“They’re going right down into it. God help them! Why does it have to be?”
A French officer encountered us, asked us politely if we wouldn’t like to step down into a dugout. I was amused at his manner which was as casual as if he were offering us an umbrella in a shower. There were some excellent dugouts up on the hill-side he assured us. “But I don’t want to go into a dugout!” “Mademoiselle a beaucoup d’esprit,” he observed, “mais ce n’est pas prudent.” Obediently we climbed the hill, to come upon a little group of Americans gathered about the entrance to a dugout, watching the shells as they came over. Taking a peep into the dugout I found it had already been patronized by several poilus. We sat on the ground and watched the shelling. On the other side of the town we could see Company H flung out in skirmish line, marching over the open fields.
Presently a boy in olive drab came panting and laughing up the hill. The group welcomed him with a shout. He was one of the billeting detail. They had been staying in a house at the cross-roads. When the others had gone out this morning he had been left to clean up and get dinner. He had washed all the dishes, he told us, and had just gone out and bought a basketful of eggs to make an omelette for dinner, when crash! the first shell had fallen demolishing the house next to theirs. He had stepped out to look at the ruins and returned, when bang! went the house on the other side of him! He began to think it might be time for him to move, when, oh boy! zowie! a shell had wrecked the upper story of the billet over him. Then he had left. But he was feeling very badly about those eggs. Corporal G. also of the billeting detail looked at him with widened eyes. “And I was half a mind to stay upstairs in bed and not get up this morning!” he remarked. The boys found solace for the loss of the omelette in the thought that all the effects of the very unpopular captain billeted next door must surely have been annihilated.
After an hour or so the shelling stopped. One by one blue forms emerged from the dugouts. The Chief had ordered the flivver to report at eleven. It was noon and it hadn’t appeared.
“We must walk to Rattentout,” said the Chief. “No use our staying here.”
It was hot and dusty and my helmet weighed like a mountain on my head, but at last we made it. Some two miles or so from Dugny we passed two marines sitting in discouraged postures by the roadside.
“What’s the matter?”
“He’s had a fit,” growled one of the warriors, jerking his thumb in the direction of his comrade’s back.
“He has ’em. They never ought ter let him come.”
There was nothing we could offer them but sympathy.