III
The Americans were “doing things” in France. The German steam-roller had smashed head-on into another steam-roller and the second steam-roller had not been the one reduced to pig iron.
“We’re givin’ ’em hell!” informed the Stevens man. “Consulate here got a long wire this morning. We’re hangin’ our dirty shirts on the Hindenburg line and pepperin’ Chinless Willy’s pants with buckshot so he looks like a country signboard.”
“Down where we were, not a word’s come through since the fuss at Château-Thierry. Won that, didn’t we?”
“Won it? Won it? Think the Yanks come across to hold a tea party, maybe? God! They’re only stoppin’ the slaughter o’ Huns when their rifles get hot and plug. This war’s goin’ to be over by Christmas, I’d almost be willin’ to bet by Thanksgiving. I hear there was one time they ordered the Yanks to retire but the order to retire couldn’t catch up with ’em fast enough so they used it to wipe German blood off their pants. And went out and killed a few thousand more before supper just to call it a day! You been out here since it first started, ain’t you?”
“Wiley and I came up a year ago last July. A year ago last July! Fellows, it seems like—it seems like—eighteen years!”
They were very sober. They understood.
“And what do you hear from America—home?”
They told him all they had heard from America and—home.
At eleven o’clock that night, Nathan was still talking.
“——in those get-away trains from Moscow the poor devils were even hanging to the locomotives—like flies—some standing on the red-hot piston boxes, gripping the cow-catchers. They slammed us into a freight car and locked us in—pitch dark!—men and women, Lord it didn’t make any difference who or what we were!—two hundred and twenty-one of us slammed in a tepluska, crammed so tightly we couldn’t raise our hands to our shoulders—twenty-four hours of it—agony just standing up, and when we couldn’t stand up any longer we just sagged on those about us—they took out seventy-eight corpses when they finally unlocked the door and let us out—rode with a dead woman pushed so hard into my right side her cold body hurt my ribs—she was a well-dressed woman too; her fur boa kept tickling my ear—and the typhus down there! What do you hear from the Red Cross? Any trains come out this way?”
“Doc Seaver and Cleeve are headed this way with a train. The Consulate expects them some time the last of next week.”
Nathan leaned forward with his face in his hands.
“Thirty million dead in Russia since the bust started—think of it, fellows—thirty million! That’s an awful mass of dead bodies.”
“Yes,” said the Scranton man tersely. And the railroad man observed, “I’m natcherly a peaceable yap. But for once, if they’d lynch that dam’ Kaiser, believe me, I’d pull on the rope!”
“Amen!” said the small man who had not spoken.
“I wonder what the chances are for getting transportation through to Vladivostok? Lord, I’ve got to get through! Those poor devils off there at ‘Cold-belly’ as we called it, are dying like flies, just for bandages and disinfectant.”
“Better go over to the Consulate in the morning and ask Thompson. He’ll know. There’s a he-man.” This from the engineer.
“They run a string of ‘empties’ through to Harbin for supplies about once a week,” added the chap from Scranton. “There’s a consular courier named Roach going out when the next one starts. Maybe you could kick in with him.”