Army Boys In France or, from Training Camp to Trenches

"Looks like war, fellows!" exclaimed Frank Sheldon, as, on a cold March morning he came briskly into the business house where he was employed, and slipped off his overcoat.


"Oh, I don't know," responded Bart Raymond, Frank's special chum. "It's looked like war ever since the Lusitania was sunk, but we haven't got our fighting clothes on yet. The American eagle keeps on cooing like a dove."


"He's waking up now though," asserted Frank confidently, "and pretty soon he'll begin to scream. And when he does there'll be trouble for the Kaiser."


"He isn't worrying much about us," put in Tom Bradford. "He figures that his U-boats will do the trick long before we get ready to fight. Sometimes I think he's pretty nearly right too. They're sinking ships right and left. They got three of them yesterday, and one was a liner of more than ten thousand tons."


"That's bad," agreed Frank. "But the worst thing about it is that one of the three was an American ship. As long as they sank only French and English vessels, it might be said that it was none of our business, although it has always seemed to me a cruel and cowardly way of fighting. But when they get after Uncle Sam's boats it's time for us to get busy."


"Johnny get your gun! get your gun!" chanted "Reddy," the irrepressible office boy.


"What's the use of talking," said Bart disgustedly. "They'll cook up some excuse about not knowing that it was an American ship, and we'll swallow the excuse and pretend to believe it. One lie more or less is nothing to a nation that calls a treaty a scrap of paper."


"It wasn't that way in the old days," remarked old Peterson, the head bookkeeper, who had been at the "Bloody Angle" when Pickett led the charge at Gettysburg. "Men were men then and ready to fight at the drop of a hat. Americans didn't need a swift kick then to get them into action."


He shook his gray head mournfully at the thought of the evil days on which his country had fallen.


"Don't you worry, Mr. Peterson," replied Frank confidently. "America is just as sound at heart as ever she was. Just let the bugle call and a million men will answer. We'll raise an army in less than no time."


"Well, perhaps so," admitted Peterson half grudgingly. "But even if we did they'd be raw troops and stand no chance against trained soldiers. They'd only be food for cannon. It takes at least a year to make a soldier. And before we could get on the firing line the Germans might have France and England licked to a frazzle."


"Not much chance of that," put in Tom. "It's more likely to be the other way. What's Hindenburg doing now but retreating?"


"But it's a long, long way before he'll get back to the Rhine," replied Peterson. "And in the meantime it looks as if Russia was getting ready to quit. I tell you, boys, if we get into it, the work of winning the war will be on our shoulders. And it won't be a cinch any way you look at it."


"Not a cinch perhaps," agreed Frank thoughtfully, "but I wouldn't have any doubt about how it would come out in the long run. I'd back America to whip the world."


"So would I," came back Peterson promptly, "if it were just a question of man against man. But this is a war of machinery. The day's gone by when a man could grab a musket and run out to meet the other fellow who, as a rule, wasn't any better prepared than he was. Now it's a matter of cannon, and machine guns, and liquid fire, and poison gases, and all the rest of it. The Germans have those things and know how to use them. We haven't got them and wouldn't know how to use them if we had. Why, a single German army corps has more machine guns than we have in the whole United States!"