“And apple dumpling—­green apple dumpling with hard sauce,” welled up from Henry’s heavy heart.  It was a critical moment.  If it had kept on that way we would have got off the boat, and trudged back home through a sloppy ocean, and let the war take care of itself.  Then Henry’s genius rose.  Henry is the world’s greatest kidder.  Give him six days’ immunity in Germany, and let him speak in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Leipsic and Cologne and he would kid the divine right of kings out of Germany and the kaiser on to the Chautauqua circuit, reciting his wrongs and his reminiscences!

Henry, you may remember, delivered the Roosevelt valedictory at the Chicago Republican convention in 1912, when he kidded the standpat crowd out of every Republican state in the union but two at the election.  Possibly you don’t like that word kid.  But it’s in the dictionary, and there’s no other word to describe Henry’s talent.  He is always jamming the allegro into the adagio.  And that night in the encircling gloom on the boat as we started on our martial adventures he began kidding the ocean.  His idea was that he would get Wichita to vote bonds for one that would bring tide water to Main Street.  He didn’t want a big ocean—­just a kind of an oceanette with a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea, and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps that rose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken and mashed potatoes of our dream, had vanished.

And so we fell to talking about our towns.  It seems that we had each had the same experience.  Henry declared that, from the day it was known he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the town had set him apart; he was somewhat like the doomed man in a hanging and people were always treating him with distinguished consideration.  He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the town boomer, had the memorial services all worked out—­who would sing “How Sleep the Brave,” who would play Chopin’s funeral march on the pipe organ, who would deliver the eulogy and just what leading advertiser they would send around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to get the Murdocks to print the eulogy in full and on the first page!  Henry employs an alliterative head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered whether he had decided to use “Wichita Weeps,” or “State Stands Sorrowing.”  If he used the latter, it would make two lines and that would require a deck head.  We could not decide, so we began talking of serious things.

How quickly time has rolled the film since those early autumn days when the man who went to France was a hero in his town’s eyes.  Processions and parades and pageants interminable have passed down America’s main streets, all headed for France.  And what proud pageants they were!  Walking at the head of the line were the little limping handful of veterans of the Civil War.  After them came the middle-aged huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so boyish and so very solemn, came