By this time they had traversed a plainly marked road which led along the end of a field bordering the woods, and Jimmy complained bitterly of its evidence. “We’ve made that road since we came here. It’ll show up plain on their photographs and show a lot of circulation here.... You can see they’ve been droppin’ shells on it now.”
They entered the denseness of the woods to find it teeming with American soldiery who occupied the quiet of the day in enlarging and making more comfortable the makeshift dugouts they inhabited.... These were not such dugouts as Kendall had seen described in books about the war; they were such affairs as he had made himself when he was a boy and called “coojees,” where he had played robber and baked potatoes. They were hastily dug and as hastily covered with a mat of boughs and a layer of earth—flimsy sanctuaries, able to shelter from spraying shrapnel, but of no effect whatever against explosive shell.
Suddenly an invisible seventy-five was discharged almost at Kendall’s elbow, and Jimmy laughed to see his friend’s reaction to the unexpected sound. They parted the bushes and examined the beautiful little gun—that weapon which one may almost say has been the salvation of France!
A captain of artillery issued belligerently from a timbered dugout and confronted Martin. “Say,” he demanded, “you’re the ding-donged Intelligence officer that had me pinched the other night. Ain’t you?”
“Oh, was it you? Sorry. The boys are sort of stirred up about spies. They didn’t savvy you. When a strange officer comes poking around these woods looking for a place to light and asking oodles of questions about whether there’s artillery here and such like, somethin’s goin’ to happen. A couple of boys came rushin’ up to me to ask what to do, and I told them to pinch you. This place is full of spy rumors. Everybody’s seein’ them. The doughboy that hasn’t seen somethin’ darn mysterious and suspicious in the last twenty-four hours is hard to find.”
“Forget it. I was some lost. Should have reported before I came down.”
“Where was it they got Lieutenant Small last night?”
“Down this path about a hundred yards. His horse is there yet.”
Kendall and Martin walked that way. Under a shelter of boughs stood the handsome horse of which the dead lieutenant had been so fond; he stood quietly switching his tail and nibbling the leaves about him, all unconscious that his back would never again bear the weight of a gentle master.... And thirty feet away was the spot where Small had met his death, met it because he had scorned the shelter of a dugout, but with his French orderly had slept on the surface of the earth, with no shelter except a lean-to of brushwood.... On the surrounding bushes were gruesome shreds....
So this was war at last! On this spot a man had been killed by the enemy and the blood of him was not yet dry!... Somehow it convinced Kendall that he was at the front, that there was actual danger where he stood. He was experiencing the thing he had come to France hoping to experience.... And yet it was difficult to feel the fact. He had fancied the line of battle to be a constant tumult, horrible with tremendous showers of bursting shells and glorious with charges and defenses. In its stark actuality it was quite different. Affairs were gone about nonchalantly and methodically. Even the artillerymen who sent a shell now and then at some target they could not see served their guns in a bored manner.