“Right away it was hail-fellow-well-met with them that had been at the front, an’ we were goin’ roun’ givin’ oursel’s airs an’ the girls seemed to think we was better than all the rest.... Well, sometimes I....
“I was jus’ a young fellow, y’ know, an’ kep’ gettin’ in deeper an’ deeper an’ never thought it’d mean anything. When a man says, ‘John, you remember that clump o’ trees the Fifty-eighth lay under at Antietam?’ why, you say, ‘Yes.’ An’ the next time y’r tellin’ about Antietam you jus’ throw in them trees without thinkin’. That’s the way it was with me. An’ I read books to get my facks straight an’ no one never caught me nappin’. I used t’ correct them.... At last I got to believe it all myself....
“Then the G. A. R. Post was organized in our town.... An’ so it went.
“Well, it’s been a long time. If I’d ’a’ known in the first place maybe it’d ’a’ been different.... But it was my right, anyway, wasn’t it, now? Say, don’t you think it was comin’ to me? It wasn’t my fault. By God, I wanted to fight! Jus’ one chance an’ so help me——
“They cheated me out o’ it an’ I got even. That’s all it was. I never took no pension. I’ve had the glory, like ’em.... I’ve paid for it.... I on’y took my own.
“And the Post will bury me.”
THE AVIATOR
By Hornell Hart
“The French Government declines to accept your services.” The words said themselves over and over in his ears in the drone of the motor, as the monoplane climbed into the velvet night sky. Was that diplomatic blunder of two years ago so utterly unforgivable? Was exile not enough? Would the Republic deny him even the right to fight under her colours? “The French Government declines to accept your services.” The recruiting officer had said it, and General Joffre had reiterated the unrelenting statement in reply to his direct appeal for enlistment. And now the drone of the propeller, the hum of the motor, and the rush of the air through the braces whispered the words ceaselessly into his ears as the great wings carried him up into the darkness.
Below, the ghostly searchlight fingers of the fortress reached up, groping toward him. The central searchlight of the fortress was playing on a French cruiser which had crept up recklessly close to the fort and was pouring shells in rapid salvos up into the battlements on the hill. The sparks of fire from the ship’s side seemed but tiny points of light far down below. Momentarily balls of flame appeared above and around the dim outlines of the fortifications, and the smoke of bursting shells drifted wanly across the white, searching pencils of light. Down there France, undaunted, grappled the Turk in the darkness. From the farther shore distant lights of Asia twinkled in the night.