must go to 
 rehearsal, and you can t see me on my way." One bolt of 
 tenderness touched her face ; she put her hand on his shoul 
 der: "You re just a boy, Andy. It will all come out right, 
 I m sure." 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 PRESENTING SYLVIA RAEBURN IN A NEW ROLE 
 
 GARCIA, in order to turn up the lamp, bent so low that the 
 reviving light fell first on his altered face and only bit by; 
 bit, while his fingers fumbled at their task, illuminated the 
 room and the other person in it. 
 
 His cheeks were flushed by a yellowish pink; the mottled 
 skin, ordinarily tightly drawn over his cheek-bones, was now 
 a little bloated. His lips hung loose, and there was an angry 
 mark upon the point of his chin. Under the gaze of his pro 
 truding eyes a glow smoldered. 
 
 "Now," he said there was a slight thickness in his speech, 
 which disregarded the particles "now we ll have real party." 
 
 The growing light showed his parlor: the center-table on 
 which the lamp stood, and some American papers and a 
 strong-bladed paper-cutter lay; a couple of easy chairs beside 
 the comfortable coal-fire; a cliaise longue near the bedroom 
 door, standing ajar; two heavily curtained windows, between 
 which rose a closed Breton writing desk, carved in high relief, 
 and, finally, the door opening on the stairway, by which, with 
 Tac beside her stood Sylvia Eaeburn. 
 
 She was not the Sylvia that Andy knew. A wide-brimmed 
 crimson hat shaded, but failed to hide a face as much changed, 
 though by whatever means, as was her host s. When she 
 threw back her ermine opera-cloak, her bust and shoulders 
 of warm marble shone, in flowing curves and full roundness, 
 above a dress that matched its hat and clung to a figure which 
 might have been that of a woman of thirty. Her yellow hair 
 had an alloyed luster, her brows seemed darker and thicker, 
 her lashes longer. Her cheeks flamed, her laughing lips were 
 as red as blood, and the hard brilliance of her eyes made 
 their color almost indistinguishable. 
 
 248 
 
VICTORIOUS 249 
 
 "A real party!" she echoed, peeling off her long gloves, 
 while a great red purse dangled from her right forearm. 
 "I told you Fd let you know some time when I was free." 
 
 "Yes. Good girl. S a good dinner, too, wasn t?" He came 
 toward her, closed the door, and began to help her with her 
 wrap. 
 
 "I love Paillard s," she vowed. As a pampered cat stretches 
 its legs under caresses, she leaned back her head while his 
 hot hands, ostensibly busied with the satin lining of the opera- 
 cloak, lingered over the still smoother skin of her firm shoul 
 ders. 
 
 "That all you love?" Holding the cloak wide with both 
 hands, Garcia, from behind her, bent his smiling face to her 
 face upturned. 
 
 She shook her yellow curls. 
 
 He brought his arms together, but they closed upon the 
 cloak only. She had darted out of its folds and was laugh 
 ing at him from across the table. 
 
 "Oh, what a man-in-a-hurry !" she taunted. 
 
 Garcia had, in fact, not drunk that evening so much as 
 was usual with him no more than he frequently bore from 
 luncheon to the rue Ste. Anne without any hurt to his cen 
 soring of manuscripts save such as infuriated the correspond 
 ents but the wine of her beauty, the sense that he was re 
 venging Andy s blow, while they strengthened his resolution, 
 weakened his body enough now to make cardinal what had 
 been venal. His smile became grim. He lurched toward her. 
 Instantly, Tac barred the way. 
 
 "Halte!" cried Sylvia. 
 
 Tac stood still. 
 
 "Damn that dog," Garcia grumbled. "Near fell over him." 
 
 "Id!" she commanded, and was obeyed. 
 
 "Don t like me, the brute." 
 
 She was fondling the brute provokingly. On her knees, 
 with one cheek against Tac s head, she gave the lieutenant 
 a glimpse of her pouting mouth, her mocking eyes. "I don t 
 believe you like him!" She pointed to the knife-like paper- 
 cutter. "I believe you d like to use that on him," she said. 
 
250 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Garcia s attempted chuckle was ratHer a grant. "Me ?" he 
 answered. "Crazy bout him." 
 
 He unlocked and opened a closet that formed the upper 
 part of the Breton desk, took out some bottles, a syphon and 
 glasses, brought them to the table and then relocked the 
 closet. The glasses had clinked dangerously as he carried 
 them. 
 
 "Helluva country/ he said. "Cold as pole, but can t get 
 ice." 
 
 She appeared to enjoy the joke, and, when he had mixed 
 two brandies-and-soda, raised her glass so that it touched his. 
 
 "To our better acquaintance," she said. 
 
 "Bottoms up!" he ordered, and she drank it, her bright 
 eyes looking across the brim into his. 
 
 He poured another drink, and they sat down to it in the 
 easy chairs beside the fire. Garcia prodded the coals with a 
 poker; Sylvia, feline still, curled herself in the warmth of 
 the resulting blaze, her crimson purse lying deep in her crim 
 son lap. The light from the flames played over her crimson 
 dress, her white bosom, her yellow hair; it played also over 
 the lieutenant s uniform and woolly head; it played on Tac, 
 lying between them. 
 
 "You can t guess when it was I first saw you in Paris," 
 she presently said. 
 
 He looked up, lifted his glass from the floor and drained 
 it. "I member time first saw you stage N York." 
 
 "Oh, but you only met me once over there and that was 
 in a crowd. You forgot all about me." 
 
 Above the last drops, he shook his head. "Never forgot," 
 he said, into his glass. 
 
 "But guess when I first saw you in Paris." 
 
 "Dunno." He put down the glass and leaned toward her, 
 his gaze fixed at her breast. "When was?" 
 
 "It was just after I got here, when I made my first visit 
 to the provost-marshal s. I was getting my Y worker s pass 
 the one I showed you at Paillard s to-night. You d come 
 out of your office and were standing in the hall near the 
 doorway." 
 
 
VICTOEIOUS 251 
 
 Garcia, leaning to the table, poured himself some more 
 brandy-and-soda. "Have nother ?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Aw, c on!" 
 
 "Well" she held out her emptied glass "just a little one : 
 some soda with a little brandy in it." 
 
 "JsTo" Garcia, rising, took her wrist between the thumb 
 and finger of his left hand "not till you do some n for." 
 
 "Something for you ?" 
 
 " S what said/ 3 
 
 Her mouth drooped. "What do you want me to do?" 
 
 "Off your hat." Garcia burst into loud laughter and re- 
 leased her wrist. "Off your hat an stay a while !" 
 
 Without a word she raised her white arms, loosened the 
 hat from the yellow glory of her hair and threw the crimson 
 thing across the room to where, on the cJiaise longue, her 
 cloak lay. 
 
 "There," she said, smiling once more. "Now, will you give 
 me a drink?" 
 
 He shook his head. "Be good li l girl: say, Please/ 2 
 
 "Please, teacher !" 
 
 This time his chuckle was untrammeled. He poured a stiff 
 drink and handed it to her. He put the syphon back upon 
 the table, where it rested drunkenly on the paper-cutter s 
 thick steel blade. 
 
 "Oh !" She made a great face over her dram. "That s not 
 soda with a little brandy in it." 
 
 "What t is?" He swayed before her. 
 
 "It s brandy with a little soda." 
 
 They both laughed. She put down her untouched glass and 
 resumed her chair; he, very close beside her, leaned against 
 the table, his glass in his hand. Thick though his speech was, 
 his head was clear. 
 
 "Provost-marsh office," he reflected. "Sure remember." 
 He felt his wounded chin; he straightened up. "Kid with 
 you," he said. 
 
 "A kid?" She couldn t recollect. 
 
 "Young know-it-all Brown." 
 
2o2 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 "Oh, yes of course." 
 
 She would have dismissed Andy with the lightest of ges 
 tures. 
 
 "Been runnin around with him lots/ he insisted. 
 
 "I have?" 
 
 " S what said." 
 
 "You asked me." Her full eyes could hide no secret ! "I ve 
 always reported." 
 
 "No use overdoin 9 t" He frowned. "Ain t stuck on him ?" 
 
 "On Andy Brown?" Sylvia laughed at the idea. "He s 
 just a nice boy." 
 
 " S damn trouble-maker. Tol you that." 
 
 "Yes," she agreed, "he s a trouble-maker; but trouble 
 makers are just the kind of people most women don t care 
 about." 
 
 "Yes " Garcia s brow darkened. "You were in } s rooms 
 las night." 
 
 She smiled her scorn of the insinuation, a scorn, it seemed, 
 directed not so much at the implied event as at the mentioned 
 partner in it. 
 
 "Of course I was," she said. "I just told you you asked 
 me to keep an eye on him. Here was a chance. I was at the 
 Theatre Frangais when the air-raid came. I thought he was 
 out of town." 
 
 "Find anythin ?" 
 
 "No. He came in too soon. I had to pretend to be asleep." 
 
 "Somebody else found," said Garcia slowly. 
 
 "I know. He s been to see me. He told me." 
 
 "Did he tell you" the mark on the lieutenant s face burnt 
 redder "tell you he saw me to-day?" 
 
 "No. What did he say to you?" 
 
 "Nothin . Scared him." 
 
 "You mean you got something?" 
 
 "Got interview we ll s press." Garcia paused; he watched 
 her carefully. "An some letters." 
 
 "Well?" she asked, her eyes darkening. 
 
 "To a girl," said Garcia. "Didn he tell you what girl?" 
 
 "No. I don t care what girl it was." 
 
 
VICTORIOUS 253 
 
 "Oh, don t you? Well, I know her. She s a peach." 
 
 Again he reflected. "My girl/ he concluded. 
 
 She bit her lip. She had been thinking all the time, some 
 how, of a girl back home in Americus. "That goes well," she 
 presently resumed, "after what you ve been saying at dinner 
 about all you thought of me" 
 
 A light broke on Garcia. "My old girl," he corrected. 
 "Now why d you say he s a nice boy?" 
 
 One of her slippered fe .J; tapped the floor. Its buckle glis 
 tened in the firelight. 
 
 "He used to be that." 
 
 Garcia put down his glass. Placing an arm on the back of 
 her chair, he leaned over her. 
 
 "Look here: mu? n t lose your head. He s just kid; can t 
 do anythin for a <rl." 
 
 "He s just a ki ," she reflected. She was looking at the 
 leaping flames in the grate and at Tac, lying broad awake 
 before them. 
 
 "Innocent kid," Garcia insisted. "Some women like em." 
 
 "Can you " She gave him that provoking smile again. 
 "Can you guess who it is I like ?" 
 
 "Who?" He bent closer. "More n one, I bet yo ." 
 
 "Well, one just now, anyhow." Alas, poor Andy! 
 
 "Who t is?" 
 
 "I won t tell." 
 
 His face nearly met hers. "Yes, will. Make you." 
 
 She pushed him merrily away. 
 
 "Not yet," she said. 
 
 Garcia recovered himself. "Can t do anythin for a girl 
 he can t. No money, no pull. I can." 
 
 "Oh, don t let s talk about him. Andy Brown!" She 
 laughed Andy away. 
 
 "But I want to know" 
 
 "So do I." She faced him saucily. "You were talking 
 about an old girl : I saw you with somebody on the boule 
 vard a day or two ago." 
 
 Garcia squared his shoulders. "Nothin to it." 
 
 "She was very pretty." 
 
254 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Oh, pretty nough. Nothin to it, though"." 
 
 "Now, now!" A raised forefinger admonished him. 
 
 "Well," he said, "I tell you. Silly kind girl. Got crazy 
 bout me. Not my fault. You re a woman: know how t is." 
 
 She nodded a pensive comprehension. 
 
 "But these French girls no idea time. No matter how 
 much love you, no idea time. Never gave her couragement, 
 hut she d always be hangin round. Then saved her life yes 
 terday n big gun smashed cafe, an li l devil didn t keep din 
 ner date for las night. Loves me, but no grat gratitude an 
 absolutely no idea time." 
 
 "And so you re coming back to your liking for American 
 girls?" 
 
 "Betcher boots." His breath broke quickly. "One of em." 
 
 Her hands were on the arms of the chair. He took that 
 nearer him. 
 
 The touch of it was as heady as Kussian-poppy wine. He 
 gripped it. 
 
 "Sylv !" 
 
 She rose toward him, and her purse, dislodged by this 
 movement, fell, spewing its contents on the floor close to 
 Tac s unbudging nose. 
 
 It was one of those trivial occurrences which, because they 
 come from without, are ever an effective, though temporary, 
 interruption to passion. Sylvia gave a little cry and stooped, 
 under her admirer s descending lips, to recover her spilled 
 treasures. Garcia, with an oath, joined her in the search. 
 Tac snapped at him, and she had to order the dog away. 
 
 They seemed to have gathered everything together when 
 Sylvia exclaimed: 
 
 "My card !" 
 
 "Your what ?" asked Garcia. 
 
 "My worker s card: my *Y worker s card." 
 
 They searched for it, their groping hands frequently touch 
 ing on the fur of the hearth-rug. 
 
 "Can t find it," said the impatient Garcia at last. "Not 
 here." 
 
 "No" she rose on her knees. "I ve just remembered. 
 
VICTOBIOUS 255 
 
 Don t you? I took it out to show you at dinner. It s at 
 Paillard s. I laid it beside my coffee-cup and never put it 
 back." 
 
 He argued with her, but she was quite certain now. When 
 he insisted on a further search about the room, the results 
 only confirmed her. She grew a little sullen and withdrew 
 her hand whenever he took it. 
 
 Finally she stood upright. "I ve simply got to have that 
 card. I can t go anywhere outside of Paris without it." 
 
 "Oh, hell !" said Garcia, rising also. "Get you nother to 
 morrow." 
 
 "And let that one be found and turned in to the Y au 
 thorities? What would they think?" 
 
 "Well, what goin do bout it?" 
 
 She fronted him. "I m sorry, but you ll have to get it for 
 me to-night before the restaurant closes at nine-thirty." 
 
 He protested, but she wouldn t listen. When he gave way, 
 it was scarcely with a good grace. 
 
 "Then you come long." 
 
 "You re not very considerate." Something close to anger 
 came into her eyes at his suggestion. "I ve risked enough, 
 coming in here once ; I won t come in twice in the same night. 
 No, you must go alone and let me wait. If you make me 
 go with you, I won t come back. Hurry I heard it strike 
 nine a little while ago." 
 
 Muttering complaints, he got into his overcoat. He went 
 to the desk, tried it, found it locked. Then he approached 
 her. He drew very close, his arms open, the recaptured sour 
 smile upon his lips. 
 
 "Kiss good-by," he commanded. 
 
 She met his gaze doubtingly. Tac was standing by her side. 
 
 "Will you hurry?" 
 
 "Course will. Want get back t you." 
 
 "You you haven t drunk too much to get there?" 
 
 "Drunk?" He straightened himself. "Cold sober. What- 
 cher mean, drunk ?" 
 
 "Oh, no ; I know. I didn t mean that. Don t stop to argue : 
 I believe you. Only do do get there before they close !" 
 
56 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Get taxi boulevard." His eyes settled on her. "You wait." 
 
 "Of course I will." 
 
 "Not goin give me slip?" 
 
 "If I do," she said seriously, "keep the card and tell the 
 provost marshal not to issue me another." 
 
 His arms passed about her. "Then kiss good-by." 
 
 He lowered his face and she raised hers. Their gazes met ; 
 their lips drew closer. Where now was Ste. Jeanne d Arc? 
 
 Suddenly she laughed. "No, not yet. If I kissed you, 
 you d never go." She put both her hands against his breast 
 and pushed until she was free. "I ll keep that for a reward. 
 When you give me the pass, I ll kiss you. Now, please go !" 
 
 II 
 
 The door closed after him. She stood by the table, leaning 
 lightly on it. She heard the street-door close. 
 
 She was changed instantly into a quick and frightened 
 thing. But she was again the girl that Andy knew. 
 
 "Tac!" she whispered. 
 
 The dog wagged his tail. 
 
 Out of a pocket in her purse she drew a bit of cloth; it 
 was the piece that she had torn from the lining of Andy s 
 cap. She thrust it under Tac s pulsing nostrils. "Cherche!" 
 she commanded, and restored the keepsake to its pocket. 
 
 The dog laid back his ears; his tail tightened low between 
 his legs. Sniffing excitedly, he moved, with a silent quickness, 
 about the room. 
 
 "Vite!" whispered Sylvia. 
 
 Minutes passed. His nose now down, now up, Tac hur 
 ried. He went to the hearth-rug, the tables, the chairs. He 
 smelled of the chaise longue. 
 
 "Vite, mon Men!" pleaded Sylvia. "Cherche vite vite!" 
 
 He disappeared into the bedroom, but was out again before 
 she could follow him. He paused at the carved Breton desk, 
 but, when she came toward it, he darted away. 
 
 "Oh," she cried, "vite for God s sake, Tac pour I amour 
 de Dieu!" 
 
yiCTORIOUS 257 
 
 He made a fresh circuit of the room. More minutes sped 
 and more : a quarter of an hour. 
 
 Sylvia wrung her hands. Tac s pace lagged. Was he sur 
 rendering his quest ? 
 
 Then he stopped "before the carved Breton desk. He stood 
 up on his hind legs and placed his forepaws against its closed 
 lid. His tail flicked; he softly whimpered. 
 
 Sylvia ran to the desk : it was indeed locked. She scurried 
 back to the table, overturned the syphon and seized the heavy 
 paper-cutter that lay beneath it. With surprising strength, 
 she plunged it into the crevice that ran between the lid and 
 the body of the desk. She had chosen a point directly over 
 the lock. The veins stood out on her boyish hands as she 
 moved the blade backward and forward. 
 
 The lock was old and stiff, the wood was thick and her 
 time grew very short. She wasted five minutes. 
 
 Suddenly she went mad with desperation: she withdrew 
 the knife, held it above her head and thence, shutting her 
 eyes, drove it down blindly. 
 
 There was a splintering sound, and the knife fell to the 
 floor. She looked: the knife had torn the wood from about 
 the lock; the desk would open at a touch. 
 
 She flung it wide. Was there yet time for a search ? There 
 was, at all events, no need: there, before her, lay a pile of 
 letters and, beneath them, a manuscript in Andy s hand. 
 
 Under the lamp on the table, she made sure of her find in 
 another glance and put it into her breast. She took up the 
 letters; she had not meant to look at them, but how, she 
 asked herself, was she to know them for the right ones unless 
 she did look at them? She would look; she did. 
 
 They were in the same hand as that which penned the 
 manuscript. 
 
 They were addressed to her! 
 
 She staggered against the table, and Tac, his tail wagging 
 with the rapid joy of pride, gave a quick lick to her unoccu 
 pied hand. She pressed the letters wildly to her lips. She 
 thrust them into her breast, ran to the chaise longue, picked 
 up and put on her hat, flung her cloak over her shoulders 
 
258 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Card wasn t there/ 5 said Garcia. "What in liell liave you 
 been up to ?" 
 
 in 
 
 He stood in the open doorway, and realization of her du 
 plicity sobered him. His lips writhed frightfully, and he 
 leaped toward Sylvia. 
 
 She sprang behind the table. 
 
 He bent across it. His face had tightened; he was chalky 
 white. 
 
 "Hand em over !" he commanded. 
 
 She looked at the door. She couldn t make it. Then she 
 gave him gaze for gaze. 
 
 "I won t," she said. 
 
 "Then" still bending over It, he edged round the table 
 "I ll take em, and, by the Lord God, I ll take you, too !" 
 
 "Attaque!" cried Sylvia. 
 
 Something brown shot over the table s edge and struck 
 Garcia full upon the chest. With tremendous force it struck 
 him crashed with him to the floor stood over him, and, as 
 he lay supine, he looked up into Tac s opened muzzle. 
 
 "Halte!" commanded Sylvia. "Bouge pas! If you move 
 a hair s breadth," she calmly warned Garcia, "he will kill 
 you." 
 
 Garcia answered with a curse, but he did not stir. 
 
 "I am going now," she concluded. "When I get to the 
 street-door, I ll call him. You had better not try to overtake 
 me while he lies between us." 
 
 IV 
 
 At her appeal of "Cordon" the invisible concierge snapped 
 on the hall light as he opened for her the front door. The 
 light fell full on her and on Tac, who at this instant joined 
 her there. 
 
 The exit brought to pause, in the shadows across the street, 
 somebody that had been about to call on Garcia. This person 
 saw her, and saw the dog. He saw her, as she turned toward 
 
 
"VICTOEIOUS 259 
 
 the boulevards in search of a taxi-cab, pull something from 
 her breast and put it to her lips. 
 
 He did not pursue his purpose. He slid into the shadows 
 of the rue Mont Thabor. He was shaken by sudden sobs. 
 He had recognized Sylvia coming out of Garcia s rooms by 
 night and kissing a love-token. 
 
 He was Andy Brown. 
 
CHAPTEE XIX 
 
 HOW MISS HATTIE DISCOVEEED A LITTLE, AND CHRISSLY 
 LOST A GEEAT DEAL 
 
 ALTHOUGH, "Over There," men began to tremble, "Back 
 Home" continued, by and large, ignorantly and almost joy 
 ously confident. It was a sin to grumble ; it would have been 
 a crime to suspect. The whole country fasted with the enthu 
 siasm of a new convert to a stern sect. It made a joke of 
 freezing; lightless nights, meatless days and wheatless: the 
 people observed them as one dons a decoration. Nothing was 
 more wonderful than the rapidity with which the nation made 
 itself at home in a totally strange environment. Just now a 
 sale of war-bonds was approaching: men looked forward to 
 it as if it were a fete. True, the enemy again neared the gates 
 of Paris; but was not the American army about to fight? 
 Washington sent forth magnificent descriptions of aeroplane 
 production, of great guns in the making and of ammunition 
 manufactured in Gargantuan quantities and with miraculous 
 speed. The Administration talked in the vast figures that 
 the native mind adores: we were ourselves, tremendous, 
 magic, unconquerable. So was it in big cities and little towns, 
 and so in Americus. 
 
 Meanwhile, Miss Hattie Lloyd was busy, and her grudge 
 grew apace against the power of the daughter of a dentist who 
 had once extracted the wrong tooth by mistake. 
 
 In her lonely home, she opened ancient chests-of-drawers, 
 took out faded daguerreotypes and pictures of little boys 
 that were now old men, and she read many yellowed letters. 
 She was trying to remember something that she had for 
 gotten. 
 
 She made a trolley-trip to Doncaster and visited the court- 
 
 260 
 
VICTOKIOUS 261 
 
 house. When she came back, she went straight from the car 
 to Lawyer Dickey s office. 
 
 "James," she said, "I ve been looking up the title to that 
 house Ralph Bolingbroke loaned to the Eed Cross." She 
 cocked her head. "There s something queer about it." 
 
 "Poof!" said the old lawyer. "How do you know how to 
 look up a title?" 
 
 "I don t : I made the young man there do it for me. The 
 deeds go up to Joe Tollens time, and then there s a gap till 
 Ralph got it." Miss Hattie gave herself a little hug. "Ralph s 
 got a lot of things in this town, and umbrellas aren t all: 
 has he got everything according to law?" 
 
 "Of course he has," Dickey sought to assure her. "He s 
 not a robber." 
 
 "Well," Miss Hattie persisted, "he doesn t seem to have 
 much to show for the way he got that house. I don t believe he 
 has any right to it, and I believe Sarah knows it. I believe 
 she knows something and just won t tell because she s got so 
 much of the old Tollens pride in her. The young man in 
 the court-house said it looked queer. It is queer; you ve got 
 to admit it is." 
 
 Mr. Dickey scratched his head. Reluctantly, he took up the 
 telephone and called Ralph Bolingbroke s office at the factory : 
 the lawyer had had a telephone installed in violation of his 
 principles, and he used it on this occasion as one uses a nec 
 essary but unworthy tool. 
 
 "Ralph," he said into the transmitter, "about that house 
 of yours that the Red Cross is using: how d you get it? 
 What? A bad debt? Yes, I just want to satisfy a possible 
 purchaser" he winked shamefacedly at Miss Hattie "who s 
 in my office now. Yes. They did? The Tidds? How did 
 they get it? Oh, I see: adverse possession. Thank you." 
 
 He hung up the receiver. 
 
 "There you are," he said in a voice that indicated fear 
 lest the telephone should hear him. "The Bolingbrokes got 
 the house for a bad debt from the Tidds, and the Tidds got 
 it from Tollens through adverse possession." 
 
 Miss Hattie blinked rapidly. "What s that?" 
 
262 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Possession against legal right/ Mr. Dickey looked about 
 him at the rows of calf-bound law-books. "It has to be hos 
 tile, continuous, exclusive, actual and visible." 
 
 "Does it?" said Miss Hattie. "Then what is it?" 
 
 "If you own a house and let a man live in it without pay 
 ing rent " 
 
 "In other words, if you re a fool," Miss Hattie suggested. 
 
 " and if," continued Mr. Dickey, "he keeps telling people 
 that it s his house, why, after a while, it is his." 
 
 "The Tidds did that to Joe Tollens !" 
 
 "Ralph says so." 
 
 "And he let them Joe did?" 
 
 "That s what Ralph says." 
 
 "Well" Miss Hattie rose "I can almost believe it: it 
 sounds just like Joe Tollens." She smoothed her black silk 
 skirt. "Thank you, James." 
 
 "Don t mention it," said the lawyer. 
 
 "How long does the person have to live in the house ?" 
 
 "To acquire it by adverse possession? Twenty years." 
 
 "Thank you," said Miss Hattie again, and stalked out of 
 the office. 
 
 II 
 
 Mr. Dickey was still flurried by this visit when, next morn 
 ing, Colonel Eskessen dropped in. 
 
 "I never saw such a woman as Hattie Lloyd," the lawyer 
 complained. "She keeps on questioning Ralph Bolingbroke s 
 right to the old Tidd house and after all the splendid Red 
 Cross work Mrs. Ralph s done." He told his friend all about it. 
 
 "Is the place worth much?" asked the colonel, reflectively 
 patting his poll. 
 
 "There s been an offer of ten thousand as it stands." 
 
 "Well, Miss Hattie talks a lot, but she generally has some 
 thing to go on." 
 
 "Nonsense, Kai !" Mr. Dickey swore softly. 
 
 "Let s see," the colonel imperturbably ruminated : "Sarah 
 Brown was born the same year as my cousin Kate s boy, 
 George. That d make her . Yes, George d be forty now, if 
 
VICTOKIOUS 263 
 
 he d lived; Kate spoke of it in a letter I got from her last 
 week. And Joe Tollens lived in the Tidd house when his 
 father died. When did old man Tollens die, Jim?" 
 
 "I don t care when he died." 
 
 "I think he died in 79 or 80. Then if Joe left the place 
 to go to Mt. Horeb, he must have done it inside of two years, 
 for an estate s got to be settled within two years, hasn t it? 
 That would make it Why, Jim" the colonel s mild eyes 
 widened "allowing I m a year out of the way, and calculat 
 ing the Tidds moved in right off, they couldn t have been 
 there over nineteen years." 
 
 The lawyer stood up ; he began to pace the room. The two 
 men racked their memories, recalled dates, argued; but the 
 colonel won his argument. 
 
 "Thunder !" said Mr. Dickey. "I don t know what to do. 
 I wish Why can t Hattie Lloyd let well enough alone? 
 Of course, Ealph ll do the right thing no question about 
 that: Ealph ll do the right thing." 
 
 When Blunston passed, they called him in as a friend of 
 Sarah s. He heard the well-meaning pair in silence. Only 
 when, with an appeal for his advice, the lawyer concluded, 
 did Blunston offer a suggestion; but what he then said was 
 effective: 
 
 "Why worry Bolingbroke? You told me Miss Hattie thinks 
 Sarah knows all about. ... If she d wanted anything done, 
 it seems to me she would have done it long ago, or else. . . . 
 In short, it s her affair. . . . It s not yours, it s not mine. I 
 really don t see. . . ." 
 
 Put that way, it was not any more visible to Mr. Dickey 
 or Colonel Eskessen. 
 
 in 
 
 To an Americus occupied with such matters Chrissly re 
 turned from France. Notification that he was to go seemed 
 scarce to have, reached the hospital before the form of his 
 release followed. His leave would be short, and most of it 
 would be passed as a sort of war-exhibit, carried about from 
 one Liberty Loan meeting to another under orders from the 
 
264 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 committee charged with raising Doncaster County s quota; 
 but it meant home, or a glimpse of home, and he started on 
 the journey without another chance to see Andy and with 
 no awakening of the stunned memory from which the shock 
 of an exploding shell had blown Leonie s image. From Phil 
 adelphia he sent two telegrams announcing his approach : one 
 was addressed, in accord with instructions, to Colonel Es- 
 kessen, the only member of the Loan Committee that lived in 
 Americus; the other Chrissly knew would amaze his father 
 by being conveyed to him from the telephone nearest the 
 Shuman farm, a matter of eight miles. 
 
 The evening train was slow, and Chrissly grew restless 
 long before it entered the Americus yards. He had been wor 
 rying because of the sense of something gone from his life, 
 something nameless, yet of paramount import ; worrying over 
 the speeches that he would, he was told, be expected to make 
 for much of his rusticity had returned when the conscious 
 ness of Leonie left him worrying because, though sure that 
 his country would somehow grope its way to victory in the 
 end, he was aware of much that was at present ill, and vaguely 
 apprehensive of immediate consequences. He began to wander 
 up and down the aisle of the dim smoking-car; he fell into 
 desultory conversation with an elderly traveling salesman; 
 but his walk only made him more restless, and he was ap 
 palled to find that he had nothing which appeared to interest 
 the blood-thirsty drummer when that person, discovering the 
 fact of his foreign service, assailed him with questions about 
 the war. 
 
 "What s it like?" echoed Chrissly. "Oh, how do I know? 
 It s wet, just, an noisy an it s org cold." 
 
 "But the killin ?" urged the salesman. "Didn t you do 
 for a couple of Dutch ?" 
 
 "Huh? I Why, what s all the noise still?-" The train 
 was nearing the station at last. Chrissly escaped his perse 
 cutor by throwing up a window and letting in a blast of 
 whistles and a ringing of many bells. "They must be a fire 
 or somesing." 
 
 The train stopped. Station and street were crowded. The 
 
VICTORIOUS 265 
 
 noise was deafening; there were torches and flags and cheer 
 ing people and a band. 
 
 "Young fellow," said the drummer, "I guess you re the 
 fire!" 
 
 IV 
 
 They bundled him out and hugged him and huzzawed for 
 him hundreds of them, people he had known only to bow 
 to across his father s market-stall and more people that he 
 did not know at all. With that strange sense of loss adding 
 to this sense of a new Chrissly in a new Americus, he was 
 hustled through a hand-shaking, back-slapping throng and, 
 almost at once, found himself following a fresh silk flag and 
 the Silver Cornet Band over Second Street and up brilliantly 
 lighted and yellingly lined Elm Avenue at the head of a pa 
 rade composed of the Elks, the Eagles, the Moose and the 
 Owls, of the local platoon of State Militia, factory-workers, 
 school-children and the Girls Patriotic League, in the glare 
 of red lights and the splutter of Roman-candles and under 
 the everywhere evident marshalship of "Babe" Campbell in 
 full uniform. 
 
 "So you re back, Chris Shuman," some one in the rank 
 behind him called above the clamor. "You must want to hear 
 all the news and things that s happened in Americus since 
 you went to France." 
 
 Chrissly suddenly found himself embraced by a dispropor 
 tionately tall person, who seemed to have been his childhood s 
 bosom friend, yet whom he recognized as Mr. Bolingbroke, 
 head of the town s umbrella-factory, who had never before 
 exchanged with him any phrases save those of trade. Ralph, 
 with genial condescension, took up the talk : "The old place 
 keeps going right along," he said. 
 
 Chrissly grinned and nodded. He couldn t stop grinning, 
 and he couldn t talk. 
 
 "We re mighty glad to have you," said Ralph "migh-ty 
 glad, Mr. Shuman. We had only an hour s warning, but I 
 got up the parade without the least trouble in the world." 
 , The crowd along the street kept up a continuous roar c 
 
266 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "To hell with the Germans!" called some of the crowd; it 
 struck Chrissly that this hatred of the enemy was a little too 
 vocal. But they were glad to see him ; there was no mistaking 
 that ! Every now and then a man jumped forward and shook 
 his hand and jumped back again; once, somebody plucked at 
 his khaki overcoat and he turned in time to see the flutter 
 of a disappearing skirt and to wonder if it was Minnie s. 
 There was an ache in his head an ache, as it were, in his 
 memory but, though he felt very foolish, he felt very proud ; 
 he had never felt so proud before : he hoped his father and 
 mother had got their telegram in time to be here. 
 
 "Gee," said Chrissly the grin was fixed on his face; he 
 was sure it would never go away "gee, but this here s a good 
 town !" 
 
 They swept him up the Opera House steps; they jostled 
 around him and cheered, and the band played The S tar-Span 
 gled Banner and all the people took their hats off and Chrissly, 
 between the chief burgess and Ralph Bolingbroke, stood at 
 salute above the crowd. 
 
 "Speech!" cried two or three persons, and at once every 
 body was crying : "Speech !" 
 
 Chrissly but he was grinning still looked appealingly at 
 Ralph. 
 
 "Go on, talk to em," said Ralph. 
 
 "Oh, no," Chrissly stammered. "I can t." 
 
 "Sure you can," Ralph insisted : "you ve got to." 
 
 He himself stepped forward and introduced Chrissly : 
 "The first hero of Americas to come home from the war. 
 He left us a farm-boy; he returns a veteran soldier. Three 
 cheers for Chrissly Shuman, who s going to tell you how he 
 killed his share of the Huns." 
 
 They all wanted to hear about killing; they did not want 
 to hear about anything else. With a high-pitched, nervous 
 Voice, Chrissly tried to tell them of the training-camp, but 
 stuttered and stumbled over it: he was interrupted by cries 
 for horrors. He endeavored to talk of the dreariness and filth 
 of the trenches, but no Roman amphitheater ever so demanded 
 blood. 
 
VICTORIOUS 267 
 
 He vocally fumbled; he stopped. Then, suddenly, it came 
 to him : they had paid him with their welcome ; he must give 
 them what they asked. He was giving it before he had any 
 idea how the adventure would turn out: 
 
 ". . . my ozzer two pals dead there aside o me, so s I was 
 the only one alive still, an them sree Germans comin right 
 at me. The first of em, him I gave the last cartridge I had 
 left yet, an the next one I let him have my bay net ; an then 
 I yanked it out an give the sird fellow the butt just as the 
 second he was go in to stick me !" 
 
 He reached the unexpected climax at exactly the moment 
 when he saw his father s face approaching him by movements 
 of the burly paternal shoulders through the crowd. If he had 
 seen it a second earlier, he would have been unable to finish ; 
 but time was kind, and the renewed cheers of the crowd 
 saved him. 
 
 "Chrissly," said his father, as they drove homeward, "we 
 gotta hurry some. It s Saturday to-morrow, an you re to 
 help me tend market." 
 
 "Yes, pap," said Chrissly. 
 
 "An Chrissly," said his father nor did he ever again refer 
 to the ovation of Americus "you re a good boy a real good 
 boy. F I was you, Chrissly, I wouldn t lie no more about 
 killin sree Germans wis one gun." 
 
 yi 
 
 When, an hour later, he had passed up the familiar path 
 and flung himself upon the ample bosom of the mother sil 
 houetted in the lamplit doorway, the tears that rained upon 
 his face were not all her tears : glad as he had been to start 
 for home, he had not guessed how good it would be to arrive 
 there. He returned kiss for kiss; he walked about the house, 
 touching the remembered furniture to make certain of its re 
 ality ; he even entered the parlor, generally sacred to weddings 
 and funerals, and sat on one of its stiff horsehair-cushioned 
 
268 VICTORIOUS 
 
 chairs and vowed that it was good to rest on something soft 
 again. He ate hugely of the huge supper that was waiting 
 him; he babbled Pennsylvania Dutch as if he had never 
 known another idiom, and when at last he tumbled into bed 
 into a high feather-bed he was prepared to nurse there 
 but two sensations: delight in homecoming and relief that 
 his pacifistie parents avoided the subject of war. 
 
 Yet there was something lacking. The ache in his head 
 throbbed for deliverance. Unless it was Minnie, he could 
 think of nothing that he did not have. He would see Minnie 
 on the morrow. . . . 
 
 But was it Minnie? 
 
 Throughout the voyage across, he had been too anxious for 
 home to analyze his trouble. Now he could not analyze it. 
 Often, as a boy, he had come back from market with the sense 
 that he had forgotten some commission that should have been 
 executed in Americus, but the nature of which it was impos 
 sible to recall. This was like that; but it was more intensi 
 fied. . . . 
 
 He tried to go over all that had happened to him since 
 his arrival in France, and found that it was everywhere hazy. 
 Among the people he had seen there, no individual was dis 
 tinct. There was some individual that he wanted to remem 
 ber: some one that had either hurt him very much or been 
 very kind to him. Who was it, and why should this person be 
 important ? 
 
 Chrissly stretched out his arms and legs in the soft luxury 
 of the bed. He had not slept in a real bed since leaving home. 
 
 That person it must be Minnie. . . . 
 
 Chrissly fell asleep. 
 
 VII 
 
 That was in Pennsylvania. In the black attic-room of a 
 village-tavern in Meurthe-et-Moselle, a French girl was lying 
 rigid on her narrow mattress and staring into the darkness 
 above her staring hard, as if it were possible to pierce it 
 and to find, beyond it, the face of some one swallowed by the 
 night of war. 
 
CHAPTEE XX 
 
 BUT WHAT ABOUT ANDY? 
 
 God!" said McGregor. 
 
 Garcia had been saying a great deal not the details of 
 how Andy s papers had been secured or of how, once secured, 
 they were lost but enough to justify the contractor, who 
 never cared for anything save results, in his ejaculation. 
 
 "Good God!" said McGregor again. 
 
 He stood behind one of his living-room s gilt chairs, and 
 his pudgy hands twisted its back until Garcia, pale and ner 
 vous before him, thought the frail woodwork would snap. 
 
 "You told me not to pull the rough stuff," said Garcia. 
 
 "And what do you call what you did pull?" McGregor de 
 manded. "You rob his rooms " 
 
 "The censorship wanted to delay that interview till it was 
 a dead one." 
 
 "I don t care a damn about the censorship; all I m inter 
 ested in s planes, and you know it." 
 
 "I thought it d be a good thing to get something on him." 
 
 "And what did you get? A few love-letters that he never 
 sent !" 
 
 Garcia raised malicious eyes. "He had that woman up 
 there. We found that out." 
 
 "In an air-raid. You said so yourself." 
 
 "Nobody d believe she went there for that. I don t." 
 
 "You wouldn t. Well, I do. I may have my doubts about 
 her, but I haven t got any about him. He s a clean straight 
 boy. Anybody with any sense d know you couldn t get any 
 thing of that kind on him. All I wanted was to get him 
 where he couldn t hurt my aeroplane business: that s why I 
 fixed it so s he could be given a commission. And how did 
 
 269 
 
270 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 you go about that part of the job? Did you play up to his 
 patriotism ? You did not ! You offered him a lieutenancy, 
 or a captaincy, or whatever it was, the way I d offer a hun 
 dred-dollar bill to a town councilman that I wanted to vote 
 for a franchise ! I hope he knocked you down." 
 
 Garcia turned away. 
 
 "Come back here," ordered McGregor. "Look up/ And 
 when he had been reluctantly obeyed: "You ve spilled the 
 beans. I can t make another move against Brown we ve lost 
 every chance of him. But I can do something for you : I can 
 pay you for your raw work. I said I d do it I warned you 
 and now I m going to make good." Gripping the chair with 
 both hands, the contractor leaned across it; his little eyes 
 shone ominously above bags of fat turned a dull brown. 
 "You re going back to line-work, Garcia. I ll fix that before 
 luncheon !" 
 
 Eage and terror pulled at the lieutenant s lips. "If you 
 try that" 
 
 "You won t do anything," McGregor interrupted. "You 
 can t touch me, but I could send you to Leavenworth on any 
 one of a dozen counts. Instead of that, I m only going to 
 have you sent to the front; I m only going to give you a 
 chance to make a man of yourself." 
 
 Terror won Garcia, His mouth twitched; tears came into 
 his eyes. 
 
 "Mr. McGregor, please ! You know I m no soldier ; you 
 know I" 
 
 "Get out of here !" said McGregor. 
 
 "But, Mr. McGregor" 
 
 The contractor raised a short arm; his pointing finger in 
 dicated the door. "Get out !" 
 
 Garcia knew that his cause was lost. He stumbled away. 
 With his hand, however, on the knob, he turned to McGregor 
 a face black with spite. 
 
 "You re crazy over that kid," he said. "I believe you think 
 more about him than 3*ou do about your contracts. Well, you 
 needn t bank on getting him out of trouble. You ve started 
 something you can t stop. I ve got Brown framed." 
 
VICTORIOUS 271 
 
 ii 
 
 McGregor, when the door had closed, wrote a note and sent 
 it by messenger to Andy s rooms : he asked Andy to come at 
 once to see him. Within the hour, he had his answer: 
 
 "DEAR MR. MCGREGOR Thank you, but I d rather not. 
 We don t think alike, so what s the use of talking? And, 
 besides, I don t want to see anybody just now. 
 
 "Yours truly, 
 "A. McK. BROWST." 
 
 in 
 
 Andy was living in a darkened world, darkly. He was 
 living in a Paris the mood of which was but as the shadow of 
 his own cast tremendously against the sky. The Germans 
 were at the gates, the Allies were weakening; America had 
 failed the Allies, and Sylvia had failed his ideal. 
 
 On the day that he heard from McGregor, he heard from 
 her. She, too, asked him to come to see her, and to her also 
 he sent a refusal. All dreams were false. 
 
 There are few entries in his note-book for this time, but 
 of these a few are worth transcription : 
 
 "Friday 9 P. M. Air-raid. Three hours. 
 
 "Saturday 7 :30 A. M. Bombardment by big gun, continued 
 
 till 4 P. M. 
 
 9:30 P.M. Air-raid. 
 
 "Sunday 7 A. M. Big gun again. Till 3 :30. 
 
 "Monday 1 A. M. Air-raid. 
 
 6 A. M. Big gunning. 
 "I don t care! )f 
 
 It was fitting that she should fail just when democracy 
 was failing; they had been intertwined in all his visions; 
 they were inseparable. He tried to think of neither, and 
 thought of nothing else. 
 
 The whole world had changed; the world of yesterday was 
 dead. It had been murdered and, with its life-blood, his own 
 
272 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 life-blood, the life-blood of all that mattered in him, had 
 flown into the street and dried there, a clotted thing, the food 
 of hideous flies. Proved impotent at crisis impotent or un 
 willing the entire American effort had turned to a cynical 
 joke, and she who had symbolized it she, too, was a thing 
 for laughter. 
 
 "If any one calls for me," he instructed the concierge, "say 
 that I have gone to the American camp. I don t want to 
 see anybody." 
 
 "Not," asked Mme. Lafon "not anybody?" 
 
 "Nobody." 
 
 "But if" the concierge smiled "if somebody called like 
 the pretty mademoiselle that monsieur found in his room 
 some evenings since " 
 
 "Her especially," said Andy. But he did not expect her. 
 
 That very evening, on his return home from a dismal din 
 ner with Evans, Mme. Lafon said Sylvia had been to the 
 house and asked for him. 
 
 "What did you tell her?" 
 
 Madame shrugged. "What would you? What monsieur 
 told me to tell, my faith !" 
 
 (There was a snake in his heart. "Don t see her." it whis 
 pered. "She is trying to cozen you again. You have missed 
 her: let her go.") 
 
 rv 
 
 The neighbors watched every clear sunset with the certainty 
 of a nocturnal attack. The sirens would utter their terrify 
 ing, long drawn out shrieks, and the population would make 
 for its cellars. 
 
 By day, the long-distance gun "Bertha," they called it 
 made the streets almost as uncomfortable as the air-raids 
 made them by night. A restaurant was blown to bits; every 
 twenty-four hours, people were killed; on Good Friday came 
 the destruction of St. Gervais, when the service of a congre 
 gation already in black was interrupted forever. The husband 
 leaving home for work in the morning might never return, 
 or, returning, find destruction awaiting him. The gun fired 
 
VICTOKIOUS 273 
 
 with disquieting irregularity, and presently there were long 
 lines of prospective travelers before the booking-offices of the 
 railway-stations : Evans declared that eight hundred thousand 
 persons had left the city. 
 
 The air was electric. The communiques were twenty-four 
 hours late: what was happening out there in the world be 
 yond? 
 
 Drivers of camions that passed through the suburbs, and 
 engineers of trains that transported troops, told their friends 
 of things they had seen with their own eyes and of rumors 
 they heard, and always believed, from those of the military 
 with whom they came in contact : the stories passed from lip 
 to lip like prairie-fire. Andy, listlessly visiting the govern 
 ment buildings, saw messengers come and go at all hours, 
 dashing up in motor-cars that had darted through the streets 
 at breakneck speed; telephone-receivers were never on their 
 hooks; telegraph-instruments clicked incessantly; day and 
 night, many of the officials remained in their offices. 
 
 Often he would sit long in his darkened rooms, looking 
 out upon the shadowy gardens where the fountain played. 
 He would hear other lodgers return home, climb the com 
 plaining stairs, shut their heavy doors. He would hear the 
 night-rounds of the house and the occasional footsteps of some 
 belated wayfarer passing along one of the paved galeries be 
 low. But he would not budge for an air-raid: dawn would 
 find him at the window. 
 
 It was there that he had found her asleep. This room had 
 been alight with her presence; she had curled her delicate 
 body in this very chair. . . . 
 
 ("You fool!" whispered the snake in his heart. "You 
 small-town fool!") 
 
 His faith was shattered. He saw a diabolic world to return 
 Lazarus to which had been a cruelty. When he thought at all 
 of Garcia, he thirsted for a Thystan vengeance. 
 
 There was the moment when Andy definitely learned that 
 the German army had broken through the line at the point 
 
274: VICTORIOUS 
 
 of juncture between the English and the French; the five 
 days when Gough s British Fifth Army fell back and back 
 until disaster seemed inevitable; the hour when, from the 
 highest quarters, the word was whispered that the road to 
 Paris lay open. Andy was walking homeward on that evening 
 with the knowledge that the French reserves would not be 
 concentrated for action before Sunday and that the outnum 
 bered British might not be able to hold longer than Saturday 
 night. 
 
 The Germans were at the gate. 
 
 Where was the "fighting army" promised by America? 
 
 Where was Jeanne d Arc? 
 
 VI 
 
 To the French, an American had to present himself in 
 apologetic mood, had to try always to explain the obviously 
 inexcusable. The ordinary Parisian did not make distinction 
 among the newer uniforms, mistook Eed Cross and Y. M-.-C. A. 
 workers in Paris for United States soldiers enjoying them 
 selves at the capital while Frenchmen died in the trenches. 
 The discontented shook their fists and expressed ugly opin 
 ions of all persons "too proud to fight." Dark streets were not 
 always safe for Americans. 
 
 There have been few days of such suspense. Even the un 
 informed came to know that something impended. The 
 boulevard crowds were smaller than usual, and more restless. 
 People gathered in little knots and spoke in undertones. Like 
 every other accessible citizen of his country, Andy was again 
 and again appealed to: 
 
 "Will not they let your army fight at last? Surely, they 
 will let it fight now !" 
 
 VII 
 
 Evans at last peremptorily bundled Andy away. The great 
 good-natured man saw that something was eating out the 
 lad s heart and decided for a change of moral atmosphere. 
 
VICTORIOUS 275 
 
 "Go down to Brest and see our navy," tie commanded. 
 "They know how to do things right." 
 
 He got Andy a pass through the naval attache at the Em 
 bassy and shipped his patient across France, and Andy, for 
 a time, plucked up some heart when he observed the splendid 
 liaison maintained at the old port and saw something of the 
 efficient patrol and convoy system operating from there. 
 
 Yet even here he found, soon, traces of the fatal blight. 
 Sitting in the cafe of the Hotel Continental, a naval officer 
 told him: 
 
 "This is a perfect harbor; it s the only natural harbor on 
 the Atlantic coast of Europe, and it is splendidly defended. 
 Now that we re beginning to use it, the transports can make 
 their round-trips often in less than three weeks, whereas they 
 used to take a hundred days. The only trouble s the poor rail 
 road facilities." 
 
 Andy remembered the enormous railway-yards that he had 
 seen building at Bordeaux. He spoke of them. 
 
 "That s just it," said the officer. "The army staff saw the 
 makings of a good railroad center at Bordeaux and picked 
 it for our chief port without thinking that when you come 
 to choose a port it might be a good thing to consult somebody 
 that knows something about water. Bordeaux s a hundred 
 miles farther east than Brest ; it s up a river that anybody can 
 mine, it s across a sandbar that nobody can dredge, and it s 
 got a tide that runs six or seven miles an hour. One of our 
 transports got up there on the highest tide of the month and 
 then had to wait for the next month s highest tide before it 
 could get down." 
 
 A desperate official proved to Andy the army staff s rail 
 way failure at Brest. He took his guest over three miles 
 of docks that resembled a house into which a vast family had 
 but just moved. From one end of the place to the other ran 
 almost uninterrupted ramparts, fifteen and twenty feet high, 
 piled with material that the navy had delivered, but that the 
 army s transportation chiefs could not remove. Mail-bags, 
 motor-cars and wagon-parts lay there, and had, some of them, 
 lain there for months. Food rotted before one s eyes. Here 
 
276 VICTORIOUS 
 
 was a group of expensive tractors pronounced impractical in 
 France ; there was a half-shipload of useless coffins, sent over 
 empty, when there was so much need of space; a half -cargo 
 of clothespins was heaped beside them. Worthless and valu 
 able, the entire conglomeration was tossed together, still a 
 day s journey from its destination, and fated, it seemed, never 
 to move again. 
 
 "The other day," said the official, "we had a cargo come 
 in with sugar and iron-rails. Some contractor d packed the 
 rails on top of the sugar; they d busted through and ruined 
 everything under them. The stevedores just had to throw that 
 sugar into the harbor seventy thousand pounds. And only 
 yesterday there were forty tons of beef on a ship that hadn t 
 remembered to install a ref rigerating-plant : we tossed the lot 
 overboard." 
 
 An energetic Y. M. C. A. secretary carried Andy out to 
 barracks to speak to soldiers newly arrived. He stood on a 
 low stage at the end of a vast tunnel-like hut, and the sec 
 retary had the soldiers sing for him. 
 
 "While you are sleeping, 
 Your France is weeping: 
 
 Wake from your dreams, Maid of France !" 
 
 They sang slowly, giving full weight to every word and 
 conferring a true dignity on what they sang. 
 
 "Her heart is bleeding: 
 Are you unheeding? 
 
 Come with the flame in your glance !" 
 
 He saw them as a sea of faces upraised to his. The secre 
 tary had been saying that Andy knew this war and would tell 
 them of the high battle in which they were soon to bear arms. 
 
 "Through the gates of heaven, with your sword in hand, 
 .Come, your legions to command !" 
 
VICTOKIOUS 277 
 
 A sea of boys faces a sea of the faces of boys clean, eager, 
 earnest, idealistic 
 
 They swung into the refrain: 
 
 "Joan of Arc ! Joan of Arc ! 
 
 Do your eyes, from the skies, see the foe ? 
 
 Don t you see the drooping Fleur-de-lis ? 
 
 Can t you hear the tears of Normandy ? 
 Joan of Arc ! Joan of Arc ! 
 Let your spirit lead us through ! 
 
 Come, lead your Prance to victory: 
 Joan of Arc, they are calling you !" 
 
 Andy ran away. He took the evening train for Paris. What 
 he needed was not a change of moral atmosphere, but a self- 
 vindication. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Quite a heap of papers was piled on the desk in his work 
 room when he returned to it. There was a letter from his 
 mother, between whose always reserved lines he read a grow 
 ing anxiety lest all should not be well with him, and another 
 letter from Blunston, which would have been cheering in any 
 other circumstances, since it replied in sturdy tone to Andy s 
 memorandum of camp-conditions and said that the articles 
 now bearing Andy s name were winning him a newspaper-rep 
 utation. A note scribbled by the conscientious Mme. Lafon 
 said that the accompanying package had been left by an un 
 known messenger: the package was addressed in typewriting 
 and contained everything that had been stolen from his rooms. 
 
 Andy promptly enclosed, without revision, the recovered 
 interview in a fresh envelope and addressed it, with a formal 
 apology for delay, to the French official who, Sylvia had told 
 him, was to have it verified and dispatched. His letters to 
 Sylvia he burned in the grate. 
 
 He was puzzled about these and the interview until he had 
 read two other letters that were on his table and had been at 
 the bottom of the pile. They were unstamped and bore super 
 scriptions showing that they came from the American Staff. 
 
278 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 His first glance at their coverings had led him to believe them 
 only a pair of the many circulars of fresh instructions sent 
 to correspondents, but when he had read them, Andy said : 
 
 "Of course they sent the other things back. They don t 
 need them now." 
 
 For the letters contained Garcia s revenge. The first one 
 ran: 
 
 ". . . In several American newspapers there has been pub 
 lished an article, which it is learned you wrote, though you did 
 not sign it with your own name, criticizing the Press-Division, 
 calling it the big joke and one of the horrors of war and 
 which was not previously submitted by you for censorship in 
 accordance with the term of the agreement. . . . 
 
 ". . . You have been suspended from privileges as a visit 
 ing correspondent with the American Forces in France. You 
 are also hereby notified that a cable has been sent to the Sec 
 retary of War recommending that your bond as an accredited 
 correspondent be forfeited regardless of the fact that you sur 
 rendered your credentials at a date now sometime past. . . / 
 
 Andy folded this letter carefully and put it back on the desk. 
 His hand shook a little as he did so, and the tremor increased 
 as he read the second communication : 
 
 ". . . On January 31st, a memorandum, signed by an 
 officer who states he was at the railroad station when the inci 
 dent occurred, was submitted to the Chief of the Intelligence 
 Section, Line of Communications, the memorandum reading 
 as follows: 
 
 " 1. A newspaper correspondent by the name of Brown 
 was passing through Chaumont from Neufchateau on January 
 18th. At the station, while waiting for the evening-train, 
 which was several hours late, he made imprudent statements. 
 He charged England with being beaten and ready to quit, he 
 spoke very discouragingly of the French, he criticized the U. 
 S. Army, besides giving away military information which he 
 had obtained regarding the entry of the 1st Division into the 
 trenches, and similar pieces of military information. 
 
 " 2. His first name is Andrew. He was dressed in an 
 
VICTOKIOUS 279 
 
 American officer s uniform, without officers insignia, but with 
 a correspondent s brassard. He was clean-shaven, red-haired 
 and freckled. 
 
 ". . . No doubt your application to visit the British Front 
 was denied owing to the statements you are alleged to have 
 made in the memorandum quoted above. 
 
 "The report, when received here, would have resulted in an 
 investigation with a view to recalling your credentials as an 
 accredited or visiting correspondent, but coincident with its 
 receipt information was received that you had already violated 
 your signed agreement as an accredited correspondent by send 
 ing home for publication matter regarding our forces in 
 France which had not been submitted to our censorship. . . ." 
 
 The grossness of these lies Andy cynically remembered 
 his swathings of sweaters and trench-coat, which concealed 
 the brassard on his arm the falsity apparent on their face, 
 the reason why theft had followed their setting in action, or 
 why bribery had, still later, been attempted all that mattered 
 nothing. Garcia had kept his word : Andy was "f ramed." 
 
 Scarcely able to see the paper on which he wrote, he sat 
 down to answer his mother s letter. It was his day to write to 
 her, and he must not let it pass. 
 
 "Dearest Mother," he wrote, "somehow, your last letter 
 makes me think you are worrying about me. You mustn t 
 worry. There is no danger in this part of the city from the 
 long-range gun that you ve of course read about, and our cel 
 lars are air-raid-proof. Things are extremely interesting, and 
 I am safe and well and happy. . . " 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 RECORDING TWO HIGHLY EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 WHATEVER might be said of Andy and his mother, Minnie 
 Taylor s folks were not the sort of folks to write letters for 
 no better reason than that none had been written for some 
 time, and because of this highly practical attitude, Chrissly 
 did not see his Ghismonda nearly so soon as he hoped. Minnie 
 was visiting a cousin in Sunbury. She had stayed longer than 
 she had planned to stay and, knowing nothing of Chrissly s 
 return, enjoyed herself until the end of her visit. By the day 
 when she came back to Americus, Chrissly s visit was also 
 nearing its end, and he was soon to start on his Liberty Bond 
 tour, from which, without again reaching home, he would set 
 out for France. 
 
 Minnie s mother mentioned his presence when she walked 
 up from the station with her daughter ; her daughter immedi 
 ately flew into a rage with her for another cause. It being 
 evident that Chrissly was a town-hero, Minnie, the next morn 
 ing, sauntered marketward. Although the family basket 
 swayed from one plump arm, she wore her newest and shiniest 
 short-skirt frock; her blonde hair was fastened by large pins 
 that a Sunbury admirer, who gave them to her, had assured 
 her were real tortoise-shell, and her pink cheeks had never 
 been pinker, her china-blue eyes so blue. Chrissly was in 
 uniform, but he stood behind the food-laden stall, helping 
 his parents, almost as if he had never left off helping them. 
 Minnie wormed her way through the crowd and then, as she 
 caught his glance, started : she would have said that she reg 
 istered amazement. 
 
 "Why, Chrissly!" He was afraid she was going to break 
 down. "Were you wounded? How on earth did you get 
 here ? When did you come back ?" 
 
 He blushed and, a sidelong glance telling him that his par- 
 
 280 
 
VICTOKIOUS 281 
 
 ents were busy trading, stammered his explanations. He was 
 so much his old self that she momentarily lacked interest, but 
 she regained it when she saw how other people were regarding 
 her and how proudly they regarded him. Then, as he stum 
 bled on, she noted two new things about him new and some- 
 ; what uncomfortable: he carried himself with a straightness 
 jthat repudiated early memories of the plow, with movements 
 .that had none of the remembered uncertainties of other days, 
 and his gaze on her face this was the other thing, a thing, 
 she felt, only fortuitously accompanying the former was in 
 tent, questioning, a little puzzled. 
 
 She asked about his wounds, and when she found that they 
 were quite cured, she reached across the stall and twisted one 
 ,of the bronze buttons of his blouse. 
 
 1 "Can t you" she lowered her modest eyes to the pile of 
 sausages that lay between them "can t you get a while to see 
 your old friends, Chrissly?" 
 
 Chrissly burned with delight, but his gaze still questioned 
 her. "I want to, lots." 
 
 "After market ?" She gave him her smile. 
 
 "A right. Pap s got some sings to buy : I ll have most an 
 hour." 
 
 "You come up to our house." 
 
 He had never before been invited there. He should have 
 been overwhelmed, but he seemed only the more puzzled. 
 
 "Sanks," he said. 
 
 Minnie recovered her poise. "I ll be pleased to see you," 
 said she. "And I d like three pounds of this smoked sausage, 
 please." 
 
 n 
 
 1 One did not pass through the chilling formality of a hall 
 way to attain the Taylors parlor, for the street-door opened 
 directly into that apartment; but any want of rigidity in the 
 matter of approach had its compensation in the glory of ar 
 rival. The Taylor parlor was a place for a great many things, 
 and they all had the air at once of being new to it and of mean 
 ing never to be used or moved a hairbreadth from their re- 
 
282 VICTORIOUS 
 
 spective positions. There was a green and yellow rug on the 
 floor as fresh as when it had hung in the show-window of a 
 Doncaster instalment-house; there was much yellow wood 
 work and a brass chandelier apparently polished to an alarm 
 ing degree of thinness. The ornate mantelpiece was covered 
 by a crimson lambrequin that moved only composedly in the 
 draughts of hot air from the open heater below it and that 
 bore so many vases and plaques that it looked like the china- 
 counter in the Racket Store. There were also some blue-plush 
 chairs, and there was an orange-covered sofa on which Minnie 
 dimplingly bade her soldier sit beside her. 
 
 "Now/ she said, after explaining how it was that she had 
 not seen him days ago, "we ll have a regular old-fashioned 
 talk." She had received him at the door with a stiff-armed 
 handshake that would have stopped a closer greeting on his 
 part, had the perplexed young man contemplated any; but 
 ensconced on the sofa she assumed a kinder tone. "I m just 
 dying to hear all about the war." 
 
 "Aw, no," said Chrissly, smiling down at her: she was a 
 very pretty girl. 
 
 "Yes, I am. And you needn t be afraid of any one butting 
 in, because my mother s gone to Doncaster in the Froenfields 
 automobile." Mrs. Taylor had been banished to the kitchen 
 fifteen minutes before, but the motor-trip was planned for 
 that afternoon, and Minnie did not see why a matter of three 
 or four hours should rob her of the expedition s glamour. "I m 
 crazy to hear about the war." She fingered that blouse-but 
 ton again. 
 
 "If you pull them-there off," Chrissly cautioned her, "I ll 
 get a call-down next inspection still." He drew an inch away. 
 
 "How many Germans did you kill ?" asked Minnie. 
 
 Chrissly, who felt excessively out of place on the stiff uphol 
 stered sofa, needed but this question to bring his embarrass 
 ment to the limit of endurance. 
 
 "Aw," he said, rubbing his red hands together, "don t let s 
 talk about that none." What was lacking? What was it that 
 he had forgotten ? The ache in his head had never left him ; 
 now it was acute. 
 
VICTORIOUS 283 
 
 "We ve had all sorts of times back here/ she said : "we ve 
 had a whole lot of Eed Cross dances, and oh, we had a sort 
 of regular epidemic of typhoid." 
 
 The statements about Americus evinced much more interest 
 than her question about France. With some relief, but not 
 entirely with relief, he realized that her preliminary urgings 
 were mere politeness, that here was only another person pos 
 sessed by a deeper interest in domestic affairs than in affairs 
 foreign ; Minnie did not really want to hear about the war at 
 all ; she did not want to hear about anything : she wanted to 
 talk. 
 
 She did talk. She talked with dancing dimples that gave 
 place to smiles sunny and not infrequently interrupted by the 
 silver notes of teeth-displaying laughter. She told of the ty 
 phoid epidemic, and particularly of her part in it: how she 
 had been one of a corps of volunteer nurses, who went about 
 "and in real uniforms" to do nursing among the poor of 
 Americus. Minnie said how she thought she had bathed fifty 
 people, men, women and children, washed dishes and scrubbed 
 floors. 
 
 "I never thought any places could be so dirty," Minnie de 
 clared. 
 
 Chrissly said nothing. He merely kept a questioning at 
 tention that was for her face rather than her words. 
 
 "Some of the regular nurses thought they knew it all, and 
 some of the doctors were horrid pretended they were smarter 
 than the Eed Cross nursing-book. They re awfully old-fash 
 ioned the doctors in this town, I mean. The book said to 
 bathe them and keep the windows open bathe the sick peo 
 ple, of course and Doctor Patrick scolded us because we 
 did it!" 
 
 She was pretty. He admitted as much, but he admitted it 
 with the generous ease of a man whose affections were engaged 
 elsewhere. What was it that he had forgotten? He thought 
 he would go mad if he did not remember. 
 
 One thing he realized clearly: past months had separated 
 him from Minnie by countless miles. To this girl in her 
 guarded little town, the war was a good deal like what an 
 
284 VICTORIOUS 
 
 earthquake might be in Honduras, where one or two persons 
 she had known happened to be. She had not had the chance 
 to go over there as had gone to hard and dangerous work 
 some of the devoted women that he saw in France, and so 
 the great struggle was less of a present world-horror than 
 a local annoyance for her, here and there upsetting the nor 
 mally merry progress of her life. Why, she talked as if she 
 thought that her amateur nursing was war-work ! 
 
 No, Minnie was not that which he had lost, though, when 
 he was in the hospital in France, it was of her he had thought 
 so much. But since not Minnie what? 
 
 She was clicking on. If she wanted to impress him, she 
 wanted just as sincerely to entertain him, and she never 
 doubted that hers was the certain way. Now her subject was 
 a new "social club" that some of the boys, home on leave from 
 the cantonments, were planning to establish after the war. It 
 would be a real club with a whole house of its own, and very 
 select. She thought they might get the Tidd house when the 
 Eed Cross was through with it, and she told him her idea of 
 how it could be remodeled. On a rainy afternoon when no 
 body else would be there, Mrs. Ralph had motored her to the 
 Doncaster country-club ; since which memorable visit, Minnie 
 was her friends authority on such matters. 
 
 She thought she would ask Mrs. Ralph what the Tidd house 
 would rent for. She would put the question after next Fri 
 day s meeting of the pneumonia- jacket class. Then she would 
 tell Chrissly the answer at Saturday s market. 
 
 It was only through this chance chatter that she learned the 
 date of his departure : 
 
 "I won t be here still, the back-end of the week," said 
 Chrissly. 
 
 Minnie stopped short. "Why when when are you going 
 away?" 
 
 "Day after to-morrow." Chrissly said it as if he were talk 
 ing of a trip to Doncaster. 
 
 "Not to France?" 
 
 "I go round an round the country like, to these here Lib- 
 
VICTORIOUS 285 
 
 erty Bond meetings. But I don t git back here no more fore 
 I sail." 
 
 Minnie paled a. little, and her pout arose from genuine feel 
 ing. "I thought of course you d stay a while." 
 
 "I have stayed, Minnie. I can t stick around here doin 
 nussing all the time." 
 
 "I hate the old war !" Minnie s dimpled fist pounded the 
 orange-colored sofa without making any visible impression 
 on it. "It s bad enough the way it crowds out everything in 
 the papers and puts in big head-lines about places nobody ever 
 heard of or cares about. And now and now you ve got to go 
 back to it I don t see why: you ve done your share; why, 
 you ve been wounded: that s enough for one person to do. 
 Chrissly Shuman, I believe you ll be glad to be going!" 
 
 Some other woman had once talked to him before he went 
 back to war ; but not thus. Some other woman : what had she 
 said and who was she ? 
 
 A sudden something swept over him a sense that utterly 
 reversed every emotion experienced since his return. He stood 
 up. He could not comprehend why, but he knew that he ut 
 tered a master truth when he heard himself replying to her 
 pout: 
 
 "You shust let I ll be glad to go !" 
 
 Glad indeed ! This was not at all what she had expected : 
 it was senseless. The idea of a man pretending happiness at 
 a return to certain discomfort and possible death ! She could 
 only gape at him from the orange-colored sofa. 
 
 "T I stayed here much longer," vowed Chrissly, staring 
 wildly at her, "I d git right drank an then srow myself in the 
 Susquehanny !" 
 
 She saw it now as a reflection on her wiles : he was telling 
 her that she made him tired ! Flaming, she sprang to her feet. 
 She thrust her angry face close to his. There shot before her 
 memory the recollection of his awkward advances in the old 
 days and of her scorn of them, nor did she fail to see in a new 
 light the advances that she had just been making and that he 
 had repulsed. These rough soldiers thought they were bet- 
 
286 "VICTORIOUS 
 
 ter than anybody else. What had Chrissly Shuman been, any 
 way? 
 
 "You re a horrid pig!" she cried; "I d like to slap your 
 face!" She had often before struck impertinent youth,, but 
 now it was as much to her own amazement as to his that she 
 swung her open palm across his intent eyes. "You re a hor 
 rid pig I" she repeated. 
 
 Chrissly was blinded, but, with the word and the blow, more 
 had come to him to remain than any sense that was tempo 
 rarily taken away. He reeled backward, he clapped his hands 
 to his face, but through his hands he shouted : 
 
 "Cochon! That s it: that s what fer she said when I hit 
 him ; that s what I said first time in the trenches. I got it now. 
 Why why " His hands came down. He looked again at 
 Minnie, and then he looked, terribly, fixedly, beyond her, 
 across the sofa, as if he would pierce the wall : "Leonie ! he 
 cried. "C est toi! C est toil Ah, ma petite! Tu vas lien? 
 Tu es la, tou jours, dans I auberge? Tu ne m a pas oublie tu 
 ne m a pas oublie?" 
 
 Minnie did not understand a word, but she understood that 
 she had somehow lost him. She cried out to him in her in 
 jured pride, but what she saw before her was a man she did 
 not know. 
 
 Chrissly jammed his trench-cap on his head and dashed 
 from the house as if the French inn that he was thinking of 
 stood just across the street. 
 
 m 
 
 Nevertheless, when, two days later, he left the farm for 
 Americus, whence he was to take the train for Doncaster, he 
 went away in not quite the same mood. It was one thing to 
 turn from a Minnie proved worthless to a suddenly remem 
 bered and realizedly ill-used Leonie; it was another to say 
 good-by for a second time to his father and mother. The first 
 time had been hard enough; now he knew to what it was he 
 ;was going. . . . 
 
 Tears blotted out the house, and the two homely figures at 
 
VICTORIOUS 287 
 
 tke gate, before his wagon reached that turn of the road which 
 would itself have drawn a curtain. He loved the place and 
 the people in it, and he wanted to carry the clear picture of 
 it and them out there to the land of mud and filth, of misery 
 and death, to which he was returning. 
 
 IV 
 
 Blunston was crossing Second Street as Ghrissly s wagon 
 rattled down Elm Avenue. The elder man knew Chrissly now, 
 as all the town did, and stopped in the middle of the way. 
 
 You re Mr. Shuman, aren t you ?" Blunston held a yellow 
 piece of paper in his hand. 
 
 Chrissly nodded. 
 
 "You saw Andy Andy Brown in . . . ?" A gesture to 
 ward the eastern horizon completed the question. 
 
 "Yes, sir. He give me some Spys" 
 
 "There s a chance that you can do something for me ... 
 for him." 
 
 "I ll do anysing I can, sir." 
 
 "The fact is," said Blunston, "I ve just received some rather 
 disquieting news." 
 
 v 
 
 In Paris, twenty-four hours previously, Andy had been 
 among the ruins of his hopes and set about a Spartan recon 
 struction. He was acting on the hard theory that asserts the 
 possible victory of ideals pitted against realities. 
 
 Relentlessly, he remembered the wounded rabbit that he 
 had once been too nerveless to kill. He remembered the bloody 
 face of the soldier that died in his arms in the shelled head^ 
 quarters-town beyond Toul. He grimly reviewed the corrup 
 tions, the abominations and inevitable indecencies of the 
 trenches, the horrible pandemonium of battle and the sight 
 and smell of slaughter and decay, and the imagination that 
 had helped him to write truly made him feel too clearly. He 
 reached, nevertheless, a decision ; he went to see a doctor, and 
 came out with his red head high : the girl he had mistaken for 
 
288 VICTORIOUS 
 
 the goddess was only a woman of the theater, but that did not 
 prove the goddess inexistent; the Hun was at the gates, but 
 he had not yet entered them; the direction of his country s 
 effort was either stiff-necked and blind, or else criminally in 
 competent and itself profiteering for power, but the spirit of 
 the men was the old spirit of America, and even yet that 
 spirit would win, even yet, because of it, democracy, both at 
 home and abroad, would somehow triumph over autocracy. 
 Though through lips of clay, divinity had spoken : 
 
 "The cause is bigger than its mistakes/ 
 
 He went to an insurance-office in the Boulevard Haussmann 
 and transacted some lengthy business. He went to another 
 office. From the latter he sought the rue Auber and dis 
 patched a cable-message to Blunston. 
 
 Twilight was falling as he crossed the Place de 1 Opera. A 
 group of American Red Cross workers passed him, dressed as 
 if hurrying on some assignment to the front. They were 
 singing, and he caught the words : 
 
 "And we won t 
 Come back 
 Till it s over 
 Over There !" 
 
 He was looking across his shoulder at them and not, as he 
 should have done in so perilous a place, in the direction in 
 which he was going. He walked into the short arms of the 
 comfortably swathed McGregor. 
 
 "Hello !" cried the contractor. "Here you are at last ! Now 
 you ve got to talk to me." He peered at Andy. "You look 
 solemn." 
 
 "I m not down-hearted," Andy qualified. 
 
 "Well, you know what the doctor said when they called him 
 in to look at the man that fell off the Woolworth Building: 
 Twenty-five wounds; the first fifteen are fatal, but the last 
 ten are luckily not dangerous. Come on and have dinner at 
 a new place I know. Good food. It s too cloudy for an air 
 raid, and the gun stopped at four-thirty I never go out till 
 the municipal authorities phone me it does. Besides, we ve 
 
VICTORIOUS 289 
 
 something to celebrate to-night. Come on;" he winked per 
 suasively : "I ve got something to tell you, and you look as if 
 you had something to tell me." 
 
 "I don t think I ought to," said Andy. He could not help 
 liking the rascal. 
 
 "Not another party in your rooms ?" McGregor poked him 
 in the ribs and then drew hastily away from Andy s quickly 
 warning glance. "Oh, I knew it was all right and all that, 
 but I did hear about it, and really it was indiscreet. Look 
 here" he grew quite grave "what I want to see you about 
 is Miss Raeburn, for one thing " 
 
 "I don t want to hear about her," said Andy, "and you 
 oughtn t to want to tell. Please don t do it." 
 
 "And the other thing s Garcia," McGregor insisted. 
 
 "He can t do anything more to me," said Andy. 
 
 "He can t, can t he ? That s all you know about it, my son. 
 Come on anyhow and eat. I tell you we ve got to celebrate." 
 
 Andy had been full of his own concerns : "Celebrate what ?" 
 
 "You don t mean to say you haven t heard?" McGregor 
 poured out the glad news : 
 
 The miracle had happened. The French performed the first 
 part of it: tired and harassed as they were, the war-weary 
 army of that people whom all the rest of the world used to re 
 gard as merely mercurial said to itself: "We have to do our 
 work all over again" and began doing it forthwith; the re 
 serves that "couldn t get up until Sunday" got there on Sat 
 urday ; they stopped the first advance of the German offensive. 
 The second portion was performed by the British : their Fifth 
 Army was rallied, and the other parts of their line held fast. 
 The third phase fell to the lot of America : knowing the seri 
 ousness of the situation, the English premier sent for the 
 American secretary of war, who was then in London; the 
 American secretary of war hurried to Paris, where he was 
 seen by the French premier; next the American secretary of 
 war sent for the American commander-in-chief, and, finally, 
 the American commander-in-chief completed the unity of 
 command under Foch by offering that officer, on the part of 
 America, "all we have and all we are." 
 
290 VICTORIOUS 
 
 To hear McGregor tell it, a stranger would have thought 
 that the contractor had all along advocated such a cause : 
 
 "So you see, I was right when I kept saying it would all 
 come out for the best in the end. Somebody had to put the 
 screws on, but he did it in plenty of time. Now come on, and 
 we ll eat." 
 
 Andy had heard him in silence. Now he said : 
 
 "I can t do that, but I m much obliged for the news. It 
 wouldn t have made any difference in what I was going to do, 
 even if I d known it, but it s fine news and I m glad it s hap 
 pened." 
 
 McGregor blew out his always puffy cheeks. "What you 
 were going to do? D you have another exposure on hand? 
 What was it?" 
 
 "No," said Andy, slowly smiling, "no exposure. I m 
 through with them. I ll tell you what it was. . . ." 
 
 VI 
 
 The cable-message that Andy had sent from the office in the 
 rue Auber, the message that Blunston held in his hand when 
 he stopped Chrissly Shuman on Elm Avenue, read thus : 
 
 "Bond declared forfeit have insured life to protect make it 
 easy but tell mother have enlisted." 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 CONTAINING SOME ADVENTURES OF A PUPIL IN THE SCHOOL OF 
 WAR, AND SHOWING HOW LE*ONIE DID NOT WAIT IN VAIN, 
 AND HOW ANDY FOUND HIS SOUL 
 
 WHEN he could have had a commission ! 
 
 And at such a time as this! 
 
 McGregor had offered, argued, pleaded in vain. Whereto 
 Andy, in a stubborn modesty, made brief answers to the effect 
 that such a commission as the contractor could get for him 
 would, since he was a novice at military matters, hold him 
 somewhere behind the lines, when what he wanted was to fight. 
 As for the time well, examining physicians proved to be not 
 so exacting as formerly, and this was precisely the time when 
 every fellow was needed. Finally, he broke away from Mc 
 Gregor s grasp of his lapel and almost ran up the Avenue 
 de l 0pe"ra. 
 
 McGregor looked after him, chewing a cigar. Then he 
 said: 
 
 "It s a woman. It s that pretty actress !" 
 
 He was genuinely worried. War was a splendid thing for 
 people one was not too fond of jet it was not, in McGregor s 
 view, a thing for Andy. Toward him the Chicagoan s attitude 
 had never been feigned. He felt at their first meeting, one of 
 those sudden likings for the lad to which none is so predis 
 posed as your cautious business man. Their subsequent social 
 relationship, revealing Andy s boyish frankness and matter- 
 of-fact manliness, awoke affection. Once or twice, to be sure, 
 their purposes ran counter to each other, but that was only 
 in the field of hard business, and even there Andy s able and 
 fair fighting, not to speak of his plucky opposition to heavy 
 odds, evoked admiration though it forbade mercy. McGregor 
 
 291 
 
293 VICTORIOUS 
 
 would have done anything for his friend except permit him 
 to expose the aircraft failure. 
 
 And now, here was this matter of an actress. McGregor 
 liked Sylvia, considering the little he had seen of her ; he had 
 even allowed himself to speculate upon the possibility of lik 
 ing her a great deal ; a woman s past never annoyed him, nor 
 her present, so long as he saw the chance of changing that; 
 but for Andy it wouldn t do. There was the mysterious re 
 cipient of her money! She could not be serious about this 
 young fellow: before a woman throws herself at a man, she 
 finds out whether he is a good catch, and Andy s lack of abil 
 ity in that particular was patent. What was the New Or 
 leans fellow s name ? He d made a careful note of it. A hus 
 band, of course: actresses always had censored husbands in 
 their background, unpublishable persons that nevertheless 
 were never killed, rarely in any sense made place for some one 
 more desirable before some one less desirable secured irrefuta 
 ble claims for their place. There was no use looking them up : 
 if you found them, you always found them out of the ques 
 tion. He himself was hardened, but not so Andy. Oh, it 
 wouldn t do at all ! 
 
 That was why, that very evening, Andy received a labored 
 letter from McGregor, borne by a Eitz cliasseur. It began 
 with some tender reminiscences of the late Mrs. McGregor, 
 intimated, rather broadly, that Sylvia had better be given up, 
 hard as such a process might prove, and ended : 
 
 "Take an old fellow s advice and try it. Nobody ever knows 
 what he can do till he tries that s why a lot of people never 
 know what they can do." 
 
 Andy burned the letter, worried about his forfeited bond, 
 recollected that his mother would hear of his enlistment from 
 Blunston before receiving his letter telling her that all was 
 well and went about packing his belongings for storage. He 
 wrote a note to Owen Evans. He did not get to bed until 
 morning. 
 
 "Men," he said to himself as he turned in, "are somehow 
 always worse than women. Even when they re talking about 
 
VrCTOKIOUS 293 
 
 a a bad woman, they always show themselves worse than 
 she is." 
 
 He was too tired to dream. 
 
 ii 
 
 Meanwhile, McGregor had called on Sylvia. He considered 
 it his duty to prove her a not unpleasant duty, but a duty 
 nevertheless and that a decisive conclusion did not decide 
 him is a fact which nobody familiar with McGregor will con 
 sider paradoxical. An interview in a hotel parlor rarely; 
 proves anything, anyhow. 
 
 She seemed glad to see him. She even let him sit beside 
 her as Andy had once, in this same parlor, sat. And she 
 thanked him again for sending that money. 
 
 "No trouble at all," said McGregor. He regarded Tac 
 lying at her feet. "It got there all right, did it?" 
 
 "Quite. I had a cable." 
 
 "From Mr. Rayburn?" His eyes could be sudden when 
 they wanted to be : they were sudden now. 
 
 To no purpose, however: hers had in them something like 
 a smile. "From the person you were good enough to send the 
 money to, of course." 
 
 She understood him, and she wanted him to know that she 
 did. McGregor liked her the better for that. 
 
 "I get you," he chuckled. "Did you ever hear about the 
 tramp that knocked at the kitchen-door and told the lady-of- 
 the-house he didn t know where his next meal was coming 
 from ? She said : You ve come to the wrong place to find out ; 
 this isn t an information-bureau. Seen anything of young 
 Brown lately?" 
 
 Sylvia bent to pat Tac, and so her face was hidden. "Not 
 lately." 
 
 "He s a nice boy," said McGregor. 
 
 "Very," said Sylvia. 
 
 "But," said McGregor slowly, "he s only a boy." 
 
 To that Sylvia said nothing. 
 
 "Only a boy," McGregor repeated slowly. He produced his 
 wonderful cigar-case. "Mind if I smoke? No? Thanks." 
 
294: VICTORIOUS 
 
 He lighted the chosen cigar. "Anybody could make a fool of 
 him. Fm always afraid somebody will." 
 
 She looked up now. Her face was quite composed. 
 
 "I wouldn t be," she said. Her eyes maintained their 
 depths, but her smile was perfectly worldly-wise. "There 
 isn t the slightest danger, Mr. McGregor." 
 
 "You re sure ?" 
 
 He studied her carefully, but decided her assurance au 
 thentic. 
 
 She answered : "Quite." 
 
 McGregor sighed relief. He chuckled. He put out his 
 hand. 
 
 "Shake," said he. 
 
 They shook hands, and he held her hand. 
 
 "Miss Raeburn," he said, "I wish I could see more of you. 
 I m a lonely man all the time, and I m mighty lonely over 
 here." 
 
 He might have said more, but she withdrew her hand so 
 quickly that Tac, disturbed by the movement, looked up 
 meaningly at her companion. 
 
 "I m so very busy," she murmured. 
 
 McGregor rose with a little bow. 
 
 "That s for you to say," he told her. "The longer I live, 
 the less I know about ladies. You remember the five-year-old 
 that brought her three-year-old sister for vaccination? She 
 said: Doctor, sis don t know her left arm from her right, 
 so maw washed ? em both. " He offered his hand. "It s 
 for friendship this time," he explained. "We can be friends ?" 
 
 In friendship she met him. "Of course." 
 
 McGregor s puffy face grew sincerely grave. "And we ll 
 try to help the boy." 
 
 "Andy?" 
 
 "Yes. He may be needing friends. He s enlisted." . . . 
 
 in 
 
 It was a chilly night, but McGregor, as, a half-hour later, 
 he wheezed into his waiting motor, mopped sweat from his 
 cheeks. 
 
VICTORIOUS 295 
 
 "I guess my work s not calculated to make gentlemen," he 
 murmured to himself. "Anyhow, I don t understand women 
 not a bit I don t. Says she don t care for him, and yet, all 
 the time I try to make up to her, she s as ready to fly away 
 as a butterfly on a flower. Says she don t care for him, but 
 says it with the kind of smile the thoroughbreds put on when 
 they re sacrificing themselves for some fool notion or other. 
 Says she don t care for him, and then faints when I tell her 
 he s enlisted !" 
 
 rv 
 
 Andy, waking before dawn, had only to dress and go to 
 the Gare de FEst, where a sergeant would provide him with 
 transportation to the place at which he was to join his unit. 
 He was glad that he had done his packing, instead of leaving 
 that to the kindly proffered offices of Mme. Lafon: it made 
 departure easier that the rooms should be pretty well dis 
 mantled. He looked at the pile of luggage for which the 
 storage-men were to call later in the day and wondered how 
 he had collected so much when he had brought so little; he 
 looked also at the grate that held the ashes of McGregor s 
 letter and at the curtains between which Sylvia had stood. 
 
 He blew out the candle. 
 
 Then, in the resounding railway-station, with gray-blue 
 poilus rolling trainward, incredible packs on their backs, a 
 mother on one arm and a sweetheart on the other, Sylvia 
 met him. His impulse was to dodge away from her, but it 
 was at once evident that she was there to seek him. 
 
 She was pale he thought that perhaps she was over 
 worked ; he had heard that she had again been making a tour 
 of the -foyers yet she smiled as she came through the crowd. 
 He saw that immediately. 
 
 "I m so sorry not to have seen you all these days," she 
 said. "I tried to get in touch with you and couldn t. Last 
 night Mr. McGregor told me you d enlisted. He told me 
 
296 VICTOBIOUS 
 
 you d be going from here this morning. So I came to wish 
 you luck/ 
 
 Andy tried to make reply. 
 
 "I wanted you to know I was still your friend/ said Sylvia. 
 
 "Thanks," said Andy. "I m it was good of you to get 
 up here at this time of day." But she wasn t changed ! His 
 heart hardened. "Those papers were returned," he said. 
 "Somebody sent them back. I started the interview on its 
 way. I hope it gets through and has some effect. It will be 
 my last newspaper job for a long while." 
 
 They were standing beside a closed ticket-window, a little 
 withdrawn from the hurrying hundreds that filled the station. 
 She started at his words: 
 
 "Somebody?" 
 
 "Yes. Garcia, I guess. Garcia." 
 
 He held her with his eyes as he repeated the name. In the 
 so familiar way, her brows puckered. She flushed, caught her 
 breath. She bit her lip. 
 
 "I see/ she said. 
 
 "He probably thought he didn t need them. He d fixed me 
 another way." 
 
 "How?" She barely breathed the monosyllable. 
 
 "Oh," Andy tried to laugh, and he looked to one side : 
 "It doesn t matter, does it?" 
 
 "Because you ve enlisted?" 
 
 "Yes because I ve enlisted." He wouldn t look at her 
 again. 
 
 "That s one of the things I ve come to tell you about ; and 
 to wish you good-by," she said. "I think I think you re won 
 derfully brave Andy." 
 
 He did laugh now. "For the love of Mike," he said, "don t 
 talk that way. I found out they d have me at last, so of 
 course I went." 
 
 "But you kept on trying." 
 
 "Look at all the other fellows. I couldn t have stayed out 
 and had any self-respect left. As a matter of fact, I m scared 
 to death here for fear I ll be scared to death" he nodded 
 
VICTOKIOUS 297 
 
 his red head toward the train-shed as toward the battle-line 
 "out there/ 
 
 "When " Again she caught her hreath. Had he looked 
 at her, he would have seen how wistful was her face. "When 
 do you have to get on your train?" 
 
 "In ten minutes." He shifted his feet. "I ve got to report 
 to a sergeant at the gate " 
 
 "Then I mustn t keep you." 
 
 He was ashamed of himself. After all, she had never en 
 couraged him to believe in her never, indeed, been anything 
 but friendly. And this coming to see him off: that was un 
 commonly friendly. 
 
 "Til be in training for a long time, I guess," he said. 
 
 She shook her head. He glanced at her once, very quickly, 
 and saw how her hair caught all there was of the early light, 
 but he did not see her eyes. "Not long. Not now. They need 
 men too badly." 
 
 "And where ll you be?" 
 
 Her face was white indeed. "Amusing my soldiers." It 
 was she who now looked aside. 
 
 Andy clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Sylvia, you hate 
 to see a friend go, don t you?" 
 
 Her head was bowed. "Yes," she said. 
 
 "And you ve some sort of silly notion about a fellow not 
 coming back?" 
 
 She did not answer : there was no need. 
 
 "Well, a fellow oughtn t to count on it," he said; "but 
 lots of them do come back, you know. I hope" yes, he knew 
 now that he did hope it ! "I hope I come back, and we can 
 be friends again." 
 
 Just friends : he meant that. He would keep his ideals, but 
 he could at least be friends with clay from which the spirit 
 of those ideals had fled. 
 
 "We will be," said Sylvia: "good friends." She raised her 
 eyes : they were bright. "And, if I may say it as a friend, I 
 want you to go. I m proud of you." She had her cue now: 
 he had given it her. "I m proud that a friend should go." 
 She took his hand from her shoulder, pressed it lightly . 
 
298 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 dropped it. "Hurry," she said. "You ll be late if you don t, 
 and it would never do to begin being a soldier by being late." 
 She was bidding him farewell with a smile. "Good luck to 
 you friend !" . . . 
 
 When she had run a few steps, she stopped and looked after 
 him, but saw that he did not once turn. 
 
 Close by the station was a church into which she entered. 
 Before a figure of the Blessed Virgin a poor modern thing, 
 it was she knelt until she knew that his train had gone. 
 
 VI 
 
 Andy sat beside a window in a third-class carriage and 
 watched the brown fields and white hamlets race past him. 
 Luckily, he was the only American there, and the other pas 
 sengers assumed that he could not speak French. Through 
 his brain, pictures, rather than thoughts, were hurrying much 
 as the objects along the railway -track were hurrying before 
 his eyes, but the realities had a certain order and a limited 
 variety; his memories had neither. 
 
 There was his mother. He knew how she would seem to 
 take the news of his enlistment. But how would her heart 
 receive it ? 
 
 There was Blunston. Would Blunston understand? 
 
 And the newspapers that he had been serving. Perhaps he 
 should have given them fair warning; perhaps, in perform 
 ing one duty, he was betraying another. 
 
 He would have to work hard and long to make good the 
 forfeited bond. After the war was over. Unless, of course 
 
 But he wasn t going to be killed 
 
 He hoped How frightful if he were maimed, if his whole 
 earning-capacity were spoiled, if he came out of this hell 
 of war a creature hideous and v useless, like some that one had 
 seen on wheeled chairs in the sunlight before military hos 
 pitals and would some day soon see squatted at street corners 
 with an upturned hat deposited beside them the pedestrians 
 with averted faces the clank of dropped coppers ! 
 
 He remembered Americus, and Elm Avenue of a bright 
 
VICTORIOUS 299 
 
 Saturday night in midsummer. He remembered its kindly 
 people. 
 
 Minnie Taylor: she would have had a chance, if she had 
 got over here. 
 
 What had McGregor meant by writing such a letter and 
 what did it matter what he meant, now? 
 
 It had been kind of Sylvia to come to wish him Godspeed, 
 and he had behaved insufferably to her ! He had blamed her 
 because she was not what he had thought her. Why, she al 
 ways disclaimed being that ! There was, of course, no doubt 
 about her; but one could be kindly without being a saint: 
 there was more than a single sort of nobility, even for women. 
 He would try to be her friend, when he came back. More he 
 could not be, but this he could and would. His love 
 
 That remained. It remained loyal to his ideal. The ideal 
 lived: it was immortal. His fault it was not Sylvia s, nor 
 the faultless ideal s if he had confused the ideal with the 
 fallible human. The dream, freed of earth and its beauty 
 emancipated, would endure. 
 
 It was one with democracy. He shared it, a goddess, with 
 all these young enthusiasts whom he was about to join. 
 Fronting the overwhelming hosts out of Germany, she would 
 at last overwhelm them; unseen by martinets, she would 
 compel them to be men was already compelling them. Had 
 she been deluded by a few autocratic politicians at home? 
 She would return, victorious, to scourge them from her des 
 ecrated temple. . . . 
 
 VII 
 
 He came to the place for which he had set out. A calm 
 rested on the dun hills. At first it was impossible to believe 
 that there was a war. Perhaps he was dreaming; perhaps he 
 would wake up in his attic room in Americus with the 
 thumbed school-books, and his paints, and the dance pro 
 grams looking at him from his dressing-table and his mother 
 telling him that if he did not get up he would be late at the 
 office. 
 
 But no, he was awake. He was on the station platform in 
 
300 VICTORIOUS 
 
 charge of another sergeant, who looked at him scornfully and 
 demanded: "What the hell did you enlist for?" They were 
 tramping a road full of great ruts of hardened mud. From 
 some unseen valley came a clatter of machine-gun practice 
 like the noise of typewriters in a busy office. They skirted 
 the foot of a knoll and saw a regiment drilling in extended 
 order. They were standing beside a white farmhouse, and 
 from above it fluttered the beautiful Flag. 
 
 Andy s eyes filled at the sight of it. More than ever it was 
 now his flag: he was at last a soldier. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Or learning to be, and in a hard school, under hard mas 
 ters and among hard pupils. He was a "doughboy" : he had 
 chosen the infantry because he thought that it was the in 
 fantry which did the most arduous work of war. His unit 
 was newly arrived and had had little training before it set 
 sail from America some twenty men, last-moment failures 
 in aviation, had never shouldered a rifle before landing in 
 France but there was a sprinkling of sergeants from the 
 ranks of the old Regular Army and some corporals out of the 
 National Guard, and these, whose previous experience seemed 
 to Andy to include a year or two each as under-keepers in 
 prisons or as chain-gang bosses, were putting the utterly un 
 learned through the "School of the Soldier," the "School of 
 the Squad" and the "Manual of Arms." It looked hopeless, 
 it was profanely declared impossible; yet, under one s eyes, 
 it was being done. 
 
 Andy used to think his correspondent s knapsack heavy. 
 Within twenty-four hours, his identification tag newly sus 
 pended from his neck, he was learning what number-two man 
 in the rear rank does in response to the order "Squads Right" 
 while carrying eight and a half pounds of rifle on his shoul 
 der, two hundred and twenty cartridges in his belt and bando 
 liers, a bayonet in a heavy scabbard, a haversack, a first-aid 
 pouch, a filled canteen topped by a drinking-cup, and, down 
 the middle of his back, under an entrenching tool, a marvel- 
 
YICTOEIOUS 301 
 
 ously put together and speedily spilled roll that his compan 
 ions called an 0. D. (or olive drab) Baby and that held the 
 half of a shelter tent, five metal tent-pins, a poncho, a blanket, 
 a meat-can and a condiment can, knife, fork and spoon, under 
 clothes, socks, shoelaces, comb, tooth-brush, soap, towel and a 
 sewing-outfit. It was not until evening that number three- 
 man told him how to roll one sock to look like two and a 
 shirt to resemble shirt and drawers. 
 
 "For me," Andy was soon writing home, "the worst of it 
 is the rifle. A bit of grease on it is a misdemeanor and a 
 rust-speck s a crime. Nobody ever told us how to clean the 
 confounded things, but Fve found a man that stole a can of 
 gasoline from the truck-gang, and a few drops of that (if 
 you re not caught) will do in ten minutes more than all my 
 rubbing does in an hour. Before I found that out, I had a 
 hard time. The day before an inspection, we marched, in the 
 usual rain, halted in it, stacked arms, retook arms and 
 marched again. Back in billets, I thought I d never clean my 
 gun just splashed it with oil and let it go at that. Next 
 morning, when the inspection began, I happened to see the 
 number on it (you have to remember all sorts of numbers) 
 and found it wasn t mine at all. Betaking arms on that 
 march, my file-leader d given me his gun, so I traded for my 
 own then and there. Well, that file-leader was a hunting-man 
 from Maine; he understood rifles and d got mine into good 
 shape, but he got a call on his own when the captain saw the 
 way I d left it!" 
 
 Rushed through the Infantry Drill Regulations, the awk 
 ward squads were redistributed about the unit and absorbed 
 in the general scheme for intensive training. They were set 
 to digging five kinds of trenches, to constructing the sandbag 
 loopholes and the hopper, to rigging a hand-grenade screen 
 and to do strange things with barbed wire. 
 
 "Imagine a little valley of pasture lands," wrote Andy. 
 "When you first look at it, you don t see anything strange, 
 but when you get nearer you can make out that the fields are 
 all cut up by lines, like fresh furrows that a weighted plow 
 
302 VICTORIOUS 
 
 would make behind a runaway horse. They re really a tangle 
 of dug-outs, first-line and communication trenches and I 
 helped make em! It s all mighty different, being a sol 
 dier, from writing about being." 
 
 A company would disappear into those rifle-pits and pres 
 ently project above them cardboard figures of men. At once 
 for this drill was conducted under a time test another 
 company would run forward from a given distance, form as 
 "skirmishers," drop to the ground and fire a designated num 
 ber of rounds "at will" ; rise, run on, drop and fire a second 
 time. The bullets rattled against the farthest hillside, tore 
 up little spurts of dust in front of the trenches, pierced the 
 cardboard enemy. A third advance and a third volley, and 
 then, after the score was registered, a second company re 
 peated the performance. 
 
 Hand-grenade practice followed. Next, the machine-guns 
 would rush up and were put into action in an attempt at 
 record time. After that came the bayonet-charge. 
 
 Fronting a barbed-wire entanglement, in a line of trenches 
 three deep, was a company of dummy men, on the breast of 
 each of which lay a numbered paper-tag ; behind the trenches 
 was some rough ground, and back of that perhaps fifty 
 paces back a row of sticks with a tin-can poised on the top 
 of every stick. A whistle would blow: out of other trenches 
 leaped Andy and his companions, rifles in hand, bayonets 
 fixed; they plunged through the wire and at the dummies, 
 each soldier collecting upon his bayonet as many of the num 
 bered tags as he could, and then, having raced over the rough 
 ened ground, they flung themselves prone and fired at the 
 tin-cans. 
 
 If this sort of thing at first sickened Andy, the preliminary 
 lectures were worse. For them, a cheerful major stood, with 
 rifle and fixed bayonet in hand, before a swinging dummy. 
 The dummy had a lolling head, for all the world like that 
 of a hanged man, and clamped at right angles to the figure s 
 side was a stick that made erratic thrusts; numbers were 
 painted on him to indicate his vital parts. 
 
VICTORIOUS 303 
 
 "Now, when you get into a charge," said the major merrily, 
 "remember that, as sure as you don t get your man, he ll get 
 you. You must get him first, or you ll be out of luck." 
 
 He proceeded to tell how the old method was now harm 
 less: 
 
 "The best place to get your man is in the belly, because 
 that s fatal, and there aren t any bones to tangle you up. Try 
 and get him in the belly. If you ve got to go for his neck, 
 be sure it s with a cut and not a lunge. If you jab him there, 
 instead of cutting, like as not you ll run your bayonet up 
 in his skull, and it ll stick there, and while you ve got your 
 foot on his face, wrenching it out, the man behind him will 
 get you." 
 
 The listeners expressions were worth watching. Some be 
 gan with a grin; few finished so. 
 
 That sort of life left little daytime for thought, but a good 
 deal for personal discouragement, and some, even, for a bat 
 tle against tears. It was not until several days had passed that 
 he realized that he was not the only recruit incurring the 
 sergeant s condemnations, that to be sworn at and despaired 
 of was a regular part of the training and that one might be 
 a brandedly hopeless case to-night and a genuine soldier to 
 morrow. 
 
 A caterpillar accustomed to one sort of leaves is likely to 
 starve himself to death rather than eat of another sort, no 
 matter how good for his kind in general the second sort may 
 be, and Andy could not be expected to like at once the new 
 conditions of his life. There had been a time when he was 
 the sartorial glory of the Americus, Pa., Daily Spy, and had 
 considered a man with dirty hands as much to be avoided as 
 a leper, and for similar reasons; subsequent experiences had 
 broadened him, but no hardening process had begun when he 
 came to a camp where his first introduction to a barber left 
 him shorn like some sort of semi-convict, where his only 
 clothes were a speedily soiled uniform that had been too small 
 
304: VICTORIOUS 
 
 to begin with, and where the niceties of civilization could not 
 have been practised had they been deemed requisite. 
 
 The kitchen was an only partly converted blacksmith- 
 shop, and most of the provisions were piled outside of it in 
 lath cases that did not protect them from the flies. Every 
 meal in which potatoes were to play a part and that was 
 most meals was begun by eight men sitting on the curb and 
 "peeling the spuds" beside the gutter. Sweating cooks, in 
 side, stirred the contents of gigantic pots with whittled sticks. 
 At mess-time, the hungry filed by the servers, and the latter, 
 out of huge ladles, flung the food into the tin utensils that 
 the former held out to them. When the weather was dry, 
 Andy squatted in the road and ate there ; when it was wet, he 
 leaned against a house-wall. .He soon discovered that a serv 
 ice-shirt is the army s only substitute for a napkin. 
 
 His dwelling-place was the loft of an ancient barn. There 
 were rats in the barn and on its inhabitants fleas and lice, so 
 that one s spare time was largely devoted to futile efforts 
 toward appreciably decreasing the number of one s vermin. 
 The roof of the barn leaked, and its only window was glass- 
 less. The sloping walls were decorated by one or two pictures 
 clipped from the Sunday supplements of American newspa 
 pers, and somebody had put up a rude sign: 
 
 SPIT ON THE FLOOR 
 
 // tJiat s what you do at home, for 
 
 WE WANT YOU TO FEEL AT HOME HERE! 
 
 His straw-bed was always damp, and yet he was never sorry 
 when the hour came to seek it. 
 
 Out in the muddy street a bugle would sound. His dormi 
 tory companions would knock out the pipes and pinch the 
 cigarettes that had filled the place with acrid smoke. Candles 
 would be extinguished. The sole remaining light would be 
 a sputtering lamp that gave forth more of odor than of 
 illumination. Instantly, the other men would fall asleep in 
 whatever posture happened to be that in which their bodies 
 struck the straw. They breathed stertorously ; they scratched 
 themselves without waking. 
 
VICTORIOUS 305 
 
 To Andy they became at once so many ghosts. The whole 
 world faded away, and he was left alone with his fear. 
 
 For he was afraid that he was going to be afraid. By day, 
 he could make himself believe in that metamorphosis into a 
 soldier. At the approach of night he always turned in gladly 
 certain that his infinite weariness would steep him in sleep. 
 But no sooner was the ribaldry of the hayloft silenced than 
 he was wide awake and trembling. He saw himself running 
 away from an approaching party of raiders, fainting at the 
 order to go over the top; he saw himself in every role that a 
 coward could assume. He wondered why none of the other 
 fellows should feel this fear of fear : they all talked like ber 
 serkers. He tried to tell himself that bravery was a matter 
 of the will, but he remembered the rabbit that he could not. 
 kill, and the major s lectures on bayonetting; and he said to 
 himself that perhaps his arms and legs would rebel against 
 his will. 
 
 Physically, he was not a strong boy, and it was only grit 
 that made it possible for him to survive the physical hard 
 ships of his training. It was this same grit that he opposed 
 to his dread of cowardice. 
 
 His was one of the early units of the draft-army to reach 
 France, and in Andy s company were young fellows of each 
 year covered by the first conscription law. The wide democ 
 racy of the uniform was complete: every trade was repre 
 sented, and most of the professions; there were club-men and 
 mill-workers, bond-salesmen and shop-clerks; there was a 
 young lawyer and a college under-graduate, and a sturdy 
 Irishman that had begun his career in the police. Ibrahim 
 Reshid was Turkish-born, and said his prayers with his face 
 toward Mecca and splashed water on himself thrice a day; 
 Carlo Angelelli, who looked like a Greek statue, came from 
 Calabria and went to mass on Sundays in the village church, 
 whereas, though he resembled a Genoese and had a brogue 
 that would have pronounced him an Irishman, Christos 
 
306 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Christopoulos was a native of Aetolikon and had no church 
 te go to in the camp. There was Kozlofr 1 , a Russian, who used 
 to push rolling-chairs at Atlantic City, and Schwartz from 
 Hochwald and, finally, there were such men as Winters and 
 Levy, Davies, Campbell and Flynn, whose folk, although 
 Flynn also spoke in a brogue, had lived in the United States 
 for at least three generations. These last had all the unemo 
 tional practicality with which the American masks the fact 
 that he is a dreamer, and adopted all the coarseness under 
 which he is likely to conceal such troubles as nostalgia; but 
 every one of the company wanted, above all else, a chance to 
 fight. 
 
 "If the damn-fool brass-hats d only send us in, I wouldn t 
 bother so much about home," said tow-headed Winters, "and 
 there d be something else for Johnson and Ryan to yell their 
 damn throats out at, then." 
 
 Johnson, a cross-eyed factory-foreman, was corporal of 
 Andy s squad, possessed of a really remarkable vocabulary in 
 oaths that shook his whole body as it hurled its missiles from 
 his lips. Heavy-fisted Ryan was the company s first-sergeant, 
 who had been a welter-weight boxer and did not find his 
 previous trade useless in the practice of his present calling. 
 
 "Ryan never hits me," said Andy, but he knew that the 
 sergeant treated him with a pitying contempt that was worse 
 than blows. 
 
 "Oh, me neither," bristled Winters. "I d like to see him 
 try it ! He d find somethin ticklin his damn back, first time 
 we went over the top." 
 
 "He chust keeps his fist for Reshid und them foreign fel 
 lers," Schwartz explained. 
 
 One of the lieutenants was scarcely more popular than 
 Ryan: Wilson, graduate from a Reserve Officers Training 
 Camp, whom the men called "President"; but he was soon 
 to be transferred elsewhere. The other, Graaberg, second- 
 lieutenant and son of Norwegian parents, everybody liked. 
 Their captain "but he only got his rank for the duration ef 
 the war," said Winters was named Bates, a wiry person of 
 forty-five, whose face resembled smoked meat, and whose tern- 
 
VICTORIOUS 307 
 
 per had been soured by West Point jealousies of his advance 
 ment he had enlisted as a private during the Philippine re 
 bellion and who, generally silent, seemed to speak only un 
 der the impulsion of a temper no longer to be restrained. 
 
 XI 
 
 In his scant leisure, Andy hung about the Y. M. C. A. hut 
 at the end of the village and wrote his shy letters home. They 
 were intended to be cheerful letters and were the poorest 
 piece of work he did in France. To Blunston he quoted the 
 infantryman s song: 
 
 "Here come the doughboys 
 
 With dirt behind their ears ! 
 Here come the doughboys 
 Their pay is in arrears ! 
 The cavalry, 
 Artillery, 
 
 And the lousy engineers 
 They couldn t lick the doughboys in 
 A hundred thousand years I" 
 
 To his mother he made light of his various inoculations 
 and their immediate effects of headache and a sore arm; he 
 joked about the fleas, but said nothing of the lice and did 
 not tell how he was sometimes wakened, of nights, by rats 
 that scurried across his face. 
 
 He had a fight with Flynn, who was his file-leader and, 
 quite truthfully, accused Andy of tramping on other people s 
 heels: Flynn had to knock him down three times, and even 
 then Andy would not admit defeat, and Winters dragged him 
 away. Davies, a giant of a fellow, gave him maliciously in- 
 correct instructions about clip-fire, laughed at him when the 
 consequent error called forth picturesque insults from Ser 
 geant Ryan and earned a grudge that Andy carried for many 
 days. All the men in his company, talking as if they had 
 had experience, filled him with tales of the enemy s power, 
 told of the terrible slaughter of semicircling German ma- 
 
308 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 chine-guns that fired seven hundred shots a minute, and 
 affirmed that the American Army s hospitals in France were 
 already taxed beyond their two hundred thousand capacity. 
 . . . Andy looked away and wrestled with the fear of fear. 
 
 "They say we ain t got a damn aeroplane of our own at 
 the front," said Winters. 
 
 "I was talking to a man," said the gigantic Davies, "that 
 has a brother up in the artillery, a man in C Company. He 
 says all our guns, pretty near, are French. He told me we 
 hadn t got across any explosive shells bigger than the three- 
 inch ones. We can t shell our objectives, he said, and so, when 
 we doughboys go over the top, the Heinies chaw us all up. 
 Gimme a cigarette, somebody." 
 
 "The tanks can go ahead of the infantry," said Andy. 
 
 " Could, you mean," Davies disdainfully corrected : "we 
 "haven t got any tanks. Gimme a match, will you ?" 
 
 Yet, when they were not playing practical jokes on Andy, 
 these men were all complaining because the high command 
 did not send them at once into action. They hated the high 
 command ; there was none of them that did not consider him 
 self a better strategist than any member of the staff. 
 
 "Ker-ist," said Campbell, whose face was always caked 
 with dirt, "I wisht I was boss for one day. We d all go in 
 to-morrow and walk the Dutchmen acrost the Ehine." He 
 proceeded to draw maps in the dust and show how his cam 
 paign could not fail. 
 
 Captain Bates and Lieutenant Wilson were daily dispar 
 aged. "Know em as well as if I d et em for last night s 
 supper," Winters would say, "an they taste like slum." By 
 quotations from the Infantry Drill Regulations and the Field 
 Service Regulations, he would prove his assertion; but when, 
 one day, a man from another company agreed with him, Win 
 ters thrashed that outsider. 
 
 Flynn, the squat American of Irish parentage, was one 
 of the few that never joined in these complaints until blows 
 followed mere words. Then he was an active participant ; the 
 rest of the time, his usual commentary confined itself to a 
 single point of view: "What s the use o worryin ? Oi used 
 
VICTOBIOUS 309 
 
 to, but I soon learnt it s little enough good it does us to 
 bother our heads about th War Departimint, er th brass- 
 hats either. Poor t ings, they dawn t know nothin at all, 
 they dawn t. You guys give me a pain." 
 
 It was only Levy that could answer this. He was a young 
 Jew that had come out of college and had still the mental 
 marks of the sophomore. He objected that they were all 
 having their individualities destroyed by being fitted to a 
 pattern, that they were being made into soldiers according 
 to a mathematical formula, of which the mathematics were 
 faulty. Their discussions continued until somebody turned 
 the talk to home, when Winters was sure to accuse everybody s 
 sweetheart, and his own first, of infidelity during their ab 
 sence, or until they united in a chorus of derision for every 
 regiment in the army except their own. 
 
 There were times when Andy thought that the sheer stu 
 pidity and fullness of those days would drive him mad. Until 
 the training began to harden him, he was sickened by the 
 coarseness of it all. No matter what the previous life of these 
 young men had been, this routine existence seemed to lower 
 them all to a common level ; their very speech became equal 
 ized, and it was never worse than at mess. There was no 
 privacy in any act of life, and, apparently, no thought that 
 was held sacred. 
 
 One day, walking down the village street, Andy said as 
 much to Winters. 
 
 "Whaddje mean sacred ?" Winters demanded. 
 
 <f Well, there used to be some things a fellow didn t talk 
 about," said Andy. "Weren t there?" 
 
 "Sure, Mike. But we re soldiers now. I only wish they d 
 let us be honest-to-God soldiers." He went on to damn the 
 army as worthless; then he drew himself to attention before 
 the advance of an erect military figure, a man with a weather- 
 beaten face and silvered hair. 
 
 "Salute, you lousy skunk!" whispered Winters. His eyes 
 sparkled admiration. "This here s our general, this is!" 
 
310 yiCTOEIOTJS 
 
 XII 
 
 Then, for Andy s salvation, Chrissly came to camp en 
 viably a veteran and still more amiably fresh from home a 
 Chrissly in a new uniform, his accent almost entirely gone 
 with his return to France. He had been transferred to Andy s 
 own regiment and assigned to Andy s own company. Blun- 
 ston, he said, had arranged part of it from Washington, and 
 the colonel did the rest here. 
 
 They almost embraced each other. They talked for a long 
 time only of Americus, and Andy was as overjoyed at the 
 copies of the Spy that Chrissly brought him as Chrissly had 
 once been at those sent him by Andy. The only subject they 
 avoided mentioning was Minnie Taylor. 
 
 "You re lookin right good," said Chrissly, surveying with 
 approval the soldierly person that Andy had become. 
 
 "I m all right enough," said Andy. 
 
 They shook hands again perhaps it was for the third time 
 since their meeting. Chrissly, who knew an easy way to learn 
 and remember everything, at once took Andy for his especial 
 pupil ; being a man that had been wounded, the former farm- 
 boy was a hero in their company, and his ward ceased imme 
 diately to be anybody s butt. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Chrissly had seen Leonie. By arranging to lose his way 
 the. day after landing, he managed to go first to the village 
 in which his own training had been done, and arriving there 
 of an evening, and avoiding any awkward military answers 
 by jumping off the train fifty yards before the station and 
 clambering over a fence, proceeded to the old inn and entered 
 the kitchen through the paved court. 
 
 Dinner was over, and the other servants were all in the 
 front of the house. Leonie, worn out by a hard day s work, 
 had been overcome by fatigue as she finished her labors, and, 
 like the healthy animal she was, fell asleep in a chair the 
 moment she finished them. On a freshly scrubbed and lamp- 
 lit table her round arms were outspread, and upon them her 
 
VICTOKIOUS 311 
 
 black head rested. Her face was in the light and turned to 
 ward the door ; Chrissly, entering, saw the grave brows above 
 the closed lids, the dusky cheeks touched with pink, the red 
 lips that, parted ever so little, permitted a pearly hint of the 
 teeth behind them. He saw her firm neck from which the 
 loosened collar was drawn free below the line of the sunburn, 
 and, under it, the full breasts rising and falling regularly. 
 Leonie slept with the abandon of a child ; her hands, relaxed, 
 lay open on the table, the fingers only curled above the rosy 
 palms. 
 
 Chrissly whispered her name. 
 
 She raised her head as a panther does, but lie stood in the 
 shadow, and she did not at once see him. 
 
 <Leonie !" he repeated. 
 
 He came forward. 
 
 With a little cry, she put out her hands to him. Then, 
 before he could grasp them, they flew to her face to hide the 
 betrayal that she felt there, and when he tried gently to pull 
 her fingers away, they remembered the disorder of her hair, 
 and, that they might repair it, her arms rose high. 
 
 She was very beautiful. Where sleep had lain upon her 
 cheeks its warmth still lingered ; her eyes were wide with still 
 uncertain wonder. Her woman s guard of self had been down, 
 and there was now no time to raise it. At first instinctively 
 retreating, she nevertheless did not resist when Chrissly, mov 
 ing with the directness of a boy, recaptured her errant hands ; 
 instead, she let him draw them toward him, released them 
 only to place them about his neck as she put up her mouth 
 to his. 
 
 "Mais, mon Dieu, que je suis contente!" she breathed. 
 
 It was the longest moment of his life, because it was that 
 one most full of meaning. He had premeditated nothing, 
 but he had accomplished all. She was his, completely and 
 forever. In that touch of lips it had happened, her trans 
 forming surrender. Even her potentialities were his own, her 
 limitations circumscribed by his limitations. It was un 
 changeable, and Chrissly entered his heaven reverently and 
 in awe. 
 
312 VICTORIOUS 
 
 Outside, under the stars, she confessed, without shame, 
 how she had longed for him, and he, in his recovered French, 
 told her how he had been wounded and how sent home. He 
 told her where he was going, and she confided to him her 
 plan presently to return to her native village, whither other 
 folk that had heen exiled were now returning. These lovers 
 swore to meet there "apres la giwrre" and it was not until 
 they began their long parting that she asked her woman s 
 question : 
 
 "But it is true, is it not, that you have loved some one else 
 before?" 
 
 "Ah, it is true," laughed Chrissly, "but I am much harder 
 to suit than I was then." . . . 
 
 3TV 
 
 The trenches at the camp were narrower than they should 
 have been, and in the practice-charges on them some one was 
 always being bayonetted. Andy was cut in the hand one day, 
 and his comrades hung about him while the wound was 
 dressed. 
 
 "Come away from there," Captain Bates grimly ordered. 
 "You ll be seeing all you want of that sort of thing soon 
 enough to suit you." 
 
 This made everybody happily certain that the regiment was 
 soon to move. 
 
 3T 
 
 It became a regular evening custom for the company to 
 gather outside the barn in which Andy slept and there listen 
 to Chrissly talking of the people at home. 
 
 "I got enough of ? em all but my own folks," he said. 
 "They made me sick. They re terribly ensusiastic give you 
 parades an lots to eat; but they don t know nussing. Nearly 
 everybody gets into some sort of a uniform and then sinks 
 he s winning the war or specially her. You ought to hear 
 the fellows with five an ten dollar a day mill- jobs say they re 
 doin their part same as us re doin ourn. The country s full 
 
yiCTOEIOUS 313 
 
 of soft snaps. There s fourteen-year-old kids gettin seven- 
 teen-fifty a week waitin on officers messes at munition-fac 
 tories, an we draw a dollar a day to fight in France." 
 
 "When we do draw it," amended Winters, who had never 
 heard a gun fired, save in practice. 
 
 "An you can t make em unerstand what fer a battle s 
 like," Chrissly continued. "I guess it s so bad nobody could; 
 an the censors over here, it seems they don t want em to, 
 anyways. Besides, they ve all kind of got their minds made 
 up about sings. To read the stuff in the papers, you d sink 
 we was an infant-class at a Sunday-school picnic. The people 
 back there, they don t seem to want to know. Try an make 
 em unerstand, an they just says, Well, that was tough, 
 wasn t it now? an go on tellin you they bought a Liberty 
 Bond as ain t paid fer yet an ll be sold before it is paid fer." 
 
 They asked him if it were true that the ports were full of 
 unshipped shells. 
 
 "An then some," said Chrissly. He did not hesitate to 
 give as first-hand what he had received at second. "The De 
 partment s distributed the manufacture of parts an can t 
 assemble em. An tanks ! I seen a tank-school up to Gettys 
 burg some of the people at home took me fer a joyride to 
 .Gettysburg in their automobile: six sousand men an one 
 tank! They kep it in a kind of shed, like it was a sacred 
 white elephant an the rain might hurt it, an if you re a good 
 boy they take you around once in a while an give you a peep 
 at it." 
 
 He said he had never seen so many lieutenants as home 
 now boasted, and he was hard on the officers of the Ordnance 
 Department. He thought that stay-at-home soldiers all 
 should wear distinctive uniforms, " stead of usin up warm 
 cloth we fellows can t get fer wintertime," and he repeated 
 the remark of the congressman who said Washington officers 
 wore spurs in order to keep their feet on their desks. 
 
 "I wonder will they let us have our say when we get back 
 home," he would always conclude. "Seem s if they d been 
 doin all the talkin an lawmakin up to now. All we re good 
 fer s to fight." 
 
314: .VICTORIOUS 
 
 XVI 
 
 Andy s hand healed rapidly, but it gave him a few days of 
 leisure, and one of these he employed in a trip to Domremy. 
 He wanted to see the Bethlehem of Jeanne d Arc. 
 
 The grass was turning green again when he entered the 
 little garden that half the American Army in France already 
 knew, and an ancient sheep-dog dragged a rattling chain 
 from his kennel, only to look at him with the same sort of 
 trustful eyes that were shown him by the children to whom 
 he had given pennies at the gate. The habitual old woman, 
 who vows that she, too, is descended from Jacques of Dom 
 remy, showed him through the flagged apartment with its 
 huge fireplace, through that in, which Joan s brother slept, 
 and then into Joan s own. 
 
 Just a cell. A cell of hewn stone, such as a nun might in 
 habit. A cell with a mere slit in the wall through which 
 Andy could see something of the medieval church close by. 
 
 That was all. But here the Maid had knelt. Here, as well 
 as in those fields out there, the angels came to her with their 
 mighty message. Here were said some of those prayers that, 
 long ago, saved France. 
 
 "A young wench of an eighteene years old. Of favour she 
 was counted likesome ; of person stronglie made, and manlie ; 
 of courage great, hardie, and stout withall; an understander 
 of counsels, though she were not at them; greet semblance- 
 of chastitie both of bodie and behavior; the name of Jesus 
 in hir mouth about all their businesses ; humble, obedient and 
 fasting divers days." . . . 
 
 In a chance magazine at his village "Y" he had come 
 across a poem by Joyce Kilmer: 
 
 "My shoulders ache beneath my pack, 
 (Lie easier, Cross upon His back.) 
 I march with feet that burn and smart, 
 .(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart.) 
 Men shout at me who may not speak, 
 
VICTOKIOUS 315 
 
 (They scourged Thy back and smote THy cheek.) 
 I may not lift a hand to clear 
 My eyes of salty drops that sear, 
 (Then shall not fickle soul forget 
 Thy agony of bloody sweat.)" 
 
 Andy wanted to pray. 
 
 Above the doorway, in a niche, stood, where a FrencK mon 
 arch had placed it, a mutilated statue : 
 
 "The sale Boche did that in 70," said the old woman. 
 And then Andy found his soul. . . . 
 
 XVII 
 
 There was always singing in the camp of evenings ; the men 
 would sit on their bunks, and Davies, Flynn, Winters and 
 Campbell, as a quartette, would lead them in that unprintable 
 American army ballad about a fabulous King of England and 
 There s a Long, Long Trail A-winding with equal fervor 
 and feeling; but heretofore Andy had neither heart nor 
 strength to join in the refrains. He had not sung since he 
 had been in France, and had forgotten that he had a voice. 
 To-night, however, in a lull of the concert and while he 
 scraped his muddy boots, he found himself, to his surprise and 
 that of his companions, singing quite alone, It s a Long Way 
 to Tipperary, just as he had often sung it in the mornings 
 at home when he hurried into his clothes in order not to be 
 late in getting to the office of the Daily Spy. 
 
 Winters threw a boot at him. "Shut up ! Don t you know 
 that song s bad luck? French s army sung it, and they re air 
 dead men now." 
 
 Chrissly caught the boot and tossed it at Winters head. 
 Flynn said: 
 
 "Sure an shut up yourself ! Can t you hear the boy s got 
 a voice?" 
 
 He had a beautiful, wistful voice, the faithful successor 
 of his choir-days, and there and then there began their hom 
 age to it. Later big Davies secured, by highway robbery, a 
 
316 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 mouth-organ from a weakling in C Company, and Andy, dis 
 placing the unenvious quartette, sang every evening to his 
 admiring comrades. He sang, in his pure, still boyish way, 
 such songs as Annie Laurie and My Old Kentucky Home 
 and Old Black Joe, and he made them all sing Way 
 Down Upon the Suwannee River. His popularity was 
 achieved; separately and confidentially, all the men he knew 
 came to him and talked about their parents and told him the 
 names of their girls back home. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 On that first evening of his singing, Andy was handed a let 
 ter from McGregor. The contractor wrote regularly and 
 gravely, collecting Andy s mail in Paris and forwarding it; 
 his manner was that of a man with a moral debt to discharge. 
 He now said he considered it dangerous in the capital on ac 
 count of the long-range gun, and was going to Aix-les-Bains ; 
 he understood that was an American rest-camp, and he hoped 
 soon to see Andy there. 
 
 "I can do my work almost as well in Aix as here," he 
 wrote, "and I can t do it at all if I m killed. You know what 
 the Tommy said when the shell exploded in the trench and 
 somebody yelled that Bill s head was blown off ; he said, Well, 
 where is is ead? Blymme, e was smokin my pipe! Now 
 you d better take a lesson from me and not go exposing your 
 self unnecessarily; a dead soldier s no use to his country." 
 
 There was not a word about Sylvia. Andy leaned from the 
 loft-window and tore the letter to bits, letting the scraps fall 
 into the street below. 
 
 Some light still remained in the sky, and by it Andy saw 
 a dull gray motor-truck silently approaching. Its top dropped 
 far over the front; its dashboard rose high to meet that de 
 pending top ; between these, crouched over the steering-wheel, 
 his eyes hidden by goggles, his face just peeping from an 
 enfolding scarf, sat a grimy, stolid Cochin-Chinaman, the 
 
VICTOKIOUS 317 
 
 driver ; through the open rear of the truck, as it passed, Andy 
 caught sight of French soldiers packed inside from twenty 
 to twenty-five of them. He caught just a sight of them and 
 no more, because another truck nosed on close hehind the 
 first one. Then came another. He tired of counting them; 
 looking from north to south, he saw that they resembled a 
 gigantic hooded cobra, crawling from horizon to horizon. 
 The night fell, and, with only tiny lights, they continued 
 passing passing. Something impended: these were camions, 
 transporting troops from one point of the front to a second. 
 
 He could hear them when he went to bed. He had meantj 
 to lie awake, not because of his old fear, but rather to deter 
 mine why that fear had left him and what was the connection 
 between its departure and his visit to Domremy, yet he fell 
 fast asleep almost as soon as he lay down. 
 
 When his eyes opened, a glance at the phosphorescent face 
 of his wrist-watch told him that time had passed into those 
 still hours of the earliest morning when reason is in abeyance 
 and the primitive susceptibilities and sensitiveness inherited 
 from our earliest forefathers come again to life and power. 
 Outside there was still the muffled roll of camions; inside, 
 as if fanned by the loud breathing of the soldiers, the blue 
 flicker bf the odorous lantern fell on rifle-barrels at bed-heads 
 and made them move until they seemed to be shedding streams 
 of blood that ran down to the figures of his comrades couched 
 beneath them. 
 
 To right and left, from shadow into shadow, those figures 
 lay in all the grotesque poses of the infinitely weary, like* 
 drunkards whose potations have suddenly overcome them. 
 Now and then one tossed and mumbled in his sleep, or ad 
 dressed somebody that was far away, or cried out as if in 
 helpless terror of something that was drawing near. Those 
 faces which were visible were as the livid faces of children 
 suffering from a wasting disease; all coarseness had gone 
 from them, all the years and the contamination of the years : 
 they were very like children that are ill and know that they 
 are ill. 
 
 Andy thought of Sylvia : he told himself that he had been 
 
318 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 selfish in his love for her and that his demands exceeded his 
 deserts: he would keep his ideal, but he would be friends 
 with Sylvia and he would never be selfish in his dealings with 
 anybody again. He thought about his mother, and planned 
 to make her happier on his return. About Blunston, and 
 how much he owed him; about Americus, and the woods 
 where the waxen flowers of the May-apple would soon be 
 blooming, and about Colonel Eskessen and Mr. Dickey, and 
 even, kindly, about Minnie Taylor and all his friends in the 
 lovable town. And then he thought of the bare little room 
 in which, that very afternoon, he had felt like falling on his 
 knees, and about her that once prayed there. 
 
 Andy prayed. . . . 
 
 Somehow, that made him understand these uncouth men 
 who lay snoring around him. He saw, behind all their ri 
 baldry, how fine and brave and generous their spirits were, 
 and how the worst that they showed of themselves was no 
 more than a screen raised by them to protect an ideal too 
 dear for vulgar display. They were not here out of adven 
 ture, nor yet, these conscripts, merely from compulsion; one 
 and all, they knew in their laughing but stern souls the tragic 
 greatness of their task: they had come, though they had to 
 come, willingly, to fight for democracy. Their loud com 
 plaints were in reality only complaints against impious dese 
 crations of the cause and deadly delays in the sacrifice. Un 
 der the assumed coarseness of the hooligan, Andy was reading 
 the epic of the hero. 
 
 And he was one of them oh, not a hero ; but a participant 
 in the common endeavor. That obliteration of the individual 
 of which one of them had pretended to grumble : it was what 
 he had needed. He was become a glad atom in a splendid 
 body. He shed his troubles : rather they were shed from him 
 he had forgotten how to be afraid, even of fear. The Dream 
 had never gone away; now it drew near; the Cause was 
 greater than the sum of its mistakes: 
 
 "Thy Kingdom come," prayed Andy. 
 
 He had triumphed over himself: so would Democracy tri 
 umph over all her enemies. 
 
VICTORIOUS 319 
 
 XIX 
 
 The next morning they told him that Lieutenant Wilson 
 had been transferred and that his place was to be taken by a 
 Lieutenant Garcia. But Andy was indifferent : Sergeant Ryan 
 had grudgingly confessed that he might become a soldier 
 after all. 
 
 The endless train of camions passing along the village- 
 street had changed its direction, had become another sort of 
 train ; its trucks, too, were gray and traveled slowly, but each 
 of them bore a red cross on its side, and sometimes some 
 thing crimson ran out of them and left little black spots on 
 the white road and sometimes he could catch a glimpse of 
 the inside of these French ambulances. But Andy only prayed 
 the harder: 
 
 "Thy Kingdom come." 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 SARAH BROWN HEARS NEWS OF HERSELF AND OF HER SON 
 
 AMERICUS lay quiet under the spring sunshine. In the 
 larger cities, there was some unrest; talk of a vague exotic 
 called Bolshevism was heard there, and there were meetings 
 at which men of strange names addressed men and women of 
 foreign birth and spoke of setting the world right in a day by 
 setting it free of all the habits of thought to which it had 
 grown accustomed; but elsewhere, on farms where the tillers 
 were making fortunes from high food-prices, in death-produc 
 ing mills of toadstool growth wherein the toilers received large 
 pay that they could not save, labor, at least, was more than 
 content : it was jubilant. The thought that the costs, which 
 were always raised a little while after the wages, must some 
 time remain after the wages declined, occurred to few. The 
 people at large, and especially such towns as Americus, were 
 doing well. 
 
 Miss Hattie Lloyd s sharp red nose and sharp white chin 
 went poking into each home; whenever bad news was re 
 ceived, she was the first to know it outside of the family im 
 mediately affected. Industrial contentment did not interest 
 her, and she only hugged herself the tighter under the spring 
 time sun. 
 
 To-day she passed Mr. Dickey on the corner "Not doin 
 s well as he might," she reflected and hugged her way into 
 the Red Cross rooms in the Tidd house. There were a great 
 many uniformed women there, who looked up in surprise at 
 this unusual visitor. 
 
 Young Mrs. Bolingbroke bounced from among them. 
 
 "Miss Hattie/ she said, "you can t come in unless you get 
 a uniform. We ll be glad to have you work here, but you ve 
 got to wear a uniform. Those are the rules from national 
 
 320 
 
VICTORIOUS 321 
 
 headquarters, and national headquarters are a branch of the 
 United States Government, and so are we." 
 
 "Thanks," said Miss Hattie ; "I only came to give you these 
 socks." From beneath her shawl, she forthwith produced a 
 pair, which Mrs. Ralph accepted. "I guess you ve got enough 
 help without me," she concluded. 
 
 "We need all we can get," said Mrs. Ralph. She spoke for 
 the benefit of Minnie Taylor and her other deferential abigails, 
 who were gathered round her so as to lose no word she uttered. 
 
 Miss Hattie cocked her head. "Then why don t you bring 
 Sarah Brown here, Mrs. Bolingbroke? She s got a boy over 
 there, and she s never done a bit of work for the Red Cross, 
 s far s I can hear." 
 
 Mrs. Bolingbroke looked at her visitor with quick suspicion. 
 Caution advised silence, or at most evasion ; but the demand of 
 discipline over the surrounding lesser workers was paramount. 
 
 "I guess Mrs. Brown d help," said she, "if she wanted to 
 and if she doesn t want to, she s a slacker." 
 
 Miss Hattie gave herself a delighted squeeze. "Maybe she 
 has some other reason." 
 
 Minnie Taylor giggled. She giggled out of sheer excite^- 
 ment, but the thought that Sarah might have talked of her 
 visit to the Red Cross rooms and of what had happened there 
 set Mrs. Bolingbroke aflame. 
 
 "Did Sarah Brown tell you anything about me?" she 
 demanded. "Because if she did, she lied !" 
 
 "Mercy me !" cried Miss Hattie. "I didn t know I was stir 
 ring up a hornet s nest. Sarah tell me anything? What 
 about, Mrs. Bolingbroke?" 
 
 "Never mind what !" Mrs. Ralph saw that she had walked 
 into a trap. <r What you don t know can t hurt you. Now 
 then, Miss Hattie, we re much obliged to you for these socks, 
 but we ve got to get back to work. Come on, girls." 
 
 II 
 
 Miss Hattie walked directly to Blunston, whom she found 
 at his old house, on the back-porch that used to be a front one. 
 He rose at her coming, rather bewilderedly. 
 
323 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Here s a red-winged blackbird . . ." he began. He indi 
 cated the end of the big yard. "I was just watching . . ." 
 To himself he was saying : "Miss Hattie ! Who next ?" 
 
 "Good morning, Andrew," said Miss Hattie. "No thanks, 
 I won t sit down." He had not offered her a chair. 
 
 "Yesterday," he said, "I thought I saw an indigo-bunting, 
 but it s early for. . . ." 
 
 "I came to see you about Sarah Brown," said Miss Hattie. 
 
 "Mrs. Brown? . . . Me?" Really! 
 
 "Yes." She told him something of her suspicions : she had 
 a compelling way of presenting suspicions; she had practice. 
 "It s my idea," she concluded, "the Tollens pride s gone a lit 
 tle too far this time. Sarah s just cheating herself out of 
 money she needs. I m sure she needs it. I want you to go 
 with me to see her. I want a witness." 
 
 Blunston attempted remonstrance. 
 
 "If you don t go with me, I ll have to go alone," said Miss 
 Hattie. "For I will go." 
 
 So she captured him. Blunston represented to himself that 
 he accompanied her in order to make the interview easier for 
 Sarah. 
 
 ill 
 
 Whether he succeeded is doubtful. Andy s mother received 
 them in her parlor with its marble-top center-table, its photo 
 graphs of Andy as a baby and Andy in uniform, and seated 
 them in chairs that were relics of the Tollens departed glory. 
 She had slipped off her apron, but there were bright smudges 
 on her black sleeves: she had been regilding, with Andy s 
 paints from up-stairs, the chandelier that Andy always liked 
 to keep bright. 
 
 Blunston made a timid beginning, but Miss Hattie cut him 
 short. She repeated her recent conversation with Mrs. Ralph. 
 
 Sarah turned pale. "What else did Mrs. Bolingbroke say ?" 
 
 "Besides calling you a slacker and a liar? What more do 
 you want, Sarah?" 
 
 "I don t think Mrs. Bolingbroke has a right to talk about 
 me/ 
 
VICTORIOUS 323 
 
 "Certainly," Blunston hurriedly agreed. "Only of course 
 we ought to remember, she really does a lot of good and so on 
 and. . . ." 
 
 "She always lets the whole town know it when she does do 
 good," sniffed Miss Hattie. "What was it she thought you d 
 told, Sarah?" 
 
 Sarah compressed her lips and did not answer. 
 
 Blunston made a restless movement. He felt absurdly 
 placed: "But, Miss Hattie. . . ." 
 
 "I ve come here to tell Sarah something for her own good, 
 and I mean to do it. Sarah, I happened to be in Doncaster 
 a while ago, and I went to the court-house. It was something 
 about deeds. How did your poor father come to lose that 
 Tidd place?" 
 
 Sarah stood up. "I can t talk about that." Her face was 
 very firm. "I m surprised you asked me." 
 
 "But, Sarah" 
 
 "Yes, you think it s for my own good, I know. I m the 
 best judge of what s good for me. I can t talk about it, and 
 I won t." 
 
 Miss Hattie made remonstrances, she made fresh begin 
 nings ; but Sarah always blocked her before she ever made, in 
 full, a complete statement of the case. Moreover, Andy s 
 mother had Blunston as an ally; he came out of his distress 
 definitely to side with her against the probing of what he con 
 ceived a secret wound. In the end, Miss Hattie had to go 
 away unsatisfied. 
 
 On the door-step, she turned on him. 
 
 "There s something very queer. I can tell that by Sarah s 
 not letting me talk. She s a perfect fool and you re a per 
 fect fool, too !" 
 
 Blunston was glad to be rid of her. He walked alone down 
 Elm Avenue. As he passed the telegraph-office, the operator 
 came to the door and called to him : 
 
 "Cable for you, Mr. Blunston. I was just going to send it 
 down." 
 
 Blunston opened the proffered envelope : 
 
VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Bond declared forfeit have insured life to protect make 
 it easy but tell mother have enlisted." 
 
 IY 
 
 Minnie, released from her lahors for the Eed Cross, un 
 dulated upon him as he stood there with the bit of yellow 
 paper in his trembling hand. 
 
 "Good morning, Mr. Blunston," she dimpled. "Any news 
 from Andy?" 
 
 Blunston s fist closed on the cable-message. 
 
 "No," he said; "no news." 
 
 Whenever they thus met, Minnie, on the strength of her 
 single call at the Blunston house, had been treating him as a 
 privileged friend. 
 
 "We don t hear much from our boys," she said, "and I guess 
 we never will hear much good of some of them." It was only 
 the other day she had had her disconcerting morning with 
 Chrissly. "You remember the parade and all for that Shu- 
 man fellow. Well, I hear he s a case. I never could see why 
 we made such a fuss over just a private soldier, anyhow." 
 
 Blunston s grave eyes were fixed on something far off. 
 
 "You couldn t?" he said. 
 
 "No; and to hear him go on, you d think nobody but the 
 soldiers were helping win the war. He starts back to-day. 
 I don t know a girl that s not in the Eed Cross, or the Emer 
 gency Aid, or something. Between you and I, Mr. Blunston, 
 some soldiers make me tired." 
 
 "Soldiers . . .," said Blunston. The sign that hung in 
 front of the Philadelphia Shoe Store needed repainting: this 
 was the first time he had noticed it. 
 
 "Everybody goes on about soldiers, no matter what sort of 
 family they come from, like they were just grand. I m sure 
 the army wasn t so nice to General Wood. I hate the old war ! 
 What do you hear from Andy, Mr. Blunston?" 
 
 Her second mention of the boy s name pulled him up. "Not 
 much, Miss Ta}dor ; not a great . . ." 
 < He raised his hat and was off. 
 
YICTORIOUS 325 
 
 Minnie stared after him. 
 
 / she said, "he s turned back the way he came I" 
 
 Blunston s walk was long, but he knew that it could have 
 only one ending. After an hour s tramping on back streets, 
 he returned to Elm Avenue, made a purchase at the Racket 
 Store and then went back, with his wrapped purchase in his 
 hand, to "the Brown house." While he waited for Sarah to 
 answer his summons, he saw a three-star service-flag in the 
 window of a small house opposite and, under the flag, the rest 
 of its story, a sign : "For Kent." 
 
 "Drew ?" Sarah was startled at his reappearance. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "I m here again. May I . . ." 
 
 She took him into the parlor. Neither sat down. 
 
 "I m sorry Miss Hattie had to . . ." 
 
 "You didn t come here to talk about Miss Hattie," said 
 Sarah. 
 
 "No. I I have some news. . . ." 
 
 He handed her the parcel. She unfastened it; her fingers 
 calmly mastered its knots. She unfolded a silk service-flag 
 that bore a single star. 
 
 A faint touch of color came into her sallow cheeks. Her lips 
 tightened as they had tightened under Miss Hattie s question 
 ing. But all that she said was : 
 
 "He s enlisted r 
 
 Blunston bowed. 
 
 "When?" 
 
 "I got a cable. ... It was late about five days." He 
 caught something in her face. "But that s all it means : en 
 listment. He ll have weeks and weeks of training. ... It 
 was splendid of him. I know just how he felt." The old 
 longing beat over the iron-gray head of the former war-corre 
 spondent. "How I wish I was there !" 
 
 "If it was right," said Sarah, "I m glad." 
 
 "Oh, it was ! We need every man." 
 
 "There was something the matter with his heart once." 
 
32G VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "That must be all right now. There s the same medical- 
 examination there. . . . He ll come back . . ." 
 
 It was as if, by doing the braver thing, Andy had done that 
 which would remove the danger she once voiced: there was 
 quick flame in the glance she flung at Blunston : "Of course 
 he ll come back !" 
 
 ". . . stronger than ever/ Blunston concluded. She had 
 always understood his ellipses ; that she failed this once showed 
 an emotion nothing else betrayed. 
 
 "The war will be over before August," said Sarah. Her will 
 to end it rang in her voice. 
 
 Blunston took her hard hand. He saw for the hundredth 
 time how the years had changed her, but he saw, crowning her 
 care and her weariness, a coronet of nobility, the mask of 
 that hardest conquest, the conquest of deserved adversity. 
 What she saw was a man now visibly past the height of his 
 powers, a man to-day beginning the descent of the hill and, 
 for the first time, she saw, at this long last, just what his sac 
 rifice had been; what his ambition and his triumph over it; 
 what, in a word, he had done for her boy. There could be no 
 thought of love between them, but there and then from that 
 handclasp was born to them something that, in no small sense, 
 was finer. 
 
 "You d better go now," said Sarah. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "I d better go." 
 
 She went with him to the door. 
 
 "I know," he said, "why you called him Andrew. It was 
 good. . . ." 
 
 "I never called him Drew, " she said. 
 
 VI 
 
 She hung the silk flag in the window, and the news spread 
 all over town, and Andy was a hero again, and his mother 
 again received light from his glory. "Babe" Campbell con 
 gratulated her ; everybody congratulated her ; for two evenings, 
 her progress along Elm Avenue was triumphal and, though 
 she appeared not to care appeared all along to have expected 
 
VICTORIOUS 327 
 
 her son s enlistment she walked with such a carriage that 
 Lawyer Dickey said she was recovering the Sarah Tollens of 
 her youth. Doctor Dawson, who nowadays gave new solemnity 
 to the ninth petition of the Litany, came to call on her and 
 asked her if she wouldn t return to St. Paul s now that Andy s 
 name had an undisputed right on its Eoll of Honor, though he, 
 for one, had never doubted its undisputed right there and 
 whether she wouldn t, please, enter the Red Cross. 
 
 "Perhaps I ll come to church, after a while," said Sarah; 
 "but I won t join that club of Mrs. Bolingbroke s." 
 
 Far off she saw a stretch of land beaten hard and torn and 
 torn again. She could smell the black smoke that hung over 
 it. She could see the lurid spurt of flame that clove the smoke 
 and hear the scream of the shells. There were men there, men 
 in dirty uniforms, men lunging at one another with gleam 
 ing bayonets, madmen bleeding. . . . 
 
 "I don t know just what to say to you," she wrote Andy in 
 a labored letter that the military post promptly lost; "except 
 that I m glad you ve done it, if what you ve done is what you 
 think is right. I want you to do your duty, Andy. Be sure 
 you keep on doing it now; but I know my boy always will. 
 I ll be all right. You mustn t worry about me. I m glad 
 you ve done what you think is right. God bless you.* 
 
 As she posted this note, she said to herself : 
 "I bore him. And I sent him, too : if I d have asked him 
 not to go in the first place, my red-headed boy d have stayed 
 at home with me. I sent him. I m proud of that. And so 
 far, this time, I haven t cried." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 IN WHICH 
 
 THE shrill notes of the reveille shattered the heavy dark 
 ness that precedes the dawn. Lights appeared in the village ; 
 hob-nailed boots clattered on the cobblestones. There was 
 the hoarse shouting of orders, and the forms of many men, 
 blurred by the night and awkward from sleep and cold, began 
 to come out of houses and barns and to draw together in the 
 street. "Word jumped from mouth to mouth among the sol 
 diers that they were going into trenches to relieve a seasoned 
 division for the open fighting in the north. 
 
 "Just like the brass-hats to send us where it s qu-quiet," 
 Winters grumbled between his chattering teeth. "They cer 
 tainly have it in for us I" 
 
 "Shut up !" said Flynn. "It s a shot at the Heinies, any 
 ways. Can t ye be t ankf ul for small mercies ?" 
 
 Andy found his place in the rear rank between Chrissly and 
 Campbell. The light of Ryan s flash-lamp showed him Levy, 
 Davies and Johnson. Down the line, it fell successively on 
 Schwartz and Christopoulos, Kozloff and Ibrahim Reshid, 
 the Turk, and on smiling Angelelli. He had a glimpse of 
 Garcia s face, very white, and of Lieutenant Graaberg receiv 
 ing some rapid instructions from their battery captain. 
 
 The time had come, and he was ready for it. 
 
 Every man had his kit with him, but there was no inspec 
 tion. As soon as the reports were made, a repeated order rat 
 tled along the ranks, and while it was yet dark they had be 
 gun their march. 
 
 II 
 
 In the first light of the morning, they passed other regi 
 ments, lying on the wet grass behind stacked rifles and waiting 
 for Andy s regiment to precede them. 
 
 328 
 
VICTORIOUS 329 
 
 Davies would call out : "You ve got to make room for us !" 
 
 " Take a look at me now ! " cried Campbell. 
 
 And once, one of the men on the grass retorted : "Sure ! 
 We won t get another chance." 
 
 Everybody that heard him laughed. 
 
 "You re the th, ain t you ?" somebody inquired. 
 
 Andy nodded. 
 
 "I thought so: your colonel dropped his pet louse, and it s 
 green." 
 
 "Oh, well," shouted Flynn, "we knew who you was by the 
 smell of yez." 
 
 They passed ambulances and some artillery, the guns har- 
 lequinading in yellow, green and brown. They passed a mile 
 of wagons. The men were overladen; besides, it had rained 
 yesterday, and there were many pounds of water in their uni 
 forms and boots. Before they had made their second rest, and 
 scarcely ten minutes after they were in their proper place in 
 the line, Winters was complaining that he had come to France 
 to fight and not to be walked to death. 
 
 They knew the villages they came to by the plaque on the 
 first house of each. Sometimes French soldiers cheered them, 
 and girls waved in hysterical gaiety. One that tried to run 
 upon Andy s squad, throwing kisses, Johnson, the cross-eyed 
 corporal, shoved backward so roughly that she fell : Andy s 
 last sight of her showed her on her knees, her lips stiffened in 
 their greeting. Outside of that village they cheered an am 
 bulance that was driven by a pretty Englishwoman in V. A. 
 D. blue. . . . 
 
 in 
 
 They crossed at last the borders of desolation. Here was 
 a house the front of which had been blown away: the table 
 was still set, in the dining-room ; up-stairs the beds were wait 
 ing. There was a main street without so much as one of the 
 dogs that used to frequent it; the grass was growing between 
 the cracks in the paving. The roof, floor and furniture of an 
 old church were dumped into its crypt, and the graves, blasted 
 open, exposed to this twentieth-century war the whitened 
 
330 VICTORIOUS 
 
 skulls of peaceful priests, which had lain in quiet and dark 
 ness for hundreds of years. In the largest town along their 
 route, only ten out of five hundred houses remained untorn 
 by shells, and every house that had been hit was uninhabitable. 
 The next place was a mere dust-heap wherefrom, knee-deep in 
 debris, sallow Asiatics raked together bits of brass and iron and 
 collected the leaden house-numbers for conversion into ma 
 terials of war. 
 
 After that the countryside was a plain of pulverized stone, 
 gashed hunks of concrete, acres of deserted trenches and rusted 
 labyrinths of barbed wire. Scarcely ruin remained. Empty 
 dug-outs, yawning mine-craters, deep shell-holes, but not a 
 house, not a tree. The very course of streams had been visibly 
 altered, villages were only names on the officers maps. 
 
 A dog-cart stood by the road and near it three people in 
 civilian clothes. One of the two men might be a small-town 
 doctor, the other had patently been bred to the law, the 
 woman . Why, she was just a girl, just a girl of eighteen 
 or nineteen and though Andy had already seen something 
 of grief in this war, he had never seen a face on which such 
 grief was written. It was written so plainly that, taken into 
 consideration with the scene and its other actors, the meaning 
 of the little tragedy was clear : the last of her family, this girl 
 must have lived here all her life until the days of the invasion ; 
 she had now returned to find her home, and she could not even 
 pick out the spot where the house once stood. 
 
 IV 
 
 To Andy it seemed a matter of months, that journey to the 
 trenches. The long column had been broken and rejoined and 
 broken again, and marching was but one factor in its prog 
 ress. The end came, however, and came, for Andy s unit, 
 amid a roar of cannon, with a sudden turn to the left out of 
 a shell-pitted road in the twilight of a long day. Captain 
 Bates said something to Kyan ; Ryan passed this word to the 
 corporal, and cross-eyed Johnson told his squad : 
 
VICTORIOUS 331 
 
 "Cut out the gab an keep your heads down, or you ll be 
 pushing up the daisies to-morrow." 
 
 The last sight that Andy had of the outside world included 
 a battery of artillery swinging into the fields beside him, the 
 guns followed by their caissons, each driver mounted and hold 
 ing the bridle of an off -horse. Near by a medical-unit was con 
 verting a rough shed into a hospital; orderlies, beside huge 
 pots of boiling water over the blazing fires, were laying on 
 a clean table a brilliant battalion of forceps, scissors and saws, 
 while around them other orderlies busily unpacked chests of 
 lint, compresses and bandages. The noise of the guns oblit 
 erated sound, and it was strange to see all these preparations 
 going on in seeming silence. 
 
 "There s our general," said Winters, much as he had said 
 it in camp, and Andy saw the overcoated, soldierly form stand 
 ing by an old shell-crater as the company went past. The next 
 moment he was in a gulley and slopping through the earth. 
 
 They had a mile and a half to go, at long "distances" and 
 in single file, before they reached the third line, and then a 
 thousand yards to the firing-line. On the way, they passed 
 scores of openings into other trenches, and the only assurance 
 that they would not be lost was the presence of a guide from 
 the unit they were relieving, who led the way. 
 
 If Andy had any fear, it was that he might be killed in 
 some trivial manner before the hour for fighting arrived. He 
 obeyed orders, therefore, so long as his youthful curiosity per 
 mitted ; but there came moments when he could no more re 
 strain himself, and when he would rise tiptoe and, without 
 pausing in his journey, look over the top of the communica 
 tion-trench. On such occasions he was rewarded by nothing 
 except the sight of a vast wasteland from which houses, trees 
 and hedges had all been wiped away and the surface of which 
 shells had churned and churned again. 
 
 Horses rotted in rain-pools among broken wagon-wheels 
 and the scraps of shattered camions, but the first dead man 
 that Andy saw lay on the sodden earth close to the trench s 
 edge with a flatness that at once announced his final condi- 
 
332 VICTORIOUS 
 
 tion ; a rat was gnawing his cheek and looked at the passers-by 
 without discontinuing his horrible repast. Andy, like his com 
 panions, was proceeding with his arms free, his rifle being sus 
 pended by its strap from his shoulders, his arms poised to pro 
 tect him against a fall: once he slipped, and his left hand, 
 flung over the top, clutched something that admitted his fin 
 ger-tips as if it were jelly; when he recovered his footing, he 
 saw that this something was the decaying face of what had 
 been a French soldier. 
 
 v 
 
 "Here s where we live," said Chrissly. 
 
 It was a slimy ditch. Andy s feet sank into sucking muck. 
 Because men had inhabited the trench as the animals of a 
 menagerie inhabit their cages, to enter this place was to force 
 one s way through a stench almost tangible. It was just such 
 a trench as that which he had visited in those prehistoric times 
 when he was a war-correspondent. It reeked of death. 
 
 Instinctively trying not to lean against the revetment, try 
 ing to avoid all contact with the contaminated walls, Andy 
 looked about him. Chrissly was already seated on a more or 
 less dry bit of board, his helmeted head resting against the 
 oozing earth, the chunks of mud that were his boots propped 
 upon the planks that, half afloat, were intended for a foot 
 way; Levy was volubly explaining the system of the trenches, 
 about which he knew nothing ; big Davies and Winter and the 
 other men of the squad were gazing around them with conster 
 nation; Johnson stood by uncertainly, awaiting orders. 
 
 Andy mounted the firing-step. He peeped out at a black 
 ened ash-heap cluttered with broken things and deformed, 
 which lay drenched and water-logged. Above, the shells 
 roared; from below rose heavily the odor of human flesh in 
 all the stages of putrefaction. 
 
 "You damn fool, keep your head down!" Johnson warned. 
 
 Chrissly touched Andy on the shoulder and pointed to a 
 hole, the mouth of a tiny cave scooped under the forward wall 
 of the trench : 
 
 "And here s where we sleep," he said. 
 
VICTOEIOUS 333 
 
 VI 
 
 Well, here he was. It surprised "Andy a little at first to see 
 red flashes from across the ash-heap and farther tip the line 
 and to realize that fighting was going on there while, for all 
 the hideousness of his part of the trenches, he and his comrades 
 were in comparative quiet : the subjection of his individuality, 
 which was really its extension to include his regiment, his 
 division, had not yet progressed, though it soon did so, to the 
 point where it would include a still larger force. Nevertheless, 
 what was about him was sufficiently grizzly, its potentialities 
 sufficiently imminent. This was not the flag-flung, drum- 
 beating war of which he used to read ; it was an unbelievable 
 intensification of the war of which he had once tried to write ; 
 it embraced such chances as crouching in muck until a mean 
 ingless piece of shell carried off one s nose, blew one s face 
 away, left one alive and a shape of repulsion. 
 
 He had wondered what ugly shape the German soldiers 
 would assume when he saw them. Now he wondered if he 
 would ever see a German soldier. He devoutly prayed that, 
 if he did, the man would not cry "Kamerad" when there were 
 orders to take no prisoners. 
 
 But he knew that he would never be afraid again. 
 
 VII 
 
 He had been there an entire day before he had familiarized 
 himself with the maze of the trenches, for they were a stink 
 ing warren of which every part was like every other, and he 
 argued with Flynn that a man would be a fool to try to run 
 away in them, because no man could tell whether he were going 
 forward or back. Their former occupants had given them- 
 names, and to the communication-trenches these held, but 
 those of the front line proper were numbered, in that sector, 
 from left to right. The duty of the occupants, who were di 
 vided into shifts, was to remain on watch, to report any suspi 
 cious movement observed in No Man s Land and to pick off 
 any head that showed itself above the opposite mole-ridges 
 that were the works of the enemy. 
 
334 VICTORIOUS 
 
 The quarters were close. Whenever anybody passed, the 
 men, unless congregated in an "elbow/ had to press them 
 selves tight against the revetments to make way for him, and 
 this enforced propinquity led to frequent quarrels. If a sol 
 dier broke his watch, he would nearly cry over the accident 
 and then loudly blame his neighbor. Just beyond the far edge 
 of the pit, a dead man lay, and there was a long squabble as 
 to whether the body should be dragged in and buried and if 
 so whose duty it was ; when Andy volunteered, the arm of the 
 corpse came off as he pulled at it. 
 
 Dawn always appeared grudgingly, as if dreading the sure 
 renewal of the titanic noises that used to cease to a porten 
 tous silence for an interval beginning at three o clock. The 
 morning seemed hesitant, the sun, if there were the rarity of 
 clear weather, sickening at the thought of what it must see, 
 battling weakly with the sulphurous smoke-wreaths, below 
 which rolled sluggish waves of mist and animal-gasses gen 
 erated in the fatal swamp. One has said that nothing could live 
 out there, and yet many optimistic robins, long accustomed to 
 the guns, were ever ready to welcome the day. Their first flut 
 ter was as a signal : the stridor of the artillery would immedi 
 ately recommence, and its mad bellowings, its deafening 
 shrieks continue until reason tottered. The men would think 
 that they could bear them not an instant longer and would 
 bear them. Not cowardice, but a revolt of the auditory nerves, 
 which seemed no longer controllable and would be controlled. 
 It was quite as Chrissly had once described it; but Chrissly 
 had since discovered, and now imparted, the sole method of 
 quelling that reprising: one must center one s attention on 
 the course of each shell, must determine on which side it was 
 passing and try to occupy the mind with its character. 
 
 Andy and his companions, cramped in the muddy trench , 
 were no longer the soldiers of tradition. They were so 
 wrapped in fold after fold of all the clothes in their kit, and 
 of all the rags to be ravished from the outlying dead, that 
 every man was twice his natural breadth. Other care of the 
 person was impossible ; their hands became filthy claws, their 
 beards grew rank, their faces were often unrecognizable 
 
VICTOKIOUS 335 
 
 because of the dirt upon them. The recurring need for gas 
 masks constantly curtailed conversation, and their three re 
 laxations were watching the battles of aircraft and anti-air 
 craft guns, taking pot-shots at the enemy a sport that did 
 not commend itself as sportsmanlike to Andy or stirring 
 the Germans to a fusillade by firing one themselves, and 
 finally eating the rough fare that the cooks brought out to 
 them under a rain of lead. When a man crouched alone in the 
 slime and looked at the damp wall directly ahead of him, it 
 was certain that he envisaged there some picture of somebody 
 at home. 
 
 The long nights were little better than the long days ; the 
 night was not much more than the day with complete dark 
 ness added. Threatening shadows stalked in No Man s Land, 
 flares and star-shells only gave the distorted an increased dis 
 tortion. Preying creatures made noises that were mistaken 
 for the first signs of an attack. In the dug-out the air was so 
 foul that Flynn said only the activities of the vermin kept 
 one active enough to combat asphyxiation. 
 
 Most of the squad became superstitious : you must not light 
 three cigarettes from one match ; you must never tighten your 
 helmet s chin-strap after putting the helmet on ; you must al 
 ways avoid the numbers 4, 8 and 13. A dull disease laid hold 
 of two or three of the men, a fever that came and went, leav 
 ing a dragging lassitude; everybody developed a dirt-rash. 
 Andy was weakened by a cold, and Davies successfully disputed 
 with Chrissly the privilege of taking the lad s hour on guard, 
 while Winters lent him a sweater and went over the seams of 
 his blouse with a lighted candle, burning body-lice. 
 
 "It s hell here," said Winters. "In Gawd s name, why don t 
 they let us go over the top ?" 
 
 Levy had a plan for a raid that would necessarily prove suc 
 cessful, but Flynn found this virtue in the life: that it left 
 small leisure for regretting one s past. The squad s first 
 casualty was in the case of Campbell, who put his careless 
 head above the trench -top, had his cigarette shot from his lips 
 and then, as he peevishly complained of that loss, received a 
 neck-wound which sent him, dripping blood, to the rear. 
 
336 yiCTORIOUS 
 
 One day, just as Andy s cold was better, letters arrived 
 their first since leaving the camp and the delight of the 
 lucky was as keen as the disappointment of the unfortunate. 
 Chrissly was angry because his letter came not from Leonie, 
 but from Minnie, who, now that he was again overseas, had 
 decided to veil her chagrin in one more effort at recapture. 
 The former Amishman s reply was brief: 
 
 "DEAR MINNIE : 
 
 "Thanks fer your letter. Don t write again. 
 
 "CHBISSLY." 
 
 For Andy there was no letter at all. 
 
 VIII 
 
 He did his guard-turn that nigh t, but he was very tired and 
 still weak from his illness. He could scarcely keep his heavy 
 head poised before the loop-hole. It would sink toward the 
 support of the parapet; his eyelids were like pieces of metal. 
 He welcomed every star-shell because it prodded him to wake- 
 fulness. The tobacco had given out, and, although normally 
 a light smoker, he longed for a cigarette as a man that has for 
 a day had no water longs for a drink. He fell to thinking of 
 Americus and of what the awakening woods must be like now. 
 He thought of the S} r lvia of his early dreams and of how he 
 came here. He considered his course absolutely consistent: 
 placed as he had been, his first duty was to tell the people at 
 home of the abuses that were threatening their men with 
 death and their cause with defeat; when that course was im 
 passably barred to him, his next duty was enlistment. He 
 had done it and had no regrets. 
 
 Somebody struck him roughly on the shoulder. 
 
 "Keep your damned eyes to that hole, Brown. What the 
 hell s the matter with you ?" 
 
 It was Garcia; he was a wan scorbutic figure. Andy said: 
 
 "I m sorry, sir. It won t happen again." 
 
 "You were asleep," said Garcia. His voice showed malice. 
 
yiCTOKIOUS 337 
 
 Andy had not been asleep, and he knew that Garcia knew 
 it. "No, sir/ he said. 
 
 "Don t contradict me. I could have you shot for sleeping 
 at your post/ 
 
 Andy said nothing. 
 
 "For two cents, I d do it," Garcia pursued. "It s thanks to 
 you I m out here." 
 
 McGregor s letters had said nothing of this, but Andy 
 guessed a little of how he had influenced Garcia s transfer 
 ence from Paris, and he knew that the work of a front-line 
 intelligence-officer included scouting in No Man s Land, 
 which was no pleasant job. He watched Garcia as the lieu 
 tenant passed on, with regret. He had no hunger for ven 
 geance. 
 
 IX 
 
 By this time, everybody, even Elynn, fretted for action. 
 They all wanted to try a raid. 
 
 "Ain t we ever goin to get a chance?" demanded tow- 
 headed Winters. He looked at the thunderous skies, but he 
 addressed the distant staff, and he voiced the plea of the en 
 tire line. 
 
 All sorts of silly rumors came to them from nowhere. Now 
 they were depressed by the certainty that events were going 
 badly in the north ; now encouraged by some trifle, which they 
 took as an indication that they were to be permitted a raid. 
 After the first novelty of the trenches and its horror had some 
 what abated, they talked of their coming term in billets ; but 
 this talk had waned before the growing appetite for hand-to- 
 hand battle. What was the good of staying here to be shelled 
 and not doing anything in return ? They did not reckon with 
 the fact that their own artillery, although hampered by an 
 ammunition-famine, was serving the Germans something of 
 what the German artillery was serving them. 
 
 Andy s squad appeared to be pointedly neglected. Nightly, 
 other groups took off their identification-disks men not 
 nearly so good, said Johnson, as his men and crawled out 
 into a No Man s Land across which machine-guns could throw 
 
338 VICTORIOUS 
 
 their shots three ways at one time. Some of these scouting- 
 parties had lost their course, got into the enemy s trenches and 
 yet returned safe. Now and then a man was killed, and more 
 often men were wounded. There was a fellow in the scorned 
 C Company that had lain for twenty-four hours in a shell-hole, 
 but come in safe. Still another that Andy laughed at for his 
 jack-in-the-box antics as he darted hither and yon was shot 
 through the head before the watchers realized the danger of 
 his position. Yet all these things happened to other people: 
 there was talk in the squad of executing a raid of their own. 
 
 "Perhaps the Boche ll come after us," Andy suggested. 
 
 "They can t," explained Levy. "They need all the men they 
 can spare up the line. That s why we ought to try a raid." 
 
 "They haven t got the nerve to come after us," said Winters. 
 
 There was a night when they heard a queer whimpering 
 sound outside the trench. Something was dragging itself to 
 ward them, wriggling along on its back, a foot at a time. A 
 German star-shell showed it to be a German soldier fright 
 fully mangled. German machine-guns put an end to him. 
 
 Then something happened. The whole section of the 
 horizon opposite burst into flame. Hundreds of guns poured 
 out shells that fell a short distance behind the line of trenches 
 of which Andy s trench was a part. The noise was appalling, 
 the heat terrible. It kept on and on. The cooks could not 
 bring up food, the rear could not send up reenforcements. Or 
 ders were shouted, but they could not be heard; they were 
 obeyed simply because the men knew what orders must, in 
 such an event, be given. This was a barrage-prelude to a raid. 
 
 The squad donned its masks against shell-gas and, bay- 
 onnetted rifles in hand, leaped at the peep-holes and watched 
 the fiery panorama: spurts of light, vast fans of flame, long 
 shafts of redness. The roar shook everything ; though his body 
 was wet with sweat, Andy s eyes felt like red-hot marbles ; he 
 risked lifting his gas-mask to drink from his canteen, but 
 
VICTOKIOUS 339 
 
 water was one of the things that could not now reach here : 
 the canteen was empty. 
 
 A new line of fire developed. Beginning close to the mole- 
 trails of the enemy, it advanced toward the American lines. 
 
 Chrissly pointed. It was as if he said : 
 
 "They re back of that. They re coming !" 
 
 Through the flames, Andy could see them coming: a line 
 of men in extended order. They would fall to the ground; 
 he thought them all shot down; but they rose immediately 
 and came farther forward. 
 
 Something that was not sweat added to the dampness of 
 Andy s forehead. He felt no pain a fragment of shrapnel 
 had torn away a shred of his scalp but he bound his hand 
 kerchief around his head. His overcoat, sweater and blouse 
 were off. So were those of the other men, silhouetted at their 
 posts about him. Their open shirts showed to those nearest 
 them the workings of their throats. 
 
 American machine-guns rattled from near-by nests ; but the 
 Germans continued advancing. From the next trench a man 
 staggered into Andy s and fell sprawling there, his mask shot 
 off, his eyeballs protruding, his twisted mouth making sounds 
 that could reach nobody s ears save his own. There was no 
 time to help him, and he was beyond help. A shrapnel-shell 
 broke over that end of the trench, and, in the light of a co 
 incident flare, the man died with an expression on his face 
 like that on the face of a child who does not know why it is 
 being punished. 
 
 Andy turned back at the loop-hole; but the enemy were 
 tumbling into the trench. 
 
 They were all about him. The pit had become a swirling 
 mass of men. Everybody was fighting. You might be fight 
 ing your comrade, but you had to fight. 
 
 A great hulk of a man was lunging at Andy s abdomen. 
 Andy s rifle parried the thrust ; his bayonet passed through the 
 fellow s neck. He wrenched it out and wheeled to meet an 
 other lunge from another quarter; he pressed the trigger of 
 his rifle without bringing as indeed there was neither time 
 
340 VICTORIOUS 
 
 nor space to do the butt to his shoulder, and this second 
 enemy fell. A figure with a flashing knife leaped upon him ; 
 Andy closed and grappled ; together the pair rolled in the mud 
 amid feet that kicked and trampled on them. . . . 
 
 XI 
 
 "Cut it out ! Cut it out ! You re wasting ammunition." 
 
 Andy realized that he was lying maskless across the parapet 
 and shooting with what must be a German rifle, at nothing 
 ness. Johnson was tugging at his belt and, because he came 
 down without a twinge, he knew that he was unhurt. Flares 
 were still constant, and he looked on a horrid picture. 
 
 Faces up and faces down, crouching, twisting, outspread, 
 bodies lay about in a tangled heap. Here was one with its 
 legs bent impossibly under it, there one the head of which was 
 wrenched completely around on its broken neck. Nearly all 
 wore German uniforms ; most showed their teeth ; in the midst 
 of them was extended the corpse of Winters, his two hands 
 hiding his face. 
 
 Andy s first thought was one of horror that he had helped 
 in this slaughter, his next clear realization of its necessity. 
 Then he bent over tow-headed Winters : that soldier had been 
 bayonetted through the chest ; the blade was still in the wound, 
 the attached rifle sagging after it. Andy withdrew the hands 
 to close the eyes. The face, he found, was calm; it had the 
 dignity of one that has lucidly given all that is his to give. 
 
 Save a few of the enemy s dead, nobody was masked now; 
 most masks had been ripped away in the hand-to-hand fight 
 ing, and, as soon as the raid ended, it was discovered that gas 
 had played no part in it. The men shouted joyously to one 
 another and clapped one another on the shoulders; they ex 
 changed loud narratives and inquiries, congratulations and 
 commiserations. 
 
 Winters was the only death in the squad, and there was 
 miraculously no serious wound save in the case of big Davies. 
 Too weak to move, the man that had done guard-duty for 
 Andy sat staunching a profusely bleeding thrust in his left 
 
VICTORIOUS 341 
 
 shoulder and placidly waiting th e stretcher-bearers. Chrissty 
 had some superficial cuts that his friends first-aid kits re 
 paired; Levy s knee was sprained, and a gun-butt had raised 
 a large welt on Johnson s forehead. Untouched Flynn was 
 saying : 
 
 "Sure but they re not any good at all! They never fazed 
 me not a wan ov em." He wrung Andy s hand he who had 
 once knocked him down: "You re a rale scrapper, Brownie. 
 I watched you while I was bitin* this fellow s thumb off." He 
 nodded to a man beside him ; he spat. "Fough, but he tastes 
 bad !" said Flynn. 
 
 For Flynn had taken the only prisoner. The fellow was 
 nursing his bitten hand, but doing so with a face that showed 
 considerable satisfaction with his lot. He was a young blond 
 man ; he might have been one of the waiters in the New York 
 roof-garden whither Blunston had taken Andy in the long- 
 ago. Andy had wondered what German soldiers would look 
 like: they looked like anybody else. 
 
 Levy explained, while none listened, just why the raid was 
 a failure. Chrissly went over Andy for signs of a wound. 
 Davies, while he waited for the stretcher, gasped: 
 
 "Wasn t it a fine fight, though? . . . I ll betcha we put 
 up the best fight around here !" 
 
 Then they all fell to talking about Winters : 
 
 "Got it right in the chest." 
 
 "That s hard luck, that is." 
 
 "Remember how he was always kickin for a real fight ? He 
 wouldn t call this anything !" 
 
 "Poor old Winters." 
 
 "Must a died right off no pain, you know." 
 
 "Flynn got the fellow that got him ; didn t you, Flynn ?" 
 
 "He was a regular fellow, Winters was." 
 
 No one looked at the body a second time. When Johnson, 
 who had gone to get news from the neighboring trenches, re 
 turned with Sergeant Ryan, they said : "Winters is dead." 
 
 "You knowed Winters got his, didn t you ?" 
 
 Cross-eyed Johnson, the former factory-foreman, uttered 
 something strangely like a sob. Then he swore lustily. 
 
342 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Shut up," he said. " Course I know it. He was the best 
 of the lot of you." 
 
 Ryan said : "Schwartz is dead. KozlofFll lose his right arm." 
 
 XII 
 
 When dusk fell, Lieutenant Graaberg came cheerfully 
 among them and dispensed news to greet which they coined 
 new oaths of satisfaction. 
 
 Johnson dealt out hand-grenades ; watches were set. Ryan 
 passed through the trenches with a basket of carrier-pigeons. 
 They were to return the Germans raid in kind. 
 
CHAPTEE XXV 
 
 HOW ANDY WENT "OVER THE TOP" 
 
 IT SEEMED as if the zero-hour would never come. The 
 men, who had studied the maps and had their instructions by 
 heart, cursed softly. The day had been clear, but it was a 
 damp night, and the spring air was still cold. When one rose, 
 his joints cracked. Each again and again went covertly over 
 his rifle and bayonet; there was more attention paid to of 
 fensive weapons than to defensive. Somebody was always 
 looking at his watch and thinking it had stopped ; the soldiers 
 crowded one another at the peep-holes out of which there was 
 for long nothing to be seen but slowly eddying clouds of mist. 
 
 Levy proffered his hand to Flynn. "So long," he said. 
 
 "Aw, go to hell wid yez !" said Flynn ; but he said it with a 
 bruskness not unkindly. 
 
 At last, Andy, looking directly eastward, saw, or thought he 
 saw, not the dawn, but a faint lessening of the darkness there. 
 Lieutenant Graaberg, who had been standing in the elbow, 
 walked quietly away. 
 
 Then the American artillery opened fire. 
 
 It was like the night before last, but the shells were less 
 numerous and were "departures/ not "arrivals." 
 
 As they were putting on their gas-masks, Chrissly said : 
 
 "I don t sink it ll be much of a barrage. One o them first- 
 aid fellers as come fer Winters tol me Washington cabled as 
 we was usin too many shells." 
 
 Johnson, with picturesque oaths, told him to shut up. 
 
 They were to follow the advancing barrage and not to be 
 afraid of running into it; they were assured that it would 
 precede them and that a smoke-screen would also go ahead 
 of them. As a matter of fact, neither as they stood poised nor 
 later, did any one of them think again about the barrage. . . 
 
 343 
 
344: yiCTOBIOUS 
 
 II 
 
 They leaped clear of the parapet. In front of them, as 
 they ran, went that curtain of fire. 
 
 Andy heard, distinct in the ensuing pandemonium, German 
 machine-gun bullets rattling like hail on the debris of No 
 Man s Land, beating against broken wood and distorted metal, 
 lacerating, doubtless, the unwincing bodies of the long dead. 
 What he felt was only a great exultation, a high joy. He felt 
 the capacity for sacrifice. Once he had a quick vision of the 
 parlor at home and of his mother in it. There was a strange 
 second when so incongruous a strain as that of the Pan-pipes 
 in Gounod s Au Printemps seemed interwoven with the 
 raucous screech of a shell; there was a stranger when one of 
 the running forms ahead of him took on the bright likeness 
 of a Maid in armor with a flashing sword in her outstretched 
 hand. 
 
 The ground was dangerously rent; he fell many times. A 
 German "crump" shattered the earth close by. The hurtling 
 column from the American trenches seemed futilely few. 
 The soldier nearest in advance of him had no helmet he had 
 no head had only a spouting neck toppled over : something 
 splashed over Andy s hands. 
 
 At arm-signals from their leaders, whom only those signals 
 distinguished as leaders, the men threw themselves to the 
 earth. At other signals, they sprang up and dashed on over 
 the shell-torn surface and under the crackling sky. Andy 
 passed a hooded figure clutching its breast with a dripping 
 claw and reeling back to their front line ; he wrenched his side 
 in a sudden endeavor to avoid setting his heel on the upturned, 
 maskless face of the Macedonian Christopoulos, who, dying in 
 the glare of a star-shell, looked more than ever Italian. 
 
 Now they were in a tearing maze of barbed-wire, which 
 robbed the dead of their rightful couches and entangled the 
 living. Something who knew? had prevented the demoli 
 tion of that maze and was now stopping the barrage; but of 
 this there was no time to think, nor was there any time to 
 think of scratches ; only to fight and go forward. 
 
YICTORIOUS 345 
 
 And then they were there. 
 
 Andy was looking down into a trench along which gray 
 forms ran the forms of men with empty hands raised in the 
 instinct to protect their heads. They ran among flashes and 
 explosions, for other men were throwing bombs among them, 
 and the smoke of each explosion was followed by a chorus of 
 piteous yells. He was conscious of a grizzled man, one mo 
 ment flattening himself against the farther trench-wall, his 
 fists pressed to his eyes; the next, and that man was a pulp 
 of shredded flesh and shattered bone. Legs and arms lay in 
 the mud. 
 
 His stomach heaved. He was saved by a spasm of resist 
 ance on the part of a platoon of Germans that rushed out from 
 the next trench. There were two or three minutes of 
 bayonetting. 
 
 in 
 
 Then, at least in the point in the line toward which Andy 
 and his immediate comrades had delivered their attack, the 
 raid was over. It was victorious, and Andy and his fellows 
 were in the trench carelessly waving masks and helmets over 
 their defenseless heads. 
 
 It was a shambles. Here a seldier with a quiet face lay, 
 a little black hole between his closed eyes, with his hair among 
 the gushing bowels of the bomb-torn corpse of a lieutenant. 
 There were silent men bleeding to death from wounds that had 
 lopped away hands or feet. A sergeant was curled in the 
 muck of a corner holding his boot and looking stupidly at the 
 severed foot that was in it. Against the firing-board, a dark 
 man in a drenched shirt was propped ; the last agony had ex 
 tended all his limbs at ridiculous angles and on his lolling 
 face there was the grin of a buffoon. 
 
 Of all people in the world, terrible First Sergeant Ryan 
 was patting Andy on the shoulder : 
 
 "Damn good work," he was saying. "I saw you put 
 two of them out of business up there." 
 
 Andy had not the slightest recollection of the act. He was 
 about to say so when Ryan turned to Angelelli, to whom the 
 
346 VICTORIOUS 
 
 carrier-pigeons had, it appeared, been entrusted. It was An- 
 gelelli s duty to release them with a message giving news of 
 their success before the men themselves returned. 
 
 "Did you send those birds?" asked Eyan. 
 
 Angelelli smiled assent. 
 
 " Damn it all, you oughtn t have done that till we d identi 
 fied this Boche unit here !" 
 
 "Me, I identify it alia myself," Angelelli grinned. "An 
 I write heem: I m tired a-carryin dees damma pidge ." 
 
 IV 
 
 There had, of course, been no idea of holding the trench. 
 The raid was made for the purpose of identification referred 
 to by Ryan, and, the officers accomplishing this, as quick a 
 return as possible was imperative. The artillery s work had 
 been exact, but its lack of shells had compelled a fatal brevity ; 
 to remain for more than the fewest essential minutes would 
 be to court death or capture. Little battles were engaging the 
 trenches to right and left of them, but Andy s unit seemed 
 no sooner to have attained their objective than they began 
 scaling the top to depart from it. Andy and Chrissly were, 
 however, the last to leave, the former having stopped to do 
 what he could for the German sergeant, the latter to tie to his 
 belt a German helmet intended for Leonie. 
 
 They all reached the top and started back. A second later 
 they were in a whirl of fighting with a bunch of gray men 
 that amazingly came upon them from up the line. 
 
 Andy s bayonet broke in the first antagonist against whom he 
 used it. He was aware of his comrades darting by him. He 
 was aware that, obedient to instructions to take no unneces 
 sary risks, he was following them. Then the heavens fell, 
 and the earth opened, and there was oblivion. . . . 
 
 All this occurred during one of twenty-four hours concern 
 ing which the official communique announced that there was 
 "nothing of importance to report" from Andy s sector. 
 
VICTORIOUS 347 
 
 Andy was sure, &s soon as he came to himself, that, sore as 
 he was, he had not been badly injured, and he made this as 
 surance doubly sure by stretching first one arm and then the 
 other, one leg and then the other, and by going over himself 
 with his hands without budging more than he had to in the 
 puddle in which he lay. It was only when he had finished his 
 examination that he began to express interest in the puddle. 
 
 The puddle was black, and it stank. It occupied the bot 
 tom, the rather cramping bottom, of a circular cavity that was 
 a good deal greater in diameter at the top. The sides were 
 of scraped gray clay. 
 
 Andy lay still for a while. He was horribly thirsty, but he 
 would not drink of the filth in which he perforce wallowed. 
 He looked at his watch: it had indeed stopped. Overhead 
 raged the now familiar cacophony of battle, but he knew 
 enough of battle to distinguish its day from its night, and, 
 judging from the prevailing light, or, rather, the obtaining 
 degree of darkness, he decided that the hour must be about 
 two of an afternoon. Cautiously and slowly, because such 
 an act might be dangerous, and was, to his bruised and stif 
 fened body, painful, he raised himself, his belly against the 
 cavity s sides, to a point from which he could just look over 
 the top. 
 
 Special landmark there was none, but he could tell that he 
 was Somewhere about the center of No Man s Land and that 
 the German trenches were in the direction in which he was 
 then gazing. Evidently, he had been knocked over by the 
 shock of some explosion, had dazedly made a break toward his 
 own lines and had stumbled, at the same instant, into uncon 
 sciousness and this shell-hole. He had escaped drowning 
 simply by virtue of falling in such a manner that his head 
 was out of water. 
 
 He must wait for the real night. 
 
 In the agonies of thirst he waited. There were hours of 
 torture. There were long minutes when he debated whether it 
 would not be better to drink of the poisonous liquid about 
 
348 VICTORIOUS 
 
 him, and other and yet longer minutes when he thought it 
 simplest to rush for his trenches at once and so to die. His 
 tongue lolled from his mouth, a rough dry thing. He fought, 
 not always a winning fight, against delirium. Death seemed 
 a very little matter to bother about, but because it appeared 
 easy, he felt it wrong to seek death. He argued, in McGreg 
 or s words, but to a nobler purpose, that a dead soldier was 
 of no good to his country, that he must preserve his life now 
 if only to lose it usefully. Even into his madness he carried 
 the resolution of remaining where he was until nightfall. 
 
 At nightfall he set out. 
 
 At first he went in a stooping posture, dropping flat 
 whenever a flare or a star-shell illuminated the horrors over 
 which he blundered and revealed the waste to the unsleeping 
 snipers and machine-gunners. Soon worn out by this, he 
 began to go on all fours. In a little while he was crawling 
 like a wounded snake. His course lay among the carcasses 
 of men, the spatter of bullets, the detonations of shells; it 
 lay among blasted tree-stumps and broken posts, over pieces 
 of barbed-wire, wheels, shot-riddled helmets, rotting accouter- 
 ments all the unsalvageable wreckage of war. The earth 
 was as full of holes as a Sweitzer cheese. It was necessary to 
 climb and crawl into and out of holes waist deep here and 
 there so large that a fair-sized house could be hidden in them. 
 The soil had been turned over again and yet again. Not only 
 was it now unlike what it had been a month ago, but a month 
 ago it \vas utterly unlike what it had been thirty days before 
 that ; what was now a hillock was yesterday a shell-hole, and 
 that which was to-day a crater would, a week hence, be a 
 mound. 
 
 Andy became heedless of the shells. He became heedless 
 of the passage of time. Having once headed toward the 
 American lines, he thought no more of direction. He was 
 crazy with thirst, he was hungry, he was sore from the battle, 
 he was stiff from his night in the fetid pool. His arms would 
 sometimes refuse to drag his body forward, his toes to push 
 it an inch farther. Once or twice he fainted, but by the time 
 he had recovered consciousness, purpose had triumphed over 
 
VICTORIOUS 349 
 
 fatigue; with the energy with which he had once pursued 
 his course against the censorship for the enlightenment of his 
 public, with the determination with which he later under 
 took hie new duties, he kept on crawling. . . . 
 
 It was Chrissly that dragged him into the trench against 
 overwhelming chances, he had -somehow come back to the 
 very trench from which he set out twenty-four hours earlier. 
 
 "I been out in No Man s Land lookin fer you/ said 
 Chrissly, "an near got arrested fer it. I been lookin fer 
 you efferywheres. Where was you, anyhow?" 
 
 Andy s tired heart thumped with gratitude, but his crack 
 ing tongue could not forbear an answer: 
 
 "Over to the Hotel Americus for a glass of beer. Where d 
 you suppose?" 
 
 Chrissly wanted to send him to hospital, but Andy wouldn t 
 hear of it: he only fainted. It was not until daylight that 
 he would consider leaving. 
 
 Then a lieutenant passed along the line, consulting cap 
 tains regarding men commanded by them. He held his 
 breath, thrust his head into Andy s dug-out and called : 
 
 "Private Andrew McK. Brown!" 
 
 Andrew painfully came out. He sleepily saluted. 
 
 "Want leave?" asked the strange lieutenant. 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 The officer showed his. amazement. "You don t?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "Well, you ve got to take it. Captain Bates recommends 
 you for a week at a rest-camp." 
 
 "If you please, sir, I d like to stay with my company." 
 
 "Your regiment goes back to billets to-morrow, anyhow. 
 You re recommended for for" he consulted a note-book 
 "for good work in a trench-raid, two nights ago." 
 
 "Where is the rest-camp?" asked Andy. 
 
 "Dunno," said the lieutenant. "Get your kit together and 
 report to Captain Bates." 
 
CHAPTEE XXVT 
 
 JUST A CHAPTER TO BE SKIPPED BY EVERYBODY THAT DOESN T 
 CARE ABOUT LOVE 
 
 ANDY dipped his manicured fingers into the scented finger- 
 bowl and wiped them with his damask napkin. Then he 
 leaned back in his deep chair, stretched his long legs well 
 under the recently laden table and heaved the sigh of the 
 healthy young man that has eaten a little more than is good 
 for him. He lit one of his host s pet cigars and, out of a 
 far-tilted head, blew a thin spiral of smoke straight heaven 
 ward : it was like the smoke of a thank-offering. 
 
 "It certainly is good to be here," he said. 
 
 "Here," as may easily be imagined, was a beautifully ap 
 pointed private dining-room. 
 
 "And it s good to see you again, too/ Andy added. 
 
 "Are you sure you mean that ?" McGregor asked. 
 
 He eyed Andy with the jealous gaze of genuine affection. 
 Himself in evening-clothes and sufficiently invigorated by 
 half a bottle of M. Ledaire s best Burgundy, the little con 
 tractor thought that Andy s military experiences had done 
 the boy no end of good. If Andy s clean uniform told of a 
 slight loss of weight, it was equally explicit about a gain of 
 muscle, and the freckled face of its wearer had the glow of 
 an athlete. 
 
 Until that afternoon, Andy had long been what seemed a 
 great way from McGregor. They had met in Aix only toward 
 the end of Andy s leave, because, during the larger part of it, 
 the contractor was in another portion of the country. 
 
 "Good to see you?" repeated Andy. "You bet it is!" 
 
 McGregor showed a slight inclination to press that point, 
 
 350 
 
VICTOKIOUS 351 
 
 but this he for the nonce overcame. "The town s cheered 
 you up? 5 
 
 "It ought to." 
 
 "Well, I guess it s an all right place. Of course, they ve 
 spoiled it hy putting the lid on the roulette- joints, but it s 
 about as all right as such things run over here." 
 
 "I ll show you what I think of it/ said Andy. He took 
 an unposted letter from his pocket and handed McGregor 
 the first few pages. "Head that," said Andy. 
 
 The contractor read : 
 
 / 
 
 "DEAREST MOTHER 
 
 "All at the same time and under the same roof: 
 
 "Loie Fuller is making an impromptu speech; 
 
 "Jim Europe is beating time for a buck-and-wing dance; 
 
 "Winthrop Ames (shirt-sleeved) is rehearsing a slap-stick 
 sketch ; 
 
 "E. H. Sothern has stage-fright; 
 
 "The daughter-in-law of an ex-President is doing house- 
 cleaning by hand ; 
 
 "America s greatest opera-singer is at a piano, leading a 
 bunch of doughboys in Beautiful Katie/ 
 
 "And the richest woman in New York, wearing a gingham 
 apron, is selling chocolate from behind a counter to a dozen 
 clamoring khaki-men. 
 
 "Aix-les-Bains has a rue Eoosevelt and a rue Pierrepont 
 Morgan, and it s American. After the trenches, it s heaven, 
 and our fellows all think so, even if they do call it Aches- 
 and-Pains. 
 
 "I blew in the first of the week and got bathed hot bathed 
 and barbered oh, barbered till I smelt a mile! and slept 
 in a real bed in a real hotel kept by a royal prince that pre 
 tends he s only a hotel-keeper called Ledaire. 
 
 "Mother, it used to have a population of eight thousand 
 out of season, and in season it had a population five times as 
 large. The rich Englishmen that didn t come to it to play 
 in its magnificent casino, came to it to take its waters, and 
 before the rich Englishmen came the rich Eomans. It was a 
 proconsul of the first Caesar that built the baths an arch and 
 a temple of Diana are still standing. The two springs yield 
 daily over a million gallons of water at a mean temperature 
 
352 YICTOEIOUS 
 
 of 115 degrees, loaded with carbonic and free nitrogen gas, 
 sulphurated hydrogen, hydrophosphates and carbonates of 
 calcium, some chlorides and traces of bromides and iodites.* 
 "You may drink the waters or get into them, and it isn t 
 only the people that bathe in Aix the town itself is washed 
 three times a day." 
 
 Many things had happened to Sarah before she received 
 that letter, but she did at last receive it. Blunston thought 
 that it showed the effects of army life on a bourgeoning liter 
 ary style. 
 
 ii 
 
 McGregor returned the letter to Andy. He made but one 
 comment : 
 
 "I d like to meet your mother." 
 
 "You ought to," said Andy. "She s a real mother." 
 
 "The best woman in the world, I suppose?" 
 
 "None better." 
 
 The contractor studied his cigar. "I may get a chance to 
 meet her soon. I haven t much more than another two 
 months work over here." 
 
 "You re not going home ?" Andy leaned forward excitedly. 
 
 "In about two months, I guess. I ve got one big piece of 
 work that ll keep me a while." 
 
 "I wish you would look her up just to say you saw me. 
 "Women like that sort of thing, you know." 
 
 "Do they ? Lately, I ve begun to wonder if they knew what 
 they do like." 
 
 Andy laughed. "You re not in love?" 
 
 "I m not a fool. You know what the fellow said : When 
 a man finds a woman there s nothing too good for, he offers 
 her himself. I ll never try to trot in double-harness again, 
 my son." 
 
 The tokens of some recollection not altogether pleasant 
 
 * One suspects that Andy looked in the guide-book for that : when 
 he left home, he knew nothing of chemistry. R. W. K. 
 
VICTORIOUS 353 
 
 passed over Andy s ingenuous face. "But I don t see why 
 you talk that way," he said. 
 
 "Look here/ said McGregor. He tapped his cigar against 
 a fragile demi-tasse. "There s something I guess I ve got to 
 say to you, young man. It s my duty." 
 
 Andy just managed to suppress a smile. "Shoot," he how 
 ever said. 
 
 McGregor turned his cigar in his moutK. "I couldn t ever 
 see why two people couldn t be friends outside of business 
 hours, no matter what they had to be -inside." 
 
 Andy twinklingly supposed he couldn t. 
 
 "Of course," McGregor pursued, "there was once or twice 
 when I had to sprinkle a little glass in front of your auto, 
 but that was during business hours. Eight down at bottom, 
 young fellow, I always liked you. I liked your grit; I liked 
 your fight and I found out I even liked your damn-fool 
 stand of No-Compromise." 
 
 "Thanks/ Andy said into his blouse collar. 
 
 "I m old enough to be your dad," continued McGregor. 
 "Fact is, I had a kid once, and he died. If he d lived, he d 
 be just your age. And he had red hair." 
 
 There was a gap of silence. The young soldier studied his 
 coffee-cup and discovered that something was stinging his eyes 
 which he had to blink to keep there. The contractor looked at 
 the ceiling and smoked violently. Presently McGregor re 
 sumed : 
 
 "Anyhow, I liked you. I like you now, and I don t want to 
 see you get in wrong with life. Being an older man, it s my 
 duty to give you a pointer." 
 
 Andy looked up quickly. "I think I ve been in right ever 
 since I came to France. Ever since" he added. "Oh, I know 
 some of the censors are decent chaps. Most of them. I had a 
 long talk with one about Alan Seegar and Rupert Brooke and 
 and such things. It isn t the individuals, but they ve got a 
 sort of fog-gas that they use against the people at home, the 
 way the Germans use mustard-gas against the Allies." 
 
 "You re thinking of the censorship ?" 
 
354 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I m not." 
 
 "And I was right when I enlisted. I found that out" 
 Andy nodded northward "up there." 
 
 "You know you could have had a commission." 
 
 "Somewhere behind the lines ; we needed fighting men." 
 
 "A lot of em, my son, a lot of em. You were just one." 
 
 "Then I was one more," said Andy. 
 
 "Oh, all right," McGregor soothed him. " Anyhow, you re 
 in for it now. I ll do what I can for you " 
 
 "I want to earn what I get." 
 
 "Sure you do. I know now. All I say is, I ll try to see you 
 get what you earn. But that s not what I wanted to talk to 
 you about." 
 
 Again Andy said : "Shoot." 
 
 McGregor was a long time beginning. 
 
 "Fellows like you are," he finally said, "get the idea that 
 the Lord made women according to the rule of the best comes 
 last. He didn t. It s the way the man said: The Lord 
 waited till everything else in creation was ready, because He 
 didn t want the job he was at all talked over and pulled to 
 pieces and made over again/ Now, we both of us know an 
 actress " 
 
 Andy moved uneasily. 
 
 "Don t get excited. Remember how it was I came to talk to 
 you. This time I want a chance to say something that won t 
 hurt anybody. Well, then, this young lady s a nice girl as 
 nice as any stage-people and nicer n most but actresses aren t 
 the sort a young fellow wants to think too much about if he s 
 going to get on in the world." 
 
 Andy sat silent a while, twisting an empty wine-glass. 
 
 "I m not in any danger of thinking too much about this 
 particular actress," he finally said. 
 
 "You waited too long to make up that speech," said Mc 
 Gregor. 
 
 "It s true, anyhow," asserted Andy, "and besides, there s no 
 reason why an actress can t be" he had forgotten nothing, 
 but he went on "a good woman." 
 
VICTORIOUS 355 
 
 0h reason!" McGregor pulled at his mustache. "What s 
 reason got to do with it ? Season don t count with women. If 
 you find you re beginning to like a woman, first thing for you 
 to find out is if she s got a husband." 
 
 There was an inexplicable catch in Andy s throat. "A a 
 husband ?" 
 
 "In the background," nodded McGregor. "Most of em 
 have, you know actresses." 
 
 "I m afraid I don t understand." 
 
 In the fewest possible words and the kindliest McGregor 
 told, before interruption was possible, the story of the money 
 sent to New Orleans. "Who is Ainslee Eayburn?" he con 
 cluded : "and why does she send money to him ?" 
 
 "It s none of our business," said Andy ; but he added : "It 
 might be her brother." 
 
 "It might be," said McGregor, disregarding the first state 
 ment, "but it isn t. It never is." 
 
 Andy got up. "We mustn t talk any more about it," said 
 he. "I tell you, there isn t any danger for me in the way 
 you think." 
 
 McGregor meant every word he said. Now something in 
 Andy s voice touched him even more deeply, and something in 
 Andy s face made him sure that there was indeed no danger. 
 He got up, too. He came around the table and put his arm 
 about the boy s sturdy shoulders. 
 
 "I see," he said: "there was something else something I 
 didn t know about." 
 
 "Yes," said Andy. "Let s go round to the casino. Let s 
 see the show there. I ve only seen it three times." 
 
 "I can t," McGregor answered. "I ve got a man coming here 
 at nine." 
 
 "Then, if you don t mind, I think Til go." 
 
 "But" McGregor s face bespoke his anxiety "I ll see you 
 before you start back ?" 
 
 "Of course you will. I don t leave till eight to-morrow 
 night." 
 
356 yiCTORIOUS 
 
 in 
 
 Contrary to his expectations, it was a new performance that 
 Andy saw at the casino. Illness had invaded the company 
 that was concluding an engagement there; the company 
 booked for the next week could not be hurried away from 
 Paris, but a third company had been brought from the rem 
 nants of the American camp. Andy was late; when he ar 
 rived at the theater, Sylvia was on the stage. 
 
 She was speaking in the low voice the thrill of which he 
 knew so well. The footlights showed her massed hair, her 
 level brows, the childlike mouth, the perfect contour of cheek 
 and neck. She raised, in a bit of stage-business, a hand as 
 white as cherry-blossoms. . . . 
 
 IV 
 
 She started at sight of Andy when, with an instantly recog 
 nizing Tac leading her, she found the straight young soldier 
 waiting at the stage-door. 
 
 "Andy I 9 she cried. 
 
 She ran a few steps toward him; then stopped uncertainly. 
 In two great strides he came forward. 
 
 They had a thousand things to say to each other, for both 
 forgot, in the surprise of meeting, the restraint that each had 
 felt when last they parted ; but Sylvia, it appeared, might only 
 make the rounds of the Grand Cercle s gardens : she must re 
 turn for a rehearsal. The next day was a Sunday, and there 
 was no Sunday rehearsing permitted under Y. M. C. A. 
 auspices. 
 
 "So I have to go now, * she said. 
 
 "But I want to hear more ahout you !" 
 
 "I want to hear all about you." 
 
 "I haven t half begun to tell you yet." 
 
 "There ll be other days. We re to take the other company s 
 place and play here all next week." 
 
 "I m going to-morrow," said Andy: "in the evening." 
 
VICTOKIOUS 357 
 
 The casino s windows flooded their path with light. He 
 could see her draw away from his announcement. 
 
 "Back there ?" she asked. 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "Oh," she said, "and I have to go now !" 
 
 He could not have told what his feelings were. "Don t go." 
 
 "I must/ 
 
 He thought of taking her white hand and keeping her by 
 force. He thought of nothing else. 
 
 "Don t go. I ve half a mind not to let you." 
 
 It was as if he indeed held her. "Please," she pleaded. 
 
 "Do you want to go ?" he demanded. 
 
 "I must." Her voice faltered. 
 
 He bent to her. "But do you want to?" 
 
 She shook her golden head. 
 
 "Say it," said Andy. 
 
 She shook her head again. 
 
 "Say it/ he commanded. 
 
 He could scarcely catch her whispered: "I don t want 
 to go." 
 
 The roll of a drum came from the grande salle of the casino. 
 It was the prelude of one of the band s fox-trots, but the band 
 was a military-band, and the sound passed like marching men 
 between them. It broke a spell. 
 
 "But you ll have to-morrow free," said Andy. 
 
 "Oh, yes to-morrow." 
 
 Their tones had become conventional. 
 
 "And you still like to walk?" 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 "Then we ll drive through the mountains to a place I know 
 and walk back by the lake." 
 
 "I d love it." 
 
 "Is nine o clock too early for an actress ?" 
 
 "Not for a <Y actress in France." 
 
 He went back with her to the stage-door and there bade her 
 good night quite as he might have said it to any other girl. 
 
358 VICTORIOUS 
 
 All he would do, he promised himself, would be to be her 
 friend. In that there was no harm; he owed it to her. As 
 for going with her unchaperoned into the hills well, people 
 did that sort of thing, especially American people, in war 
 time France. She could, she said, arrange "leave" and thereby 
 have permission to wear mufti instead of uniform. He would 
 consider nothing concerning her save her friendship. But, 
 when he went next morning to see McGregor, he did not think 
 it necessary to mention to the contractor her presence in Aix. 
 That would be soon enough known ; to speak of it would be to 
 invite the renewal of a discussion doubtless well intended, yet 
 scarcely delicate. 
 
 McGregor, finishing a thoroughly American breakfast, was 
 propped against many pillows in a very French bed. San- 
 shine poured in through the windows, enhancing the pink rose 
 buds of the Chicagoan s nightgown. 
 
 "You re early, young man," said McGregor. 
 
 "Army habits," Andy explained. 
 
 "Have a cigar. They re over there on the bureau. I smoked 
 the last of the lot I put on the bed-table, last night." 
 
 "No, thanks," said Andy. "I just came in to say good-by." 
 
 "Good-by?" McGregor s pudgy face grew grave. "Why, 
 you don t go till to-night, do you ?" 
 
 "Something s turned up. I m going to be away all day." 
 Youth is involuntarily a little careless of maturity. "So I ve 
 checked my kit at the gare, and I ll go right there when I get 
 back to town." Then Andy saw how McGregor was taking it, 
 and his heart smote him. "I m sorry." 
 
 The elder man asked no awkward questions. He held out 
 his right hand, and Andy took it, and then McGregor put his 
 free arm about the young fellow s shoulder. 
 
 "You didn t mind me saying that to you last night?" 
 
 Andy shook his head. It was the time for a generous lie. 
 
 "And you ra sure you wouldn t like that well, that com 
 mission ?" 
 
VICTORIOUS 359 
 
 "Not that one/ said Andy, smiling his thanks. "Quite 
 sure/ 
 
 Neither spoke for a second. Then McGregor said : 
 
 "Take care of yourself/ 
 
 "I will/ said Andy. 
 
 "There s no sense," said McGregor, "in running unneces 
 sary risks. So don t be a damn fool." 
 
 That was his farewell. 
 
 VI 
 
 And Andy and Sylvia drove up through the hills that rose 
 into mountains drove in a low open carriage that gave them 
 the freedom of the queer villages and the wide woodlands and 
 the roadside sanctuaries drove behind a horse that did not 
 tire and a driver that could crack his whip in the romantic 
 style. Tac sat, like a statue of Watchfulness, on the front 
 seat, and they talked as a man and a woman do when they are 
 real friends which is to say merrily and about everything 
 save the thing that happens to be nearest to their hearts. 
 
 They dismissed the carriage on the summit of the last hill 
 and prevailed on an ancient inn-keeper to make them a won 
 derful omelette, which they ate, to the accompaniment of a 
 no less wonderful white wine of the country, in a little mom 
 of their own, although there was not another visitor about the 
 place. They laughed a good deal Andy could still forget 
 horrors when he felt that horrors should be forgotten. Sylvia 
 recounted, at his urging, incidents of her tours among the sol 
 diers, and made Andy tell her, with many blushing hesita 
 tions, a little about his trench-experiences and, unhesitatingly, 
 a great deal about his regiment and his company and about 
 Johnson, Levy and Elynn, about Chrissly, wounded Davies 
 and Campbell and poor Winters, and what fine fellows they: 
 were, and how for so Andy s memory saw it they had al 
 ways been kind to him and treated him well. 
 
 The late luncheon over and the slow coffee consumed who 
 would want liqueurs on such a day? they went to the porcK 
 that overhung the mountainside and looked down at Le Bour- 
 get. Enfolded in perfumes wafted upward by the invigorating 
 
360 VICTORIOUS 
 
 firs, the picture was a study in green and blue. The sloping 
 acres of vineyards immediately beneath them were from here 
 invisible ; the sky was a sheer cloudless azure, the great steeps 
 opposite embowered heights of verdure; the long lake, with 
 now and then a tiny boat upon it, mirrored at once the tints of 
 wood and sky. 
 
 Sylvia looked with the wind in her hair and wonder in her 
 eyes. Andy, beside her, dreamed that the war was at a tri 
 umphant end : it was the happiest afternoon of his life. 
 
 Clambering downward, there were times when he had to 
 take her hand and help her over this or that rock, around the 
 sides of this or that abrupt declivity. Not till then did some 
 thing of his old feelings reassert itself frankly in the old 
 guise, and only then bring with it the puzzle and pain in which 
 he had thought they ended. 
 
 The excursionists were silent, but forest-birds broke their 
 silence with silver song; golden shafts of sunlight fell straight 
 from heaven through the primeval trees; their feet sank 
 softly into mossy beds, and there came to them the shy scur- 
 ryings of startled animals moving too quickly to be seen. The 
 heart of the springtime beat audibly, the rising of its new 
 blood was all but heard, and when they reached the long 
 empty road that ran beside the water, when the descending 
 sun cast shadows far ahead of them, both, though neither at 
 once guessed it, were drawing near a forgetful surrender to 
 those cosmic forces that use a superhuman tolerance to bend 
 all things to their will. 
 
 The sun, as they walked, sank lower. The first pale star of 
 early evening hung above the lake; there was a hush solemn, 
 religious, over hillside and water; tempting the soul out of 
 the body, the air was sweet with wild flowers. Andy found 
 himself saying to her: 
 
 "McGregor s in Aix. He had a talk with me last night a 
 long talk." 
 
 The familiar wing of perplexity ruffled her level brows. 
 
 "You wrote me, before you went away," she said, "that 
 you couldn t see me. I didn t try to see you, after that, until 
 I heard that you were going." 
 
.VICTORIOUS 361 
 
 "And then," said Andy, "you didn t tell me why you hadn t 
 tried to see me." 
 
 "Wasn t your note/ she asked, "reason enough?" 
 
 There came that instant when the day and night are one; 
 the world stood still ; the air was an air of revelation. 
 
 "Reason enough," Andy ruefully admitted, "and I m 
 ashamed of it." 
 
 She was looking straight ahead of her, up the white ribbon 
 of the road between the indigo waters and the purple hills. 
 "I I thought it might be wise, if we if we didn t meet 
 again." 
 
 They went on walking. There was a poignant ache in 
 Andy s heart : he did not attempt the difficult task of discover 
 ing the reason for what he said : 
 
 "But you did come to see me at the station." 
 
 Her voice fell. "To tell you good-by," said Sylvia. 
 
 "McGregor s in Aix," the boy repeated. "Last night he 
 had a long talk with me." 
 
 Her eyes remained fixed on the white-and-purple distance, 
 but he saw that they were swimming. Her face was nobly 
 beautiful, and yet pathetically girlish. 
 
 "Mr. McGregor," she said, "has been kind to me. He 
 helped me to send some money to my mother, Ainslee Ray- 
 burn, in ISTew Orleans. Oh, he thought the y was queer, I 
 know, but Raeburn looks so much better on a program! 
 My mother," she added, "has not had a happy life. She has 
 to have an attendant. I have never never been able to get 
 used to the idea of sending her to an an institution." 
 
 As Sylvia spoke, the sun dropped behind the western hills, 
 and, with that suddenness with which such changes take place 
 along Le Bourget, the insect chorus rose from the woods, and 
 all the lanterns of the night were lighted in the sky. 
 
 "Sylvia!" 
 
 r As one born to the Church, but turned to doubt, unknow 
 ingly might wander by dark into a vast cathedral and 
 there, without forewarning, see some miracle of modern me 
 chanics flash into light every candle on the high altar, reveal 
 ing the crucifix above, the veiled host below, and as he, so 
 
362 VICTORIOUS 
 
 seeing, must feel his knees bend under him and his head bow 
 while, though reason remains, faith returns and rises above all 
 reason, so, at this moment, Andy Brown. Only error can 
 breed error ; where there was the child, there must the dam be : 
 
 "Garcia that night one night I d started to his rooms 
 about those letters I saw you come out " 
 
 "I went there to get them. I got them. I sent them to 
 you afterward/ 
 
 Close by, in a green thicket, a nightingale burst into song. 
 
 Under the light of the stars, she stood before him, pale, reso 
 lute and pure. Under the music of the bird, the echo of her 
 voice surrounded her the meaning of her words smote him at 
 once with shame and exaltation. He saw her as enraptured 
 peasants at the roadside-shrines along this lake had seen, 
 rising from the passion of their prayers, the likenesses of 
 those whom they besought ; the dew sparkled in her lashes and 
 her hair: hers were the eyes of high adventure, her gaze the 
 gaze of excellent duty; it needed only the poetry that he could 
 never write, but must always live, to see the gleam of the 
 casque and the corselet of the Maid. . . . 
 
 "Sylvia!" 
 
 "He wanted me to watch you, and I thought, if I pretended 
 to, I could help save you from him." 
 
 Her voice caught. She turned her head quickly from him. 
 She clenched her slender hands at her sides. 
 
 He had wronged her horribly, and now, when he was going 
 away, he knew the truth. . . . 
 
 More truths than one, for he knew also 
 But it was too late now. It was too late. 
 
 In the starlight, the scent of the wild flowers grew sweeter. 
 The song of the nightingale ravished his ears and maddened 
 his heart. 
 
 His slim young figure quivered. He drew very close. He 
 put out his appealing hands. "Can you ever forgive me ?" 
 
 The bird was calling calling. 
 
 "There s nothing to forgive, Andy." 
 
 He forgot all his awkwardness; he forgot one-half of his 
 
VICTORIOUS 363 
 
 awe. He told her everything. He laid bare his earliest 
 dreams. He gave no ear to her protestations. With the elo 
 quence of utter self -disregard, he painted her as she had been 
 to him before ever he saw her when first he saw her through 
 the days of his bitter fight against governmental procrastina 
 tion and heartbreaking mismanagement through the no more 
 bitter nights in the trenches. 
 
 "Please," she pleaded "please. Fm just a woman, Andy." 
 
 But he would not hear. 
 
 "I want you to know it ; I just want you to know it, that s 
 all. It was you made me everything I am everything that s 
 any good at all." 
 
 "You mustn t." 
 
 "It was you." 
 
 "I can t stand it !" 
 
 "I tell you, it was you. You gave me the strength to go up 
 against that gang ; it was you gave me at last the faith to en 
 list. First you made me so I could risk disgrace from the 
 press-division, and I risked it ; then, when the need came, you 
 said the Cause was bigger than its mistakes, and I knew that 
 was true " 
 
 "Andy! Don t, Andy!" 
 
 "I will. I must. This once I ve got to. You ve been every 
 thing everything everything for me and to me. You re a 
 million miles above me, but I have to let you know let you 
 know and then leave you: I I worship you, and I I love 
 you, Sylvia!" 
 
 "With the sound of that last phrase, he came to abrupt pause. 
 A silence descended. She had drawn from him put up a 
 white hand before her lowered eyes. Even the song of the bird 
 ceased ; lake, hills and sky seemed to be holding their breath. 
 
 Ever so slightly she swayed. He thought she would fall; 
 he caught her waist. 
 
 "Don t don t love me," she whispered; but as she let fall 
 her hand, he felt her velvet fingers chance to touch his hair, 
 and that light touch shattered the last armor of his restraint. 
 
 He seized the hand. He dragged her to him ; he bent back 
 
364: VICTORIOUS 
 
 her golden head ; he forced her wistful face toward his. With 
 a glad cry, he bent to her, and she, crying out with him, flung 
 her arms around his neck, and their lips were joined. 
 
 Sylvia wrenched herself free. 
 
 "No, no, no!" she said. And the iron doors of the impos 
 sible seemed to clang between them as she said it. 
 
 He was plunged from staggering delight against stagger 
 ing dismay. "You don t mean " 
 
 "I shouldn t have let you. I mean" again her white hands 
 hid her face "I mean I m ashamed." 
 
 He tried to pull her hands away. "But Sylvia " 
 
 "Oh, I can never forgive. myself 1" she moaned. 
 
 "For making me happy? Sylvia!" He thought he under 
 stood. "There s somebody else?" 
 
 But she shook her head. 
 
 "Then why " He felt as if a chill wind had blown down 
 the valley. "I see: I know: of course, you can t love me. 
 How could you love me?" 
 
 There came, under the stars, a great light upon her face. 
 
 "Andy," she said, "you re worthy of the best woman s 
 love; but you told me a little while ago you thought, once, I 
 was a kind of Joan of Arc " 
 
 "I always thought so;" and he vowed, "I always will." 
 
 "I m not that. I m only a very ordinary sort of woman 
 Just like most, Andy nothing great, or fine, or wonderful " 
 
 "I know better." 
 
 " but I m your friend, Andy. Can t we let it go at that? 
 Can t you? Can t you let me be just your friend?" 
 
 She put out both her hands to him. 
 
 "If that s the most" he said. 
 
 "It must be, Andy so long, so long as we re in France." 
 
 "Sylvia!" 
 
 A raucous whistle tore the air. 
 
 "Your train !" she cried. 
 
 "Not yet," he said, straining his eyes to search hers and 
 pledge his love to them. "There s time. It s miles away. 
 The sound carries far; I ve often heard it. And the train 
 waits fifteen minutes at Aix. And Sylvia" 
 
VICTORIOUS 365 
 
 He drew her toward him, a little apart from the roadway. 
 He would not be resisted. "You mean/ he demanded, "that 
 afterward you ll " 
 
 "Oh, Andy, don t you see? I mustn t love you now. I 
 came to France to work ; it was a sort of vow to myself " 
 
 "Is that all?" His voice was loud with relief. "But you 
 love me? You do? You do?" 
 
 He had her face close to his, her eyes upturned to his 
 again. 
 
 "It s forever and ever," he whispered. 
 
 "Forever and ever after the war I" 
 
 VII 
 
 In the shadows outside the station-yard, she stopped. 
 
 "I ll not go in," she said. 
 
 "No," said Andy. 
 
 People were hurrying to and fro. There were shouts and 
 laughter. 
 
 "It s better to say it out here." 
 
 "To say it out here, yes." 
 
 "Oh, Andy, I m afraid," she said. A blue electric lamp 
 sputtered into life and shone on her face. A little, crooked 
 bmile twisted her lips. 
 
 He had to hold back his tears. Somehow a new responsi 
 bility had come to him. He ought to stay and look after her. 
 She was very fragile in the lamplight, and he so strong in 
 his khaki. 
 
 "God bless you," said Sylvia, with something like a sob. 
 
 He wanted to kneel on the pavement. He had her blessing ; 
 he had her love. He held her close for a long moment. He 
 wanted to protect her. 
 
 Then it was as if, by a miracle, she again protected him. 
 It was as if, again, there was little of her that was woman, 
 and what was not woman was indeed the Cause. For the 
 sure triumph of that cause he was going back to fight she 
 wanted him to feel that way. Love he would forever give 
 her, but a worship also, which was more than even love. Aft 
 erward . 
 
366 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 "Good-by," she said. 
 
 Reverently, he kissed her hand. 
 
 "You ll always be Joan of Arc to me/ said Andy. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Carriage-doors were banging. The guards called shrilly. 
 
 He dashed from her. An excited railway-servant flung him 
 his kit. He ran through the gate and stormed a car. 
 
 The train pulled out of the shed. Andy put his face against 
 the cold window-pane. 
 
 He saw her standing where he had left her, under the light 
 of the sputtering lamp. 
 
 Never once looking up, never once guessing that she was 
 visible to him, Sylvia was pressing to her lips the hand that 
 his lips had touched. Her bosom tossed, the tears rained 
 down her cheeks; she kissed her fingers where his kiss had 
 been. 
 
 Andy wrenched the window. It would not open, and she 
 did not look up. 
 
 IX 
 
 Two weeks later, when his regiment was again in billets, 
 Andy received a hurried note from Sylvia. It was addressed 
 to her "Dear-Friend-until-after-the-war" and signed "Yours 
 affectionately." It said that her work in France was draw 
 ing to a close, that she was soon to sail for home, but that 
 she would like to see Andy before leaving and would, indeed, 
 be playing on the next evening after he received the missive, 
 at a town only twenty miles behind that in which he then 
 happened to be. 
 
 Andy asked permission to go. He would be away but twen 
 ty-four hours, and Captain Bates seemed to think the re 
 quest reasonable. It was Garcia who, hearing of it, interfered. 
 He said that Private Brown had, one night, been negligent in 
 his guard-duty, and so Andy remained with his regiment. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 HOW CHKISSLY CAME TO MIRANDE-LA-FALOISE, AND HOW 
 ANDY STAYED THERE 
 
 ONE balmy night of stars, cross-eyed Corporal Johnson 
 came running back to the ruined cottage in which his squad 
 was quartered. 
 
 "Full kits!" he cried. "We re goin to move." 
 
 Campbell and Davies, both of whom had recovered from 
 the effects of their wounds, set up, as scarred men have the 
 right to do, an echo of complaint. 
 
 "Move again? Where the hell are they goin to send us 
 now?" 
 
 "I never seen such a bunch. They don t know their own 
 minds. They don t know what they want." 
 
 Nobody knew anything certainly, but every sort of rumor 
 spread through the village: they were going into new 
 trenches, the American Army was about to take over Verdun, 
 the British front was broken, and this Yankee division was 
 to be hurried to the rescue. A hundred reports came from 
 nowhere and went everywhere. 
 
 Within half an hour the roads leading to the nearest rail 
 way-station were choked by marching men. Staff-cars tore 
 down the center of the way, the captains giving quick com 
 mands that the lieutenants and non-commissioned officers re 
 peated just in time to prevent their cursing men from court 
 ing disaster. A sluggish flood of trucks lumbered by. Andy s 
 regiment joined the march and melted into it. 
 
 They came to the railway-town, but the big square in front 
 of the station overflowed soldiers, and late comers could not 
 get near it. Hoarse voices shouted. Men flung down their 
 arms and accouterments and went to sleep upon them, only 
 
 367 
 
368 VICTORIOUS 
 
 to be roused at once and moved, protesting loudly, a few yards 
 to left or right. Whistles blew and bells rang. 
 
 "If the Heinies don t know what we re doin it s no fault 
 of ours," grumbled Chrissly. 
 
 "And if our brass-hats does know," said Campbell, "I m 
 a liar." 
 
 Slowly it developed that most of the soldiers were to be 
 loaded into motor-trucks, and the turmoil of that loading, 
 the loss of platoons and companies, the piling into one con 
 veyance in obedience to one order only to be tumbled out 
 again in obedience to another these things gave to the help 
 less participants a sense of nightmare. Hours were lost in 
 confusion, energy passed into hysteria. It was with loyal sat 
 isfaction that Andy observed how his leathern Captain Bates 
 retained soldierly calm. 
 
 Finally, some of the trucks were loaded and started away. 
 That bearing Andy and his immediate companions forced a 
 slow passage among threatening men still unplaced. It 
 stopped, went on again, stopped. It got clear of the square 
 and had to wait for other trucks. The other trucks came, and 
 the caravan left the town and received orders to wait upon 
 another caravan. Morning was on the fields when the journey 
 really began. So many of the men as could, filled the open 
 end of the truck, those behind making those in front sit down 
 and kneel down, in order to provide some glimpses of the 
 countryside and to wave to the men in the truck that fol 
 lowed; thus they saw fields and villages bounce by them. 
 
 Andy was uncomfortable, and so were his companions. At 
 the last moment, kits had been reduced to the fighters 7 barest 
 necessities. The lice and fieas were active; the trucks jolted; 
 Ryan said that the supply trains had been cut, and that there 
 would be little rations, if any. There was no tobacco. 
 
 "Know where we re headed for?" Johnson asked of the 
 first sergeant. 
 
 Ryan didn t know. "I heard one colonel say it was some 
 where between thirty and forty miles." 
 
 Even above the roar of the camions, there rose persistent 
 from the distance the low rumble of guns. 
 
.VICTORIOUS 369 
 
 II 
 
 At a hilltop they were told to get out and march. All the 
 roads below them, converging behind a high hill, were full 
 of soldiers, cars and wagons, some moving slowly forward, 
 others mixing in whirlpools, the men swearing, the wheels 
 locked, officers gesticulating wildly. The ways were full of 
 ruts; dust rose in choking clouds; everybody coughed. Now 
 and then an infantryman would twist his ankle and fall out 
 of line. Some ran about like juvenile picnickers that have 
 lost their parents. Broken sentences, accepted as inspired 
 truths, passed along: 
 
 " Tain t trenches. We re goin to have the real thing at 
 last." 
 
 The Boche ve broke through up that way near a lot of vil 
 lages where the people ve went back. We re goin in to stop 
 the advance." 
 
 "They say we re goin to have a hell of a time: ten divi 
 sions against us." 
 
 "They say our artillery ain t got enough shells to sup 
 port us." 
 
 "They say we don t know nothin about the Heinies be 
 cause we ain t got a single scoutin plane with us." 
 
 The enemy was none too far away ; his guns grew momen 
 tarily more clearly audible; but nobody seemed really to care 
 about the inequalities of the possible conflict. They could 
 win against any numbers and under any disadvantages. The 
 great joyous fact was that there was to be a "real scrap," by 
 which was meant an open battle. Chrissly summarized the 
 division s sentiments : 
 
 "It s our chance t, Andy! It s our big chance t!" 
 
 Dusk at length fell, and the officers flash-lamps came out. 
 
 Andy s rifle bruised his shoulder, but he began to sing. 
 In a high clear voice he sang The Marseillaise, and his tired 
 comrades joined him, until Captain Bates sharply com 
 manded silence. 
 
370 VICTORIOUS 
 
 in 
 
 They swung into a village street, about which there was 
 something familiar to Andy. He had missed the name on the 
 plaque; so had every one near him. Twin rows of cottages, 
 clean and thrifty, rose on either hand ; fertile fields fell away 
 behind these, and what must generally have been a little 
 creek, but what far-away rains had now swollen to the size 
 of a small river, ran through the meadows. Save that shops 
 were closed and that the men were marching, there was noth 
 ing of war about the place. A few cottagers stood along the 
 curb, and, at sight of them, the soldiers became more erect, 
 their steps more swinging. In spite of the enjoined silence, 
 Flynn, who had a sprig of green thrust into his rifle-barrel, 
 began to chant the old song: 
 
 "For we won t be home until mor-ning. . . ." 
 
 Some staff-officers were grouped in a doorway: the men s 
 heads went up; they should have been physically worn out 
 by their journey; they were sleepless, stiff, footsore; their 
 uniforms were white with dust, their hands and faces black 
 ened ; yet they were happy. 
 
 Andy saw before him at the end of the street a quite for 
 midable house, an old inn that, in this village where, it was 
 evident, remained even traces of Roman days, dated from 
 medieval times and that displayed for sign the lilies of French 
 royalty. Then he remembered: this was Mirande-la-Faloise, 
 at which, so long ago, he had waited for the train. He had 
 no sooner realized it than a woman a splendid, dusky, pan- 
 therine woman ran out of the inn and into the ranks: 
 Leonie flung her arms about Chrissly amid the good-natured 
 laughter of his fellows. . . . 
 
 Andy heard the passing colonel complain to Captain 
 Bates : 
 
 "Why in thunder haven t they sent these civilians out of 
 here?" 
 
 "God knows," said the captain. 
 
VICTORIOUS 371 
 
 "Well/ muttered the colonel, "it s too late now." 
 
 His regiment rested in the village, and Andy noticed that 
 the colonel and some of his officers were being conducted by 
 cottagers around the place and across the fields toward the 
 woods that lay a half-mile beyond the inn. They seemed to 
 be observing the ground and judging its martial possibil 
 ities, as well as the scanty light permitted. 
 
 Chrissly secured a stolen quarter of an hour with Leonie. 
 Andy got some bread and wine from her and dozed against 
 a house-wall. Past the outskirts of Mirande-la-Faloise, myr 
 iads of marching men and army-trains pressed inexorably 
 northward. There was an air-alarm and some activity on 
 the part of rapidly mounted anti-aircraft guns. The sounds 
 of heavy cannonading seemed to draw nearer. 
 
 That night the regiment deployed from the line of march. 
 It crossed the fields, went through the woods and took a road 
 that ran around other fields and into hills; but then it came 
 hurriedly back to the village. Eiders had met its advance- 
 guard and delivered messages. All the succeeding night was 
 passed in Mirande-la-Faloise. 
 
 Andy slept on the floor in a cottage, with the other mem 
 bers of his platoon. He slept badly, because the cannonading 
 increased in violence. He was awakened at dawn by an up 
 roar of distraught men hastening pellmell through the street 
 and away from the direction in which he knew the front to 
 be strange men in blue-gray with sweat and blood upon 
 them. 
 
 Somewhere a part of the retiring first line had crumbled. 
 The Germans were tearing through. They were upon the 
 hills. They were coming toward this village. 
 
 IV 
 
 Andy was one of a scurrying crowd, of which each member 
 was seeking his own company, his own squad, and all were 
 being sworn at by excited officers. Men were buckling their 
 stiff belts as they ran. Sergeants shouted. Captains yelled 
 commands. 
 
372 VICTORIOUS 
 
 "Where the hell s our artillery?" somebody asked. 
 
 And somebody answered : "They re in the right place, but 
 they haven t got the shells." 
 
 More commands were given, and the non-commissioned 
 officers seemed to divine their meaning. A column that in 
 cluded Andy tramped into the fields behind the inn, resolved 
 itself into a line spread wide in extended order. It passed 
 through the woods to the other fields and came in sight of 
 the hills beyond. 
 
 Out of the sides of those hills burst a biting rattle. 
 
 Arrived in the open, the regiment, dripping from its re 
 cent immersion, stopped uncertainly. Andy saw a man drop 
 his rifle, throw his hands up, pitch headlong. Another s legs 
 bent under him, and he gently collapsed. A shouted word 
 came from up the line. Captain Bates gave the signal: 
 
 "Charge !" 
 
 At what? At nothing but some hills out of which came 
 bullets, a crisscross rain of bullets, which swept the wide 
 unprotected fields of approach. 
 
 They ran. They fell. They got up again some of them 
 and ran on. Twice, while lying down, they fired. The ma 
 chine-guns bullets whizzed overhead like angry bees. Lieu 
 tenant Graaberg received a scalp-wound and swore cheerfully 
 at the blood that drenched his face, but could be observed 
 shaking his blond head when Captain Bates told him to go 
 back. You could now see the flash that preceded the explo 
 sions. The hills were a little nearer, but very little. 
 
 Bleeding men, mostly silent, but some howling, began to 
 turn back and reel toward the rear, their faces grotesquely 
 contorted by pain. Others fell, too badly wounded to move. 
 Some were killed outright. The extended line ran on. 
 
 Andy s breath came in short gasps that cut his throat. He 
 no longer tried to avoid the fallen. At first he had recognized 
 this one or that, but now he recognized none. There was no 
 time to care for any; all that could must continue to go for 
 ward. Anybody might be the next to be hit. 
 
 There came an increased rain from the machine-guns. It 
 seemed a solid mass of lead. The long line wavered. 
 
VICTORIOUS 373 
 
 "Go on! Go on!" yelled Captain Bates. His wiry figure 
 bounced up and down. What else he said could not be heard. 
 He caught a turning soldier by the collar and shook him as 
 a pedagogue shakes a recalcitrant pupil. 
 
 Chrissly was beside Andy. 
 
 "We ve got to go on/ said Chrissly. "There s Leonie back 
 there. They mustn t git to Leonie." 
 
 Graaberg, wiping the blood from his blue eyes, ran up and 
 down among the bullets, persuading the men. Something 
 struck Andy s rifle and shattered its stock; at once Chrissly 
 darted to a dead man, secured that one s fallen rifle and 
 thrust it into Andy s eager hands. 
 
 "God damn it!" bawled Captain Bates, "come on!" 
 
 He leaped out in front of the line, and the line stiffened. 
 
 Then three runners were seen approaching. First one and 
 then another fell, but the third reached the captain. They 
 bore orders to retire. 
 
 Somehow, in the hailstorm of pelting bullets, the with 
 drawal was made, and made without disorder. They reached 
 the woods. Complaining now that they had not been per 
 mitted to proceed, that they had been risked to no purpose, 
 that they had not so much as seen one of the enemy, they 
 passed on to the village. 
 
 Here they were to make a stand. 
 
 Andy s company was assigned to the Inn of the Lilies. The 
 old house was strong. It rose above the swollen stream and 
 looked out over the fields, directly upon the woods. Captain 
 Bates stationed some men outside, behind a low wall, close 
 beside the stream. The others went through the house and 
 brought mattresses to the windows of the dining-room that 
 commanded the space across which the enemy must pass. 
 An old peasant Andy wondered if this could be Leonie s 
 father directed the search. 
 
 Chrissly hurried through the house. In one room, a white- 
 haired woman was quietly knitting; she looked at him with 
 
374 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 dumb reproachful eyes, but said nothing. In the tap-room 
 he found Leonie. 
 
 "Go I" he said. "They are coming, the Boche. You must 
 go." 
 
 She raised to him the damp gaze of those born near the soil. 
 
 "When you go," she answered. 
 
 "But, Leonie" 
 
 Garcia entered and ordered him back to the dining-room. 
 
 VI 
 
 There were four windows here. From one of them Andy 
 and Chrissly watched the now empty fields and the silent 
 woods. Lieutenant Graaberg, his head bandaged and his 
 blond hair caked with blood, stood in the center, a pistol in 
 his hand. Down the stream, now whirled this way and now 
 that, floated the dead body of a grinning doughboy, 
 
 "Hold your ammunition," the lieutenant commanded. 
 "Don t fire till I tell you." 
 
 For a long time the men crouching behind the mattressed 
 windows saw nothing. Then the tree-trunks of the woods 
 seemed to move. 
 
 One of the men at the river-wall put up his head. Imme 
 diately there was a shot. He fell outspread ; his legs twitched 
 like a frog s; he lay still. A comrade jumped up and fired 
 blindly. 
 "Stop that !" cried Graaberg. "Lie down, or" 
 
 A gust of bullets swept from the woods and spattered on the 
 walls of the inn. One or two tiles were dislodged and crashed 
 to earth. 
 
 "They re comin !" cried the man that had fired. 
 
 A long line of gray came out of the woods. 
 
 "Hold your fire," cautioned Graaberg. He was smiling 
 serenely. "Wait for my order." 
 
 He came behind the kneeling Andy, who bent above with 
 rifle ready, every nerve aquiver. The lieutenant peered at 
 the advancing line. 
 
VICTORIOUS 375 
 
 A second followed it, and a third. A fourth appeared. 
 
 Campbell, at the next window, said: "There s a whole 
 army of em." 
 
 "We should worry !" laughed Flynn. 
 
 It was more, however, than the lonely American regiment 
 had counted upon. Graaberg ran out of the room and re 
 turned with Captain Bates. The captain gave one glance 
 from the window. 
 
 "Fire at will I" he commanded. 
 
 All the rifles rang out. Men were seen to fall from the 
 advancing lines, but the lines came on as if at parade. No 
 body could kill enough of them : so much was at once clear. 
 Here was a fight of ten to one. Captain Bates sent Garcia 
 on an errand for the colonel. 
 
 Andy and his companions kept on firing. The room filled 
 with stifling smoke. The advancing lines would pause to 
 reply, and bullets clattered again upon the walls. Ibrahim 
 Keshid, the Turk, was shot in the face; he tottered to the 
 center of the room and fell there ; Graaberg dragged the body 
 out of the way. 
 
 There was an explosion overhead. 
 
 "Shrapnel," said Bates to Graaberg. "They re getting the 
 range. They ve got their big guns back of the hills. They ll 
 open soon and we can t reply." 
 
 The body of a man fell from an upper window. 
 
 Stripped to their waists, the soldiers in the dining-room 
 were firing with all the rapidity at their command. Dust and 
 smoke made a darkness cut only by flashes of flame. Sweat 
 poured from faces and added to the pungent odor of the 
 powder. The enemy paused and replied with systematic reg 
 ularity ; they shot well : Campbell lay in a pool of blood, killed 
 instantly; near him a comrade was struck in the head and 
 his brain spattered over his neighbor; many were wounded, 
 and of these some lay moaning horribly. Stray bullets had 
 broken mirrors and shattered the walls; the floor was an 
 ensanguined clutter of broken glass and plaster. 
 
 Suddenly, with a roar to which the explosion of the shrap- 
 
376 VICTORIOUS 
 
 nel was as the sound of a mere popgun, a great shell fell en 
 the river-bank and sent high in air earth, mud, water and 
 the stones of the wall. 
 
 Garcia dived into the room from the street. 
 
 "We re to go I" he yelled to Captain Bates. "The colonel 
 says nobody could hold this place. The whole division s fall 
 ing back ! v 
 
 Three more explosions shook the village. 
 
 "Come on!" cried Bates. "In order, now. There s no 
 hurry/ 
 
 But there was hurry. As he spoke, one whole side of the 
 inn collapsed in a brain-splitting roar. 
 
 Chrissly darted for the tap-room. Andy resolved on one 
 more shot; he looked, through a heavy cloud, at the fields 
 outside. Across them the calm lines were still advancing. 
 Behind one group, he saw a man that seemed to be an officer 
 running up and down, Andy fired, and the officer spun 
 around and toppled over. 
 
 Then all the regiment was in the street. 
 
 VII 
 
 All the regiment, and, it at first seemed, much of the divi 
 sion. The bitterness of defeat, the scourge of panic, whipped 
 them. Those who had accouterments were flinging them away. 
 The little thoroughfare was a ruck of swirling men, plunging 
 animals, snorting motors. The rage of hundreds rose in a 
 chorus of cries and was swept away upon a blast of disorder. 
 The shells roared, houses were smashed to splinters. A 
 mounted officer, whether in an endeavor to rally his men 
 or to escape, rode into the mob, trampling the fugitives, and 
 was unhorsed. Andy had a glimpse of Garcia running with 
 his head down and his hands to his ears, of the colonel swear 
 ing and cajoling. Graaberg seized Garcia s arm. 
 
 "Take your hands off o me !" shrieked Garcia. He raised 
 his fist and beat his fellow lieutenant on the latter s wounded 
 iiead. 
 
 The vast torrent swirled Andy out of the village. 
 
YICTOEIOUS 377 
 
 "But it s not the end/ he kept saying over and over. "It s 
 not the end! Something s slipped, that s all. We re going 
 to win." 
 
 Then the Germans reached the village, and, from its point 
 of vantage, began to pour a steady rifle-fire into the retreat 
 ing Americans. Captain Bates, rallying such of his men as 
 he could find, fell beside the road ; undei a spatter of bullets, 
 Andy darted back, picked the officer up and, with the dead 
 weight across his shoulders, resumed his retreat. 
 
 As he did so, he saw the glad signs of order s restoration. 
 The panic had been short-lived, and the colonel of Andy s 
 regiment had checked it. He quieted the men, he reawakened 
 the pride that only inexperience had made vulnerable. Andy s 
 last glance backward showed an organized rear-guard pro 
 tecting the retirement. The Germans held Mirande-la-Fa- 
 loise, but they would come no farther. 
 
 VIII 
 
 There were strong positions behind the village, and to these 
 the Americans were going. Shells shrieked overhead. Some 
 exploded among the fields and some, scattering men and mo 
 tors, in the road. 
 
 Andy, by dint of many questions, obtained news of a field- 
 hospital. He was soon part of a separate procession, bound 
 thither. Some of the wounded hobbled alone, using their 
 rifles as crutches; others walked with their arms about com 
 panions necks, or were carried in the arms of less injured 
 men; most were on improvised litters or regimental stretch 
 ers. 
 
 The exterior of the white farmhouse toward which this 
 march directed itself was like the outside of a slaughter-house. 
 Men lay on the reddened grass, some dying, some that had 
 fainted, others in every variety of suffering. Buckets of 
 bloody water stood about, and even amputated arms and legs 
 had been flung among the maimed. Fat flies buzzed busily; 
 a low murmur of suffering quivered on the heavy air, and 
 out of the open door came a breath in which the scent of an^ 
 
378 VICTOEIOUS 
 
 esthetics mixed witH the reek of riven flesh. Among those 
 who could speak there was an outcry against the paucity of 
 American shells that had made this slaughter possible, but 
 more expressed only; chagrin at the defeat and most predicted 
 speedy retaliation. 
 
 "It s lucky my trade s a bench-job/ said a man whose legs 
 were destined to go. 
 
 "I ll hate to draw a pension," said a wan boy, shot through 
 the middle : "It s taken such a little while to earn it/ 
 
 Andy staggered up to a hurrying surgeon whose arms 
 dripped from a score of operations. 
 
 "What you got there ?" asked the surgeon. He was a thin 
 overworked fellow, wearing tortoise-shell goggles. "Put it 
 down put it down !" 
 
 "Here ?" asked Andy. "On the ground ?" 
 
 "There s no room inside." 
 
 Very gently Andy laid his burden on the grass. 
 
 The goggled surgeon gave one look. "You ve had your 
 work for nothing," he declared: "the man s dead" and he 
 hurried on to another case. 
 
 IX 
 
 In a cottage under a hill Andy found the remnants of 
 his own command, and found it busy with explanations and 
 excuses. Everybody was sure that reenforcements would come 
 up during the night and that Mirande-la-Faloise would be 
 retaken next morning; Levy was especially convincing. In 
 Andy s squad only Campbell had been killed, and though 
 Johnson and Flynn were hit, their wounds were superficial : 
 they would fight on the morrow : in order to be certain of it, 
 they refused to go to report to the medical-officers. But 
 Chrissly was missing. 
 
 "Sure, I seen him go down with a bullet in his head just 
 before we cleared out of the hotel" said Flynn. 
 
 "No you didn t," said big Davies. "He was standin right 
 alongside that stable before the shell struck it." 
 
 Andy remembered Leonie s presence at the inn and said 
 
VICTOEIOUS 379 
 
 nothing. He thought: "Chrissly remained to protect her, 
 and has paid the price." 
 
 Overcome with fatigue, he sat down in the cottage door 
 way. The sun sank, the firing lessened. In a farmhouse a 
 candle twinkled through a crack in the shutters. It was there 
 that the divisional staff received its reports, pored over maps, 
 sent forth telegrams and made desperate plans for vengeance. 
 They would have it this, Andy repeated, was not the end. 
 He was so sure of the coming triumph that he could dismiss 
 the day s defeat. 
 
 He counted Chrissly dead and sorrowed for him. He pic 
 tured that peaceful Amish farm its two old people the 
 scene when the telegram from the War Department should 
 come. . . . 
 
 He thought of his mother and of Blunston. He thought 
 what a quiet night this must be in Americus the boys would 
 be going swimming soon and he thought of Sylvia. 
 
 A figure crept out of the darkness. 
 
 "Andy I" 
 
 The whisper reached him as he was about to doze. It was 
 as if the dead spoke. He was sure it was the dead. 
 
 "Is that you, Chrissly?" 
 
 Chrissly Shuman clapped his hands on Andy s shoulders: 
 
 "Did you sink I d runned away, Andy? I hung back fer 
 Leonie. I got her just to the inn-door, an then a shell come 
 a big one an I couldn t find her anywheres, Andy not 
 nowheres I couldn t find her at all. . ." 
 
 Reenforcements, in the shape of the rest of the division, 
 were brought up during the night, and before morning prep 
 arations for the counter-attack began to take active form. 
 Company after company was marched into the silent dark; 
 everybody knew that there approached the opportunity of 
 reparation. 
 
 Andy s regiment, it became evident, was to be sent directly 
 against the village, traversing the road and fields along which 
 
380 .VICTORIOUS 
 
 their retreat had lain. The way was almost level with their 
 objective and was unprotected. Already the enemy s guns 
 were bombarding their positions. The sunrise was shrouded 
 in dense smoke ; the air crackled ; yet, tired as the men were, 
 the realization of a new chance gave them fresh strength and 
 buoyancy: they were like race-horses prancing at the line 
 after a false start. 
 
 "Anyhow," said Levy, as the column halted at a crossroads 
 and came to rest, "they won t use gas-shells. You see " 
 
 "Who cares what the divils use?" demanded Flynn. 
 
 "Whenever there was a parting of the red-streaked smoke- 
 clouds, Mirande-la-Faloise was now in plain view, showing, 
 at that distance, few signs of the wounds inflicted by yester 
 day s battle. Andy looked at it as the crusaders must have 
 looked at Jerusalem; Chrissly looked at it out of haggard 
 eyes. Behind them, the colonel was talking to a smiling 
 Graaberg and a Garcia whose mouth worked with a nervous 
 tick. 
 
 "But not without artillery we can t," Garcia was com 
 plaining. 
 
 The colonel s answer was almost careless : "We ve got to." 
 
 Andy caught the words; he caught the tone. We had to, 
 therefore we would. Therein lay all of America in this whole 
 conflict. For the time, the fate of Mirande-la-Faloise became 
 the final fate of the war to Andy. Mirande-la-Faloise would 
 be recaptured against the impossible, and its recapture would 
 yes, it would surely mean determining victory. . . . 
 
 XI 
 
 Through waves of heat and billows of ripping bullets, the 
 charge began. The men ran at dog-trot, their rifles grasped 
 two-thirds of the way up the barrels. They ran with their 
 bodies low, but with their souls high. 
 
 They were crossing the scene of their retreat. Helmets, 
 mess-kits and blouses, water-bottles and entrenching tools 
 were scattered broadcast, belts, boots, bayonets, torn leggings ; 
 they tripped over the discarded things. The wounded had 
 
yiCTORIOUS 381 
 
 been gathered up, but the dead lay where they had fallen; 
 corpses prone with fingers clawing at the ground, corpses su 
 pine with open mouths and staring eyes; one began to notice 
 a certain repetition in their postures, as if a plethora of ma 
 terial had exhausted the possibilities of arrangement: too 
 many had died of late for the living to be sorry for any one. 
 And this was not the end; rather, it was the beginning. 
 
 The beginning of the triumph: that sense, once lodged in 
 Andy s brain, remained there. He ran on, impelled by an 
 inexhaustible energy; he laughed at every military caution. 
 The bullets whined like hounds, men fell on his right hand 
 and on his left ; Andy was not afraid to fall, but fall he knew 
 he could not until Mirande-la-Faloise had been won. Leonie 
 waited there for Chrissly: he must help retake it for their 
 sakes. The regiment s honor was pledged there : he must help 
 redeem it. The new peril to the ancient cause was symbolized 
 by this village : the symbol must be shattered and the reality 
 crushed. A splendid rage bore him on its wings; democracy 
 was at the door of victory; through the smoke, far ahead of 
 him, he could see the golden hair and the gleaming sword 
 of the Maid. 
 
 The intensity of the enemy s fire was withering; there was 
 no pause, no respite; but the line of advance never faltered. 
 This man was killed and that man wounded, but the men 
 did not pause. Their shirts were stiff with filth, their trousers 
 white with dust; through the caked dirt on their faces the 
 sweat rolled in yellow runnels. Their eyes did not shift from 
 their objective; they were crazed with an anger that kept 
 them cold in the blistering heat. Thirst meant nothing to 
 them, nor weariness. These soldiers who had been the pup 
 pets of panic scarcely thirteen hours ago now went forward 
 against a fortified and unshelled enemy, went forward over 
 unprotected fields, against a wind of death as veterans 
 march to a review. 
 
 XII 
 
 Andy s battalion was to assault the southern extremity of 
 the village, and his company was to strike in the center of 
 
383 VICTORIOUS 
 
 that part. Thus, at half a mile from the outlying houses, 
 they debouched again into a piece of straight road, walled 
 and lined with Lombardy poplars, which became farther up 
 its length, the street of Mirande-la-Faloise. Arrived there, 
 they changed their advancing dog-trot to a run, their silence 
 to a chorus of yells. 
 
 Ahead of them, just at the entrance to the hamlets, a bar 
 ricade ran from one stone cottage to another right across the 
 way. From this poured, down their narrow aisle, a flood of 
 machine-gun bullets, and from the twin cottages came a spat 
 ter of rifle-fire. 
 
 "Now we ll get them ! Now we can t help getting them !" 
 shrieked Levy. 
 
 He bounded in front of Andy, and then pitched into the 
 dust as a baseball runner slides for a base. 
 
 With Graaberg in front, the remnant of the company leaped 
 over Levy s corpse. The last semblance of strict formation 
 was lost. Andy, his body stooped forward against the fatal 
 storm, caught sight of Carlo Angelelli on his left, his lips 
 smiling; on the other side came Chrissly with fury in his 
 eyes. Johnson, limping ever so slightly, was falling a little 
 behind, where Andy saw, or felt, the presence of a white Gar 
 cia; but Flynn, big Davies and the former pugilist Ryan 
 were all in front, Flynn s voice rising above all the racket in 
 a banshee battle-shriek. The swiftest runners took the lead. 
 
 One man jumped high in air and fell down dead. Two or 
 three others, unable to turn aside, crashed over him. The 
 next instant, the company was throwing itself across the 
 barricade and tossing at grips with the defenders. 
 
 Chrissly transfixed a mustached Saxon with his bayonet, 
 wheeled and drove the same weapon into the belly of another 
 man, whose blood spurted over his slayer from waist to neck ; 
 entangled his weapon in the breast of a third ; seized a pistol 
 and blew out the brains of a fourth. Ryan was performing 
 almost equal prodigies with a dripping knife wrenched from 
 the expiring grasp of his first victim. Flynn and Davies were 
 clubbing their guns, the blows cracking bones and crushing 
 skulls. Graaberg had been shot in the right arm, but was 
 
VICTOKIOUS 383 
 
 using his pistol with his left. Andy found himself swinging 
 his rifle by its barrel in a mighty circle around his head, 
 screeching Germans falling about him. Even then, he knew 
 that he had no hate in his heart. Individually, these were 
 men uncommonly like himself; they were doubtless it struck 
 him as odd that the thought should remain in such a crisis 
 of activity doubtless fellows from towns the Teutonic coun 
 terparts of Americus, with friends and relatives like Andy s 
 own. But collectively they were the enemy, they represented 
 reaction, barbarism, the rule of blood-and-iron, and therefore 
 they must die. His rifle-butt whizzed around his head, and 
 another of them fell. 
 
 What remained were now running headlong down the way, 
 where the white houses danced in the heat of the struggle. 
 Some members of Andy s company had dashed into the neigh 
 boring cottages; they were flinging from the upper rooms 
 the bodies of sharpshooters they had cornered and killed there. 
 His fingers in the throats of a pair of his enemies, big Davies 
 lay at Andy s feet, a knife in his abdomen. 
 
 "Don t stop! We ve got them on the run!" shouted Graa- 
 berg, waving his pistol in his uninjured hand. "Come on, 
 now!" 
 
 Clutching up rifles any rifles, whether of friend or foe 
 the company raced down the street. Tiles fell among them, 
 chimney-pots were tossed on their heads. Shots rang out 
 from houses. Other American soldiers, squads from other 
 companies, were bursting in from the byways, and of these 
 some started through the cottages after the enemies hidden 
 there and flung their bleeding bodies on the cobblestones. A 
 few houses, fired by the now desperate Germans, blazed into 
 flame, through the smoke of which rifles cracked, the wounded 
 cried for mercy and fighting men shouted oaths. Chrissly 
 had disappeared again. The dancing Flynn was struck by 
 a far-flung tile ; it split his head from top to chin and silenced 
 him in a purple puddle. 
 
 On and on up the street, overtaking and subduing party 
 after party of the enemy, Andy and his company fought their 
 way. His last clip of cartridges was soon exhausted. He saw; 
 
384- VICTOKIOUS 
 
 one gray man, a German major, fire a pistol-sliot from a 
 doorway and then, before the pursuers could reach him, ex 
 plode the weapon at his own temple. He saw many drop their 
 rifles and fling up their hands, crying "Kamerad !" And, in 
 the smoke and smell of slaughter, he saw, but nearer to him 
 now, the radiant armor of the Maid. 
 
 Then, with a salvo of shots to clear the way, an entire 
 platoon of Germans ran out of a house a few rods ahead of 
 Andy s friends and, their hobnailed boots thundering on the 
 stones, turned into one of the byways that led to the farther 
 fields across which they had yesterday come victorious. An 
 immediate fusillade followed them, the shots ringing against 
 their water-bottles. Andy and a few others, supposing that 
 their friends would support them, raced after these fugitives 
 down the byway, and with this party of pursuit Garcia was 
 carried along. 
 
 At the turning, Andy trod on the outstretched hand of a 
 dead man and fell. He had lost his helmet; his head struck 
 sharply against the cobbles, and he lay for some moments 
 stunned. 
 
 When, amid the continued racket of musketry, he raised 
 his eyes, still swimming from the concussion, he was looking 
 directly down the narrow, corpse-strewn alley. At ten yards 
 from him it ended at the stream. Across the water a dozen 
 Germans plunged toward the fields and the safety of the 
 woods beyond. 
 
 "Help ! Help !" screamed somebody. 
 
 There was a tussle going on at the end of the alley. Five 
 Germans were closing in upon a white-faced, shouting Amer 
 ican officer, who stood with his back against a cottage-wall. 
 
 "Brown, there for God s sake, help !" 
 
 It was Garcia. 
 
 His skin was ashen; his eyes protruded wildly; his helmet 
 was gone and his thick black hair, always unruly, bristled as 
 with fear ; his uniform was in tatters. He looked like a snarl 
 ing rat, a rat frightened to the point of fighting, whom ter 
 riers have brought at last to bay. In one red hand he held 
 a knife, and with this he struck blindly right and left. One 
 
YICTOKIOUS 385 
 
 of his opponents was similarly armed; of the four others one 
 flourished an evidently empty pistol; the remainder were 
 weaponless. 
 
 Andy reached for his rifle. The bayonet had been loosened 
 by his fall. Eemembering that his ammunition was ex 
 hausted, he discarded the rifle and snatched up the bayonet. 
 
 The village still crackled with battle. To Andy it seemed as 
 if the result of this minor action, which he accepted as sym 
 bolic of the war as a whole, vibrated in the balance; democ 
 racy was locked with autocracy in the determinative struggle. 
 Of that struggle Garcia was, however unworthily, a part, and 
 even aside from this aspect of the case, it was impossible to 
 look at the lieutenant and not be sorry for him, nor do what 
 one could, at whatever price, to save him. 
 
 It was as if somebody seized Andy s hand and pulled him 
 to his feet. He could feel the fingers close about his palm 
 the cool firm fingers. He could see, he was sure, the ar 
 mored figure by his side could catch one flash of the won 
 derful eyes. . . . 
 
 He ran forward. He hurled himself among Garcia s as 
 sailants. 
 
 His head struck the man with the pistol in the midriff 
 and sent him sprawling. He felt his bayonet grate against 
 another s ribs. He seized a descending hand that held a knife 
 and wrenched the knife free and captured it himself. A fist 
 caught him between the eyes, but he struck out with the knife. 
 
 He had a vision of a woman s face, bright and yet like the 
 face of an ice-statue. . . . 
 
 The first man that had fallen scurried into a cottage. 
 
 Andy had a sense of Garcia standing, petrified with terror, 
 against the wall. 
 
 "Fight!" he cried. "Fight I" 
 
 The man that had gone into the cottage came out. Andy, 
 from the corner of his eye, saw the fellow creeping forward 
 with a weapon it was an old fowling-piece clutched in his 
 two hands. 
 
 One of the fallen men had regained his feet. 
 
 The boy struck once more with his knife. Again he struck 
 
386 VICTORIOUS 
 
 and again. Two men went down. He fought like Tydeus, 
 son of (Eneus. ... 
 
 XIII 
 
 CKrissly had gone in search of Leonie. 
 
 He ran, regardless of the flying death, distractedly through 
 the village. Mirande-la-Faloise had suffered cruelly from yes 
 terday s bombardment. Scarcely a building in the hamlet of 
 the town escaped the shells, and many had been hit more 
 than once. The church-tower was pitched into the street, and 
 now men had fought across the ruins; its clock lay in the 
 gutter, a mass of broken wires and splintered metal. Here 
 was a house utterly pulverized, there one a mass of newly 
 kindled flames. 
 
 Chrissly sought the inn. He went through a bystreet, and 
 no enemy or friend checked him. Bumping, stumbling 
 over unseen impediments into unguessed pitfalls, he made 
 his way. Shots rang overhead. Concussions shook the tiles, 
 rattled the ground like an earthquake. There would come 
 moments of comparative silence that, uncompanioned, would 
 have seemed ear-splitting, and then staggering volumes of 
 sound like the approaching finale of a horrible composition 
 wherein the hideous hell-music climbed ever higher and 
 higher, note upon intolerable note, beyond all human con 
 ception. 
 
 He reached what remained of the Inn of the Lilies. It 
 was a mere shell. Only the blackened walls stood. Between 
 them, planks, chairs, tables, bedding all the once lost and 
 once recovered contents of the ancient resting-place for trav 
 elers, all those things which must have meant home for L6- 
 onie rose in a still smoking heap from the ruin of the 
 cellars. 
 
 The body of an old man topped this funeral-pyre. His face 
 was calm, but his white locks were wet. His throat had been 
 cut from ear to ear. 
 
 Chrissly began madly to tug with" bare hands at the smol 
 dering wreckage. He pulled some boards from before what 
 had a day ago been a chimney-piece. A woman crouched 
 
VICTORIOUS 387 
 
 there, an uninjured woman but not her he sought. This was 
 as old as the man whose corpse lay close by. She raised her 
 hands for mercy. 
 
 "Let me stay !" she screamed. "Let me stay ! I have noth 
 ing!" 
 
 "Leonie!" yelled Chrissly. "Where is Leonie?" 
 
 The woman hid her face. Chrissly shook her. 
 
 "I do not know/ groaned the woman. "Yesterday she hid. 
 I saw two Boche dragging her down that bystreet toward 
 the fields/ . . . 
 
 X lV 
 
 When Chrissly, his bayonet-mounted rifle swung in his 
 hands, ran into that bystreet, he came upon what might have 
 been posed for as a tableau of triumph. Garcia, saved, leaned 
 against the cottage-wall, his eyes closed. Above the bodies of 
 four Germans stood the boyish figure of Andy Brown, his 
 red head up, his freckled face alight, his nostrils wide, hia 
 glance clear and fixed, not on anything around him, but on 
 something that he seemed to see in the already brightening 
 sky something that nobody else could see there, yet some 
 thing by him so clearly seen that his own gaze took on a ra 
 diance no longer earthly. 
 
 It was best to look upward, but it had been safer to search 
 the earth. A form that had skulked in the shadow of the 
 houses leaped forward and leveled a fowling-piece against 
 Andy s breast. 
 
 There was a flash and a roar. Andy fell. 
 
 Chrissly came forward in a single jump. He tripped the 
 already fleeing German. The man, a big fellow, turned over 
 on his back and tried to rise. 
 
 Chrissly drove his bayonet into the German s belly. . . . 
 
 XY 
 
 1 She s here," said Andy, when first he opened his eyes. 
 His eyes were very large. "Oh, no, of course I forgot" 
 he smiled "you can t see her." 
 
388 VICTORIOUS 
 
 They had laid him in the shadow of the wall where his 
 enemy so lately skulked. His head was on Chrissly s lap, and 
 Chrissly s thighs were wet with blood. They had flung Gar- 
 cia s blouso an officer s blouse, the blouse of the man that 
 had been Andy s enemy over the hideous wound. There was 
 no question of finding a surgeon: the boy s breast was shot 
 away. 
 
 "I forgot," Andy went on "I forgot I was dying." He 
 smiled. His freckled face was calmly beautiful. "I am dy 
 ing?" he insisted. 
 
 It was not an appeal. It was merely a question asked by 
 one that cared only for the facts. 
 
 "No !" said Garcia, kneeling beside him. 
 
 "Yes," said Chrissly, bending above the boy. "I guess you 
 got yours, Andy." His voice was very low. 
 
 Save for these three and the bodies of the five Germans, 
 the cobbled alley was empty. Throughout the village the firing 
 had ceased. A strange silence brooded over Mirande-la-Fa- 
 loise, and the sun shone. 
 
 "Have we won?" asked Andy. 
 
 "We ve won," said Chrissly; "and," he added, with a nod 
 toward the cramped corpse of the man that had held the 
 fowling-piece, "I did fer him." 
 
 "Then it s all right," said Andy "if we ve won." He 
 seemed content. "I knew we would. You needn t have killed 
 that fellow, Chrissly: it didn t matter." 
 
 Garcia broke in; his face was twisted by twitching grief: 
 
 "I m damned sorry, Brown. I m damned sorry for every 
 thing. You re a nice kid." 
 
 Andy s eyes studied him. "Oh, that s all right, sir," said 
 Andy. 
 
 "But I m sorry!" insisted Garcia. 
 
 "You only did what you had to," said Andy. "It s all right, 
 r." 
 
 Garcia, his shoulders shaking, turned his face away. 
 
 "Chrissly?" whispered the dying boy. 
 
 Chrissly bent closer. 
 
 "Leonie?" 
 
VICTORIOUS 389 
 
 "I I can t find her anywheres." 
 
 "Oh/ 7 said Andy the knowledge of his friend s distress 
 clouded his contentment "it s too bad it s too bad!" 
 
 "But I m goin to keep on tryin ," said Chrissly. 
 
 "I hope you ll find her, Chrissly." 
 
 It was now only a question of minutes, the end. 
 
 "Want me to send any word to anybody, Andy?" asked 
 Chrissly. 
 
 "Yes." The boy s face brightened. "Thank you. Not 
 straight to mother. Write B. Frank McGregor at Aix. He s 
 going home. Tell him I didn t change my mind once not 
 once about anything I ve done over here but tell him I 
 said he was good to me and I remembered about that boy 
 with red hair and I hope he ll think of me that way." 
 
 "I will," said Chrissly. 
 
 "B. Frank McGregor, at Aix." 
 
 "I unnerstand." 
 
 "The insurance more than covers the bond. Mother ll have 
 something. Tell him to give her my love, Chrissly. And 
 Blunston. I ve kept faith he ll understand. And all the 
 fellows at home," he resumed. "That s not important. I m 
 only one out of so many. Still " 
 
 He closed his eyes for a moment. His lips moved some 
 words about an electric-lamp at a station, only half distin 
 guishable. 
 
 Presently, in the midst of a sentence, he opened his eyes 
 again brown eyes that saw into the sky, and never blinked. 
 
 "And tell Her" his freckled face suddenly became trans 
 figured, it glowed with a strange light "Joan never left me. 
 I kept getting nearer and nearer, and then Joan never left 
 me. Be sure to say that : Joan never left me. She s" slowly 
 he raised a steady hand. He pointed upward: "She s right 
 by me now. We ve won. The Cause" He sat suddenly up 
 right in Chrissly s arms. He seemed to listen for a moment 
 and then to repeat something that he had heard. His voice 
 rang out clear through the mean street. Garcia turned at the 
 sound of it : "The Cause is bigger than its mistakes !" 
 
 Involuntarily, the gaze of both his comrades followed the 
 
390 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 upward direction of the pointing finger. Did they see noth 
 ing? Or did they catch the glint of shining armor and of 
 golden hair? . . . And, still above that another presence 
 a Presence with pitying eyes and open arms and the pierced 
 hands of peace ? . . . 
 
 When they looked down again, Andy s brown eyes had 
 closed, and his face was the face of a little boy. He sank 
 back. With the faint sigh of a child tired from play, he nes 
 tled into Chrissly s lap. 
 
 "I guess I ll go to sleep/ said Andy, 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 OF THE GLORY OF THE STABS, AND OF HOW "ONE STAB DIF- 
 FERETH FROM ANOTHER STAE IN GLORY" 
 
 KEPLER, the Daily Spy reporter, passed along Second 
 Street and stopped, as he always did, to call to Blunston 
 seated on the porch : 
 
 "Know anything?" 
 
 Blunston replied with the usual shake of his iron-gray head 
 and the usual counter-question : 
 
 "Do you?" 
 
 "Not a thing," said Kepler. "There s a mail in from 
 France. Thought maybe you d got a letter from Andy." 
 
 "No," said Blunston. "Now he s a soldier, I suppose he 
 can t write so often. . . ." 
 
 "There s not one Doncaster County hoy in to-day s lists," 
 Kepler remarked. "There s nothing new at all, except Babe 
 Campbell told me there s a woman registered at the Hotel 
 Americus with one of those police-dogs you see in the movies. 
 I m just going up to take a look at it." 
 
 Blunston, in the breezeless summer day, continued writing 
 at the notes of the book that he had planned. His weather- 
 beaten face was the face of a man contented ; for the first time 
 since he surrendered his ambition to Andy, he was quite tran 
 quil : he had a new work to do ; Andy had shown it to him. 
 
 During more than thirty months after that August when 
 the European volcano burst with the fires of world-destruction, 
 Blunston had been of those who tried to awaken America to 
 her danger; when the late awakening came, he sacrificed his 
 desires for the sake of Sarah Tollens son, and felt, or 
 thought he felt, the numbing touch of age; but now Andy s 
 letters, showing him how unready his country had been for 
 
 391 
 
392 VICTORIOUS 
 
 war, forced the question of whether she was giving any thought 
 to the inevitable aftermath forced, as he looked about him, 
 a negative answer, and fixed in him the determination to show 
 her, before it was too late, the need to prepare for the stu 
 pendous tasks of peace and reconstruction. Ere the struggle 
 was ended, while yet Andy and his comrades fought in France, 
 Blunston, in America, would write The Lesson of the War. 
 
 It was a day, not properly of mist, but of sun-dust; there 
 had been a morning threat of thunder, but before the after 
 noon was over, the skies would be swept clean for a triumphal 
 pageant of crimson and purple and gold. Already Blunston 
 could see sketches of perfect azure between the dark-leaved 
 boughs of the Norway maple, and upward toward the zenith 
 passed a flash of red as an untroubled cardinal-bird shot by. 
 Thus would the battle-day of America end, and of Americus ? 
 
 Reflecting the big country, the little town showed him, 
 whenever he walked its streets, plain signs that it had at last 
 undergone the great change. There were some gold stars on 
 the service-flags and some new black among the women s cos 
 tumes on Elm Avenue. Fresh sorrows came with every 
 morning, and the finely-printed casualty-lists in every paper 
 were picked out with anxious eyes. The names of boys that 
 until a few months since had never been farther from home 
 than Philadelphia, were published as wounded on the banks 
 of the Marne, prisoners in Magdeburg, dead in the Argonne, 
 or, still more dreadfully, "Missing" ; lads wrote that they sel 
 dom received the letters sent from home and often did not 
 get their pay ; they were now known to be improperly clothed ; 
 stories came across the sea of aeroplane failure and ordnance 
 and of these failures price in human lives ; the confusion in 
 the records pronounced the unhurt killed, the slightly- 
 wounded seriously, and all the lists were from five to seven 
 weeks delayed. 
 
 Yet nothing could have been finer or more American than 
 the way in which these things were borne. Every recurring 
 hardship left the town stronger to meet the apparently end 
 less hardships still to follow; each loan found more sub 
 scribers; to the Red Cross and the welfare-workers Americus 
 
VICTORIOUS 393 
 
 subscribed a third of its assessed wealth; if tears were shed 
 for bereavements, they were shed in secret. This was an era 
 of silence. Even Lawyer Dickey had ceased his complaints, 
 and Colonel Eskessen took his bond-depreciations mutely. 
 There would come a time of reckoning ; meanwhile it was bet 
 ter to lose a son or a lover than not to have helped him go. 
 Any return to the old life of simple hungers and their satis 
 faction was too distant to contemplate; above every thought 
 for the future was placed the present determination to tri 
 umph. 
 
 Blunston was glad to live in such a town and to be writing 
 for such a country. He went quietly on with his work. It 
 was not until half an hour after Kepler s departure that, with 
 Tac slinking behind her, Sylvia interrupted him. She was 
 shaking hands before he could believe his blinking eyes. 
 
 "I ve been abroad with the Over There Theater League. I 
 landed only a week ago." 
 
 "But," stammered Blunston "but here . . " 
 
 She was dressed simply in a close-clinging gown of blue. 
 Against the wide brim of her dark straw hat, her hair rose in 
 golden ripples. 
 
 "Don t be afraid," she smiled she bent to stroke Tac s 
 brindled coat, but she looked up to smile at Blunston "I 
 didn t come to Americus to pay you a visit, Mr. Blunston : I 
 met a boy over there that you d told me about, and I came to 
 this town to see his mother." 
 
 "Andy? There s nothing the matter?" 
 
 "He s quite well. Only I thought his mother" Sylvia s 
 eyes were wistful now "might like to see somebody that had 
 seen him in France." 
 
 Blunston breathed his relief. There had come no letter 
 from Andy since one written in the training-camp. Blunston 
 had hopes that the German offensive might crumble before his 
 protege s unit would be fit to fight, but he knew war, and he 
 knew that none should count upon its consistency. 
 
 "Oh, of course she will. I ll be glad . . ." He looked at 
 the radiant girl before him and then thought of the shabby 
 little parlor in Sarah s home. "I ll send her a note to come 
 
394: VICTORIOUS 
 
 here . . . tea . . . something of that sort. . . . 
 You re sure he s quite . . ." 
 
 "He says he s better than he ever was before. He says the 
 trenches seem to agree with him." 
 
 "The trenches?" 
 
 "Yes, he s been in. Didn t you know ? He was going back 
 there when he left Aix. I I said good-by to him" she bent 
 over Tac again, and this time she did not look up "good-by 
 to him at Aix." 
 
 The father in Blunston was quick to see the change in her 
 manner. "Sit down. I ll go inside and write a note to Mrs. 
 Mrs. Brown. . . ." 
 
 II 
 
 Miss Hattie Lloyd had not been idle. She had, in fact, 
 bothered Lawyer Dickey until he pretended acquiescence with 
 her suspicions in the mad hope of getting rid of her, where 
 upon she said: 
 
 "If you think I m right, why don t you do something ?" 
 
 He put her off as long as he could, but he knew from the 
 beginning that no delays of the merely legal mind would be 
 proof against her persistence. In the end, he had to call Ralph 
 into Miss Hattie s presence and there to cross-examine him. 
 The upshot of the matter was that Bolingbroke found himself 
 the poorer by one house. 
 
 The miserable man was quite dumfounded. He had his 
 faults, but dishonesty, as Dickey had said, was not among 
 them. 
 
 "I can t imagine how this thing happened !" he finally man 
 aged to ejaculate. "I can t see how it ever happened. I ll 
 look up the papers to make sure " 
 
 "I ve done that already," said Miss Hattie, giving herself 
 a little hug. 
 
 " and if you re right " Ralph tried to continue. 
 
 "Pf oof !" said Miss Hattie. 
 
 " as you certainly seem to be," Ralph plunged on, "why, 
 then of course but I can t imagine how it ever happened 
 at all." 
 
VICTOKIOUS 395 
 
 "Old, it s perfectly simple," Dickey protested lie hated 
 scenes "it might occur to any one." 
 
 "Only not every one/ said Miss Hattie, "would let his wife 
 go around calling a woman like Sarah Brown a liar." And, 
 with a quick cock of her head, she told all that had happened 
 between herself and Mrs. Ralph. 
 
 Ralph hurried away. He hurried so swiftly that his wife 
 was in Sarah s parlor fifteen minutes later: an angry young 
 wife with her eyes red and her capacious bosom heaving. 
 
 "I just came to tell you," she snapped, "that you ve got 
 what you wanted, and I hope you re proud of the way you 
 got it." 
 
 Sarah, tall and sallow, was standing beside the center- 
 table that bore the family-Bible with its precious record of 
 Tollenses born, baptized, married and deceased. 
 
 "I don t know what you re talking about," she said. 
 
 Mrs. Ealph stormed. "Oh, yes, you do! You know well 
 enough. You ve turned the Americus Chapter of the Red Cross 
 out of house and home. I was sent up here to apologize to you 
 for saying something or other to that old cat Hattie Lloyd, and 
 I do apologize, for I was a perfect fool to trust her; but I 
 must say I thought you d have a little more dignity than to 
 tell the whole town about that old piece of paper you threat 
 ened me with and I burnt." 
 
 "You mean," asked Sarah slowly, "that you ve found out 
 I own the Tidd house?" 
 
 "Found it out? First you tell me it; then Hattie Lloyd 
 tells the whole town, and to-day Ralph shouts it at me as if 
 it was my fault. It doesn t seem to me I had to hunt very 
 much for it." 
 
 "I m sorry you were annoyed," said SaraK. 
 
 "Then why couldn t you come to me like a lady?" Mrs. 
 Bolingbroke demanded. "Why did you have to go gossiping 
 to everybody in Americus ?" 
 
 Sarah drew herself up. "I didn t mention the Tidd house 
 to anybody," she said. 
 
 Mrs. Ralph s entrance had been precipitate, and on it the 
 street-door was not latched. Of this Miss Hattie took advan- 
 
396 VICTORIOUS 
 
 tage, as soon as she reached Sarah s dwelling after concluding 
 her interview with Dickey. She came directly to the parlor. 
 
 "There s one person you talked to !" flamed Mrs. Ralph at 
 sight of her. 
 
 Miss Hattie was nothing if not appreciative of the finer 
 shades of a quarrel. She had wanted to be the first to bear 
 the news to Sarah, but she understood at once that for this 
 she was a moment tardy. The agile old brain supplied all 
 that she had missed; she made the most of her disappoint 
 ment by scoring off Mrs. Ralph : 
 
 "Sarah never opened her lips to me/ said Miss Hattie. "I 
 guessed the whole thing myself. If you don t believe me, get 
 Ralph to ask Lawyer Dickey." 
 
 Ralph must, in a rare courage bred of indignation, have 
 been rather hard on his wife. This hint of an appeal through 
 him was, at any rate, more than that wife could bear. She 
 sank into a rocking-chair. Her gray eyes, which were never 
 wide, altogether closed with hysteria. She lost all her pretti- 
 ness. 
 
 Miss Hattie, never taking her glance off her victim, em 
 braced herself ecstatically. 
 
 "Now it ll get all over t-town," that young woman sobbed. 
 "You ll t-t-tell everybody how I b-b-burned that p-paper " 
 
 "What paper?" asked Miss Hattie. 
 
 "It was only a letter," said Sarah hastily. "It didn t mat 
 ter. It was an accident." 
 
 Mrs. Ralph did not hear this. "People will say I ve b-been 
 unj-j-just, and I never m-meant to be unjust." Sarah laid 
 a gnarled hand on the distracted young woman s head, but the 
 distracted young woman went on: "Me unjust! And now 
 they ll all hear this" 
 
 Sarah looked at Miss Hattie. That one advanced toward her 
 fallen enemy. This was the moment of Miss Hattie s triumph, 
 but the triumph was too thorough, and even the Miss Hatties 
 of the world can sometimes be magnanimous. 
 
 "I guess I know when to keep things to myself," she said. 
 "I ll never breathe a word about the paper. Sarah, you don t 
 seem very grateful for that house, I must say." 
 
VICTOKIOUS 397 
 
 Sarah Brown spoke slowly, marking her sentences by awk 
 ward pattings of Mrs. Ralph s bobbing head : 
 
 "I suppose I can t pretend the house isn t mine if all you 
 people want to say it is, but it s no use to me. I don t need it. 
 Of course I wouldn t think of turning out the Red Cross it s 
 theirs for as long as they can use it." 
 
 Mrs. Ralph struggled upward and flung grateful arms 
 around Sarah s neck. She desisted only to kiss Miss Hattie 
 and to secure a repetition of the promise that no mention 
 would ever be made of the burned paper. 
 
 "Not even to Ralph," she said. "Especially not to him." 
 
 And then she invited them both to dinner and wept again, 
 but more gently now, when they both refused. 
 
 Somehow Sarah got rid of them both, and, when they had 
 gone, took down from the mantelpiece the two photographs of 
 Andy, the one of him as a little child, the other in his uni 
 form. She looked at them for a long while and laid them on 
 the center-table beside the Bible when she sat down there to 
 write a letter to her son : 
 
 "You will be surprised to hear" she began "about what 
 has just happened. Some people would call it good luck. For 
 my part, I don t intend to profit by it, but you v^ill be needing 
 money one of these days, I suppose, and when that time 
 comes " 
 
 It was at this moment that Blunston s note arrived, asking 
 her to come at once and meet somebody that had lately seen 
 Andy, alive and well, at Aix-les-Bains. 
 
 It was also at this moment that a muddy motor-car rolled 
 up to the Hotel Americus, and a stout little man got out and 
 registered and asked Andrew Blunston s address. The man 
 was followed by a servant, who marshaled a multitude of bags, 
 each bearing a fresh customs-inspector s stamp. . . . 
 
 in 
 
 That had been a pleasant tea-party at the old Blunston 
 house. The host seated his guests in the hall that ran right 
 
398 VICTORIOUS 
 
 through the place, the hall into which the seventeenth-century 
 stairway descended. Two doors, each opening across its mid 
 dle, swung wide, the one letting in the subdued sounds from 
 Second Street, the other giving upon the great back yard with 
 its crowding trees and permitting a glimpse of the silver Sus- 
 quehanna and the green York County hills on the other side. 
 The sun was setting, as Blunston had known it would, in crim 
 son and purple and gold ; the scent of flowers floated in, damp 
 and cool; there came with it the last glad calls of homing 
 birds. 
 
 Sarah, somewhat to Blunston s surprise, had taken to Syl 
 via almost at once, and Sylvia had gone the radiant Sylvia ! 
 straight up to Sarah and caught her work-hardened hand 
 with trusting directness. For one moment the man saw the 
 elder woman hesitate, saw her dull eyes search the wistful eyes 
 of the younger. Would the guarding mother in Sarah sound 
 an alarm, as the paternal instinct in him had sounded it? 
 Would the Tollens pride, and the mistrust bred by those long 
 years of social affront, reject these advances? Perhaps they 
 wanted to, perhaps they tried. But they did not succeed: 
 Sarah smiled and sat down beside Sylvia, and the mother 
 fell to questioning the girl about Andy as if the girl had 
 known the absent soldier all her life. 
 
 Tea was over before the talk died down, and Blunston be 
 gan to wonder whether he should not have sent for his cousins. 
 Sarah was telling stories of Andy s earliest days: not since 
 his return to Americus to live had Blunston seen her so vis 
 ibly happy. Sylvia was listening. The scene was very rest 
 ful ; it was like the dawn of peace. . . . 
 
 Tac looked up sharply from his place at Sylvia s feet. A 
 heavy step fell on the gravel of the front walk. A pudgy lit 
 tle man with a round face and gray mustache and bags of dark 
 skin under his eyes hesitated at the doorway. 
 
 "Mr. Blunston? I suppose you don t remember me." 
 
 Sylvia was on her feet. She motioned the dog to fall back. 
 The old cloud of perplexity brushed her brows: "Mr. Mc 
 Gregor!" 
 
 He started at the sight of her. While Blunston greeted 
 
VICTORIOUS 399 
 
 him, He seemed to demur about something and then come to a 
 resolution. 
 
 Sarah had timidly drawn a step aside. Sylvia came quickly 
 up to the two men. She was white, and her lips trembled. 
 
 "Something has happened/ she whispered. "I know it. 
 Well, you mustn t " 
 
 But she was too late. Mr. McGregor either had not seen 
 Sarah or did not guess her identity: the emotions that had 
 hurried him from France would be restrained no longer. He 
 flung a packet among the ringing cups and plates upon the 
 tea-table. 
 
 "Andy Brown/ he said "there s his distinguished-service 
 cross. I ve brought it home to his mother ; it came too late 
 for him : he was killed at Mirande-la-Faloise on the fifteenth." 
 
 "Stop!" cried Sylvia. 
 
 Blunston was trembling like a man ague-stricken. Sarah 
 stood very erect ; the lines about her mouth deepened. Oh, it 
 was quite too late: McGregor was so whirled before the on 
 slaught of his grief that he could note no other s. 
 
 "A friend of the boy s sent for me." The words shot from 
 him like bullets from a machine-gun "Told me about it. 
 Andy d asked him to. Sent his love to his mother. Said to 
 tell Blunston he d kept faith. Said the Cause was bigger than 
 its mistakes. Said somebody named Joan d been with him 
 right along and said he was glad he reminded me of my kid 
 that died." He raised his absurdly short arms above his head ; 
 his voice had been shrill and cracked, but now it rose suddenly 
 to a shriek : "I tell you, Andy Brown was the finest boy in 
 France. I wish to God I d died in his place !" 
 
 Here followed a heavy silence. As with a new-born dignity, 
 Sarah was walking toward the sob-torn little man. 
 
 "Mr. McGregor/ she said when she reached him, "I am 
 Andy s mother." 
 
 She took his startled hand and pressed it. Then, turning 
 to Sylvia, she bent and kissed her mouth and walked through 
 the front doorway, alone. 
 
 Blunston watched her, clapped his fingers to his deep-set 
 eyes, drew himself together, ran after her. 
 
400 yiCTOKIOUS 
 
 IY 
 
 Sylvia stood with her back to the hall, looking among the 
 trees and up the now golden river, across which, behind the 
 pine-clad hills, the sun was setting in a triumph of color. Mc 
 Gregor had collapsed into an old saddle-back chair; his hands 
 hid his face. 
 
 Sylvia spoke without turning. Her voice was clear, as al 
 ways, but monotonous now. "It seemed terrible to me, but it 
 had to be told sometime: she had to know." 
 
 "My God!" whispered McGregor. 
 
 "7 knew it," said Sylvia, "the instant I saw you." 
 
 McGregor did not raise his face. "Of course they had to 
 die some of them: that s war. But where one would die, a 
 hundred are dying because we haven t any tanks to go ahead 
 of them anywhere along our front except a few the French 
 lent us no artillery to support them the men and no aero 
 planes to reconnoiter with not an American-made plane." 
 
 He stopped a moment, then went on : 
 
 "That was my fault mine and the fellows like me. We 
 wouldn t let anybody in with us the men up top wanted the 
 power and wouldn t admit they could make a mistake; the 
 contractors down below wanted the contracts. So we promised 
 and muddled together and suppressed the truth and now the 
 men are dying that wouldn t have had to die !" 
 
 A long red ray of sunlight, leaving Sylvia beside it in the 
 shadow, crept into the old hall. 
 
 "That was my job over there," McGregor continued: "to 
 keep things quiet about the planes. Other fellows kept them 
 quiet about other things not not murderers ; just every-day 
 men looking after their contracts." 
 
 He said : "I liked Andy the first time I saw him : he did 
 look like my kid. Every time I saw him after that, I liked 
 him better. Everybody did: Evans and Innis, and the men 
 in his company. He fought fair, and I tried to fight him 
 fair. . . . 
 
 "But you can t fight fair for a wrong cause," he said. "I 
 didn t know it then ; but I knew it when I got to Mirande-la- 
 
VICTORIOUS 401 
 
 Faloise. What could I do?" He had taken his hands from 
 his ashen face and, with his elbows on his knees, was slowly 
 beating his clenched fists, one against the other. "What could 
 I do ? I could see he got the service-cross, and I did see to it 
 for something I guess he didn t think anything about when 
 he did it. But how could that help ? He was dead Andy 
 and others : they were dying every minute. What could I do ?" 
 
 Probably she did not know what he was saying. Certainly, 
 Tie scarcely knew that she was there. 
 
 "That s what made me understand: having his friend tell 
 how he died and knowing he was dead he fought clean and 
 looked like my red-headed kid. I saw, if a game isn t right 
 to begin with, you can t play it any way but wrong. You ve 
 got to play right with God or wrong with the devil. I d been 
 against America against God. So now I m going to try to 
 play God s game and win. I had some things unfinished: I 
 let em go. Half a million, cold: it don t matter. I just 
 quit." 
 
 He got up and again fully realized her presence. 
 
 "I ve come over here," he said more calmly, "to blow the 
 whole devil s game. That s all I can do now, and I m going 
 to get a good newspaper-man like Blunston to help me. That ll 
 be Andy s real service-cross." 
 
 Sylvia turned to him, and he saw her face. He saw it and 
 read it 
 
 "Four he said. "You, too?" 
 
 She bowed her head. 
 
 "You re married?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Then, in Heaven s name, why didn t you marry him?" 
 
 She spoke without fear : "Don t you see ? I went to work. I 
 had to remember that. But, I was going to after the war." 
 
 She walked out into the old back yard among the length 
 ening shadows of the trees. Tac rose from an unobserved 
 corner and silently followed her. 
 
403 VICTORIOUS 
 
 The sky was crimson ; the perfume of the flowers rose about 
 her in an aura rose as the perfumes had risen that evening 
 along Le Bourget so short a time ago. Almost physically she 
 felt Andy s presence. He was speaking as he had spoken then. 
 A mighty expectancy was upon her; the golden twilight 
 pressed around her as if it were a bed of love and peace. Over 
 the purpling east came a single star, pale but clear. He had 
 loved her, and she had loved him. In the end, she had meant 
 to him something even higher than her love. Joan, he had 
 sent her word, had always been with him : she knew that in 
 this Joan of his she had merely the lesser part, but she knew 
 also that she could yet so live as to be not wholly unworthy of 
 that part of his ideal. 
 
 To the ancient river, to the immortal sunset and the eternal 
 hills, she raised her arms. She opened wide her girl-boy 
 hands. This was Andy s country and hers: it was America. 
 
 "I gave him to you," she said. "I gave him !" 
 
 He had died triumphant in the clear vision of democracy s 
 triumph. 
 
 And in Andy s death, Sylvia triumphed, too. 
 
 VI 
 
 Watching her from the doorway, McGregor saw her arms 
 descend and fold before her breast. Her attitude was that 
 of a mother nursing. . . . 
 
 VII 
 
 The Daily Spy printed the news about Andy, the first boy 
 from its town to win the cross, and printed also the general s 
 words accompanying that decoration : 
 
 "Private Andrew McK. Brown, Americus, Pa. Infantry. 
 At Mirande-la-Faloise . . . displayed distinguished bravery 
 in going to the assistance of his fatally wounded captain and 
 carrying that officer, under heavy shell-fire, to a field-hospital." 
 
VICTORIOUS 403 
 
 "I can t believe it," a suddenly sobered Minnie Taylor con 
 fided to everybody. She was engaged to a sergeant at Camp 
 Meade. "And just to think it was me sent Andy over there !" 
 
 For the generous little town buzzed with pride, and Andy 
 was become a hero, and Sarah the mother of one. Babe 
 Campbell rang her door-bell and wiped his eyes with his 
 roughened knuckles as he told her how he minded the time 
 Andy helped him arrest three Hungarian chicken-thieves. 
 Kepler cried; Lawyer Dickey refused remuneration for 
 straightening out the deeds to the Tidd house and wrote her 
 a very much scrawled letter in Websterian periods; Colonel 
 Eskessen sent a note that said only "We re proud of Andy and 
 weep with you"; Doctor Dawson called, and Doctor Patrick 
 asked if he couldn t prescribe something, and the girls of the 
 Eacket Store dispatched two dozen American Beauties, bought 
 in Doncaster. 
 
 Oddly, also, with the passing of Andy, there passed Sarah s 
 social ostracism. The church-people called, and the Blun- 
 ston girls. Everybody that was anybody called and hoped that, 
 when the proper time came, Sarah would return these visits. 
 Mrs. Bolingbroke called and cried and sincerely wanted to re 
 sign the chairmanship of the Americus Chapter of the Eed 
 Cross in Sarah s favor. And, finally, a big memorial-service 
 was planned to be held in the Opera House, at which the 
 senior judge of the Doncaster County Court was to preside ; a 
 speech was to be made by the junior Pennsylvania senator, 
 and the Bishop of Harrisburg was to pronounce the benedic 
 tion. The Daily Spy, at McGregor s suggestion, had seen to 
 all this, and it was then that Ralph Bolingbroke would make 
 an announcement : how Andy s mother, who had lent the Tidd 
 house to the Red Cross for the duration of the war, would, 
 immediately thereafter, give it outright to the town as a free 
 club for returned soldiers and the young fellows of Americus ; 
 how Mr. B. Frank McGregor contributed a check for twenty- 
 five thousand dollars toward its support, and how Blunston 
 and Ralph himself headed a list of citizens pledging substan 
 tial annual subscriptions to the upkeep of this Andrew Mc- 
 Kinley Brown Memorial Community Center. 
 
404 VICTORIOUS 
 
 VIII 
 
 Even Blunston began to see that Andy had not died in vain. 
 At first, Drew, through whom the boy had gone abroad, felt 
 as if it was his hand that had killed him. In spite of his inti 
 mate acquaintance with war, this death seemed only a piece of 
 reckless waste. He felt it as one feels the ruin of some deli 
 cate mechanism, the irretrievable destruction of a dead in 
 ventor s only model for a useful device, the wanton slaughter 
 of a shade-tree. All that buoyant spirit had been spilled upon 
 the winds, that source of cheerful energy and resourcefulness 
 scattered, the very soul of it blotted out. There would be left 
 but a day on the calendar, a house with a name above its door, 
 and the brief memory of man. 
 
 Yet that mood did not last. Gradually, he recaptured 
 Andy s vision, saw that no man died wastefully who gave his 
 life toward the death of autocracy, saw that he, Blunston, and 
 thousands of others would have to fight insidious autocracy 
 at home as Andy had helped to fight the open manifestation 
 of it abroad, remembered The Lesson of the War, joined in 
 McGregor s plan for an exposure of the evils done and 
 studied the soul of Andy s mother. 
 
 IX 
 
 And Sarah? 
 
 Had she wondered how the sky could be so blue ? Had she 
 pictured the dying boy that sent her his love, the baby that she 
 had nursed and a German killed ? 
 
 Nobody ever knew. What people observed was only that she 
 learned to say without tears much that few could have said 
 and not broken down ; that she could even talk calmly of that 
 distant day when the bodies of America s fallen should come 
 home again and aver that she would let her tree lie where it 
 had fallen. 
 
 In Andy s death, she had learned the kindliness of the 
 friendly town that she had so long feared as unkindly and 
 hated as an enemy. He would never have been contented not 
 to do his whole duty, as a man and a citizen; doing that, he 
 
VICTORIOUS 405 
 
 had opened her eyes. It was the end of her, but she realized 
 that it was the beginning of things infinitely more important 
 than was she. While those things grew, Andy showed her 
 love, and love was God. The Cause was not only bigger than 
 its mistakes : it was bigger than its sacrifices. 
 
 One evening, when the street was full of working men go 
 ing to their waiting homes after a day of labor well rewarded, 
 she took away that silken banner which Drew Blunston had 
 given her. Prom Andy s untouched attic-room, from the silent 
 company of the thumbed books, the now broken tennis-racket 
 and the dusty dance-programs strung across the mirror, 
 she brought his boyhood box of paints and sat down to a slow 
 task. Then in the front window she rehung the service-flag. 
 
 It bore a golden star. . . . 
 
 On the cloud-laden morning of Monday, the eleventh of No 
 vember, 1918, that portion of the American front along the 
 hills beyond Mirande-la-Faloise was, until eleven o clock, as 
 active as it had been during every day of the preceding week. 
 Explosions tore the air. Great clouds of dust and smoke leaped 
 up from the hills opposite, where the enemy lay entrenched. 
 The air was thick with war and death. The opposing lines 
 were within easy rifle-range of each other; to lift one s head 
 an inch above a parapet was to die. 
 
 On the stroke of the hour, however, there fell a sudden still 
 ness. To the ears of the combatants, long inured to the 
 brazen din of battle, that stillness was momentarily more awe 
 some than the fiercest bombardment. 
 
 Then, from the American trenches, there rose, at first un 
 certain, but steadily gaining force and assurance, a cheer. 
 
 It was faintly echoed from the farther hills. 
 
 There was a pause. Heads appeared above the American 
 parapets heads unhelmeted. 
 
 "Upon the horizon silhouettes leaped up, and tossed their 
 empty arms in the jubilant air. 
 
 The hour was the hour of the signing of the armistice. 
 The war had ended. 
 
406 VICTOKIOUS 
 
 XI 
 
 That evening, all along the line, lights were visible from 
 the ruined villages for the first time since the summer of 1914 : 
 they were the candles lighted by celebrating soldiers and such 
 of the inhabitants as remained there. In a broken window of 
 the sole wall of the Inn of the Lilies that remained upstand 
 ing, an Ameriran soldier and a tall, full-bosomed French girl 
 had just ignited a single taper. The light showed the Croix 
 de Guerre on Chrissly Shuman s breast; in Leonie s dusky 
 cheeks it showed the red rose of joy. 
 
 She seized his arm in both her hands. Her flashing eyes 
 were wet. 
 I "Mais, je suis louleversee" she murmured. 
 
 Chrissly smiled. "Me, too," he said. He spoke in his un 
 accented French. "You must remember that you ve only been 
 back here for half an hour, and I don t know yet how you got 
 away from those Heinies that took you in the fight here." 
 
 "It was very simple" Leonie regarded him with the clear 
 eyes of an animal : "I killed them." 
 
 On the whole, it seemed better to pass by the details of 
 that. "And then?" asked Chrissly. 
 
 "Then, since I could not find you here, I went back to 
 the other village and the other inn where we first met." 
 
 They were leaning beside the gutting candle and looking 
 through the broken window. A glow was visible from the 
 American trenches and, on the dark sky, could be seen the 
 reflection of another glow from trenches still more distant: 
 the trenches of those who, for more than four long years, had 
 been the world s enemies. Toward that reflection Chrissly 
 pointed. 
 
 "It s Gotterdammerung " he said. 
 
 "That is a Boche word," said Leonie, her dark brows con 
 tracting. "What does it mean?" 
 
 "It means," averred Chrissly his interpretation of the 
 word was more from the sound than from his knowledge of 
 its sense "it means the end of idols." 
 
 He slipped an arm about her waist and drew her toward 
 
VICTORIOUS 407 
 
 him. Her brown eyes, limpid and wondering, looked into 
 his. Against him her firm breasts panted. 
 
 "It means a new world, mon cher" she said. Her firm teeth 
 flashed white behind the red of her parted lips. "America 
 gives France a new world and you give it to me, hein?" 
 
 He bent his face to hers. 
 
 "I guess we ve won, somehow: democracy and such things 
 have/ said Chrissly. 
 
 Leonie waved a free hand toward a crimsoned sky. "Not 
 somehow. I think I can see Ste. Jeanne up there ; I believe 
 well that she has been fighting for us always." 
 
 Her lover hesitated. Her mention of the Maid had touched 
 his memory. "Yes," he said at last, "it s cost a lot, and those 
 who wasted have got to pay not only the Boche, but those 
 who helped the Boche because they didn t help us." He gave 
 his eyes to her again. "But it was Andy told me when he 
 died you remember Andy Brown? The Cause is bigger 
 than its mistakes. There s ruin everywhere" he glanced 
 about the ruin of the inn "but we ll rebuild." 
 
 Leonie, with a stifled cry, drew his face to hers: 
 
 "We will rebuild together." 
 
 THE END 
 
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