The scout officer swore, inexpertly, for he was not a profane fellow, but with infinite feeling. “Good God, I hope it ain’t—If you can keep my coffee hot, Tommie—Be right back as soon as I can. Save my slum. Don’t let anything happen to my slum—” The words trailed in the air as he went swiftly off, buckling his pistol-belt. The battalion commander was that kind of an officer.
The lieutenant growled in sympathy: “Somebody’s always takin’ the joy out of life. Jim, he’s hungry as I am, an’ that’s as hungry as a bitch wolf. That’s the trouble with this war stuff; man misses too many meals.” He took the cooking from the fire and replaced the lids on the little alcohol-cans with care. Canned heat was quite hard to come by; the Boche was much better provided with it; he was indebted for this to a deceased German gentleman, and it was the last he had.
“No tellin’ what the old man wants. Glad I ain’t a scout officer. This war’s hard on Jim—he takes it too serious. I’ll wait, though.” Absently he drank the tomato juice left in the can. He tried his coffee, and burned his mouth. “Wish I had the man here that invented this aluminum canteen cup! Time the damn cup’s cool enough so you won’t burn the hide off yo’ lip, the coffee’s stone cold.” Then, later: “Not boiled enough. Jim, he’s used to bein’ waited on—never make a rustler, he won’t....
“Well, he’s long in comin’. Old man sent him forward to make a map or something, most prob’ly.” He tasted the slum. “That Tompkins! Why the hell he had to stop one—only man I ever knew that could make this monkey-meat taste like anything! And he goes and gets bumped off. Hell! That’s the way with these kids. This needs an onion.”
“He takes the war too serious.”
He ate half the mess, with scrupulous exactness, and drank his coffee. He put the lid on the mess-kit, and covered Jim’s coffee, now getting cold. He smoked a cigarette and talked shop with his platoon sergeant. He gave some very hard words and his last candle-end to a pale private who admitted blistered heels, and then stood over the man while he tallowed his noisome socks. He interviewed his chaut-chaut gunners, and sent them off to beg new clips from the battalion quartermaster sergeant. It grew into the long French twilight; Boche planes were about, and all the anti-aircraft stuff in the neighborhood was furiously in action. Strolling back to his hole, the lieutenant observed that the pale private had resumed his shoes and was rolling his puttees with a relieved look. At this moment the nose-cap of a 75 came whimpering and hirpling down out of the heavens and gutted the fellow.... When that was cleaned up, the lieutenant lay in his hole, weighing the half-empty mess-kit in his hands, and trusted that nothing unseemly had happened to Jim. He thought of going up to battalion to see what was doing—but the major liked for you to stay with your men, unless he sent for you.... “Well! Might as well get some sleep....”
Toward dark the Boche began to slam 77s and 150s into the Wood northwest of Lucy. It became a place of horror, with stark cries in the night, between the rending crashes of the shells. About an hour before midnight the word was passed and the two companies got out and went up across the pestilential wheat-fields and into the Bois de Belleau.
That same afternoon an unassigned colonel had come up to Brigade Headquarters. Wanted to go to Paris, he did, and the brigade commander said that the only way to get there was to bring in a prisoner. One prisoner; seven days’ leave. Be glad to get a prisoner. Intelligence had word of a new division or so moved in over there last night; identification not yet positive.
This colonel took steps. He was a man of parts and very desirous of the fleshpots of the Place de l’Opéra. There was an elegant French captain attached to brigade for no very evident reason—just attached—spoke English and knew vintages. Said to be an expert on raids. The colonel put it up to him in such and such a way: would he go? Yes, but certainly. Just a small raid, my colonel? Oh, a very small raid. Now, as to artillery support—a map was broken out.