American machine-gun company who, in March, marched with his men into
the Somme line. He was an old football-player back in the States, and
we were having a last dinner together in Paris, a group of college men.
After dinner, when we had finished discussing the dangers of the coming
weeks, and he had told us that his major had said to him, "If fifteen
per cent of us come out alive, I shall be glad," and after we had
drifted back to the old college days, and home and babies, and after he
had shown us a picture of his wife and his kiddies, it became strangely
quiet in the room, and suddenly he turned his face from us, with just
the profile showing against the light of the window, and exclaimed: "My
God, fellows, for a half-hour you have made me forget that there is a
war, and I have been back on the old campus again playing football, and
back with my babies."

Then his jaw set, and I shall never forget the profile of his face as
that set look came back and once again he became the captain of a
machine-gun company.

Then there was the lone church service that my friend Clarke held one
evening at a crossroads of France. He had held seven services that
Sunday, one in a machine-gun company's dugout, with six men; another
with a group of a dozen men in a front-line trench; another with
several officers in an officers' dugout; another with a battery outfit
who were "On Call," expecting orders to send over a few shells; another
with several men out in No Man's Land, on the sunny side of an old
upturned mass of tree roots; one in a listening-post, and finally this
service with a lone sentry at a crossroads.

"But how did you do it?" I asked.