The coffin with the great flag burning in blue and scarlet was lowered into the grave. Slowly, with perfect expression, a bugler blew the poignant, unforgettable notes of Taps. The rifles of the firing squad cracked sharply; three volleys, it was over.
“Will they leave him there?” An old Frenchwoman asked one of the boys afterwards.
“’Till the war is over, then likely they will send him home.”
“But why? He won’t be lonely here. There will always be some one to put flowers on his grave.”
Tonight I was talking to the Supply Sergeant about the lad.
“I think he died of a broken heart as much as anything,” he told me. “They wouldn’t let his mother see him at the dock when we sailed. She came to say good-bye but it was against the rules. He never could get over that; he kept brooding all the time and fretting for her. I read some of her letters to him. They seemed more like a sweetheart’s than a mother’s.”
The doctors, however, diagnosed his disease as spinal meningitis. They have ordered the barracks in which he slept to be quarantined. Already a half a dozen boys in quarantine have taken to their beds, but this we hope is largely due to over-stimulated imaginations. Even if the disease doesn’t spread, however, I am wondering what will become of ninety-seven lively boys bottled up for two weeks in one barracks. Already various ones have eluded the guard and come sneaking furtively into the canteen to buy their cigarettes and chocolates. Whenever one of these unfortunates is recognized a regular howl goes up all over the hut.
“Outside! You’re one of the crumby ones!” they jeer, or; “Convict! Get back to your cell!”
Bourmont, December 28.
The worst of my job is playing dragon to the French children. In view of the fact that if allowed in the hut at all they swarm in, in such numbers as to fairly overrun it, and pester the boys with their insatiable appeals for “goom” and chocolate, it has seemed best to make a strict rule against their admission. (Besides which I don’t approve of giving them gum, for in the face of anything one can do or say they will insist on swallowing it, which is, I’m sure, not at all good for their tummies!) But in spite of this prohibition the place holds an irresistible attraction for them. At night one can often see their faces pressed flat against the isinglass windows as they peer inside; while chiefly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons they will slip slyly in, and then if the dragon isn’t on the jump to explain to each and every one in her very best French, that she is so sorry but it really is forbidden, why in a twinkling the hut becomes full of them. And they are so picturesque, so appealing, so full of shy wonder at the gramophone with the wheel that “marches by itself” that it is very hard to turn them out.