CHAPTER III
Starting a Big Job
LIEUTENANT Herbert Whitcomb stood for a long half minute watching the slowly disappearing Red Cross ambulance. The car merely crept on down the long, straight road, as though the driver were loath to leave his companion of the last twenty-four hours, as indeed he was, for these old Brighton boys, meeting thus on a foreign shore and bent on much the same business, had become closer friends than when at school.
“I wish,” Herbert was thinking, “that Don would get into the army service and could get assigned with me. He’d make a crackerjack of a scrapper; the real thing. But I suppose they’ve got him tied to hospital work.”
Then, after saluting the guard and saying a word or two to an orderly who was waiting to receive or to reject visitors, mostly the latter, the young lieutenant passed inside. Ten minutes later he emerged again with a happy smile on his face and, accompanied by several other men who had also returned to duty after the healing of minor wounds, Herbert Whitcomb led the way to a waiting motor car and presently was speeding away to the fighting front, all of his present companions being assigned, with him, to the Twenty-eighth Division and to a company that had suffered serious depletion because of many violent attacks against the stubborn Hun resistance in the drive beyond Rheims and on the Vesle River.
Herbert was far from being disappointed over the fact that he was not to rejoin his old battalion. Both his major and his captain had been invalided home and could never lead the boys again; several of his comrades-in-arms, among them three old Brighton boys, had been killed or pitiably wounded; there had been such a thinning out of their ranks that nothing but a skeleton of them remained, which must indeed be only depressing, saddening as a reminder. Moreover, this division had now been put in reserve where the American sector joined that of the British and was doing no fighting.
Much rather would the boy take up new duties with new comrades, feeling again the complete novelty of the situation, the test of relative merit, the esprit de corps of personal equation anew. But however glad he was to get back again into the maelstrom of do and dare, a satisfaction inspired both by sense of duty and the love of adventure, he did not welcome the opportunity more than the boys of the —th welcomed him. Before Captain Lowden and First Lieutenant Pondexter received Herbert they had been made acquainted, from Headquarters, with Whitcomb’s record and it meant good example and higher morale for an officer, however young, to be thoroughly respected by the rank and file.
And then, within a few hours back again into the full swing of military precision and custom, the young lieutenant was ready for anything that might or could come.
“The orders are to advance and take up a position on the up slope of that brown field on the other side of this little valley and thus try out the enemy; after which we may go on and attack him. So much from Headquarters. In my opinion the Colonel will say to just go ahead without bothering to try them out.” Thus spoke Captain Lowden at a brief conference of his officers, immediately prior to the line-up after early morning mess. And then he added, by way of sounding the human nature of his under officers:
“What would you say about that, gentlemen?”
Herbert waited until the first lieutenant should express himself. Pondexter was a grave and serious-minded fellow, oldish beyond his years, rather slow of speech, studious, thoughtful, austere.