"And he says, 'English, don't you bother about that. You join up with this here battalion, because when we leave for France we're going to kiss good-bye to them horses forever. This here battalion is going to be motorised.'
"And now here we are in France, and we still got horses, and they don't like me and I don't like them, and yet I got to mill around with 'em every day. The Germans ain't never going to kill me. They ain't going to get a chance. They just going to find me trampled to death some morning down in that stable."
Two or three of the occupants of nearby beds had arisen and taken seats on English's bed. They joined the conversation. One red-headed youngster, wearing heavy flannel underwear in lieu of pajamas, made the first contribution to the discussion.
"That's just what I'm beefing about," he said. "Here I've been in this army two months now and I'm still a private. There ain't no chance here for a guy that's got experience."
"Experience? Where do you get that experience talk?" demanded English. "What do you know about artillery?"
"That's just what I mean, experience," the red-headed one replied with fire. "I got experience. Mr. Gibbons knows me. I'm from Chicago, the same as he is. I worked in Chicago at Riverview Park. I'm the guy that fired the gattling gun in the Monitor and Merrimac show—we had two shows a day and two shows in the evening and——"
"Kin you beat that," demanded English. "You know, if this here red-headed guy don't get promotion pretty quick, he's just simply going to quit this army and leave us flat here in France facing the Germans.
"Let me tell you about this gattling gun expert. When they landed us off of them boats down on the coast, the battalion commander turned us all loose for a swim in the bay, and this here bird almost drowned. He went down three times before we could pull him out.
"Now, if they don't make him a Brigadier General pretty quick, he's going to get sore and put in for a transfer to the Navy on the grounds of having submarine experience. But he's right in one thing—experience don't count for what it should in the army.
"Right here in our battery we got a lot of plough boys from Kansas that have been sitting on a plough and looking at a horse's back all their lives, and they got them handling the machinery on these here guns. And me, who knows everything there is to know about machinery, they won't let me even find out which end of the cannon you put the shell in and which end it comes out of. All I do all day long is to prod around a couple of fat-hipped hayburners. My God, I hate horses."