To the truth of a part of what he said I could testify personally, for late that afternoon I had seen the squad marching forward to the spot where they were to line up for the sally later. They had been like schoolboys on a lark. If any one of them was afraid he refused to betray it; if any one of them was nervous at the prospect before him he hid his nervousness splendidly well. Only, from them as they passed us, they radiated a great pride in having been chosen for the job, and a great confidence in its outcome, and a great joy that to them thus early in their soldiering had come the coveted chance to show the stuff that was in them. And while they passed, our friend the major, standing alongside watching them go by, had said with all the fervency of a man uttering a prayer:
“By Jove, aren't they bully! No officer could ask for finer men than that for his outfit. But they're leaving oodles of disappointment behind them at that.”
“How's that?” I asked.
“I'll tell you how,” he said: “Yesterday when the scheme for this thing was completed we were told that forty-five men out of our regiment were to be allowed to take part in tonight's doings. That meant fifteen men out of each battalion. So yesterday evening at parade I broke the glad tidings to my battalion and called for volunteers, first warning the men as a matter of routine that the work would be highly dangerous and no man need feel called upon to offer himself. Do you want to know how many men out of that battalion volunteered? Every single solitary last dog-goned one of them, that's all! They came at me like one man. So to save as much heartburning as possible I left the choice of fifteen out of nearly a thousand to the top sergeants of the companies. And in all your life you never saw fifteen fellows so tickled as the fifteen who were selected, and you never saw nine hundred and odd so downhearted as the lot who failed to get on the list.
“That wasn't all of it, either,” he went on. ''Naturally there were some men who had been off on detail of one sort or another and hadn't been at parade. When they came last night and found out what had happened in their absence—well, they simply raised merry blue hell, that's all. They figured somehow they'd been cheated. As a result I may say that my rest was somewhat broken. Every few minutes, all night long, some boy would break into my room, and in the doorway salute and say, in a broken-hearted way: 'Now look here, major, this ain't square. I got as much right to go over the top as any feller in this regiment has, and just because I happened to be away this evenin' here I am chiselled out of my chance to go along. Can't you please, sir, ask the adjutant or somebody to let me in on this?'
“That substantially was what every one of them said. And when I turned them down some of 'em went away crying like babies.”
He glanced away across the blue hill. “I guess maybe I did a little crying myself.”
I thought about what the major had said and what the colonel had said and what I myself had seen after I had climbed some shaky stairs to be bedded down for the night on a pallet of blankets upon the floor of a room where several tired-out officers already snored away, oblivious of the reverberations of the shelling from our guns and from the enemy's, which went on until nearly daybreak.
In the morning I got insight into another phase of the enlisted Yank's understanding. We came downstairs to breakfast—to a Sunday morning breakfast. For the moment a Sabbath calm hung over the wrecked town and over the country roundabout; all was as peaceful as a Quaker meeting. Red, the colonel's orderly, stood in the doorway picking his teeth. Red is six feet two inches tall, and disproportionately narrow. He is a member of a regiment recruited in the Middle West, but he hails from the Panhandle of Texas, and betrays the fact every time he opens his mouth. At the moment of our approach he was addressing an unseen and presumably a sympathetic listener beyond the threshold:
“Me, I'm, plum' outdone with these here French people,” I heard him drawl. “Here we've been camped amongst 'em fer goin' on four months and they ain't learnt English yet. You'd think they'd want to know how to talk to people in a reg'lar honest-to-God language—but no, seein' seemin'ly not a-tall. I'd be ashamed to be so ignorunt and show it. Course oncet in a while you do run acrost one of 'em that's picked up a word here and there; but that's about all.