Chapter I

Now the rivalry between Captain Trowbridge, the general’s youngest aide-de-camp—called Tommy by the general when there were no inspectors or other nuisances hanging round—and Sergeant Gray began before they sailed for France. Not that Tommy would have conceded rivalry. The distance vertically between an aide-de-camp and a sergeant is something between the aviation record for altitude and the farthest fixed star.

As for significance and insignificance, there were times when Sergeant Gray felt that he hardly cast a shadow, and numerous instances when Tommy, though in the same room with him, could not see him at all. This fading away of Sergeant Gray had begun with his leaving Harvard and enlisting as a private in the Army, with a sort of Harvard idea of proving that, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, he was really no better than any one else. But his almost complete erasure—so far as Tommy was concerned—had begun with the affair of the general’s niece and the bran muffin.

By thus enlisting he had, of course, expected merely to demonstrate his true democracy; and then after a suitable time to take such training as was deemed necessary and immediately thereafter put on a Sam Browne belt and a silver bar—perhaps two. Probably two. And have a striker to polish his boots, and wear spurs and carry a crop and have people look after him in the street and say: “I’ll bet that fellow’s some scrapper, what?”

As a matter of honesty, one of the first investments he made after enlisting was in a Sam Browne belt. He kept it locked up in the brown tin trunk under his camp bed, of course, along with the signed photographs of several débutantes and a reserve store of cigarettes and some hand-knitted socks and three pairs of silk pajamas with his monogram on the pocket, which he hid with a sense of deadly shame. After a day or two with the troop he began to have nightmares about somebody discovering those pajamas.

But as a matter of fact things slipped up badly. First the Government, unable itself to swank round in anything but sack suits, issued a ban against the military belt, and made a lot of otherwise well set-up and slim young officers—and others—look as though they had dressed in a hurry and forgotten something. Stout generals who had depended for years on the belt rather than on their rectus and oblique muscles suddenly extended in the direction in which they were going and had to have a supplementary hook and eye put on below the lowest button. Thus the Army at one stroke lost all waistline whatever, and a man was likely to find his breeches reaching up to his armpits or clinging perilously to his hip lines, depending on his tailor’s taste in figures.

That was the first blow, and Sergeant Gray took it sulkily. During the first meeting of the staff after the aforesaid ruling he voiced his sentiments to the general’s horse, which he was in process of polishing to that varnished perfection which generals affect.

“Headquarters looks like a blooming maternity ward,” he muttered bitterly.

On top of that came the second blow. No one could enter an officers’ training school until he was twenty-one. And Sergeant Gray was exactly twenty years, eight months and three days old.

“Holy mackerel!” he reflected gloomily. “You’d think the Germans were going to ask for our birth certificates. If I’m strong enough to valet twenty horses I guess I could bear up under a Sam Browne belt.”

This second blow did something rather terrible for a time to Sergeant Gray. He still loved his country, but he hated the War Department. It had reflected on his manhood.

“Oh, very well,” he said to himself. “If I’m too young for responsibility, I’m too young—that’s all.”

He then proceeded to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for four lively months.

“What the devil has got into the Headquarters Troop, Tommy?” inquired the general pettishly.

“Lot of young porch climbers! If they persist in jumping the M. P.’s somebody’s going to get into trouble. The hospital’s full of ’em now.”

That, however, was before the situation developed between Gray and Tommy and so Tommy merely said: “Not enough to do, sir, probably. Some of them might help at the remount station. Lot of wild horses there now, sir.”

“Anybody know anything about horses?”

“I believe Gray does, sir. I understand his people have a ranch in the West, and he plays polo somewhere on Long Island.”

“Curious thing, this new Army,” observed the general. It was not the first time he had made the remark. The first time was when he had happened on his youngest brother-in-law scrubbing the floor at division headquarters. “But—_c’est la guerre_, Tommy. _C’est la guerre._ Send him in.”

So Sergeant Gray came in and the general viewed his tall figure with shrewd and kindly eyes—veiled, however, with the fiercest of eyebrows.

“I understand you know all about horses, sergeant,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Humph!” said the general. “Know anything about them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what do you know about the horse?”

Sergeant Gray considered.

“Sorry, sir,” he apologised. “Afraid I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s a quadruped, of course, sir, belonging to the genus—”

Here the general, who had a cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other, angrily put the match in his pocket and the cigarette on the floor and got up. He was a very large man in several dimensions.

“Don’t be funny with me,” he snarled. “Don’t be funny with me!”

Sergeant Gray looked plaintively misunderstood.

“If the general will only explain what he means, sir,” he said. Generals and so on are supposed to be addressed in the third person; see the Manual for Instruction in Military Courtesy.

The general was eyeing him with the searching glance that comes with the first star on a man’s shoulder and so increases with their number that by the time a man has four he can see entirely through the War Department.

“It was you, wasn’t it,” he inquired, “who sneezed into my horse’s ear the other day when I was mounting?”

“It came on me suddenly, sir. One minute I was all right, and the next—I’ve had a touch of coryza, sir. The dust—”

The upshot of it was that Gray went temporarily to the remount station and in the intervals taught the Headquarters Troop—which is cavalry—to ride.

He stood, tall and relentless, in the middle of a muddy ring at monkey drill; and round him circled the terrified rookies on unsaddled horses, clutching madly first at manes; then, as they slid inevitably back, gripping with frenzied legs at the hip bones of their mounts; and finally sliding with the slow relentlessness of fate off the rear, giving a last despairing clutch at the tail as they fell into the mud.

“That fellow’s got real horsemanship, Tommy,” observed the general one day. He had ridden up outside the paddock and, unseen by Gray, was watching the scene. “Good-looking young devil, too. Perfect seat. What’s he got those horses running for?”

It is unfortunate to have to record that at this moment the general suddenly left his saddle and flew over the paddock fence. One moment he was there, a fine soldierly figure on his English saddle with exactly an eighth of an inch of white collar at the neck of his blouse—and the next moment he was gone.

“Good Lord!” said Tommy.

On the other side of the paddock fence what appeared to be a largish heap of mud stirred and then raised itself to a semisitting posture and attempted to loosen a rope which was inexplicably about its chest. That failing, it cleared away the mud from one eye and mumbled: “What the hell happened to me?”

The one eye, rolling wildly, finally focused on a blue-white young face bent over it.

“I didn’t see you, sir,” explained Sergeant Gray wildly. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you—let me at the rope, sir.”

The general was now sitting up and spitting mud. He said nothing. He moved first one leg and then the other and then stared round him wildly. Through the slats of the paddock fence he could see Tommy, alighted and supporting himself by his horse’s neck and torn apparently by emotion. He was quivering from head to foot.

“Nothing hurt, Tommy,” said the general finally. “If you can find a hoe or something I should like to open my right eye.”

Tommy, thus adjured, took his handkerchief out of his mouth and gulped twice.

“Very well, sir,” he said.

The general, still sitting, then turned his gaze on Gray and commenced a sort of monologue which shall here be indicated as follows:

“!!!!?!?!?!!?——?——?——?”

Sergeant Gray’s colour came back slowly. After all, if the Old Man could talk like that he wasn’t dead or dying. Nobody facing eternity would so risk his soul.

“I was roping them, sir,” he said. “I didn’t see you. I used to be able to throw a rope fairly well and I— You were behind the horses, sir,” he finished feebly. “I hope you don’t think it was intentional. Why, I—I might have killed you!”

“You’ve damned half killed me as it is,” said the general, carefully standing up.

Then suddenly he began to shake. His vast figure quivered, his breath came in gasps. Sergeant Gray, watching him with dreadful anxiety, heard a deep stentorian rumble interspersed with breathless wheezes. The general was laughing!

“I’d give a million dollars to have seen Tommy’s face,” he said, and shook again.

There was after that a queer sort of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray, based as it were on mutual admiration—not unmingled with apprehension. Sometimes there was a little twinkle in the general’s eye when Gray’s back was turned, though his severity never relaxed. He told the story on himself once or twice at dinners, too, and made a great hit with it though he always told that Tommy had fainted; and as it was Tommy’s duty to go to dinners with him and see that the general was on the hostess’ right, with the prettiest débutante in the room next to him, Tommy got rather fed up with it.

“Never knew what struck me,” the general would say with his deep-chested rumble. “One minute I was on Sachem and the next I was over the fence and completely buried. Had to be excavated—like a sewer. And there was Tommy, crumpled up in a faint, and this young devil of a Gray digging for me. Only found me by the end of the rope sticking up.”

So Sergeant Gray’s commission remained in the dim future, and round the barracks he took to humming rather mournfully a song that ran like this:

_On his sleeve he wore a piece of ribbon;_
_He wore it in the summertime and on an August day._
_And when they asked him why in hell he wore it—_
_It stood for his commission, which was far, far away._

_The lieutenant inspected all the rifles;_
_And when he’d done inspecting them he said what he’d to say._
_Then all the lit-tle soldier boys were worried—_
_They knew that their commissions were far, far away._

“Far, far away!” bellowed Sergeant Gray in a plaintive howl like a dog baying at the moon.

Then the division got ready to move and did move eventually. And owing to the wager about a bran muffin, Sergeant Gray met the general’s niece and went straight clean crazy about her. The pink hat she wore covered the universe. The world was awheel when she was in her little car. And the depth of his madness about her was exactly the profundity of his jealousy of Tommy. They were held up for a week at the port of debarkation after all; and every day for as many hours as possible Sergeant Gray was mentally on the ground letting her walk on him. And every evening Captain Tommy Trowbridge took her to the theatre or sat on the veranda and spoke plaintively about a fellow’s chances over there; and if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

“I’ll be darned glad,” said Peggy’s father—her name was Peggy—“when I can sit on my own front porch again and not be mentally assassinated by some young idiot in spurs who wants to rave about never coming back.”

But Peggy’s mother only smiled and sent the butler out with orangeade and cookies. She knew that they were all little boys really—for all their trappings. And she knew, too, that some of them would not come back.

On the night they were finally to go Sergeant Gray very deliberately went A. W. O. L. for three hours and lurked in the shrubbery round Peggy’s house. He had already said good-bye to her and if he hadn’t had a sense of humour he would probably have said a great deal more. But she had only known him seven days; and all he said to her was that if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

So he lurked round the shrubbery—and Tommy was there, of course. But so was the general and the elderly divisional chaplain, who was an old family friend; and Gray’s fear of a sentimental parting between Tommy and the girl died painlessly. Though even hearing her voice set his heart alternately sinking because of leaving her, and beating one hundred and twenty to the minute at the thought of coming back in a Sam Browne belt, and so forth, and laying his one bar—possibly two, certainly two—at her feet.

Ultimately he wandered back to the camp and was stopped by a sentry. Sergeant Gray was singing.

“The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,” he warbled, “are as a string of pearls to me.”

“Aw, stop that racket!” said the sentry coldly. “Where’s your pass?”

“Each hour a pearl, each pearl a tear,” carolled Sergeant Gray. “Why, look who’s here!”

“Your pass!” repeated the sentry firmly.

“Now look here,” argued Sergeant Gray. “You’re not going to be persistent, are you? Why, man alive, you are going to stay here, and I”—he lowered his voice to a wistful key—“I am going, who knows whither! In an hour, or perhaps two, I shall be gone, probably never to return.” He became sepulchral. “As for man, his days are as grass—” He forgot the rest of it.

After a time the harassed sentry let him by and stood staring after him. “Gee!” he muttered.

Sergeant Gray swung along the dusty road between the line of barracks and stopped outside headquarters. Late as it was, the building was brilliantly lighted and through one of the windows the chief of staff could be seen mixing himself a mild drink. Sergeant Gray stopped and stared in at him. He admired the chief of staff. After all, why only one bar—or two? If the war lasted long enough he might get to the very top and be dined to the limit by people with sons who wanted commissions. And then—

He gave an unconscious imitation of the stride of the chief of staff as he went toward the troop headquarters.

The troop was frightfully busy. It was assembling in full kit and was to march to the lighter carrying saddlebags, blanket roll, rifle, belt, bayonet and pistol. The saddlebags bulged like pop-overs, since they contained clothing, toilet articles and cigarettes. Also cigarettes. Also more cigarettes. And yet again—

Sergeant Gray, still humming, wandered into the barracks, where the stable sergeant said: “Where the hell’ve you been? Having a last drink with the general?”

Sergeant Gray surveyed him with a loving eye. He loved the stable sergeant. He loved the mess sergeant. He loved the whole mangy troop. He loved the world.

“Let’s make it up, dear,” he said sweetly. “Kiss me, won’t you?” The stable sergeant eyed him menacingly and then thought better of it. “I’ve been out under the stars,” cooed Sergeant Gray, “thinking about the exigencies of war and that you and I may perhaps be separated over there, never to meet again. I’m all broken up, old man. If it happens, promise me—”

The stable sergeant retired, muttering.

Gray then made a final inspection of his barracks bag, which contained cigarettes. Also and incidentally:

(_a_) Extra uniform.
(_b_) Socks.
(_c_) Winter and summer underwear.
(_d_) Extra blanket.
(_e_) Extra shoes.
(_f_) Writing paper.
(_g_) Books, ranging from a Testament to a detective yarn.
(_h_) Pencils.
(_i_) Chocolate.
(_j_) Spurs.
(_k_) Sewing materials.
(_l_) Letters to read on shipboard.
(_m_) Foreign service cap.

Nor was this all. Surreptitiously stowed away was a pair of leggings and a trench coat of great expense and admirable fulness of tail. These for that great day when he received his commission. He packed and rolled carefully, humming meanwhile:

_I want a belt just like the belt_
_That all the shavetails wear._
_It has a strap that goes up the back_
_And makes the ma’m’selles stare._
_It’s made of leather with a hook or two,_
_And you can bet it makes the girls love you._
_I want a belt just like the belt_
_That all the shavetails wear._

At last he was ready. On his head he placed his steel helmet and then proceeded to hang his accoutrements onto various parts of his person. He weighed about three hundred pounds by that time and walked rather like a diver ready to submerge.

“Holy mackerel!” he groaned to the mess sergeant. “How far is it to the blooming lighter, anyhow?”

“Only six miles,” said the mess sergeant cheerfully.

“I’m about as portable as a steel range.”

Nevertheless, he felt that now for the first time he presented a truly martial appearance. He wished the girl could see him. He set his mouth in grim and rather ferocious lines and took a glance at himself in the broken mirror on the wall. Now bring on the Hun!

However, some of his joy in his appearance was dimmed by the appearance on the scene at one A. M. of a camp orderly carrying a portable typewriter. The troop, lined up and totally unable to sit, cast agonised glances at the case.

“An extra machine for the general,” said the camp orderly in a bored voice. “The general intrusts it to Sergeant Gray, who will be held responsible for it.”

“Holy mackerel!” protested Sergeant Gray. “Look here, son! Look me over! Do you see any place to hang that damned thing? You go back and tell the general that if he wants me to carry it I’ll have to swallow it.”

However, in the end he had to take it; and something of his fine military frenzy died in him.

At four that morning the division, as it stumbled in more dead than alive, had coffee on the pier. Sergeant Gray, by getting into line ever and anon, managed to land four cups, which he supplemented with some doughnuts. He felt a trifle low in his mind, however. And for quite two minutes he stood gazing in the general—and quite erroneous—direction of the abode of the general’s niece. He then sighed and ate his eighth doughnut and in due time went aboard ship. It took some four hours to load five thousand troops; and during all that time Sergeant Gray stood as lithe and graceful as a steel safe and guarded the general’s typewriter.

All attempts to get rid of it were abortive. He appealed to the general’s secretary, a wan and distracted young man, without success.

“Where is he anyhow?” he asked.

“In the bridal suite.”

“Well, you take this thing, won’t you?”

“Me? Don’t you think I’ve got anything to do? The staff’s in bed and the aides—” Here words failed the secretary. “And keep away from the bridal suite. The Old Man’s trying to get his wife on the ship’s telephone and Central’s threatened twice to report him.”

By seven o’clock he got rid of the typewriter by placing it outside the general’s door, where the division adjutant fell over it five minutes later. Being a person of quick temper, when he had picked himself up he kicked it and permanently disabled it. This is, so far as is known, the only casualty suffered at any time by the division as a whole, because—but why worry about the armistice now?

By seven o’clock the effect of the doughnuts and coffee was entirely gone and there was no hint of breakfast.

“When do we eat?” inquired Sergeant Gray of the supply sergeant.

“Paris, probably,” returned the sergeant. “D’you know our heavy freight’s gone astray? All we’ve got, so far as I can make out, is the box with the chaplain’s communion service and the Old Man’s air mattress. Not a saddle. Two hundred of ’em somewhere—probably shipped to the Belgians.”

“Don’t find ’em,” implored Sergeant Gray. “If they’re found I’ll have to carry the whole blooming lot. Seem to think I’m a slow freight.”

At ten o’clock Sergeant Gray performed a melancholy duty. This was to sit at the peril of his life in an open gangway and write post cards announcing his safe arrival on the other side. “If we ever get over,” explained the noncom who distributed them, “they’ll cable and the cards will be mailed. If we don’t—”

Sergeant Gray sent one to his mother first. After that he wrote one for the girl. After that he sat and thought about Tommy for quite a length of time. As man and man, he’d have given Tommy the race of his life and won, he felt. As between Harvard and Yale, too, he’d back old Harvard every time. But as between officer and noncom! And girls were queer too. They fell for rank right along. Put an officer’s insignia on any sort of a stuffed shirt, he considered miserably, and they’d put his photograph in a silver frame and set fresh flowers in front of it.

“The thing to do,” he reflected, “is to work hard and keep out of trouble. Then when I get my commission—”

This is the story of how Sergeant Gray kept out of trouble.

Now it should be understood from the start that Sergeant Gray had nothing on Tommy as to jealousy. And it hurt his aide-de-camp-ly pride to be jealous of a sergeant. And though he was normally a kindly young man with good manners who always asked the dowagers to dance while hoping they wouldn’t, he considered that the best way to hide his jealousy was to assume an attitude that either ignored Gray altogether or kept him underfoot.

So he found the general’s typewriter, badly wounded and with the key with the interrogation mark entirely gone—and any general will know that this absolutely impaired its usefulness, because generals are always writing letters to Washington asking why certain things are not being attended to—and he followed the scent as a dog trails a rabbit. Which brought him to Gray. Not that this was surprising. It was Tommy who had sent the typewriter to Gray to carry.

“Gray, did you leave that typewriter outside the general’s door?” he demanded in his best imitation of the general’s manner when a recommendation of his had come back from the War Department marked “Disapproved.”

“I did, sir,” said Gray. The “sir” irked him fearfully just then.

“You didn’t by any chance kick it when you did so?” asked Tommy.

“I didn’t understand that I was to do so, sir,” said Gray.

Tommy gulped. It was he who found his rank a handicap just then.

“Go and get it,” he ordered, “and put it where it belongs. And don’t try to be funny with me.”

He had got that, too, from the general.

Gray did as he was told, smiling grimly the while. If Tommy felt that way about things, all right. But just then the honours were his and he knew it. It was the beginning of the feud between them.

His rage against Tommy was most unjustly increased at finding himself far below decks in a room with five others—to be exact, with the stable sergeant, the mess sergeant, the supply sergeant and two duty sergeants. They were dropping down the river by that time and the stable sergeant, having selected the best bunk, was lying in it closely covered. Every now and then he put the blankets over his head. Sergeant Gray eyed him with some contempt.

“If you’re sick now,” he observed, “you’ll never reach the other side.”

“Sick, hell!” said the sergeant. “D’you see that sign?”

The sign was a melancholy one. It forbade absolutely all smoking below decks and on the decks above after dark. To defeat which ruling the stable sergeant was blowing the smoke from his cigarette under the bed clothing.

“Put a dog under this blanket,” he said complacently, “and he’d come out deloused all right. Say, I’m going to suggest that to—”

But Sergeant Gray was not listening. He was making an interesting experiment, which was to see whether or not he could swallow the smoke from a cigarette. He failed.

By twelve o’clock he felt very empty and extremely forlorn. The city was not even on the sky line and already illimitable distance seemed to separate him from Peggy. He stood at the rail and gazed back, but he had extreme difficulty in imagining what she might be doing at that hour, their common life having covered something less than twelve hours out of the past week. But twelve hours was seven hundred and twenty minutes and life was measured by heartbeats; seven hundred and twenty minutes at, say, eighty heartbeats a minute—

After the noon mess of boiled cabbage, tripe and tea, orders began to issue from headquarters.

The general had had a large desk put in the sitting room of the bridal suite and sat behind it thinking up orders to issue. He did this because his stomach was none too good and occupation kept him from worrying about the sea.

“First of all,” said the general, “is the matter of neatness. Take this order, Lewis.” Lewis was the secretary and was trying to steady the tripod of the field typewriter between his knees—there was some motion on—and to conceal a certain indigestion he had felt since the first roller. “As military neatness is one of the first qualities of the soldier, special attention is to be paid by the officer personnel to cleanliness of the decks. It is therefore forbidden to throw burned matches about.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was feeling a trifle dizzy.

“Tommy!” he called.

The aides were in the next room, playing chuck-a-luck in cautious silence. They had laid a folded bath towel on the top of the table and on it the dice fell softly.

“Coming, sir,” said Tommy, and appeared in the doorway, rigidly at attention, but with the edge of a two-dollar bill protruding from a pocket of his blouse.

“When my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps,” observed the general suavely, “I would be greatly pleased if they will ask the staff to meet me here at four o’clock.”

“Craps, sir?” said Tommy, greatly hurt.

“And I’d like to know whether you young gentlemen have entirely finished with the candy my niece sent me.”

“Candy, sir?” Tommy’s tone was indignant.

“Don’t repeat everything I say!” warned the general as the ship gave a real wallow. “Anchor that damned typewriter to something, Lewis, and then go and bring me a cup of hot water. I’m heading for a bilious attack.”

Then he eyed Tommy. He was in that state of mind and body when he cherished no illusions about his friends, and the possibility of Tommy as his nephew-in-law was not particularly pleasant. Tommy was just a bit too military. His neatly shined boots were at too precise an angle.

The general, who had outlived that phase of militarism some twenty years before and liked to relax now and then, felt sometimes that Tommy was trying to set him a good example.

“About that candy, sir,” said Tommy, still aggrieved and every angle of him correct, “I would like to say—”

The ship gave another roll. No, Tommy would not do. He was too damned persistent.

“If my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps, as I observed before when you interrupted me,” said the general most unjustly, “I should be highly gratified if they will say to the staff that, if they have quite finished their various poker and bridge games, the commanding general will see them here at four o’clock.”

Which, of course, was not precisely the message Tommy and the others delivered. That is what aides-de-camp are for.

Now the real story of the enmity between Tommy and Sergeant Gray dates from precisely thirty seconds after that speech of the general’s. For Tommy, going out slightly ruffled, met Sergeant Gray in the passage—or whatever they call it on a ship—and the sergeant, having just been thrown against a doorway, had struck his right crazy bone and was holding himself tight so he would not yell. Tommy, ignorant of the accident, paused before Gray and said in his most aide-de-camp-ly manner:

“Sergeant!”

At which the usage of war demands that the sergeant salute and reply, “Sir.”

But Gray was past even the usages of polite society. He still stood looking into vacancy and trying not to yell.

“Well?” said Tommy, waiting for the proper thing to happen.

Slowly Sergeant Gray came back to partial consciousness and turned a pair of eyes filled with fury on Tommy.

“Oh, go away and lemme alone!” he said. Which was neither Harvard nor regulations, and immediately made him liable to court-martial.

Tommy flushed.

“I’m in no hurry, Gray,” he said urbanely. “I’ll just wait here until you have a moment to think.”

“I’ve d—I’ve darned near broken my arm.”

“I’m waiting.”

A dogged resolution not to salute Tommy at any price was rapidly forming in Sergeant Gray’s mind. He dropped his right arm limp at his side and made an abortive effort to raise it.

“Can’t lift my hand, sir. Awfully sorry.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Tommy. “The voyage will last ten days and I’m prepared to stand here until you salute me, if—”

“If it takes all summer,” finished Sergeant Gray. “Very well, sir. But I shall be obliged to report to my captain that I am being subjected to persecution.”

It had ceased entirely to be a matter of rules and regulations and was now a matter of a girl. Both of them knew it. The anger between them was primitive jealousy complicated by a Sam Browne belt and two parallel bars. Tommy under ordinary circumstances was a nice chap who sent his mother flowers on her birthday and would pick up pedestrians in his car and give them a lift quite often, unless he was on his way to play golf. On those occasions he hadn’t time to stop. And Gray was one of those fellows, even at Harvard, who liked to chat with motormen on street cars and always sent the telephone girl a box of candy at Christmas and was likely to pick up a stray dog ’most anywhere and take it into whatever place was nearest and order it a square meal. Wrapped in paper of course.

But a very brief acquaintance with a girl—the same girl—had changed them both.

So they stood there rigidly and in silence until at two minutes after four the general put his head out of the door and said:

“Tommy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the hell has happened to the staff?”

“Sorry, sir.” Tommy was a bright pink. “Gray has refused to salute me and—I’ll notify them at once, sir.”

The general stood in the doorway and drew himself to his full and awful height. He was not, at that, much taller than Gray, but he had a chest like a hogshead and room enough for a whole constellation of stars on his shoulders.

“Come in, sergeant,” he said grimly, and stalked into his room grimly and creaked into his chair grimly.

Of course he would normally have done nothing of the sort. He would—the matter forcing itself on his attention as it had—have ordered Gray in irons at once. But there was the Peggy complication. He was very fond of Peggy.

“Of course,” he said, also grimly, “you know this is a court-martial offence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unless there are extenuating circumstances. In that case—”

He eyed Gray.

“I couldn’t move my arm, sir. I’d knocked my crazy bone.”

“Can you lift it now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Very well,” said the general. “You will salute Captain Trowbridge fifty times. In the passage when he returns.”

There was, for just the fraction of a second, the exchange of a glance of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray. It was, on the general’s part, by way of being a twinkle; and on Sergeant Gray’s, of triumph.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“Well?”

“Is Captain Trowbridge to return the salutes?”

“According to regulations, he will.”

And again, for the fraction of a second, they exchanged glances. The general liked Tommy, and in a sort of watchful and reminiscent way—remembering West Point probably—he liked Gray. But whom a general loves he chastens.

It was a very sulky Tommy who returned to the chuck-a-luck games some time later, while the staff smoked cigarettes in the general’s room and discussed such matters as physical exercise for the troops; and mumps and submarines and the rotten food the Navy gave the Army; and what the deuce had happened to the heavy freight; and seasickness; and the fundamental motives of Pershing’s strategy. A certain number of them began several times to say: “When I was in the Philippines—” and were cut short hastily.

It was when they had all gone that the general sent for Gray and made him his sergeant-orderly. He made it very clear that Gray was still under the ban of his displeasure and that the real reason he was taking him in at all was to clean up after the staff. For the floor of headquarters looked rather like the floor of a pool room, being covered with burned matches and cigarette ashes and torn-up bits of paper on which various members of the staff had noted suggestions to be made to the general—and then thought better of it.

“I have come to the conclusion, Gray,” finished the general, “that the only way to keep you out of trouble is to keep you in it. You’ll have plenty of it right here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with a sort of sinking conviction that he would now have to polish the general’s boots, until he remembered that the general had a valet along. What the deuce did a sergeant-orderly do, anyhow?

“You will stay within call,” said the general, “and make yourself generally useful. Better clean up this floor now. And hereafter, sergeant, you will make note of the name of any officer throwing matches or ashes on my floor. Keep a pad and pencil in your pocket.”

Then he went to have tea with the captain on the bridge, accompanied by the chief of staff carrying his tea ball. The general drank only his own tea.

This is really the story of a feud and its culmination. Feuds are of two sorts: The sort that spring up spontaneously out of an initial injury, and the ones that grow slowly from small things to greater ones. This was both.

Some time later Tommy sauntered into the general’s room for one of the general’s cigarettes. His own tobacco tasted queer to him—not that he was seasick of course. And seeing Gray there he did not see him—which happens in the Army now and then—and lighted a cigarette and threw the match on the floor. Whereupon Sergeant Gray got a pad out of his pocket and wrote something on it.

Tommy was vaguely uneasy. He went into the aides’ room next door and pondered. And when he had lost three dollars and twenty cents more he went back for another cigarette and lighted it and waited developments. They came. Gray got out the pad again and wrote on it.

This time Tommy told the aides and they put their heads together, but it was no use. It wasn’t the taking of the cigarettes. The general expected that, for—having almost as much privacy as a canary bird—he had never found a place where they were sufficiently concealed. Though he had done fairly well for a few days once with a box marked: “Memoranda for book on the new warfare.”

During the time the general was having tea Sergeant Gray’s list grew. He got—to be exact:

The divisional judge advocate.

The divisional adjutant.

The chaplain.

The master-at-arms.

The ship’s executive officer.

A seasick brigadier general—who threw his whole cigar on the
floor and groaned. Gray had hardly the heart to put him down.

A lieutenant colonel. This latter waited some time and threw
three matches and two butts on the floor. But this was because
he was impatient. He had been notified that he was promoted to a
full colonel, but his papers had not come before sailing and he
wanted permission to put on his eagles for dinner.

Some time later the general returned. He was quite cheery, having done all the talking and made an excellent case for the Army versus the Navy, and he smiled grimly over Sergeant Gray’s list.

“Tommy!” he called. And when Tommy came, neater than wax and slightly dignified owing to the matter of returning fifty salutes, the general very pleasantly read:

“Captain Trowbridge, two matches.

“I am determined,” said the general rather oratorically, “to enforce military neatness about me. Pick ’em up, Tommy.”

Which Tommy did, grinning sourly and avoiding Sergeant Gray’s eye.

“And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The first thing that was noticeable was the Gallicisation of the ship. The doughboys had French phrase books and pored over them diligently. There was a sprinkling of British added to the conversation also, owing to the magnificent presence of an English sergeant major on board.

“Attention for the sergeant majah!” or “Gangway for the sergeant majah!” they would call when he appeared. “Cheer-o” and “Feeling rather ducky this morning, aren’t you?” vied with such French phrases as “_Très bon_,” pronounced tray bone, and “_Combien_,” pronounced according to taste and directed at the boy behind the grating who sold tobacco and candy. The routine of the ship went on, varied by reveille and mess calls, by shooting craps and by physical exercise which consisted mostly—owing to lack of space—of putting the men on their backs and having them raise their legs in the air, on the count dropping them with tremendous thuds to the deck.

“Not dignified,” reflected the general, watching them, “but better than nothing. It might be good for the waistline.”

He took to doing it himself in his stateroom and one morning Sergeant Gray, drowsily keeping watch on the deck outside the window of the general’s cabin, was electrified to see a pair of strong and muscular bare legs, topped by feet, rise into view and disappear some six times.

This keeping watch had been Gray’s idea. It had come as a result of the united efforts of William, the general’s colored valet, and Lewis and Sergeant Gray to get the general each morning into his rubber life-saving suit for practice in case of necessity; and into his life belt in time for fire drill. The general always blamed the suit for his troubles—or his valet.

“What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?” he would roar. “Arms paralyzed?”

And when it was all over and the general was near his boat and the troops were rushing up the companionways like battering rams, each man holding to the breeches belt of the man ahead, with the little fellows who lost their footing swinging like the cracker on the end of a whip, while the staff stood at different stations timing the drill with stop watches, Lewis and Gray and William would sink into chairs and perspire.

“Eleven minutes!” Lewis would groan. “If we’re struck he’ll go down like a stone. He’s too big to move fast.”

“Dollars to doughnuts he’d refuse to leave without full equipment,” said Gray rather bitterly. “There’s only one thing to do, Lewis. He oughtn’t to be alone at night.”

“He’s got a bunch of aides.”

“He has,” assented Gray grimly. “I call ’em, don’t I? D’you ever know ’em to waken until I’ve banged at their doors for ten minutes? Eleven o’clock this morning before one of them showed up! No, this is up to you and me, Lewis.”

“All right,” said Lewis without enthusiasm. He loved the general as a mother loves a child, but he generally felt that he was running the entire division. In speaking of the general to his intimates he always said “we.”

“We issued an order about throwing cigarettes overboard this A. M.,” he would say, for instance. “If a sub should pick up two in a line she could get our course.”

Or: “Sorry, old-timer. No cards for me. We’re seeing the staff at ten-thirty.”

So: “All right,” he said. “Well?”

“He’s all right in daylight,” said Gray. “Or he will be as soon as he gives up that rubber-suit business and sticks to a life belt. It’s night I’m thinking about.”

All of which leads merely to the next step in the feud. For Lewis and Gray and William—at his own request—divided the night into three watches and hovered like ministering angels on the deck outside the bridal suite. But things were uneventful enough, except that William, his first watch on, hearing strange and stertorous sounds from beyond the porthole, roused Gray with a shuddering fear that the general had had an attack of apoplexy. And except that the general, finding Gray yawning all over the place one morning, observed tartly that he’d better stop shooting craps all night.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.

It is unfortunate perhaps that the night Tommy could not sleep for thinking of the girl and the night Sergeant Gray saw the submarine should have coincided. It was not really a submarine, so there is no need for excitement.

Gray saw the periscope quite plainly. It may have been merely a nocturnal whale dreaming, like Tommy and Gray, of a lost love, it must be so frightfully easy for a whale to lose track of his love in the Atlantic—or it may have been the leg of a table or an empty crate. Considerable excitement was wasted on empty crates in the Atlantic during the late unpleasantness. Whatever it was, Gray was not in much doubt. But he waited to be quite sure, because a fellow hates to get five thousand men up on deck in the middle of the night for what may turn out to be the carcass of a horse.

So he stood bent over the rail. And at that moment a figure came along the empty deck, walking as men walk at night when they dream of a house in the country with a lot of vines and things and a girl waiting in a runabout for the five-twenty from town—and the figure held between wistful lips a lighted cigarette.

It took just one and a half seconds for Gray to knock the cigarette out of the aforesaid wistful mouth—and then he did it by jarring rather than direct action. For he miscalculated his distance and hit Captain Trowbridge, Yale, ’16, aide-de-camp and captain of artillery, a mighty slam on the ear.

Some moments later the general opened his porthole and put out his head. On the deck just outside was a darkish mass which seemed to be still and yet in violent movement.

“Stop that!” roared the general. “Get up out of that and get below decks. What the—” There has been considerable military language so far. We’ll call it mischief. “What the mischief d’you fellows mean, anyhow?”

The mass slowly became two masses and took on vertical instead of horizontal dimensions. But neither mass spoke. By common consent they separated, looking—as Elizabeth Browning says—two ways, and moving in the direction they were looking.

It was the chaplain who first noticed next morning the coincidence that one of the general’s aides-de-camp had a swollen left ear and that the sergeant-orderly had a cut lip.

The chaplain sauntered into the bridal suite and—having been most military for two seconds—took one of the general’s cigarettes, surveyed himself in the general’s mirror and observed: “Been having a family row, I see.”

“Pick up that match, chaplain,” said the general testily. “What sort of a row?”

“Been some sort of a mix-up between Tommy and Gray. Wish I’d seen it. Must have been considerable of a scrap.”

“Nonsense,” snapped the general. “What’d they fight about?”

“Search me!”

“Besides, an officer and a noncom—”

The chaplain, who was fond of boxing, had doubled up his fists and was making tentative passes at the general’s trench coat, which was swinging on a hook.

“They haven’t liked each other much for some days,” he said, and got in a beautiful hook on the general’s collar. “’F you ask me, it’s mutual jealousy.”

“I see,” said the general in a thoughtful tone. He greatly admired the chaplain, though he complained of him bitterly. “Can’t teach him discipline,” he would say at dinner parties. “Goes A. W. O. L. whenever he wants to and turns up blithely with some excuse or other and a box of cigars for me. I don’t know what to do with the fellow.”

“How dreadful!” the débutante on his right would breathe.

“Horrible,” the general would agree. “But I can’t put him in the guardhouse, though I’ve threatened it. The men love him. They call him the Bird of Paradise. Fact. I’m the Old Bird and he’s the Bird of Paradise.”

Upon which his great shoulders would heave and the débutante would try to think of the proper thing to say.

So the general saw how the chaplain’s mind was working.

“There wasn’t much time,” he observed.

“It wouldn’t take much time. Not with the young lady I have in mind. If I were not a married man—”

But the chief of staff came in just then, very military and precise, and the chaplain became just as military and precise and went out.

During the day the general issued more orders, to keep him from thinking about his stomach, and went on deck to read for a while, taking a book on military tactics and a detective story with him. So long as Tommy was near him he read tactics. But for quite a long time he sat and looked at the sea and thought about his niece back home, who was all the daughter he had, and these two young rascals pommelling each other under his window the night before. It took him back quite a number of years.

“The young fools,” he said reminiscently.

Well, there was no use worrying about it. They were going to war and no one could tell who would come back. He looked aft along the deck to where those fine boys of his were clustered against the rail, and he wondered.