A Volunteer Poilu | Page 4

third day out; the ocean was still the salty green color of the
American waters, and big, oily, unrippled waves were rising and falling
under the August sun. From the rail I saw coming toward us over the
edge of the earth, a small tramp steamer marked with two white
blotches which, as the vessel neared, resolved themselves into painted

reproductions of the Swedish flag. Thus passed the Thorvald, carrying
a mark of the war across the lonely seas.
"That's a Swedish boat," said a voice at my elbow.
"Yes," I replied.
A boy about eighteen or nineteen, with a fine, clear complexion, a
downy face, yellow hair, and blue eyes, was standing beside me. There
was something psychologically wrong with his face; it had that look in
it which makes you want to see if you still have your purse.
"We see that flag pretty often out in Minnesota," he continued.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Oscar Petersen," he answered.
"Going over to enlist?" I hazarded.
"You bet," he replied--and an instant later--"Are you?"
I told him of my intention. Possibly because we were in for the same
kind of experience he later became communicative. He had run away
from home at the age of fourteen, spent his sixteenth year in a reform
school, and the rest of his time as a kind of gangster in Chicago. I can't
imagine a more useless existence than the one he revealed. At length he
"got sick of the crowd and got the bug to go to war," as he expressed it,
and wrote to his people to tell them he was starting, but received no
answer. "My father was a Bible cuss," he remarked cheerfully,--"never
got over my swiping the minister's watch."
A Chicago paper had printed his picture and a "story" about his going
to enlist in the Foreign Legion--"popular young man very well known
in the--th ward," said the article. He showed me, too, an extraordinary
letter he had received via the newspaper, a letter written in pencil on
the cheapest, shabbiest sheet of ruled note-paper, and enclosing five
dollars. "I hope you will try to avenge the Lusitania," it said among

other things. The letter was signed by a woman.
"Do you speak French?" I asked.
"Not a word," he replied. "I want to be put with the Americans or the
Swedes. I speak good Swedish."
Months later, on furlough, I saw in a hospital at Lyons a college
classmate who had served in the Foreign Legion. "Did you know a
fellow named Petersen?" I asked.
"Yes, I knew him," answered my friend; "he lifted a fifty-franc note
from me and got killed before I could get it back."
"How did it happen?"
"Went through my pockets, I imagine."
"Oh, no, I meant how did he get killed?" "Stray shell sailed in as we
were going through a village, and caught him and two of the other
boys."
"You must not make your friend talk too much," mumbled an old Sister
of Charity rather crossly.
The two young men with the same identical oddity of gait were
salesmen of artificial legs, each one a wearer and demonstrator of his
wares. The first, from Ohio, had lost his leg in a railroad accident two
years before, and the second, a Virginian with a strong accent, had been
done for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio
gave us a kind of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg
high above his artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can
you beat that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will
mean to the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian
explained the ingenious mechanism.
Strange tatters of conversation rose from the deck. "Poor child, she lost
her husband at the beginning of the war"--"Third shipment of

hosses"--"I was talking with a feller from the Atlas Steel
Company"--"Edouard is somewhere near Arras"; there were disputes
about the outcome of the war, and arguments over profits. A voluble
French woman, whose husband was a pastry cook in a New York hotel
before he joined the forces, told me how she had wandered from one
war movie to another hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband, and
had finally seen "some one who resembled him strongly" on the screen
in Harlem. She had a picture of him, a thin, moody fellow with great,
saber whiskers like Rostand's and a high, narrow forehead curving in
on the sides between the eyebrows and the hair. "He is a Chasseur
alpin," she said with a good deal of pride, "and they are holding his
place for him at the hotel. He was wounded last month in the shoulder.
I am going to the hospital at Lyons to see him." The