mewhere. You might call
this," he added, with pride, "an independent command."

You well might.

"Report when ready!" chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.

He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the
twilight.

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of
the guns.

"Take it on the recoil," advised the child officer. "It's sure to stick.
It always does stick."

The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but
as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a
mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down,
but make a joke of it.

The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went,
shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.

In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in
Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized
for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the
"King of England."

"I would take them," said the infant, "if they were called the 'German
Emperor.'"

At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved
back. I felt I had meanly deserted them--that for his life the mother of
each could hold me to account.

But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and
the "independent command," I could see in the twilight the flashes of
the guns and two lonely specks of light.

They were the "King of England" cigars burning bravely.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry,
artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances
filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and
excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for
him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries
to scrape the mud from every wheel he meets.

In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the
war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by
military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the
English front up to hill 516, which was the highest point of the French
front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His
idea of amusing himself was to sweep ar