Part 8 (1/2)

American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.]

”Eight degrees to the left, sir,” he barked, ”four thousand yards.”

The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.

There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior officer still under twenty.

”I suppose you're all right,” said the younger one. ”You couldn't have got this far if you weren't all right.”

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely, too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, ma.s.sed barriers of white against a gray, sombre sky; in front of him, to be exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had never seen, but who were always with their sh.e.l.ls ordering to ”move on,”

and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.

”You don't seem to have any supports,” I ventured.

The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling darkness, ”Oh, they're about--somewhere. You might call this,” he added, with pride, ”an independent command.”

You well might.

”Report when ready!” chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.

He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the twilight.

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of the guns.

”Take it on the recoil,” advised the child officer. ”It's sure to stick.

It always does stick.”

The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down, but make a joke of it.

The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went, shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.

In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the ”King of England.”

”I would take them,” said the infant, ”if they were called the 'German Emperor.'”

At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved back. I felt I had meanly deserted them--that for his life the mother of each could hold me to account.

But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and the ”independent command,” I could see in the twilight the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks of light.

They were the ”King of England” cigars burning bravely.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry, artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries to sc.r.a.pe the mud from every wheel he meets.

In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the English front up to hill 516, which was the highest point of the French front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His idea of amusing himself was to sweep around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with horror, and throw on all the brakes with the nose of the car projecting over a precipice a thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly well the precipice was there, but he leaped at it exactly as though it were the finish line of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of amusing himself was to make me sick with terror he must have spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.