“Never seen the front, eh, Jack?” this to O. D.
“No, not yet,” admitted O. D.
“Well, you’ll be disappointed if you’re lookin’ for all that you heard tell about. Once you get used to starvin’, wearin’ one suit of underclothes about three months, and cushayin’ out in any old mud-hole there won’t be much excitement for you. All the other things depend on your own good luck. If the Kaiser ’ain’t got your number you’ll pull through without a scratch. I know. I was in the infantry not long ago.”
Jimmy and the Yankee division truck-driver fought the battles of Château-Thierry all over again while O. D. listened and didn’t miss a word. The things that the veterans talked and laughed about caused his mind a thousand and one perplexities. He had always formed his ideas and pictures of the front according to the suggestion and impressions of men and women who painted the existence on the lines as a red hell-life of misery and sufferings.
He could only conceive the front as a sinister, shadowy place, abounding in terrors and hardships, where men were fighting one another day and night, while the guns roared away incessantly. But beside him were two boys who spoke of the front as if it were a playground of strange adventure where by mere accident, rather than by deliberate execution, men were killed or wounded. He was certain, instinctively, that these boys knew what they were talking of. He knew that men cannot tell about living with death, while laughing and singing of life, unless they have actually done such a thing.
O. D. heard Jimmy tell of buying a suit of underclothes at La Ferté, after his outfit had been taken out of the fight shattered to the bone from continual battling. He judged from the way Jimmy said it that he would remember buying that forty-franc suit of underclothes when his memory of the capture of Hill 190 would grow dim. Jimmy cussed more because the army was unable to give him underclothes at that time than he did over the fact that he had to lug ninety-five-pound shells on a stomach that had been empty for twenty-four hours.
O. D. wondered if he would ever be able to understand the life of the front as his new friend Jimmy did. He wondered if there was enough good stuff in him to make him accept his burden of front-line work like the other men who had already gone in and proved themselves. O. D. wondered a hundred things that were all closely associated with the fact that he was about to enter a life that would bring him face to face with supreme sacrifice. Like a hundred thousand other American boys, before and after him, O. D. saw the bigness of the test that awaited every young novice on the battle-field, and he was concerned only with the one question: “Can I make good?”
“Well, here we are at Heippes,” said the driver, cutting a story of the capture of Vaux short. “Your outfit’s up ’round Souilly, I think. I turn off here and go out toward Rambluzen. Be good, Jack, and take care of your friend here,” indicating O. D.
“Oui, bet your life. Au revoir, old man,” answered Jimmy.
“Thanks,” said O. D.