The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger.
And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five
feet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree.
We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then our
consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been
standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our
eyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like
a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our
eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier.
We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood
and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier
rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a
cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had
sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some
trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at
his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death
had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression
upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in
him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves,
a certain calmness of soul--or was it merely a dramatic expression
of a soldierly attitude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, who
had been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the shell
headed straight for us, it seemed that we should come back after
the war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the
stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We had
no desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about the
tablet on that tree stump!
The French soldier strolled over to us; helped to straighten out
the camion, and when we learned that he was going down the hill
we gave him a lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poilu
who, washed and shaved and classified, turned out to be an exchange
professer from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and
it was he who told us of the bombing of the hospital at Landrecourt;
we'll call it Landrecourt to fool the censor, who thinks there is
no hospital there. At the mention of the hospital the Major turned
to us and said: "That's where we sent that pretty red-headed nurse
who came over with you on the boat. And," added the Major, "that
is the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New York!" whose name
is also changed to fool the censor. It was a better known name!
"Say," exclaimed Henry, "the Aunt of the Gilded Youth!"
"You mean our ambulance boy who came over on the boat with you--the
multimillionaire?" asked the head of the American Ambulance service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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