clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the
British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the
hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies,
mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a
group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where
they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story
of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where
the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,--a desolate
spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very
religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together,
opened his mouth and said scornfully,

"That's a lie!"

Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you
know it is?"

"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the
Garden, and there ain't no man going to find it. It ain't
intended they should. The Bible says so."

Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years
ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?"

"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim?
Nothin'!"

The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.

Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead?
Solid ivory!"

Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off
with his washing.

. . . . . . . . . .

Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front
line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The
Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the
place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One
night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the
gun teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes,
smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases. Gerhardt was
working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean
copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning,
showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could
sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.

There was one officer who could talk all the others down,
wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the
Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet
four, and very broad,--a dynamo of energy. Before the war he was
building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in
his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius
Caesar's