The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me

by William Allen White

"Your husband, there?"

"Who—that man? Why, I never saw him in my life until I picked him up in a cafe an hour ago!"

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy "Oh." But we had a good chat just the same and she told me all about the coming fall of the cabinet. Her type in America would not be interested in politics. But the shows of the boulevards discuss politics and the theaters are free! So her type in France had to know politics. It takes all kinds of people and also all kinds of peoples to make a world. And the war really is being fought so that they may work out their lives and their national traditions freely and after the call of their own blood. If we are to have only one kind of people, the kind is easy to find. There is kultur!

Still the love affairs of the French did bother us. Henry did not mind them so much; but to me they seemed as unreasonable and as improbable as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. Every man has his aversion, and the French idea of separating love from marriage, and establishing it beautifully in another relation, is my aversion, and it will have to stand. Henry was patient with me, but we were both genuinely glad when a day or two later we came back to the sprightly little American love affair that we had chaperoned on the Espagne crossing the ocean. That love affair we could understand. It had been following us with a feline tenacity all over France. When we left the Eager Soul with the Gilded Youth in the hospital at—we'll say Landrecourt, because that is not the place—we thought our love affair was gone for ever. The letter she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor we had to trust to other hands; for he was not at the American hospital where he should have been. He had gone to the British front for a week's experimental work in something with four syllables and a Latin name at that. But the cat came back one day, when we were visiting a hospital four hours out of Paris. The place had that curious French quality of charm about it, which we Americans do not manage to put into our "places and palaces." Down a winding village street—a kind of low-walled stone canyon, narrow and grey, but brightened with uniforms like the streets of most French villages these days—we wormed our machine and stopped at an important looking building—an official looking building. It was not official, we learned—just a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That got us. For when a road leads into a house in America, it means a jail, or a courthouse, or a hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department store. But when we scooted under the house we came into a wide white courtyard, gravel paved. We left the machine and went from the courtyard into a garden—the loveliest old walled garden imaginable. At the corners of the garden were fine old trees—tall, spike-shaped evergreens of some variety, and in the midst of it was a weeping yew tree and a fountain. Around the walls were shrubs and splashed about the walks and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of colour, phlox and asters, and dahlias and hollyhocks and flowers of various gay sorts. And back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the hospital—a new modern barracks of a hospital, in a field sheltered from the street by all that grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was made of rough, brown stained boards; it was one story high, built architecturally like a tannery, and camouflaged as to the roof to represent "green fields and running brooks." Board floors and board partitions under the roof were covered as well as they could be; and stoves furnished the heat. The beds—acres and acres of iron beds—were assembled in the great wards and stretched far down the long rooms like white ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was American—new, excruciatingly clean, and was run like a factory. We were proud of it, and of the business-like young medical students who as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went about in their brand new uniforms—young crown princes of democracy, twice as handsome and three times as dignified as they would have been if they had royal blood. Henry called them the heirs apparent "of all the ages" and enjoyed them greatly. They certainly gave the place a tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown boards into a king's palace. When we had finished our errand at the hospital and were returning through the garden, we met our young doctor. He was sitting on an old stone bench, among the asters and dahlias—wounded. It was not a serious wound from an ordinary man's stand-point; but from the Young Doctor's it was grave indeed. For it was a bullet wound through his hand. He thought it would not affect the muscles permanently—but no one could know. Then he sat there in the mediaeval garden among the flowers under the yew trees and told us how it happened; took us out to the first aid post again, and on out to the first line trenches, and over them into No Man's Land, stumbling over the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the wounded. In time he came to a wounded German—a Prussian officer with a shell-wound in his leg.

He told us what happened, impersonally, as one who is listening to another man's story in his own mouth. "I gave him something like a first aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor paused, picked a ravelling from his bandage and went on, still detached from the narrative. "Then I put my arm around him, to help him back to the ambulance." Again he hesitated and said quietly, "That was a half mile back and the shells were still popping—more or less—around us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. He got it, smiled and went on without lifting his voice. "Then he did it"

"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry.

"Well, how?" from me.

"Oh, I don't know. He just did it," droned the Young Doctor. "We were talking along; and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked up. The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away as he fired. It got my hand!" He stopped, began poking the gravel with his toe, and smiled again as one who has heard an old story and wants to be polite. To Henry and me, it was unbelievable. We sat down on the hoary, moss-covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless of our spanking new uniforms and cried: "Well, my Heavenly home!" He nodded, drew a deep breath and said, "That's the how of it."

[Illustration: He told us what happened impersonally as one who is listening to another man's story in his own mouth]

"Well, what do you know about—"