“Send a wire and find out if he's still there,” said the father. Lanny did so, and the reply came in a jiffy: “Delighted advise coming quickly visitors one to five any day.” Jerry, economical fellow, had got in his exact ten words.
Lanny was all in a fuss. He must go the next day, which was Sunday. Wouldn't Robbie go with him? Jerry Pendleton was a grand chap, and perhaps was using the Budd gun, and might be able to tell Robbie things. The father said, all right, they'd make an excursion of it. Esther said to take the boys. Of course Bess started her clamor, and Robbie said: “Send Jerry a telegram to prepare tea for five!”
New England was beautiful at that time of year; the spring flowers up in the woods, and the trees a shimmering pale green. The rivers ran brown with floods from the distant hills, but the bridges were strong, and most of the roads were paved. The young people chattered with excitement, having heard a lot about this marvelous “cantonment,” as it was officially called. There were sixteen of them scattered over the United States, and they had grown like the beanstalk in the fairy tale — last June there had been nothing, and two months later there had been accommodations, complete with all modern improvements, for six or seven hundred thousand men.
They arrived at the gates of the new city at one, and found their host waiting for them. The army was proud of its great feat, and visitors were made welcome. Jerry was bronzed by the sun and seemed taller, certainly he was broader, and a fine advertisement for military training; handsome in his khaki uniform with leggings and his service hat with a flat brim and strap. He was serious, and proud of the place, showing it off as if he owned it. It was a regular city, with avenues named A, B, C, and cross streets 1, 2, 3. Its buildings were mostly one-story, all alike, of unpainted pine siding; there were fourteen hundred buildings in Camp Devens, and the stuff had all been cut to a pattern. Jerry said that when the carpenters got going they aimed to make a record of one building every hour, and boasted of a world's record when they averaged one every fifteen minutes.
Now forty thousand doughboys swarmed all over the place: keen, clean-cut fellows, all smooth-shaven — and all having had chicken and mashed potatoes for their Sunday dinner. Another world's record was being made, an army without liquor; since it had put in the plumbing before anything else, there wasn't any disease and wasn't going to be. All this the machine-gun expert told them while standing on the running board of the car, guiding Robbie through the traffic of trucks, motorcycles, and mule wagons which were like old prairie schooners with khaki tops.
Jerry took them to his own building, which he said he had in strict privacy with some thirty other men. The long room had a low ceiling, and a pleasant smell of fresh pinewood. Everything was as clean as in a hospital; the cots were of black steel and the floors were swept and scrubbed daily. Jerry showed them the messroom, where they had better food than most of the men had ever seen in their lives. He took them to the drill grounds, where you could watch thousands of men exercising — “and believe me, we get plenty of it,” said the red-headed sergeant.
“Yes,” he added, “the machine guns are Budd's.” He took them to the place where he gave instruction with real trenches, and rocks and trees and brush for cover. Jerry showed some of the drill, and sang a doughboy song: “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy!”
He and Robbie had technical details to talk about, while the young people stood and listened in awe. Yes, it was a grand gun; Jerry doubted if anybody in Europe had one as good. “I've studied some of them,” he explained. “I have to teach something about them, because a soldier never knows what he may run into on the battlefield.”
This man's army was learning fast, and it was going to do the job. Its training was all for attack, the sergeant affirmed. “We aren't going over there to sit in trenches. We teach the men how to capture positions, and to go on from there to the next one.”
“The Germans have pretty good machine guns,” cautioned Robbie.
“We expect to flatten them out with artillery, and then get them with hand grenades. There's one thing they lack, and that's a lifetime's practice at throwing a baseball. Most of our fellows can land a grenade onto a target the first throw. Every time you hit the nigger you get a good seegar!” Jerry grinned, and added: “I don't know if you ever went to a county fair in Kansas.”
VIII
All the time Lanny kept thinking: “Marcel ought to be here and see this!” — a thought which had a tendency to diminish the pleasure of his visit. It was gratifying to meet an old friend, and find him bronzed and handsome, astonishingly matured and full of vigor; but when you thought how he might be three months from now — like Marcel, or Rick, or Lanny's gigolo — the crowded cantonment took on a different aspect. They watched those proud, upstanding fellows marching on the drill ground, and Lanny saw a troubled look on his half-sister's face, and guessed that she was thinking the same thoughts. She was only ten years old, but children always know when there is dissension in a home, and Bess understood how her father felt about this war, and how Lanny felt.
On their way home the two boys prattled gaily about the wonders they had seen. They were Budds, and made machine guns, and in their fancy used them freely. They had learned to make sounds in imitation of the weapon's chatter, and as the car rolled along they discovered solid ranks of Germans charging out of some farmer's woodlot, and mowed them down without the slightest qualm. They wanted to know all about the men they had seen being entrained from the cantonment; what embarkation camp they were taken to, and what kind of transports they boarded, the time it took to get to France, the chances of a submarine sinking them.
Their father didn't worry about them, because they were too young to get into this mess. But he wanted to be sure that Lanny hadn't been seduced by all the glamour. Making war is an ancient practice of mankind, and it is always impressive to see a job done with vigor and speed. So Robbie waited for something to come out of his eldest's thoughtful mood; and when it did, he got a pleasant surprise.
Said Lanny: “Do you suppose that when school's over you could find me some job in the plant for the summer?”
“What sort of a job, son?”
“Anything where I could be useful, and learn something about the business.”
“You really think that would interest you?”
“Well, everybody's doing something, and a fellow doesn't feel comfortable just to be playing round.”
“If you make a good record at school, Lanny, nobody's going to question your right to a summer vacation.”
“If they knew how little real work I have to do, they might. And if you're going to tell a draft board that I'm needed to make munitions, hadn't I better know something about it?”
“It'll be two years and a half before you have to consider that problem.”
“I read that they're thinking of lowering the draft age. So if you don't want me in, you'd better get busy and fix up an alibi.”
“We'll think about it,” replied the father; and added, with a smile: “It would make something of a hit with the president of Budd's!”
23
Midsummer-Night Dream
I
EXAMINATIONS came at St. Thomas's, and Lariny passed with good grades, and checked off his list several subjects about which he would never have to think again.
He had now spent fourteen months in Connecticut; and during that period more than a million Americans had been ferried across to France. Jerry Pendleton and fifty thousand other sergeants were ready to try out the idea that German machine-gun nests could be wiped out by baseball players throwing Budd hand grenades. During the fourteen months' period the plants had been working day and night without let-up. Smoke billowed from their chimneys, the workers toiled like swarms of ants, and the products were piled by the million in warehouses in France and behind the fighting front. The doughboys had had a sort of tryout at the battle of Cantigny, and now were being moved into position to stop the German advance on Paris.