“He’s slept in the slush and rain and hummed a tune as the big guns barked? He’s eaten a single meal a day, and kept ragtime in his heart? He’s fallen three times, you say, in the dark, with limp, still things around, And he called the nurse ‘kid’ and asked her to help him get back to that ground? “No wonder the mouth is grim and set, no wonder the eyes a-dream; The best and worst in life and death the plain buck private has seen. Ah, well, I suppose he’d like to quit and get an easier job. No? Not he? He told you, you say, he wouldn’t trade bunks with God?” WILLIAM I. ENGLE, Pvt., Inf. “HOMMES 40, CHEVAUX 8” Roll, roll, roll, over the rails of France, See the world and its map unfurled, five centimes in your pants. What a noble trip, jolt and jog and jar, Forty we, with Equipment C in one flat-wheeled box-car. We are packed by hand, Shoved aboard in ’teens, Pour a little oil on us And we would be sardines. Rations? Oo-la-la! and how we love the man Who learned how to intern our chow in a cold and clammy can. Beans and beef and beans, beef and beans and beef, Willie raw, he will win the war, take in your belt a reef. Mess kits flown the coop, Cups gone up the spout; Use your thumbs for issue forks, And pass the bull about. Hit the floor for bunk, six hommes to one homme’s place; It’s no fair to the bottom layer to kick ’em in the face. Move the corp’ral’s feet out of my left ear; Lay off, sarge, you are much too large, I’m not a bedsack, dear. Lift my head up, please, From this bag of bread; Put it on somebody’s chest, Then I’ll sleep like the dead. Roll, roll, roll, yammer and snore and fight, Travelling zoo the whole day through and bedlam all the night. Four days in the cage, going from hither hence; Ain’t it great to ride by freight at good old Unc’s expense? THE BUGLER (A patient in Base Hospital 48) “I can’t blow taps no more,” He says to me. (They’d kidded him outside the barracks door.) “I used to do it pretty well before— Before I played my buddy off. It’s war, But don’t you see? “The moon was full and white, And shinin’ free, About the way it’s shinin’ there tonight. We started up, and Buddy got it right— A piece of shrap; it dropped him out the fight Alongside me.