German too. While the officer rattled the steel lids the cook himself
stood rigidly alongside, with his fingers touching the seams of his
trousers. Seen by the glare of his own fire he seemed a clod, fit only
to make soups and feed a fire box. But by that same flickery light I
saw something. On the breast of his grease-spattered blouse dangled a
black-and-white ribbon with a black-and-white Maltese cross fastened to
it. I marveled that a company cook should wear the Iron Cross of the
second class and I asked the captain about it. He laughed at the wonder
that was evident in my tones.

"If you will look more closely," he said, "you will see that a good many
of our cooks already have won the Iron Cross since this war began, and a
good many others will yet win it--if they live. We have no braver men
in our army than these fellows. They go into the trenches at least
twice a day, under the hottest fire sometimes, to carry hot coffee and
hot food to the soldiers who fight. A good many of them have already
been killed.

"Only the other day--at La Fere I think it was--two of our cooks at
daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost
inside the enemy's lines. Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got
separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and
walked right into them. The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its
short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun,
and they threw down their guns and surrendered. The two cooks brought
their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them
stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast
coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches. They are good
men, those cooks!"