For a long time we lay awake and talked about the day's experience,
and particularly our half day under fire. We agreed that really it
was not so bad. We were scared--badly scared; but we could laugh
at it, even at the hottest of it, and it was never so exceedingly
hot. Yet we might have been killed. Thousands who died, went out
in just such mild places as we had been through, and probably went
out laughing as we might have gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of
an inch one way or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita and
Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless live days and weeks
under what we had seen and would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused:
"I wonder if that young French lieutenant there in the woods went
out smiling!" And then for a long time no one spoke, and at last
we slept.

[Illustration: So we went back--me holding those khaki trousers up
by sheer force of will and both hands!]




CHAPTER IV

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"


This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pershing
and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France
which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental
enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story
of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we