A Volunteer Poilu | Page 4

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 day's sunset was at its end, and a great mass of black clouds surged over the eastern horizon, turning the seas ahead to a leaden somberness that lowered in menacing contrast to the golden streaks of dying day. The air freshened, salvos of rain fell hissing into the dark waters, and violet cords of lightning leaped between sea and sky. Echoing thunder rolled long through unseen abysses. In the deserted salon I found the young Frenchman with the star-shaped scar reading an old copy of "La Revue." He