“I think I will get some officer who requires a horse to keep him until I need him. Anyway I wanted him and have got him;” and added, “I may have to ride him sooner than I expect.”
At the time of my return to duty, our regiment with other American and French troops were on a line with a river which divided a historic city. On our left was a broken bridge, cleft as though by a huge blunt sword near its center. The fight for this bridge had, first and last, cost many lives.
Far away in the distance was a wood, occupied by a large force of our troops, that had been fighting for its possession. In the half-ruined town was our division headquarters, the huts of the Y. M. C. A., and hospitals, some of them occupying temporary buildings like those elsewhere described.
“This looks as though we were going in for some real fighting,” I said to a fellow officer.
“Yes,” replied Captain Cross, who had come up, “those are ‘the symptoms,’ as our doctors say;” and then thoughtfully added, “A year ago, most of us here were green as grass so far as fighting was concerned. Some of us were recruits that scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another. But now look at them! They have been trained down to a fighting edge and have already shown great soldierly qualities; and the Boche recognize it by being mighty cautious when they are facing us. That’s why we are on the fighting line here. Our soldiers, I learn, are on the front line in nearly a dozen different places from the Picardy to the Alsace front.”
“I hope that we may be able to give a good account of ourselves before long,” I asserted.
“Never doubt it,” rejoined our adjutant, who was in the group. “Our men have got the right stuff in them, and association with French soldiers has strengthened their confidence in themselves.”
“Yes,” said another confidently, though in a jocular vein, “we will wipe the Prussian monarchy from the map, and hang the Kaiser to a sour apple tree!”
“What we lack now—so I understand,” said Captain Cross, “is better means of getting information of the plans of the enemy; a better spy system.”
“Well,” said my friend Jot, “gentlemen, we must do everything necessary to win the war, or the world won’t be a safe place for Christian men and women to live in. There can be no peace until it is done.”