“Whoever it was turned loose that machine gun from the inn window, did the trick,” said the colonel, later. “It's hardly too much to say that he blocked the way to Hazebrouck--for the time, at least, if one man can be said to have done such a thing--what's that?” “That” was McDermott, who was being carried forth, unconscious, to an ambulance. It was his blue overalls that had occasioned the colonel's surprise. He was neither French nor British nor German; palpably he was a civilian, and a civilian who had no business there. And in his hand he clasped a bung starter. His fingers were closed over it so tightly that in the base hospital later they found difficulty in taking it away from him. Owing, no doubt, to the blow on his head, McDermott was unable to recall clearly anything that had taken place from the moment he had first fallen asleep under the influence of French brandy until he awakened in the hospital nearly four weeks later. During this period there had been several intervals of more open-eyed dreaming, succeeded by lapses into profound stupor; but even in these open-eyed intervals, McDermott had not been himself. It was during one of these intervals that a representative of the French Government bestowed the Croix de Guerre upon McDermott, for it had been learned that he was the man behind the machine gun that had turned the tide of combat. McDermott, his eyes open, but his mind in too much of a daze even to wonder what the ceremony was about, sat in a wheel chair, and in company with half a dozen other men selected for decoration, listened to a brief oration in very good French, which he could not have understood had he been normal. In answer he muttered in a low tone, rubbing his broken and bandaged head: “I think maybe I will jine that war, afther all!” The French officer assumed that McDermott had spoken some sort of compliment to France and kissed McDermott on both cheeks, in front of the hospital staff, several American reporters, and as much of the French army as qould be spared to do honor to the occasion. The _Croix de Guerre_ made no impression upon McDermott, but the kiss briefly arrested his wandering consciousness, and he cried out, starting up in his chair and menacing the officer: “Where is me bung starter?” Then he fainted.