“Halt! Order arms!”
Then, quite coolly, he turned his back upon the enemy—for the first and last time—whipped out his camera, called upon his men not to move, and proceeded to take a leisurely snapshot of his company while shells were falling all around.
The men were astonished, but the officer’s purpose was served. The company was steadied, and the boys, from the top of a supply wagon, watched them go gallantly to work. Sad to relate, the watchers also saw the gallant officer fall soon afterward, struck on the head by a fragment of shell.
“I tell you, General Sherman was right in what he said about war.” Billy was very positive in this expression of opinion.
On that day of fearful fighting the boys saw an entire German regiment perish in the rush of water which swept through the trenches after the Allies had destroyed the dikes; they saw hundreds of men and horses electrocuted on the heavily charged wire entanglements before the trenches.
At nightfall Billy and Henri, heartsick with the horror of it all, crawled under the wagon cover and fought nightmares through the long hours before another day.
It was raining in torrents when the boys peeped through the tear in the wagon shelter early the next morning, and it had turned sharply cold. The roar of the batteries had slackened for the time being, and it was a welcome moment for Billy and Henri, who on the day previous had heard more gunpowder racket than ever they did on all the Fourths of July they had ever known rolled into one.
Stepping out gingerly into the mud, the boys looked around for their friendly guardian, Sergeant Scott. He was nowhere to be seen among the few soldiers in khaki uniforms and woolen caps moving about among the wagons. They soon learned that the sergeant had made a capture during the night of one of the enemy’s secret agents who had penetrated the lines for the purpose of cutting telephone wires. The spy or sniper carried cutters and a rifle. From behind the lines with the rifle he had been shooting at men passing to and fro, but when he ventured inside with the cutters the sergeant nabbed him, though the invader was cleverly disguised in British outfit. Both captor and captive were up-field at an “interview,” from which only the sergeant returned.
When he observed the boys shivering in their tracks, Sergeant Scott called to a teamster to fetch a blanket from one of the wagons. Borrowing a knife from the teamster, the sergeant slashed the big army blanket in two in the middle, doubled each fold and made two slits in the top.
“Jump into these, my Jackies,” he ordered; “shove your arms through. Now you won’t catch a frog in your lungs, and you’re swell enough to make a bet on the races. Come along and tighten your belts with something in the way of rations.”