“Sure thing I get you,” Phil answered enthusiastically; “that’s a peach of an idea. It’s too bad all the other soldiers of the Allies haven’t got the same idea.”
“How do you know they haven’t?” Tim demanded quickly.
“I don’t know it,” Phil admitted with a smile, for he saw what was coming next.
“A fellow must get this pretty much by himself to make the best kind of soldier,” Tim said, speaking with the convincing manner of a veteran. “I’ve heard young fellows talk about going into battle with the expectation of being killed, but that’s before the bullets begin to fly and the shells begin to burst. The real soldier is never desperate. The minute you get desperate, that minute you are rattled. The soldier who goes into battle expecting to be killed, goes into battle desperate and is soon rattled. Don’t go into battle expecting to be killed; go into battle expecting to kill, kill, kill, and keep on killing.”
“Hooray!” said Phil jocularly. “That’s what I call war philosophy. Get me? War Phil-osophy for a fighting Phil of Philadelphia.”
“Philosophy nothing,” Tim snapped back. “You make me ashamed of your name with your jesting pun. I thought you understood me better than that, Phil. Wartime is no time for philosophy. That’s what got a lot of pacifists into trouble and some of them in prison. They weren’t philosophers enough to realize that you can’t stop to philosophize when somebody is punching you in the nose.”
“Gas masks!” yelled Phil suddenly, and similar cries came from others along the timber-sheltered line.
But the warning was not needed by Tim.
Even as he uttered the last word of his soldier’s common-sense lecture, he caught a faint whiff of mustard. Instinctively he held his breath, and eight seconds later he was inhaling the pure, safe lung-fuel, “canned oxygen,” contained in the reservoir of his mask.