16, by Virgil
Jordan.

A psychologist has said that most dreams indicate some deep fear or some
deep wish that lies dormant in the dreamer. One curious thing about this
is that the psychologist was a German. Another is that none of my
companions in the dugout at Le Pretre seemed to find in my experience
anything entirely new to them. I leave you to judge which it was--fear
or desire--that came to light in me in the trenches of Pont-a-Mousson.

Foot by foot we had driven the Germans out of the forest of Le Pretre;
and when the winter came down on us we had brought up behind the ridge
overlooking the Moselle, with the enemy on the other side, fifteen miles
away from Metz.

They managed to keep the river open, but otherwise let us alone. There
was nothing to do for weeks but to sit tight. With cement, moss, burlap,
and a few rugs and a boiler and some steam-pipe we stole at
Pont-a-Mousson, we made our dugouts pretty comfortable.

Excepting myself and the rest of the aeroplane corps, our work had been
each day to do so and so much digging, hauling, figuring, firing into
the air, mechanically protecting ourselves from shells that we took as
a matter of course, like wind and rain. We did not even know when we had
won a point against the unseen enemy. We did not feel their resistance
as one feels a push. Some one who had charge of those matters figured it
out on paper, and we moved forward or back as their calculations said.
Outside our company we knew nothing of the general state of affairs.

Once in a while, especially about Christmas, one of us would get
a bundle of books, papers and magazines from a friend. Then we
talked--talked; we discussed again and again the reasons for the war,
the object of it, what we were going to do to Germany when it was over.
Every evening we tried Germany over again, put her culture, commerce,
social system on the rack, found her guilty and had her hanged, drawn,
and quartered.

Christmas Eve, 1914, I had turned in warm and excited and confused
with the whirl of ideas we had been discussing, gathered around our
steam-pipe. I had a restless night in the stuffy dugout. About midnight
the German firing commenced in the direction of Metz. Toward morning,
Christmas Day, they stopped, and I fell into a long, dreamy sleep.

* * * * *

It was Christmas Eve, 1916. Two long, haggard years of the war had
dragged by, to a wailing crescendo of misery, famine,