“‘Go back,’ he says. ‘Go with these refugee people.’ Everybody was runnin’ away—the fields was full of ’em, dirty and tired, but still runnin’. ‘Go to Paris,’ he says.
“‘But I’m lookin’ for my sistah,’ I says.
“‘She’ll most likely be in Paris. Go quick,’ he says.
“We was standin’ in a poppy field, his battery was firing in fours—pop! pop! pop! pop!—like that. A German ae-reoplane come over like a big bee and dropped a bomb. They screamed and run, everybody did, but the bomb busted and nothin’ come out but powdered lime. Then everybody laughed. But in three minutes more the Germans was a-droppin’ shells all over us. That lime was just a marker.
“They hit my officer friend. ‘Git out,’ he says again to me, ‘Git out quick.’ His fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so bad; hit in the stomach. Then he kind of smiled once and pulled off a poppy flower and held it up to me. ‘Here’s a red poppy—the blood of France,’ he says. ‘Take it as a souvenir, and git out.’
“They got me, though—the Germans did. I was in Mardeevay” (I have no idea what the name of the town was) “when they come in. After all the fightin’ I’d seen I went to sleep in a church, and along come the Germans. They was massacreein’ the people. They wanted to shoot me, too, but one of ’em understood my lingo and he took me to the gen’ral. ‘So you’re an English spy,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll examine you a little bit, and then we’ll have you shot. Good-day,’ he says. Then they drug me into a little room in the town hall and kep’ me there. But next day come a man who spoke You-nited States; he’d been in Birmingham, Alabama—funny, ain’t it, how they travel?—and he found out I wasn’t no spy.
“Then I went to Paris——”
“You went to Paris from inside the German lines?”
Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like smile. “Yes, suh. It wasn’t hard a-tall. I was captured by the French. You see, suh, it ain’t hard to travel about in the war so long as the fightin’ is goin’ on. Them French peesants was captured by the Germans, then captured by the French, then captured by the Germans again, then captured by their own people again. It’s when the armies sits down and quits fightin’ on their feet that you cain’t git around. I could a-gone from Berlin right to Paris through all the fightin’ durin’ the first month of the war, before the battle of the Marne.