We found a bunch of Dutchies playing they were dead. “Get up!” I yelled. And tapped some of them with the stick I carried—“get up and march!”—and though they may not have understood what I said, they knew what I meant, and obeyed as docile as puppies.
That evening we captured a little village which was as full of Huns, as an anthill is with ants. We swept them in and headed them for the rear. One of these was a husky officer that Sam Jenkins said he had hauled from a dug-out as deep as a well.
“And that chap,” added Sam, telling me about it later, “had some nerve. He stopped short, took out his cigar case, and lit a cigar from a pipe one of the doughboys was smoking, and then went on ahead as cool as though he had come from an ice chest instead of a dug-out.”
We steered a lot of them to the rear like that. There was a lot to think of, and a lot to do, and I was doing the best I could for the company, with help of the lieutenants and noncoms.
At the first aid station, one of the doctors caught sight of me and called out: “This way, Captain!” and almost dragged me into his coop.
“Not much,” I said. “I am all right!”
“No, you ain’t,” he insisted, “your face is all covered with blood.” It was a slight scalp wound, and though I had bled like a stuck pig, I did not know about it until then, and needed only a little sticking plaster to fix it all right. I was as glad to escape from that doctor as though he had been a Boche.
Turning away, I saw one of our men up a roadside tree that was strung with telegraph wires, apparently. A man had just been knocked out, he was explaining to me, and as he had been in the business at home, he thought he would finish the job. Just then, whiz bang! came a shell that knocked off his tin hat without hurting him and sent it spinning away. After recovering from a transient daze, he coolly remarked: “Captain, I guess I’d better finish the business now that I have begun it.”
Then he came down and saluted in a shame-faced way, and I hadn’t the heart to censure him, though he had no business to be up that tree without orders, and away from his real duties.
When we got together that evening some of my men were missing, and naturally so, after such a mix up of a fight. We got some boss chow that the Salvation Army had brought up, and then bunched down on the ground for sleep—and we sure needed it.