WORLD'S END

Letters came from the ambulance driver; his baroness brought them to Beauty, and Lanny had a chance to read them. The exciting occupation was having an unexpected effect upon a rather dull young American whose only previous achievements had been in billiard matches and motorboat races. He wanted Sophie to share his adventures, and wrote quite vivid prose.

He was sleeping in a half-demolished barn, and the French peasants' manure pile had become a leading feature of his life, the least unpleasant of the smells of war. He was living on bully beef, and a can of chicken from Chicago made a holiday. In front of him were the French trenches, and behind him the French artillery, and he tried to count the number of shots per minute, but it couldn't be done because they overlapped. You were on duty for a twenty-four-hour stretch, and the ambulance would be ordered out at any moment of the day or night. You drove without lights, in mud anywhere from three inches to three feet deep, and you heard all the familiar jokes about seeing a cap lying in the road and stooping to pick it up, and finding that there was a man under it, walking to town, or perhaps riding horseback. Keeping an ambulance right side up on such a road was really a lot of fun, and trying to see the shell holes at night made you wish you had a pet cat along. Sometimes the shell holes were made especially for your ambulance, and that was something you made bets about with your brancardier. You wore a helmet, "just in case."

"Have you seen Old Bill?" inquired Eddie, and enclosed one of Captain Bairnsfather's cartoons, with which the English at the front were teaching themselves to laugh at calamity. "Old Bill" was a Cockney with a large mustache and a serious expression; he was shown crouching in a shell hole with bombs going off all around him, and saying to his companion, angrily: "Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it." And there was the elderly colonel who had come home for a brief leave and found that he couldn't get along outside the trenches. He had had one dug in his garden, and was sitting out in it on a rainy night, half covered with water, and with an umbrella over his head.

That was the sporting way to take war. The Americans living in France became ashamed of themselves and of their country. You just couldn't stay amid all that grief and desperate agony, and go on playing cards and dancing, going to the dressmaker and the hairdresser as you had done in the old days. It grew harder and harder for Lanny, and now and then he would find himself thinking: "I'll have to ask Robbie to turn me loose."

He helped himself a little by reading German books and playing German music, and remembering Kurt and the other warmhearted people he had met at Schloss Stubendorf. He hadn't heard from Kurt for quite a while, and could only wonder, did it mean that he had gone to the front and been killed, or had he too become disgusted with Americans - because they didn't do anything to stop the Allied blockade which was starving the women and children of the Fatherland? Lanny wrote another letter, in care of Mr. Robin, and received a reply from the oldest of the two little Robins:

"Dear Mister Lanny Budd: My papa has maled the letter that you sended. I am lerning to right the English but not so good. I have the picture that you sended my papa and feel that I know you and hope that I meat you when no more it is war. Yours respectful Hansi Robin. P.S. I am twelve and I practice now Beethoven's D-major romance for violin."

IX

The end of the year 1916 was a time of bitter discouragement for the Allied cause. Rumania had come into the war and been conquered. Russia was practically out, and Italy had accomplished little. The French armies were discouraged by having been too many times marched into barbed-wire entanglements and mowed down by machine guns. And on top of all that came the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. The German high command had made up their minds that even if America came in, the destruction of Allied commerce would be so great that Britain would be brought to her knees before America could do anything effective. At the end of January notice was given that all shipping in British and French waters, and in the Mediterranean, was subject to attack without warning. In January the total destruction of shipping was 285 000 tons; in the following April it rose to 852 000.