Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer.
by Percy Keese Fitzhugh.
PREFACE
It was good advice that Rudyard Kipling gave his "young British soldier"
in regard to the latter"s rifle:
"She"s human as you are--you treat her as sich And she"ll fight for the young British soldier."
Tommy Atkins" rifle was by no means the first inanimate or dumb thing to prove human and to deserve human treatment. Animals of all sorts have been given this quality. Jack London"s dog, in _The Call of the Wild_, has human interest. So has the immortal _Black Beauty_.
But we are not concerned with animals now. Kipling"s ocean liner has human interest--a soul. I need not tell you that a boat is human. Its every erratic quality of crankiness, its veritable heroism under stress, its temperament (if you like that word) makes it very human indeed. That is why a man will often let his boat rot rather than sell it.
This is not true of all inanimate things. It depends. I have never heard of a steam roller or a poison gas bomb being beloved by anybody. I should not care to a.s.sociate with a hand grenade. It is a matter of taste; I dare say I could learn to love a British tank, but I could never make a friend and confidante of a balloon. An aeroplane might prove a good pal--we shall have to see.
Davy Crockett actually made a friend and confidante of his famous gun, _Betsy_. And _Betsy_ is known in history. It is said that the gun crews on armed liners have found this human quality in their guns, and many of these have been given names--_Billy Sunday_, _Teddy Roosevelt_, etc.
I need not tell you that a camp-fire is human and that trees are human.
The pioneers of old, pressing into the dim wilderness, christened their old flintlocks and talked to them as a man may talk to a man. The woodsman"s axe was "deare and greatly beloved," we are told.
The hard-pressed Indian warrior knelt in the forest and besought that life-long comrade, his bow, not to desert or fail him. King Philip kept in his quiver a favorite arrow which he never used because it had earned retirement by saving his own life.
What Paul Revere may have said to his horse in that stirring midnight ride we do not know. But may we not suppose that he urged his trusty steed forward with resolute and inspiring words about the glorious errand they were upon?
Perhaps the lonely ringer of the immortal bell up in the Old South steeple muttered some urgent word of incentive to that iron clanger as it beat against its ringing wall of bra.s.s.
So I have made _Uncle Sam_, the motorcycle, the friend and companion of _Tom Slade_. I have withheld none of their confidences--or trifling differences. I dare say they were both weary and impatient at times.
If he is not companionable to you, then so much the worse for you and for our story. But he was the friend, the inseparable a.s.sociate and co-patriot of _Tom Slade, the Dispatch Rider_.
You will not like him any the less because of the noise he made in trudging up a hill, or because his mud-guard was broken off, or his tire wounded in the great cause, or his polished headlight knocked into a tin can. You will not ridicule the old splint of a shingle which was bound with such surgical nicety among his rusting spokes. If you do, then you are the kind of a boy who would laugh at a wounded soldier and you had better not read this book.
TOM SLADE
MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH-BEARER
CHAPTER I
FOR SERVICE AS REQUIRED
Swiftly and silently along the moonlit road sped the dispatch-rider. Out of the East he had come, where the battle line runs between blue mountains and the country is quiet and peaceful, and the boys in khaki long for action and think wistfully of Picardy and Flanders. He was a lucky young fellow, this dispatch-rider, and all the boys had told him so.
"We"ll miss you, Thatchy," they had said.
And "Thatchy" had answered characteristically, "I"m sorry, too, kind of, in a way."
His name was not Thatchy, but they had called him so because his thick shock of light hair, which persisted in falling down over his forehead and ears, had not a little the appearance of the thatched roofs on the French peasant"s cottages. He, with a loquacious young companion, had blown into the Toul sector from no one seemed to know exactly where, more than that he had originally been a ship"s boy, had been in a German prison camp, and had escaped through Alsace and reached the American forces after a perilous journey.
Lately he had been running back and forth on his motorcycle between the lines and points south in a region which had not been defiled by the invader, but now he was going far into the West "for service as required."
That was what the slip of paper from headquarters had said, and he did not speculate as to what those services would be, but he knew that they would not be exactly holding Sunday-School picnics in the neighborhood of Montdidier. Billy Brownway, machine gunner, had a.s.sured Thatchy that undoubtedly he was wanted to represent the messenger service on the War Council at Versailles. But Thatchy did not mind that kind of talk.
West of Revigny, he crossed the old trench line, and came into the area which the Blond Beast had crossed and devastated in the first year of the war. Planks lay across the empty trenches and as he rode over first the French and then the enemy ditches, he looked down and could see in the moonlight some of the ghastly trophies of war. Somehow they affected him more than had the fresher results of combat which he had seen even in the quiet sector he had left.
Silently he sped along the thirty-mile stretch from Revigny to Chalons, where a little group of French children pressed about him when he paused for gasoline.
"Yankee!" they called, chattering at him and meddling with his machine.
"Le cheveu!" one brazen youngster shouted, running his hand through his own hair by way of demonstrating Thatchy"s most conspicuous characteristic.
Thatchy poked him good-humoredly. "La route, est-belle bonne?" he asked.
The child nodded enthusiastically, while the others broke out laughing at Thatchy"s queer French, and poured a verbal torrent at him by way of explaining that the road to the South would take him through Vertus and Montmirail, while the one to the north led to Epernay.
"I"ll b.u.mp my nose into the salient if I take that one," he said more to himself than to them, but one little fellow, catching the word _salient_ took a chance on _nose_ and jumped up and down in joyous abandon, calling, "b.u.mp le nez--le _salient_!" apparently in keen appreciation of the absurdity of the rider"s phrase.
He rode away with a clamoring chorus behind him and he heard one brazen youngster boldly mimicking his manner of asking if the roads were good.
These children lived in tumble-down houses which were all but ruins, and played in sh.e.l.l holes as if these cruel, ragged gaps in the earth had been made by the kind Boche for their especial entertainment.
A mile or two west of Chalons the rider crossed the historic Marne on a makeshift bridge built from the materials of a ruined house and the remnants of the former span.
On he sped, along the quiet, moonlit road, through the little village of Thibie, past many a quaint old heavily-roofed brick cottage, over the stream at Chaintrix and into Vertus, and along the straight, even stretch of road for Montmirail. Not so long ago he might have gone from Chalons in a bee-line from Montdidier, but the big, ugly salient stuck out like a huge snout now, as if it were sniffing in longing antic.i.p.ation at that tempting morsel, Paris; so he must circle around it and then turn almost straight north.
At La Ferte, among the hills, he paused at a crossroads and, alighting from his machine, stood watching as a long, silent procession of wagons pa.s.sed by in the quiet night, moving southward. He knew now what it meant to go into the West. One after another they pa.s.sed in deathlike stillness, the Red Cross upon the side of each plainly visible in the moonlight. As he paused, the rider could hear the thunder of great guns in the north. Many stretchers, borne by men afoot, followed the wagons and he could hear the groans of those who tossed restlessly upon them.
"Look out for sh.e.l.l holes," he heard someone say. So there were Americans in the fighting, he thought.
He ran along the edge of the hills now on the fifteen-mile stretch to Meaux, where he intended to follow the road northward through Senlis and across the old trenches near Clermont. He could hear the booming all the while, but it seemed weary and spent, like a runner who has slackened his pace and begun to pant.
At Meaux he crossed the path of another silent cavalcade of stretchers and ambulances and wounded soldiers who were being supported as they limped along. They spoke in French and one voice came out of an ambulance, seeming hollow and far off, as though from a grave. Then came a lot of German prisoners tramping along, some sullen and some with a fine air of bravado sneering at their guards.
The rider knew where he was going and how to get there and he did not venture any inquiries either as to his way or what had been going on.
Happenings in Flanders and Picardy are known in America before they are known to the boys in Alsace. He knew there was fighting in the West and that Fritz had poked a big bulge into the French line, for his superiors had given him a road map with the bulge pencilled upon it so that he might go around it and not b.u.mp his nose into it, as he had said. But he had not expected to see such obvious signs of fighting and it made him realize that at last he was getting into the war with a vengeance.
Instead of following the road leading northwest out of Meaux, he took the one leading northeast up through Villers-Cotterets, intending to run along the edge of the forest to Campiegne and then verge westward to the billet villages northwest of Montdidier, where he was to report.
This route brought him within ten miles of the west arm of the salient, but the way was quiet and there was no sign of the fighting as he rode along in the woody solitude. It reminded him of his home far back in America and of the woods where he and his scout companions had camped and hiked and followed the peaceful pursuits of stalking and trailing.
He was thinking of home as he rode leisurely along the winding forest road, when suddenly he was startled by a rustling sound among the trees.
"Who goes there?" he demanded in pursuance of his general instructions for such an emergency, at the same time drawing his pistol. "Halt!"