“What outfit, buddy?” I says to the next bunch I come to. But all they done was look dumb, so I didn’t waste no more time on them, but went on till I come to another bunch, and I asked them.
“AEF,” a guy sings out.
“What the hell,” I says. “You think I’m asking for fun?”
“YMCA,” says another, and I went on. And then all of a sudden I knowed why them guys was acting like that, and why it was was this: Ever since they come to France, they had been told if somebody up in the front lines asks you what your outfit is, don’t you tell him because maybe he’s a German spy trying to find out something. Because of course they wasn’t really worried none that I was a German spy. What they was worried about was that maybe I was a MP or something what was going around finding out how they was minding the rule, and they wasn’t taking no chances. Later on, when a whole hell of a lot of couriers had got lost and the American Army didn’t know was it coming or going, they changed that rule. They marked all the PC’s good so you could see them, and had arrows pointing to them a couple miles away so you couldn’t get lost. But the rule hadn’t been changed that morning, and that was why them guys wouldn’t say nothing.
Well, was you ever in a lunatic asylum? That was what it was like for me from that time on. I would ask and ask, and all I ever got was “YMCA,” or “Company B,” or something like that, and it getting later all the time, and me with that order in my pocket. And after a while I thought well I got to pretend to be an officer and scare somebody into telling me where I’m at. So the first ones I come to was a captain and a lieutenant setting by the side of the road, and they was wearing bars. But me not having no bars didn’t make no difference, because up at the front some officers wore bars but most of them didn’t, and if you take the bars off, one guy without a shave looks pretty much like another. So I went up to them and saluted and spoke sharp, like I had been bawling out orders all my life.
“Which way is General Nicholson’s PC?” I says, and the captain jumped up and saluted.
“General Nicholson?” he says. “Not around here, I’m pretty sure, sir,” he says.
“Hundred and fifty-seventh Brigade?” I says, pretty short, like he must be asleep or something if he didn’t know where that was.
“Oh, no,” he says. “That wouldn’t be in this Division. This is all Thirty-seventh.”
So then I knowed I was sunk. The 37th Division, it was on our left, and that meant I had been on the right road all the time when I left Avocourt, as I seen many a time since by checking it up on the maps, and had went wrong by wondering about that fork. And it weren’t nothing to do but cut across again, and hope I might bump into General Nicholson somehow, and if I didn’t to keep on beating to Malancourt, so I could report to General Kuhn like I had been told to do. And what I done from then on I ain’t never figured out, even from them maps, because I was thinking about that order all the time, and how it ought to been delivered already if it was going to do any good, and I got a little wild. I put the horse over the ditch and went through the woods, and never went back to the crossroads at all. And them woods was all full of shell holes, so you couldn’t go straight, and the day was still cloudy, so you couldn’t tell by the sun which way you was headed, and it weren’t long before I didn’t know which the hell way I was going. One time I must of been right up with the fighting, because a guy got up out of a shell hole and yelled at me for Christ sake not go over the top of that hill with the horse, because there was a sniper a little ways away, and I would get knocked off sure as hell. But by that time a sniper, if he only knowed where the hell he was sniping from, would of looked like a brother, so I went over. But it weren’t no sniper, because I didn’t get knocked off.
And another time I come to the rim of a shell hole what was so big you could of dropped a two-story house in it, and right new, but it weren’t no dirt around it and you couldn’t see no place the dirt had went. And right then the horse he wheeled and begun to cut back toward where he had come from. Because he was so tired by then he was stumbling every step and didn’t want to go on. So I had to fight him. And then I got off and begun to beat him. And then I begun to blubber. And then I begun to blubber some more on account of how I was treating the horse, because he ain’t done nothing and it was up to me to make him go.
And while I was standing there blubbering, near as I can figure out, the 313th, what was part of the 157th Brigade, was taking Montfaucon. Because General Kuhn he ain’t sat back and waited for me. Soon as I left him he got on a horse and rode up to the front line hisself, there in the dark, and passed the word over they was to advance, and then relieved a general what didn’t seem to be showing no signs of life, and put a colonel in command at that end of the line, and pretty soon things were moving. So Nick, he got the order that way and went on, and the boys, if they had Nick in command, they would take the town. So they took it.
V
It must of been after eleven o’clock when I got in to Malancourt. And there by the side of the road was General Kuhn, all smeared up with mud and looking like hell. And I went up to him and saluted.
“Did you deliver that message?” he says.
“No, sir,” I says.
“What!” he says. “Then what are you doing coming in here at this hour?”
“I got lost,” I says.
He never said nothing. He just looked at me, starting in from my eyes and going clear down to my feet, and that there was the saddest look I ever seen one man turn on another. And it weren’t nothing to do but stand there and hold on to the reins of the goddam horse, and wish to hell the sniper had got me.
But just then he looked away quick, because somebody was saluting in front of him and commencing to talk. And it was Nick. And what he was talking about was that Montfaucon had been took. But he didn’t no more than get started before General Kuhn started up hisself.
“What do you mean!” he says, “by breaking liaison with me? And where have you been anyway?”
“Where have I been?” says Nick. “I’ve been taking that position, that’s where I’ve been. And I did not break liaison with you!”
So come to find out, them runners what had showed us the way over No Man’s Land was supposed to keep liaison, only it was their first day of fighting, same as it was everybody else’s, and what they done was keep liaison with that last year’s bird nest what Nick had left, and didn’t get it straight they was supposed to space out a little bit till they reached to the Division PC.
“And, anyway,” says Nick, “there was a couple of your own runners that knew where I was. Why didn’t you use them?”
So of course that made me feel great.
So they began to cuss at each other, and the generals can outcuss the privates, I’ll say that for them. So I kind of saluted and went off, and then Captain Madeira, he come to me.
“What’s the matter?” he says.
“Nothing much,” I says.
“You didn’t make it, hey?”
“No. Didn’t make it.”
“Don’t worry about it. You did the best you could.”
“Yeah, I done the best I could.”
“You’re not the only one. It’s been a hell of a night and a hell of a day.”
“Yeah, it sure has.”
“Well — don’t worry about it.”