erdun--"Do you want to see an odd sight?"--Verdun in storm
and desolation.

A Volunteer Poilu

Chapter I

The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre

Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, the
cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Generale was
being loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. A
hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from the
viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the air
was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks,
and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise
and odor, from the pavements on the land. Falling from the exhausts, a
round, silvery-white cascade poured into the dark lane between the wharf
and the deck, and sounded a monotonous, roaring underchord to the
intermingled dins. At the sun-bathed bow, a derrick gang lowered bags of
flour into the open well of the hold; there were commands in French, a
chugging, and a hissing of steam, and a giant's clutch of dusty,
hundred-kilo flour-bags from Duluth would swing from the wharf to the
Rochambeau, sink, and disappear. In some way the unfamiliar language,
and the sight of the thickset, French sailor-men, so evidently all of
one race, made the Rochambeau, moored in the shadow of the sky-scrapers,
seem mysteriously alien. But among the workers in the hold, who could be
seen when they stood on the floor of the open hatchway, was a young,
red-headed, American longshoreman clad in the trousers part of a suit of
brown-check overalls; sweat and grime had befouled his rather foolish,
freckled face, and every time that a bunch of flour-bags tumbled to the
floor of the well, he would cry to an invisible somebody--"More
dynamite, Joe, more dynamite!"

Walking side by side, like ushers in a wedding procession, two of the
ship's officers made interminable rounds of the deck. Now and then they
stopped and looked over the rail at the loading operations, and once in
low tones they discussed the day's communique. "Pas grand' chose"
(nothing of importance), said he whom I took to be the elder, a bearded,
seafaring kind of man. "We have occupied a crater in the Argonne, and
driven back a German patrol (une patrouille Boche) in the region of
Nomeny." The younger, blond, pale, with a wispy yellow mustache,
listened casually, his eyes fixed on the turbulence below. The derrick
gang were now stowing