An Acceptable Warrior

By Earle Looker and Arthur Hayne Mitchell

The story begins in France soon after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 Armistice on the Western Front. Signed by the Allies and Germany at Compigne, the Armistice thus terminated hostilities within six hours of signature and ended the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Shared by the U.S. forces with the French Fourth Army, Meuse-Argonne was the principal engagement of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, engaging 1.2 million American soldiers. Its successful objective was to capture the railway hub at Sedan and thus break the railway network essential to supporting the German Army in France and Flanders. It was the largest frontline commitment of troops by the U.S. Army during the war, also its deadliest, resulting in 26,277 American deaths and 95,786 wounded over 47 days of intense, bloody fighting.

The story progresses over four months, following Armistice on the Western Front, through a succession of adventures encountered by a thoughtful young American soldier and journalist from Virginia, David Atwood, and chronicles his mental state from disillusionment, lost love, hopelessness and depression toward the possibility of ultimately coming to terms with himself and acquiring a renewed sense of purpose. Any sensitive war veteran of any age will likely find some aspects of him or herself in these pages and a hopeful promise of personal transformation.

This is the story of a personal journey a young soldiers path up and out of an uncaring universe toward spiritual awakening and individual self-actualization discovering his promise and tendency to become actually what he is potentially, to become everything he is capable of becoming, to seek the frontiers of his creativity and strive to reach higher levels of consciousness, happiness, awareness and wisdom, to potentially becoming a fully conscious human a grateful spiritual warrior or will he?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504367578

Earle Looker

Arthur Hayne Mitchell is a writer, senior biodiversity, environmental and natural resources specialist, protected areas planner and manager, environmental policy specialist, conservation biologist and biological anthropologist with more than thirty years experience, including twenty-five working outside the United States in fifteen countries, primarily in Southeast and South Asia as well as East Africa and the Caribbean. Art Mitchell, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University, lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Reginald Earle Looker volunteered to serve in France, prior to the official entry of America into WWI, as an ambulance driver with the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps (Norton-Harjes). During that time, he also worked as a freelance war correspondent for The Evening Post. After the war, Looker worked as an advertising executive, magazine editor, public relations consultant, ghost-writer and speech writer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Looker was associate editor of Asia magazine and a contributing editor of Fortune magazine. In addition to The White House Gang, a 1929 New York Times bestseller, he wrote This Man Roosevelt; Colonel Roosevelt, Private Citizen; The American Way: Franklin Roosevelt in Action; Looking Forward and Government Not Politics (both ghost-written with Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Revolt (with his second wife Antonina Hansell Looker). During WW II, Looker headed the Psychological Warfare division of the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), which was transferred under the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of 1942. MIS was tasked with collecting, analyzing and disseminating intelligence. The OSS later became the CIA. He also served as a Lt. Colonel in World War II, Pacific Theater. Earle Looker died in 1976 at Toccoa, Stephens County, Georgia.

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Copyright © 2017 Arthur Hayne Mitchell.

Cover: Troops on the Western Front, Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Fôret de Boult, Ardennes, 1918.

Photo source: Alamy, ww1facts.net

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-6756-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6758-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6757-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016916790

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/21/2017

Contents

PROLOGUE

PART 1 THE 11TH HOUR OF THE 11TH DAY OF THE 11TH MONTH

Chapter 1: Surging Up Out of Pit and Burrow

Chapter 2: The Mad Frenchman

Chapter 3: A Chaplain’s Duty

Chapter 4: Silver Eagles

Chapter 5: Train to Gare de l’Est

PART 2 PARIS HIATUS

Chapter 6: La Ville Lumière

Chapter 7: Revolt against Reality

Chapter 8: A Ride in the Bois

Chapter 9: Suitable Dead Letters

PART 3 BRUGES FURLOUGH

Chapter 10: Street of the Virtuous Laughing Girls

Chapter 11: Vicar of Bermondsey

Chapter 12: Cakes and Things

Chapter 13: English Rose

Chapter 14: Night of the Long Neck

Chapter 15: Priest of the Street

PART 4 THE GRATITUDE OF LABOR

Chapter 16: Wrestling with Proteus

Chapter 17: Blue Mountains

Chapter 18: Burdens of Sisyphus

Chapter 19: In the Beginning

About the Authors

To my sons Andrew and Thomas and

for our grandfathers, Thomas, George, Arthur and Earle.

We are eternally grateful.

"Love the earth and sun and animals,

Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,

Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,

argue not concerning God, have patience

and indulgence toward the people …

And your very flesh shall be a great poem."

~ Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

PROLOGUE

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

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Armistice Day, Paris, by Frank Boggs, 1918

There is an obscure corner of my office where boxes of items no longer needed but impossible to throw out are stored, sharing a cover of dust and neglect. But in July 2015, to my surprise, I unearthed a yellow, stained, ancient typed manuscript in an old wooden box tucked away among the other seemingly irrelevant dust-covered items. Although undated, it must have been more than 75 years old. Throw it out or keep it? I blew off the dust from the yellowed pages and began to read.

I never knew my grandfather. I met him once at the train station in Alexandria, Virginia, when I was a boy; he died in 1976. But I always admired him, a flawed genius. He clearly excelled as a wordsmith. After having become thoroughly engrossed in his story, I knew what I had to do.

The story begins in France soon after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 – Armistice on the Western Front. Signed by the Allies and Germany in a railroad car outside Compiègne, the Armistice thus terminated hostilities within six hours of signature and ended the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Shared by the U.S. forces with the French Fourth Army, Meuse-Argonne was the principal engagement of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, engaging 1.2 million American soldiers. Its successful objective was to capture the railway hub at Sedan and thus break the railway network essential to supporting the German Army in France and Flanders. It was the largest frontline commitment of troops by the U.S. Army during the war, also its deadliest, resulting in 26,277 American deaths and 95,786 wounded over 47 days of intense, bloody combat.

The story progresses over four months, following Armistice on the Western Front, through a succession of adventures encountered by a thoughtful young American soldier and journalist from Virginia, David Atwood, and chronicles his mental state from disillusionment, lost love, hopelessness and depression toward the possibility of ultimately coming to terms with himself and acquiring a renewed sense of purpose. Any sensitive war veteran of any age will likely find some aspects of him or herself in these pages – and a hopeful promise of personal transformation.

Bruges figures heavily in the story. The beauty and dark mystery of this ancient medieval Belgian town is vividly described. It was a town much loved by my grandfather and where, before the war, he had abortively studied art before returning home and subsequently entering the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps to serve in World War I in France. While often visiting Paris, he stayed with his Aunt Suzanne, wife of the American sculptor, Charles Wayland Bartlett (1865 - 1925), who although living most of his life in France, became best known for his numerous monumental sculptural projects in America in addition to the statue of Lafayette, completed in 1907, placed in front of the Louvre. It was at his aunt’s home in Paris, during the many visits from writers, musicians and painters that my grandfather became aware of and was stimulated and captivated by creative artistic expression.

An excerpt shows David Atwood’s reaction when allowed to escape the war for furlough in Bruges:

"To go on leave! All at once David knew how greatly he desired it, how necessary it had become if he were to forget his obsession with these maudlin dead-letters and continual reminders of death, if he were not to turn these accusations, in desperation, into fact. Where to go? If it could not be Paris, David thought, where else was there to go? Where could he regain something of the strength drained from him during the fighting? The moment rest was possible he felt his weakness. Where was there nothing to remind him of war? Now he was more than ever aware there had been swift terrible glimpses and cries that had been frozen within his memory by fear during the action, incidents that only now were beginning to thaw, almost to putrefy. He had not felt the full horror and disgust. He had taken these in his stride, stepped over them, but now the purpose of action had gone from him, and he was thinking more and more of them. Where could he get perspective upon what he had done, upon the effect of the past on the present and imagine what might be the future? It came to him that already he had made such a decision and filed it away, the result of some conversation, some enthusiastic comment he had heard of the quiet and peace, the mellow light and shade of a place."

My contribution to this, my grandfather’s, original work was to retype, liberally edit based on my own questionable judgement and grammatical preferences, consolidate and select chapters from two very different versions of the novel, originally drafted as ‘Some Count Twice’, insert chapter heading quotes, with the hope of deriving some pertinent inspiration, add chapter titles, change some names, places, sequence and circumstances. Several significant sections were missing and had to be imagined and reconstructed. Yet, this book is very much a collaboration between myself and my grandfather – in spirit.

The story remains very true to the original – my grandfather’s story – written by someone who had intimately lived through the mud, blood, disillusionments and horrors of the fields and trenches of World War I on the Western Front and survived. It emerged from the depths of experience and his heart, and I have not altered that intention. I now deeply love and admire the man.

Another excerpt expresses the horror of David’s best friend being killed next to him:

"Alan seemed to dissolve in a bloody mist. When the bullet struck him there must have been that same burst of incandescence that made more deeply black and lonely the darkness that followed. That it was when the soul, or something like one, cries out to God for help but knows it cries in vain for in a dream a scream cannot be uttered. At the same instant, and all with it in the brilliance and the darkness, the heart grows huge with a leap as violent as some monster wrenching within the body to force its way out."

This is the story of a personal journey – a young soldier’s path up and out of an uncaring universe toward spiritual awakening and individual self-actualization – discovering his promise and tendency to become actually what he is potentially, to become everything he is capable of becoming, to seek the frontiers of his creativity and strive to reach higher levels of consciousness, happiness, awareness and wisdom, to potentially becoming a fully conscious human – a grateful spiritual warrior – or will he?

A.H.M.

Fairfax, Virginia

October 2016

"It is the human habit to think in centuries

from a grandparent to a grandchild

because it just does take about a hundred years

for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,"

~ Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

PART 1

THE 11TH HOUR OF THE 11TH DAY

OF THE 11TH MONTH

"We have ravaged women, burned houses,

slain children, exacted ransom from everyone,

eaten their cows, oxen, sheep,

stolen their geese, pigs, capons,

drunk their wines, violated churches …

For God’s sake, let us march on the pagans!"

~ Bertrand du Guesclin,

Legendary Fourteenth Century Knight

"It is forbidden to kill;

therefore all murderers are punished

unless they kill in large numbers

and to the sound of trumpets."

~ Voltaire

"We should feel fed up with the violence and killing going on around us.

If a human being is killed by an animal, it’s sad,

but if a human being is killed by another human being it’s unthinkable.

We have to make a special effort to think of each other as fellow human beings,

as our brothers and sisters."

~ Dalai Lama

CHAPTER 1

Surging Up Out of Pit and Burrow

My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.

~ Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander during the final year of World War I

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Trenches of the Western Front, 1917 (iowapublicradio.org)

Western Front, Meuse-Argonne Offensive, somewhere between Vouziers and Fôret de Boult, Ardennes, France, 11:00 a.m., 11.11.1918

David felt the roughness of his hands, without touching one with the other, smelled his own sweaty uncleanliness, but now there no longer remained trace of that familiar, though indescribable, scent of fear, which men had learned, like animals, to recognize. He felt now what he knew to be his own reviving strength, flowing from some spring tapped by elation. Thus a soul might feel when liberated from its filthy fighting body.

For the first time in these months he had worn it, he was irked by the heaviness of his flat steel helmet. But when he tipped it forward as if putting his face into a basin, and off, and kneaded his close-clipped scalp, he found himself as buoyant as a soul might be when emancipated from its body. Every sense seemed extraordinarily acute. The responsibilities of his fighting command had dropped away; the fighting was done. There would be no more action; he felt himself in a vacuum. Though now well into the second hour of it, as verified by a glance at the watch upon his wrist, that crack of calm at eleven o’clock still was like the mute pause after life is taken but prolonged, he thought, because so many men had died.

I’m alive! he heard himself say aloud. I can think!

Still he was unprepared wholly to accept reality when it so suddenly presented everything for which he had hoped. Reality seemed deceptive; it was as incredible now as it had been terrible. He wondered if this armistice might be nothing but a projection of his imagination despite its abundance of authentic detail, un settlement at last of reason from sounds and sights and shocks, a tripping of the mind as if from an electrical overload. He was aware that for some time he had been evading the full impact of fact by looking away when he came upon its examples, sprawled so inhumanly without decency or dignity.

He realized now he had acquired the veteran habit of self-deception even to the point of avoiding those paths that led through the pleasant sheltered copses and sun splashed ravines, so that he might remain in ignorance of what they so frequently contained, stenching to heaven, and still count them islands of peace and beauty in the field. He knew he was becoming more and more of a fatalist, made more reasonable the ghastly details of a battle action. It allowed the feeling he might be fulfilling his own personal part of the inevitable. He had even come to tolerate the growing apathy of his men, for like them he was beginning to prefer to live in periods of blankness divided by eating and excrement.

‘But this means peace!’ he thought. The war was over. And it must be the last one. Perhaps for five hundred centuries men had fought throughout Europe, but now the lessons from it seemed too obvious; war could never be remembered without shame, spoken of without disgust. It was unthinkable it could ever be a part of life again. These seemed facts and final.

But that was finished now. He was one who had finished it. Nothing had been of such supreme importance for centuries. There could hardly have been a greater moment in which to be alive. How many millions of the dead had fought for this? Were they deprived of knowledge of the victory? Could not their souls rush back, whatever the distance, to these bloody ditches to shout and to leap?

Even now they must have the news at home. Joy would flash across the sea to embrace the survivors – ‘I’m a survivor!’ he cried to himself – with the passion of hope come true. Sorrow would fling itself down in the mud with the abandon of another farewell seen again in memory. David said aloud to himself, You never thought like this before, did you? How much of it, he wondered, could be recollection of talks with Alan, his stimulation? How much was his own, stirred by the events of the day? How much might be Alan’s own thought struggling still to express itself? And what would Alan most urgently desire next to do? No doubt: take leave to meet this woman in Paris.

David paced back and forth across the clearing before the hut as if he had taken the place of a sentry before his command post. Alan’s reticence when he had given him the address had been one which David remembered he had noted and respected, asking no questions. Alan had said only that he had no longer any close next of kin, as the records would show. Could the impulse, David questioned now, have come from some premonition?

Doubtful it had been at least two months ago. But a chapter, he knew, was often covered in a single gesture in the field; men were surer of their common experience than ever before. David reasoned that if this girl meant as much to Alan as might be suspected, judging by what she might have meant to himself, then even the suspicion would be enough to make it his duty to break the shock to her as gently as might be; her anguish might be as great as his own – even greater?

All convictions notwithstanding, he thought, might not Alan’s mind be struggling now to get to Paris to warn her, striving at least to set up some premonition of his death so that the shock might not be so great? David felt his thought leap again to the impossible – yet was not reality even more impossible: that anything, even death, could ever destroy a mind like Alan’s?

But after all, was it quite credible that his mind could cease to be and that all his ambitions and desires could come to complete and utter frustration? They had, undeniably. Why not accept reality, David thought, impossible though it appeared when applied to such a personality as Alan’s? Why not remember this was one small episode among a million others? The word for him and for all men was minimus? Remember that even this great killing, this world war, was perhaps unimportant in the long view? At first it would be recorded in many books, then repeated less fulsomely as to fact but with more emphasis upon causes to prove this and that, then condensed to no more than a close packed chapter in some future history, finally to a page, a paragraph – true estimate, eventually, of the cycle of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, to house the survivors so as quickly as possible they might beget another generation to outnumber the sons of the enemy?

He summoned what was left of his long unused newsman’s facility to phrase this fact, in order to freeze it: ‘The peace!’ he thought. ‘At last the peace has come.’ The salvos of artillery have ceased all along the line – from guns parked so close they might be placed hub to hub from one end of the battle line at the Channel to the other in the Alps. Armistice had finally been signed at Compiègne, terminating hostilities within six hours of signature. So, these guns were silent as of eleven o’clock this morning – two hours and twenty minutes ago. That silence – ordered, expected – was nevertheless followed by disbelief and then delirium, insanity, the details of which few men may distinctly remember. ‘Some of us are still stunned, still partly unbelieving,’ he thought. Yet, he had now acquired enough control of himself to reflect that at that moment there may have been more sane men gathered together than since the world began.

Opposing battalions flung down their arms, surged up out of pit and burrow, raced into no-man’s-land shouting goodwill. They laughed and wept together with the enemy, danced and sang, exchanged tobacco and helmets, watches and rings and pictures of their girls – visited in dugouts and secret outposts – fraternized against orders. Discipline burst its bonds; authority vanished. It could not last long; presently, headquarters awoke to the fact their armies were dissolving. Frantic orders gathered urgency – and emphasis – on the way down – until they raved in the cursing of company commanders trying to get their men back into their trenches, trying to reassemble combat units, trying to reorganize safeguards against enemies altogether too friendly.

This happened, David said aloud to no one.

David had felt the sudden silence like the crack of calm in which he could hear nothing but the beat of his own heart. For a moment all had stood fast. David was not sure he was alive, unless the heavy beat in his body was proof, or that the utter stillness was not a trick of death thus to deal with unattainable hope, or that in a moment shells might not scream again to search out this trench and this time destroy him. Then, David remembered, a man had moved and another had shouted. A company had moved and shouted together. Delirium followed, the details of which he could not remember except as an attack of insanity.

David had seen his own officers become men again and leap away with his companies. He knew that the balance of his thousand men had erupted out of his front and support lines and disappeared, as a combat unit, into the madness of no-man’s-land. He had seen this happen before his eyes; he had made no attempt to restrain them. David knew that men were resuming their full identities, regaining once more whatever they had surrendered to comradeship in arms.

‘Comradeship in arms!’ David’s focus further distorted and blurred, to his surprised relief, with tears he had not wept within his memory. Nor throughout these long months of the fighting could he remember so losing command of himself. It was amazingly more important than his loss of control over this battalion of infantry.

David then saw confusion to be compared only to a general engagement gone amiss, where regiments overreach themselves and go off the map into unknown ground. Even then he was aware of the same loss of direction, the same bewilderment in unexpected ravines with units losing contact with command and with one another and presently disintegrating into smaller groups held together by suddenly arisen new leaders. Even then it had seemed to him that all moved as frantically as the ants of a hill that had been trodden upon.

He felt he had been reborn into a world more surely his than to any of the generations before. He felt strong not only to accomplish his own part but with new reserves of energy to carry along all those about him who faltered. This place was more beautiful than any he had ever known. Long disregarded details became sharp before him with an unearthly clarity, as if he had actually been killed and had returned with new perception and leisure to examine where last he had lived.

The hut before which he stood had changed from a filthy two-room shelter for his headquarters to a place upon which his understanding and even his sentiment might now be centered. From the mellowed tiles of its ancient roof and its thick walls of calcined stone, the pale November sun rippled back in faint waves. Even a glance, now, revealed it to be the obvious work of long dead hands, another link with the past in this land containing so much more that was old than new. Even this hut seemed to go back to the time of brothers-in-arms when there had been, actually, such a thing as chivalry.

Thus, now, as the great instant of the armistice arrived and men had shouted with exultation, David could neither move nor speak. Yet even then he understood that the way of sanity lay away from contemplation of the tragedy beside him and through effort to observe what else was happening about him. Though it was for this that all experience had trained him, the visibility of full day seemed to have abruptly fogged in his eyes to a few short yards in which only masses of men were discernible and these as if in a red dawn mist.

Two hours and some minutes earlier, all within the space of that last minute while David stood eagerly watching and waiting for what he knew would be the most momentous instant of his lifetime, the world seemed suddenly to come to an end. His good friend, Alan, who had stood so close their shoulders touched, had been smashed off the firing step by a bullet through the head. David’s amazement, horror, bewilderment and tremendous anger had struck into his heart as if he himself had been shot again and again.

There was little left of that in war now; each month had stripped away more and more of its trappings. David remembered the golden leaves upon his shoulders. A poignant thing that now, he reflected, these leaves given him by Alan. Both had received their promotions in the same order. Each had sought to surprise the other; indeed, they had met in the road on the way to each other for the same purpose. At this moment, Alan was wearing David’s own captain’s bars. David was glad of that. The exchange was one of the remaining gestures of chivalry, a pledge of mutual respect and affection. David remembered how his fingers had trembled when first he had pinned these leaves to his shoulder straps and how he had felt the heady rise to height when first he had mounted and ridden off at the head of his thousand fighting men, giving the hand signal Forward! of which there was no greater gesture of power over men.

No chivalry? – when he had led as fine a fighting force as had won the right to swagger with fouragier swinging at shoulder, a mark of survival through such a series of battles as had given a new meaning to the word. Hard to match, these officers and men. Men-at-arms led by knights. That was not too fanciful; he could defend the fact there had been knights.

But strangely soon, he thought to be pretending, even for one’s own morale, that the foulest cesspool men had ever made was a field of honor, that the merciless spate of machine-guns could ever be forgotten, that the glitter of steel could ever be seen without recollection of the rip of the point, that command and rank were worth learning how to weigh casualties against yards of gain.

His mind, he thought, had gone out of control; perhaps it had tripped at last from overload of responsibility, of sights and sounds and shocks. He was well enough aware he had acquired the veteran habit of evading the full impact of fact by looking away from it when he could.

Early this morning he had avoided the easy path, which led through a pleasant sheltered copse and beyond to a sun splashed ravine so that he might not see what he knew it contained, stenching to high heaven: casualties sprawled in the inhuman indignity and indecency of battle dead. He still wished to count islands of peace and beauty in the field, that was Alan, "yet whose trees are the surviving sons of great forests where men have lain in ambush for each other and fought with every sort of weapon from flints to the Mill’s grenade. Take any road through here, turn time back, and you’ll find the whole history of the civilized world night-camped along it: a sentry watching beside the Eagle of Caesar’s Second Legion, varlet grooms sleeping beside the heavy black war horses of the Robber Barons of the Ardennes, the advance party of the chivalry searching for them to cut them down, actual knights with ideals of right and justice.

Abruptly a pocket of his memory, untouched since childhood, seemed to turn out. He remembered the very words:

"After the fighting was done they unarmed him, and they gave him a bath in tepid water, and a soft robe of cloth of velvet. By and by, when evening had fallen, a feast was spread. One attendant bare a silver basin and another a silver ewer and the others bare napkins of fine linen. ‘Of all the knights victorious in battle,’ saith She, ‘I drink to three!’ Therewith She drank half the elixir that was in the chalice. Then to him, ‘Drink thou the rest to me!’ and he felt it run like fire through every vein of his body. Her face was beyond words, red upon white. Her eyes were bright and glancing like those of a falcon. Her lips were very red, like coral for redness, and her hair was like to silk for softness."¹

He beat his fist against the revetment of the trench and looked down upon a stretcher on which lay a figure so motionless under its blanket that it had already become the familiar shape of death now devoid of personal identity.

2

Desire ran through David now, quite as strong as the familiar sensations of fear that perhaps were never to come again. He could almost feel the soft warmth of some girl’s tousled head in the crook of his arm. Her’s would be no simple sufferance, no pretense of surrender. He had no picture of her yet, but he would recognize the assurance of her glance. He could almost hear the first rush of their explanations. He had earned the ancient reward of the warrior.

‘After the fighting was done,’ he thought. ‘Jesus, it must really be over! So here I am. Here I am, by God!’

He continued his unwritten story of the armistice: ‘Eleven o’clock. The battle line. Time and place have never been of such supreme importance, not for centuries. Who is there among those at home even, who does not feel his soul assume embodiment … and rush, whatever the distance, to our bloody ditches here, across France and Belgium? Joy embraces the survivors of this war (I’m one – a survivor!) with the passion of hope come true. Sorrow flings itself down into the mud with the abandon of another farewell to the dead suddenly seen again in memory. Upon the tick of eleven o’clock of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, began this peaceful silence, which … in all probability … must end the grimmest war in history.’

Sharply, David was brought back to the immediate. That flamboyant and volatile Frenchman of unmistakable booming voice, was shouting through the leafless trees, Where is this command post? Where is this hovel where I may find that American Commandant? That long piece of American mud with the blue eyes?

David saw him striding up the path, waving his arms, the hair of his moustache and beard writhing like black wires electrified. Gaspard was shouting through the clearing, "Daveed! Daveed! Nomme de Dieu! Where are you?"

Name of God! he cried. "I have mutinerie!"

Mutiny?!

Yes!

Your troops?!

"Non, non, non! Opposite. Give to me a poignard!"

It was Colonel Gaspard, commander of the regiment of the French Fourth Army on the left beside his own battalion, where the French and American divisions joined on the line during this intensely bloody but final Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The iron heels of Gaspard’s boots rang upon the stones in the path. David saw him also with a new eye. His sky-blue helmet was tilted upon the back of his head. David had often seen this gesture, which accomplished this angle in the excitement of action: Gaspard’s bear paw of a hand brushed the steel brim up as if it were the visor of a knightly casque and were looking freely out upon the world again, having just discharged some vow permitting him to uncover his face. And the face was that of a medieval warrior but little modified by continental fashion at the turn of the twentieth century. The moustache of a boulevardier hid the straightness of his lips, a spade beard nearly covered the regimental numerals upon the collar of his tunic.

But even when Gaspard’s beard was most tangled and poilu, or at those times when he lapsed into his Gallic silences, his sentiments could hardly be hidden: his command eyes, blue also but with the quality of steel, reflected fire as well as ice. They smoldered now, and he stood with arms akimbo, teetering on