"'Tis me first dicoration, darlin'," he whispered; and it was not the ocean water now that blinded him.
Just as the red sun dipped that night the patrol boat picked up the last piece of human wreckage, and dashed toward the coast of France.
CHAPTER IX
Barrow's unit had suffered sorely, but its gaps were filled from other sources and fresh supplies received from home. Close upon the middle of August it moved to take the field. This delay had not been without advantages, perhaps the chief of which was a fluency in French that many of his men were able to acquire. It had also given Jeb an opportunity to acquire an entirely new viewpoint regarding the purposes of this war, which had not penetrated to Hillsdale.
As the train now proceeded slowly, switching here and there to let other strings of cars pass toward the front with more important freight, Jeb felt that he was at last nearing the great adventure. His experience with the submarine left an indelible effect without producing anything like the result Tim would have desired. For Jeb had been involuntarily projected into that crisis before being given time to think; he had gone with the stream, not buoyed by courage but spurred by despair. Once tossed into the hideous vortex, he simply had to get out—which was vastly different from deliberately going into it with eyes ahead, as now when he approached the battle front! Nevertheless, the torture he faced upon the floating box, although unknown to him, left an impress for the good.
As he sat uncomfortably drawn up on the seat of a third-class compartment he missed Tim, and wondered dully if the regiment, which that little son of Mars had said was waiting for him—at attention!—could now be in the thick of things. He pictured Tim chasing Germans with the same dogged nerve that he had chased and caught the murderer of the little nurse. As evening fell, battle scenes grew vivid in the twilit compartment, because he was thinking again! Whenever speeding trains passed, their approaching rumbles would make him start, and leave him sick in spirit; for each time he would at first mistake them for the growling of distant guns, and he dreaded the hour when these sounds would reach him. He despised the thought of guns, despised the military trains, despised the war, the blood and maiming;—he despised himself. He needed Tim!
"Is there anything on your mind, old fellow?" one of the unit asked him kindly.
"Oh, no," he forced himself to laugh. "Have a cigarette, won't you?"
Early next morning, after an almost sleepless night, the unit disembarked at a village standing as a solitary outpost on the edge of a great unknown wilderness. Beyond this point the railroad, even civilization, had been paralyzed by the dragon that fed upon humanity. If Jeb expected the villagers to be out in force to greet Barrow's unit, he was disappointed; for, with the exception of a crippled man laboriously pushing a cart, a nun who with bowed head came from one doorway and hurried into another, and a bent old woman struggling to take down the night shutters from her shop window, the place might have been deserted. On the far side of his train, however, where he had not looked, a group of soldiers lounged about their wagons waiting to take these passengers of mercy forward; unshaven chaps they were, well meriting the nickname of poilus—"the hairy ones."