No second class matter was sent up,—­the boys had hoped for newspapers from home to give them a little war news, since they never got any here.  Dell Able’s sister, however, had enclosed a clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies, mosquitoes, unimaginable heat.  He read this article aloud to a group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where they had been washing their socks.  He had just finished the story of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,—­a desolate spot full of stinging insects—­when Oscar Petersen, a very religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together, opened his mouth and said scornfully,

“That’s a lie!”

Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption.  “How do you know it is?”

“Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the Garden, and there ain’t no man going to find it.  It ain’t intended they should.  The Bible says so.”

Hicks began to laugh.  “Why, that was about six thousand years ago, you cheese!  Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?”

“’Course they are.  What’s a thousand years to a cherubim?  Nothin’!”

The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.

Dell Able looked at his chum.  “Ain’t he the complete bonehead? 
Solid ivory!”

Oscar wouldn’t listen further to a “pack of lies” and walked off with his washing.

. . . . . . . . . .

Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over.  The Colonel’s office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room.  One night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the gun teams.  The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes, smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases.  Gerhardt was working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning, showing the limits of fire.  Noise didn’t fluster him; he could sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.

There was one officer who could talk all the others down, wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the Engineers.  He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet four, and very broad,—­a dynamo of energy.  Before the war he was building a dam in Spain, “the largest dam in the world,” and in his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius Caesar’s fortified camps.  This had been too much for his easily-inflamed imagination.  He photographed and measured and brooded upon these ancient remains.  He was an engineer by day and an archaeologist by night.  He had crates of books sent down from Paris,—­everything that had been written on Caesar, in French and German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to him in the evening.  The priest believed the American was mad.