ons and--"

"Gee!" ejaculated Mahan. "I had no idea of that! Then why don't you
walk straight ahead into Berlin? If you know all you say you do, about
war, there's nothing more for you to learn. I'll drop a line to General
Foch and suggest to him that you rookies be detailed to teach the game
to us oldsters."

"I didn't mean to be fresh," apologized the jaunty one. "Won't you go
ahead and tell us the things we need to remember?"

"Well," exhorted Mahan, appeased by the newcomer's humility, "there
aren't so many of them, after all. Learn to duck, when you hear a
Minnie grunt or a whizzbang cut loose; or a five-nine begin to whimper.
Learn not to bother to duck when the rifles get to jabbering--for
you'll never hear the bullet that gets you. Study the nocturnal habits
of machine-guns and the ways of snipers and the right time not to play
the fool. And keep saying to yourself: 'The bullet ain't molded that
can get ME!' Mean it when you say it. When you've learned those few
things, the rest of the war-game is dead easy."

"Except," timidly amended old Sergeant Vivier, the gray little
Frenchman, "except when eyes are--are what you call it, no use."
"That's right," assented Mahan. "In the times when eyes are no use, all
rules fail. And then the only thing you can do is to trust to your
Yankee luck. I remember--"

"'When eyes are no use'?" repeated the recruit. "If you mean after
dark, at night--haven't we got the searchlights and the starshells and
all that?"

"Son," replied Mahan, "we have. Though I don't see how you ever guessed
such an important secret. But since you know everything, maybe you'll
just kindly tell us what good all the lights in the world are going to
do us when the filthy yellow-gray fog begins to ooze up out of the mud
and the shell-holes, and the filthy gray mist oozes down from the
clouds to meet it. Fog is the one thing that all the war-science won't
overcome. A fogpenetrator hasn't been invented yet. If it had been,
there'd be many a husky lad living today, who has gone West, this past
few years, on account of the fogs. Fog is the boche's pet. It gives
Fritzy a lovely chance to creep up or, us. It--"

"It is the helper of US, too," suggested old Vivier. "More than one
time, it has kept me safe when I was on patrol. And did it not help to
save us at Rache, when--"

"The fog may have helped us, one per cent, at Rache," admitted Mahan.
"But Bruce did ninety-nine per cent of the saving."

"A Sc