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Page 42
A group of soldiers were lounging on the stone seat in front of
the village estaminet. Being off duty, they were reveling in that
popular martial pastime known to the Tommy as "grousing" and to
the Yankee doughboy as "airing a grouch."
Top-Sergeant Mahan, formerly of the regular army, was haranguing
the others. Some listened approvingly, others dissentingly and
others not at all.
"I tell you," Mahan declared for the fourth time, "somebody's
double-crossing us again. There's a leak. And if they don't find
out where it is, a whole lot of good men and a million dollars'
worth of supplies are liable to spill out through that same leak.
It--"
"But," argued his crony, old Sergeant Vivier, in his hard-
learned English, "but it may all be of a chance, mon vieux. It
may, not be the doubled cross,--whatever a doubled cross means,--
but the mere chance. Such things often--"
"Chance, my grandmother's wall-eyed cat!" snorted Mahan. "Maybe
it might have been chance--when this place hadn't been bombed for
a month--for a whole flight of boche artillery and airship
grenades to cut loose against it the day General Pershing
happened to stop here for an hour on his way to Chateau-Thierry.
Maybe that was chance--though I know blamed well it wasn't. Maybe
it was chance that the place wasn't bombed again till two days
ago, when that troop-train had to spend such a lot of time
getting shunted at the junction. Maybe it was chance that the
church, over across the street, hadn't been touched since the
last drive, till our regiment's wounded were put in it--and that
it's been hit three times since then. Maybe any one of those
things--and of a dozen others was chance. But it's a cinch that
ALL of them weren't chance. Chance doesn't work that way. I--"
"Perhaps," doubtfully assented old Vivier, "perhaps. But I little
like to believe it. For it means a spy. And a spy in one's midst
is like to a snake in one's blankets. It is a not pleasing
comrade. And it stands in sore need of killing."
"There's spies everywhere," averred Mahan. "That's been proved
often enough. So why not here? But I wish to the Lord I could lay
hands on him! If this was one of the little sheltered villages,
in a valley, his work would be harder. And the boche airships and
the long-rangers wouldn't find us such a simple target. But up
here on this ridge, all a spy has to do is to flash a signal, any
night, that a boche airman can pick up or that can even be seen
with good glasses from some high point where it can be relayed to
the German lines. The guy who laid out this burg was sure
thoughtless. He might have known there'd be a war some day. He
might even have strained his mind and guessed that we'd be stuck
here. Gee!"
He broke off with a grunt of disgust; nor did he so much as
listen to another of the group who sought to lure him into an
opinion as to whether the spy might be an inhabitant of the
village or a camp-follower.
Sucking at his pipe; the Sergeant glowered moodily down the
ruined street. The village drowsed under the hot midday. Here and
there a soldier lounged along aimlessly or tried out his
exercise-book French on some puzzled, native. Now and then an
officer passed in or out of the half-unroofed mairie which served
as regimental headquarters.
Beyond, in the handkerchief-sized village square, a platoon was
drilling. A thin French housewife was hanging sheets on a line
behind a shell-twisted hovel. A Red Cross nurse came out of the
hospital-church across the street from the estaminet and seated
herself on the stone steps with a basketful of sewing.
Mahan's half-shut eyes rested critically on the drilling
platoon--amusedly on the woman who was so carefully hanging the
ragged sheets,--and then approvingly upon the Red Cross nurse on
the church steps across the way.
Mahan, like most other soldiers, honored and revered the Red
Cross for its work of mercy in the army. And the sight of one of
the several local nurses of the Order won from him a glance of
real approbation.
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