“Lieutenant Haslett, Sir,” replied Captain Saunders.
“Who in the devil asked for him?” came from the inside.
“Sir,” said my godfather, “he was included in the list sent down by Headquarters.”
“Well! Is he there now?” said the power within.
“Yes, sir, right with me now,” was the reply, and I began to pull down my blouse and otherwise mill around in preparation for my entrance, for this last question was encouraging.
“Well,” came the growl, after a discomforting hesitation, “I don’t want to see him. I’m writing a letter to my wife and I can’t be bothered.”
I felt about as welcome as a skunk in a public park. In all my military experience I cannot remember anything that really hurt me so much. I wanted like a starving man wants food, to be a plain buck private in the Infantry, for this was the most inconsiderate sort of a bruise; it hurt me more, of course, because I was an officer and was wearing my pride on my coat sleeve. The only thing that bolstered me up was the fact that I had finally gotten to the American front and I was willing to sacrifice practically anything to stay there, but I certainly realized that the man who put the “boiled” in “hardboiled” was no other than Major Lewis H. Brereton.
At noon I saw Brereton for the first time. Some one was kind enough to point him out to me, and I remember thinking at the time, “How can a pleasant-faced youngster like that be so hardboiled?”
That afternoon, around three o’clock, “Deac” Saunders said we would again attempt to get an audience, and just as he introduced me, for some reason, Saunders was called away, and I had no friend to sponsor my cause before a hard judge. Brereton had just finished his after-dinner nap and was in the act of dressing in flying clothes to take a little flight around the field, so being in a hurry, he began throwing out snappy questions at me, as if trying to establish a record in getting rid of me. He lost no time in continuing his dressing, and did not even ask me to sit down or to allow me to relax from my painfully rigid position of Attention.
“What’s your name?” he commanded.