V—THE BOYS WHO ARE "GONE" FOREVER
A lot of the boys I knew in the legion are gone now. While I was in the hospital some of them got theirs. For instance, there was Allan Seeger. It was reported not long ago that he killed himself while lying in a shell hole, wounded. I don't believe that. I knew Seeger well, and it doesn't sound like him.
He enjoyed a close, strange friendship with a negro from the Barbadoes, whom we called Cafe-au-Lait because he was the color of coffee more than half milk. Cafe-au-Lait had Seeger's watch when I returned to the trenches, and he was in the shell hole with him when he lay there wounded. He had been shot through the stomach and some stretcher-bearers rescued him. He was put in an ambulance and sent to the rear, but he died before they could get him to a hospital, according to Cafe-au-Lait, who mourned his loss pitifully.
Then there was Christopher Charles, a dancer from New York, whom you'd never take for a fighter, but who could show the way to most of us. Another New York man in the legion was "Norri" Norritch. He was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre after they took me away with my lungs full of gas. They said he had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York real estate.
There was one Briton in the legion whose name was Longman. He had been discharged from the British army because he went to pieces after a girl had turned him down. His one idea was to get killed. He was always the first man over the top for an assault, and he never bothered about taking shelter from shell fire unless he was dragged into it. But he couldn't get hit.
Longman was reinstated in the British army for heroism and sent down to the Balkans. Newspapers all over the world have told his story. He went through the Serbian campaigns with all the fever, typhus and pestilence raging through the camps, and it never touched him. He wooed death and she passed him by.
Then the Turks took him prisoner. They never would have done it had he known. Something knocked him on the head, and when he waked up he was in a Turkish hospital.
It would be hard to find a more conglomerate body of men than the legion. Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Poles, who will not fight for Russia, but want to fight against Prussia; Americans and British, shoulder to shoulder, sharing blankets and little luxuries that filter into camp from time to time.
In my company were a Spaniard and a Chilian who had always been deadly enemies. The Spaniard had lost a fortune gambling, and then the Chilian won the girl the Spaniard was going to marry. They fought a duel, which the police interrupted. Both joined the legion and were assigned to the same squad.
VI—THE LEGIONAIRES IN THE BATTLE OF MONTLUEL