“Jonathan N. Von Rucker.”
What did this strange letter mean? I sat, after reading it, like one confounded. It made me heartsick to believe that it was a declaration of disloyalty to my country. It crushed, for the time being, my belief in Jonathan’s loyalty to our flag, that he had professed and promised to love and protect when he enlisted to fight its battles. But by the same process of thought must I not mistrust General Burbank? Whom could I trust, when the men of all others I had loved and believed in, seemed disloyal? Though reason said that they were false to their country, my heart said “no”; for I felt, against reason, that it could not be so.
I read and reread Jonathan’s letter, and finally decided to take a plain course—a straight cut. I took the letter to General Burbank and asked him to read it, and to make some explanation. Was it not a declaration of disloyalty?
A flush passed over his face as he read the letter. Then with a thoughtful look he read it again and passed it back to me saying, “He had his reasons for writing this letter, but what they are I do not know. But don’t you see, he does not say it is Germany that he is serving? I know that he is loyal to our flag.”
“Thank you, General, for the assurance,” I exclaimed. And stretching out my hand to his, grasped it, for I had no longer the least doubt of him or of his word. Whatever the mystery, I must and did believe in him, though I confess, Jot’s letter had puzzled me.
Upon my return from my permission, I had found my regiment occupying a rest sector, where they had been for nearly two weeks. Here, let me explain, that under prevailing conditions in the great war, a battle lasts sometimes for several weeks, and no troops can remain for that time in line of battle. They must be sent for rest at intervals, to more quiet sectors, to recuperate and reorganize.
Our division was now, after more than two weeks’ rest, again ready for active service; though Sam Jenkins and others attempted to explain that hunting cooties was active duty enough for any one.
The marching and fighting that followed is hard to describe; for we were now a part of a great whole, whose operations no one man could see or understand fully. When a battle stretches out on a front of fifty or sixty miles or more, a single participant, even though he be a captain or a general, can not know much more about it than what he sees.
We had been moved from place to place for several days; sometimes by marching and sometimes by auto trucks.
We were now on the march. I was in my place, having left my horse as too good a target when near the enemy’s snipers moving along a pathway that skirted a forest. The rising sun reflected from the helmets of the men who came tramping wearily but cheerfully—for they had been marching for over twenty hours with little sleep—with prospects now of both rest and sleep.