Everybody has a little pet trouble of his own these days. The A. R. has its share and more of them. Lieutenant C. recounted some of his tonight. He had been carrying the dangerous explosives over beyond the woods to the west of the town where they were being blown off. Then the French Town Major had called.
It wouldn’t do, he said, to blow off the ammunition there any more; there were sick people in the town and the explosions fairly made them jump right up out of their beds. And really one couldn’t blame them. So then the Lieutenant had switched to the north, over beyond the narrow-gauge, only to be promptly visited by a furious delegation of engineers. Whether it was because proper precautions hadn’t been taken or what I don’t know, whatever the case, in the course of the explosions a large rock had made a gaping hole in the roof of A. S. No. 9 and narrowly missed one of my good friends the operators. The complaint of the engineers was shortly followed by an indignant ultimatum from the Captain at Abainville who is in charge of the railway. Unless the explosions were forthwith stopped, he threatened, no more trains would be run on the road. On top of all this the Colonel of artillery must call the Lieutenant to account. The boys whom he arrested New Year’s night had been shooting off their rifles. The shells must have come from the dump. Since it was Lieutenant C.’s dump, it was his business to keep his shells in their proper places. Therefore Lieutenant C. was responsible for the shooting.
I don’t know just how the matter has been arranged with the Captain at Abainville, but the explosions beyond the tracks have been going on all day. Latest reports testify that that roof of A. S. No. 9 is riddled like a sieve with stone-holes and that the cook, who never was known to be a religious man, spends all his time beneath the table praying.
Two of the ordnance boys have been badly burned while setting off the explosions, and the whole detachment is sore and disheartened because they are being worked so hard in the mud and rain and their Sunday holiday denied them. Special details from the artillery are being sent to work at the dump every day in order to hasten the work of destruction, but these boys, too, are sullen and rebellious. They have been used to handling shells at the front, they say, and they consider it an indignity to have to handle them here in the dump as if they, forsooth, belonged to the ordnance! And so the work goes none too quickly. Everyone has been instructed to keep a particular lookout for German delay fuses, those deadly little infernal machines, which can be set, according to the strength of the acid which eats through the spring, to explode any time between a week and six months. They are disguised cleverly to look exactly like ordinary percussion fuses, the only betraying mark being a tiny six pointed star on the nose. Several have already been found planted in dumps which contained captured German ammunition, and the tale runs through camp that some have been discovered here, although this I rather suspect is just another army rumor.
Tonight one of the ordnance boys hobbled into the hut, his left foot swathed in bandages; a shell had fallen on a toe and crushed it. I attempted to sympathize.
“Don’t waste any of your sympathy on me,” he retorted, “I’m the luckiest feller you know. There ain’t a man in camp who don’t envy me.”
As for me, I am having a few pet troubles too. One of these is concerned with the army dentist at Gondrecourt. And this is all in consequence of the kind operators at A. S. No. 9 and their Christmas chocolates, for among those chocolates was a caramel and,—well that candy was made in Switzerland and so was probably pro-German anyway.
Yesterday I had to witness the harrowing spectacle of a stalwart doughboy being separated from a tooth. When the ghastly business was over he shook himself.
“I’ve been over the top,” he declared, “and got filled up with machine-gun bullets,”—he was wearing two wound stripes,—“but I’ll tell the world them bullets weren’t nothin’ to that tooth!”
But the chief of my troubles is the hut lighting problem. So far, I have not been able to get any response to my petition for an electric lighting system. Our fine carbide lamps are a frank fizzle, our candles are all gone, we have nothing but a few lanterns and small oil lamps. Every day someone breaks my heart by breaking another lamp chimney, and new ones, alas! are not to be had for love or money in this part of France. Moreover the boys have developed a most inconvenient habit of walking off with the lamps. At first I said in exasperation; “Well, let them take them! As soon as the oil burns out they’ll find the lamps aren’t any use to them.” But I didn’t reckon on their Yankee ingenuity. They are smart enough, it seems, to bring back the empty ones, and exchange them for filled ones, every evening!