“When do we eat? Won’t we get any chow all night?”
“The galley is in the town back of us. They are cooking up some slum, and it ought to be brought up here pretty soon.” He walked away.
“There’s nothing like a good kick in the face to make you forget your little troubles.” Bullis summed up the feeling of the platoon.
Kahl, industriously, was working the bolt of his rifle back and forth, pouring drops of oil in the chamber and upon the lock. He leaned toward Hicks and remarked in an undertone: “Hicks, old fellow, if Kitty Kahl doesn’t earn a Croix de Guerre to-morrow his mother will be without a son.”
“What do you want one of those things for, Kahl? You can buy ’em for five francs.”
“But you can’t earn one of them with five francs.”
“But what do you want with one of them? What good are they?”
Hicks, perhaps, was insincere. One might want a decoration and be delighted to have it, but intentionally to go after it appealed to him in the light of absurdity.
As Lieutenant Bedford departed, each man drew inside himself. Merely to observe them, one would have believed that they were concerned with profound thoughts. A Y. M. C. A. secretary would have told himself that the men were thinking of their homes and families, praying to God, and the Y. M. C. A. General Pershing would have charged them with possessing a fierce, burning desire to exterminate the Germans. The regimental chaplain—he had come to the regiment from an Episcopal pulpit—would have said that they were capitulating their sins and supplicating God for mercy.
While it was yet light Sergeants Harriman and Ryan and Lieutenant Bedford discussed aloud the plans that had been tentatively given them for the night, but as objects in their line of vision lost their distinctness and became vague, mysterious figures, they lowered their voices to a whisper. Lieutenant Bedford peered at his wrist-watch.