At the first aid post we stopped for breath. The French welcomed us back, and we rested a moment under their hospitality. Our own French guns were carolling away; the arrives were coming in. It seemed to Henry and me that we were not so badly frightened as we knew we were. For we kept a running fire going of airy persiflage--which was like the noise of boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry said: "That German gunner is playing by ear! His time is bad, or else it's syncopated." Then to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location that Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a good deal in the neighbourhood!" And to the assembled company in the dugout he remarked as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, bulldog model that he had bought on the Rue de Rivoli, "If you gentlemen will get out your gas masks now I'll light my dreadnaught!" Which he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few moments we came out of the post and went to our ambulance which would take us back to Recicourt. Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed the gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were shocked to see the body of a French lieutenant laid ready for burial. He had met death while we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk. We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it was hours before we could get back our spirit. Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned up the rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They used a dozen big steel safety pins as large as railway spikes. And that night as we were preparing for bed in a shack near a hospital, Henry gazed curiously at the job as it glittered before him in our corner, when, his friend's tunic being removed, the wealth of metal was uncovered. Henry was impressed. "Bill," he said gently, as he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, "I don't know as I ever saw a man before with so much open plumbing on him as you're wearing these days!" For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience, and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it was not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laugh at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused: "I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last we slept. [Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force of will and both hands!] CHAPTER IV WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"