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Page 91
Rather boyish, all of it, but terribly earnest. He said he had
wanted to ask her to marry him, but that the way he felt about it, a
fellow had no right to ask a girl such a thing when he was going to
a war. If he came back he would ask her. And he would love her all
his life.
The next day, at dawn, he went out with eighty men to an outpost
that had been an abandoned farm. It was rather a forlorn hope. They
had one machine gun. At nine o'clock the enemy opened fire on them
and followed it by an attack. The major in charge went down early.
At two Cecil was standing in the loft of the farmhouse, firing with
a revolver on men who beneath him, outside, were placing dynamite
under a corner of the building.
To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing
them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded
to the cellar and kept on fighting.
At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless,
and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left.
They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.
* * * * *
When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in
a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from
being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes
from the manure were stifling.
The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and
then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none
he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They
made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except
Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there
was no room to lie or sit.
He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was
dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man
who stood over him.
"It's not so bad," he said.
"The hell it's not!" said the man.
For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the
wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.
That, and days at home, long before the war.
Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of
him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking
for water again.
Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough
water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would
have slaked the thirst of his wound.
The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited
at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.
And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or
erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not
even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It
felt like a dead hand.
Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and
quiet.
The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She
stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.
"Edith!" he said.
VI
Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole
Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own
dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and
never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best
had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the
string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.
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