ble, terrible, unique in human experience, had
stirred him. He talked on, not boastfully, but in a tone, rather, of
awe and disbelief, as though assuring himself that it was really he to
whom such things had happened.

"I don't believe there's any kind of fighting I haven't seen," he
declared; "hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets, grenades, gun butts.
I've seen 'em on their knees in the mud choking each other, beating
each other with their bare fists. I've seen every kind of airship,
bomb, shell, poison gas, every kind of wound. Seen whole villages
turned into a brickyard in twenty minutes; in Servia seen bodies of
women frozen to death, bodies of babies starved to death, seen men in
Belgium swinging from trees; along the Yzer for three months I saw the
bodies of men I'd known sticking out of the mud, or hung up on the barb
wire, with the crows picking them.

"I've seen some of the nerviest stunts that ever were pulled off in
history. I've seen real heroes. Time and time again I've seen a man
throw away his life for his officer, or for a chap he didn't know, just
as though it was a cigarette butt. I've seen the women nurses of our
corps steer a car into a village and yank out a wounded man while
shells were breaking under the wheels and the houses were pitching into
the streets." He stopped and laughed consciously.

"Understand," he warned me, "I'm not talking about myself, only of
things I've seen. The things I'm going to put in my book. It ought to
be a pretty good book-what?"

My envy had been washed clean in admiration.

"It will make a wonderful book," I agreed. "Are you going to syndicate
it first?"

Young Mr. Hamlin frowned importantly.

"I was thinking," he said, "of asking John for letters to the magazine
editors. So, they'll know I'm not faking, that I've really been
through it all. Letters from John would help a lot." Then he asked
anxiously: "They would, wouldn't they?"

I reassured him. Remembering the Kid's gibes at John and his numerous
dependents, I said: "You another college chum of John's?" The young man
answered my question quite seriously. "No," he said; "John graduated
before I entered; but we belong to the same fraternity. It was the
luckiest chance in the world my finding him here. There was a
month-old copy of the Balkan News blowing around camp, and his name was
in the list of arrivals. The moment I found he was in Salonika, I
asked for twelve hours leave, and came down