Some of them were serious. The surgeon looked at me and said, "You're easy. Can't waste much time on you. Lie on that table." I lay down on my stomach and he probed for a second, then gave a yank. I thought he had pulled my leg out by the roots, but he thrust a pair of pincers in front of my eyes and said, "There it is. Want it?" and he dropped a bit of shell into my hand. I still have it. Then a big ambulance, with seven other men in it, took me to Compiègne, where I lay in the dining saloon of a château for a few hours and then was sent to Paris. The wound healed quickly and I was sent back to the trenches, but the gas had left my lungs bad, and I couldn't stand the cold and wet. It wasn't long before they invalided me out. But I'm all right now, and I'm going back if they'll let me. V--THE BOYS WHO ARE "GONE" FOREVER A lot of the boys I knew in the legion are gone now. While I was in the hospital some of them got theirs. For instance, there was Allan Seeger. It was reported not long ago that he killed himself while lying in a shell hole, wounded. I don't believe that. I knew Seeger well, and it doesn't sound like him. He enjoyed a close, strange friendship with a negro from the Barbadoes, whom we called Cafe-au-Lait because he was the color of coffee more than half milk. Cafe-au-Lait had Seeger's watch when I returned to the trenches, and he was in the shell hole with him when he lay there wounded. He had been shot through the stomach and some stretcher-bearers rescued him. He was put in an ambulance and sent to the rear, but he died before they could get him to a hospital, according to Cafe-au-Lait, who mourned his loss pitifully. Then there was Christopher Charles, a dancer from New York, whom you'd never take for a fighter, but who could show the way to most of us. Another New York man in the legion was "Norri" Norritch. He was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre after they took me away with my lungs full of gas. They said he had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York real estate. There was one Briton in the legion whose name was Longman. He had been discharged from the British army because he went to pieces after a girl had turned him down. His one idea was to get killed. He was always the first man over the top for an assault, and he never bothered about taking shelter from shell fire unless he was dragged into it. But he couldn't get hit. Longman was reinstated in the British army for heroism and sent down to the Balkans. Newspapers all over the world have told his story. He went through the Serbian campaigns with all the fever, typhus and pestilence raging through the camps, and it never touched him. He wooed death and she passed him by. Then the Turks took him prisoner. They never would have done it had he known. Something knocked him on the head, and when he waked up he was in a Turkish hospital.