In the mid-afternoon of an August day Thaine Aydelot heard the bugle note calling the troops to marching order. Thaine was fond of the bugler, a little fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Kemper, because he remembered that Asher Aydelot had been a drummer boy once when he was no older than “Little Kemper,” as the regiment called him.
“I wish you were where my father is now, Kemper,” Thaine said as the boy skipped by him.
“Where’s that? It can’t be hell or he’d be with us,” Little Kemper replied.
“No, he’s in Kansas,” Thaine said.
“Oh, that’s right next door to heaven, but I can’t go just yet. There’s too much doing here,” the little bugler declared as he hurried away.
Young as he was, Little Kemper was the busiest member of the regiment. Life with him was a continual “doing” and he did it joyously and well.
“There’s something doing here.” Thaine hardly had 367 time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of dreadful warfare.
As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley’s patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch. And even in the face of such big things as he was on his way to meet the conquest of the prairie soil seemed wonderful.
Big things were waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. Not wonderful in numbers, for there were only sixteen thousand of the allied armies, all told, to pit themselves against an armed force able to line up one hundred and sixteen thousand against them. Not numbers, but varying nationalities, varying races, strange confusion of tongues, with one common purpose binding all into one body, made the company forming on the banks of the Peiho a wonderful one.
Thaine’s regiment was drawn up at an angle with the line, ready to fall into its place among the reserves, and the young Kansan watched the flower of the world’s soldiery file along the way. 368