Just before night fell, we all set to work cutting pine branches, and with the tips prepared soft beds for ourselves. Sentries were placed, one man per section, and we laid ourselves down to sleep. The night passed quietly; again the day started with the usual hot coffee and bread. Soup and stew at 10 A.M., and the same again at 4 P.M. One more quiet night, and quiet the following day. We were becoming somewhat restless with the monotony, but were cheered by the captain. That night, he told us, we should return to Suippes, and there reform the regiment and rest. The programme sounded good, but I felt very doubtful, we had heard the same tale so many times and so many times we had been disappointed. Each day the corvées had brought the same news from the kitchen. At least twenty times different telephonists and agents de liaison had brought the familiar story. The soup corvées assured us that the drivers of the rolling kitchens had orders to hitch up and pull out toward Souain and Suippes. The telephonists had listened to the order transmitted over the wires. The agents de liaison had overheard the major telling other officers that he had received marching orders, and, 'ma foi! each time each one was wrong!' So, after all, I was not much disappointed when the order came to unmake the sacks.

We stayed that night and all day, and when the order to march the next evening came, all of us were surprised, including the captain. I was with the One Hundred and Seventy-Second, having some fun with a little Belgian. I had come upon him in the dark and had watched him, in growing wonder at his actions. There he was, stamping up and down, every so often stopping, shaking clenched fists in the air, and spouting curses. I asked him what was the matter. 'Rien, mon sergent,' he replied. 'Je m’excite.' 'Pourquoi?' I demanded. 'Ah,' he told me, 'look,'—pointing out toward the German line,—'out there lies my friend, dead, with three pounds of my chocolate in his musette, and when I’m good and mad, I’m going out to get it!' I hope he got it!

That night at seven o’clock we left the hill, marched through Souain four miles to Suippes, and sixteen miles farther on, at St. Hilaire, we camped. A total of twenty-six miles for the day.

At Suippes the regiment passed in parade march before some officer of the staff, and we were counted: eight hundred and fifty-two in the entire regiment, out of three thousand two hundred who entered the attack on the 25th of September!

THE BOULEVARD OF ROGUES
BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON

NOTHING was ever funnier than Barton’s election to the City Council. However, it occurs to me that, if I’m going to speak of it at all, I may as well tell the whole story.

At the University Club, where a dozen of us have met for luncheon every business day for many years, Barton’s ideas on the subject of municipal reform were always received in the most contumelious fashion. We shared his rage that things were as they were, but as practical business men we knew that there was no remedy. A city, Barton held, should be conducted like any other corporation. Its affairs are so various, and touch so intimately the comfort and security of all of us, that it is imperative that they be administered by servants of indubitable character and special training. He would point out that a citizen’s rights and privileges are similar to those of a stockholder, and that taxes are in effect assessments to which we submit only in the belief that the sums demanded are necessary to the wise handling of the public business; that we should be as anxious for dividends in the form of efficient and economical service as we are for cash dividends in other corporations.

There is nothing foolish or unreasonable in these notions; but most of us are not as ingenious as Barton, or as resourceful as he in finding means of realizing them.

Barton is a lawyer and something of a cynic. I have never known a man whose command of irony equaled his. He usually employed it, however, with perfect good-nature, and it was impossible to ruffle him. In the court-room I have seen him the target for attacks by a formidable array of opposing counsel, and have heard him answer an hour’s argument in an incisive reply compressed into ten minutes. His suggestions touching municipal reforms we dismissed as impractical, which was absurd, for Barton is essentially a practical man, as his professional successes clearly proved before he was thirty.

He maintained that one capable man, working alone, could revolutionize a city’s government if he set about it in the right spirit; and he manifested the greatest scorn for 'movements,' committees of one hundred, and that sort of thing. He had no great confidence in the mass of mankind or in the soundness of the majority. His ideas were, we thought, often fantastic, but it could never be said that he lacked the courage of his convictions. He once assembled round a mahogany table the presidents of the six principal banks and trust companies in our town, and laid before them a plan by which, through the smothering of the city’s credit, a particularly vicious administration might be brought to terms. The city finances were in a bad way, and, as the result of a policy of wastefulness and shortsightedness, the administration was constantly seeking temporary loans, which the local banks were expected to carry. Barton dissected the municipal budget before the financiers, and proposed that, as another temporary accommodation was about to be asked, they put the screws on the mayor and demand that he immediately force the resignations of all his important appointees and replace them with men to be designated by three citizens to be named by the bankers. Barton had carefully formulated the whole matter, and he presented it with his usual clarity and effectiveness; but rivalry between the banks for the city’s business, and fear of incurring the displeasure of some of their individual depositors who were closely allied with the bosses of the bi-partisan machine, caused the scheme to be rejected. Our lunch-table strategy board was highly amused by Barton’s failure, which was just what we had predicted.