When I escaped that doctor, got some clean clothes, a shave, a hair cut, and a good dinner, I felt fit for anything, and wanted to see my comrades.
They had heard of my return from Fritzland, and came clustering around me with many expressions of good will; and my, wasn’t I glad to see the boys that had stood by me so stoutly in the fight? The painful part of it was that there were so many absent ones who would never report for duty again. The boys were as glad to see me as I was them—for had we not fought side by side through thick and thin? And this gives a feeling of comradeship that can never be gained in any other way, one that can never be broken, and which soldiers who have stood by each other in danger alone can fully appreciate.
“Shure,” said Pat Quinn—now a sergeant—saluting, “we give them Boches wan Hail Columbia drubbing, Captain!”
“Yes,” I replied; “but I got ‘The Watch on the Rhine,’ and didn’t like it.”
“Well,” said Sutherland, who had just returned to duty from a severe wound, “we can’t have all of it our own way, but we must try and get the best of the exchange of drubbings. If the Boches would only fight a fair fight we might forgive them, but some of our men were killed in that last fight by explosive bullets—the savages!” And it was true.
In the heartiness of our greeting we forgot rank, and only remembered that we were comrades who had stood by each other in the pinch of battle. Muddy was a great favorite.
“That little devil of a dog,” said Quinn, “knows too much for wan dog. Shure by carrying your lether, he did as much as any tin av us in that fight.”
I reported once more to Colonel Burbank who turned me over to Major Cross, who said with a provoking wink, “You will have to go to a hospital—perhaps you would prefer the one Doctor Rich has charge of? When your wound is healed, you will get a permission for two weeks more. Perhaps you will prefer to stay near there during your permission!” Then with a chuckle of amusement he added, “I see that Monte Carlo has been offered as a leave area, but has not been accepted. Just imagine the ‘Y’ or the Salvation Army setting up headquarters in front of the Casino.”
“I don’t want much of a permission,” I said, “for I have a debt to pay the Huns before I die; and I am afraid that in spite of your going into a rest sector soon, you will get them licked before I can get around to fight them.”
“Don’t worry about that,” answered he. “There will be fighting enough, so that half of us may possibly be dead before we have finished this job; especially if the last sample of fighting you gave us is repeated.”