The orchestra played on, every brain fitting the words to the notes:
“Over there, over there,
Send the word over there,
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.
So prepare, say a pray’r,
Send the word, send the word to beware,
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
Slowly the curtain rose on a scene that much looking in the last few months at photographs and picture papers had made familiar to them—a French town, the kind they knew the boys were billeted in, with its long row of gray-faced houses, its red-tiled roofs, its quaint church with its simple, very simple statue of Joan of Arc; and behind, rising perpetually, mountains, along which ran a highway, climbing up and up. A company of boys in khaki swarmed over the place. They were resting on their arms, waiting orders. They hung out of the windows, sat in the doorways, grouped carelessly in the roadway, swarmed over the pedestal up to the very feet of the figure of Joan.