He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the twilight.
In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of the guns.
“Take it on the recoil,” advised the child officer. “It’s sure to stick. It always does stick.”
The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down, but make a joke of it.
The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went, shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.
In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the “King of England.”
“I would take them,” said the infant, “if they were called the ‘German Emperor.’”
At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved back. I felt I had meanly deserted them—that for his life the mother of each could hold me to account.
But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and the “independent command,” I could see in the twilight the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks of light.