Chapter IV: Hill Two Eighty-five

Captain Shipp, now attached to a famous division awaiting embarkation, was the first to hear from him. He read Dimples’s letter twice before passing it on. It ran as follows:

DEAR BRIGADIER-GENERAL,—You must be all of the above by
this time; if not, there is favoritism somewhere and you
ought to complain about it. Probably you’re wondering
where I am. Well, that’s your privilege, Brig. I’m in a
two-by-four village with a name as long as the Frisco
System, and you’ll instantly recognize it when I tell
you it has one white street and a million rats. There
are no houses whatever. Further information might give
aid and comfort to the enemy.

I’ve written lots of letters back home, but this is the
first one of my own that I’ve had time for. I’m in the
game, Brig, and I haven’t fumbled the ball. I live in a
little tin shanty with a sand-bag roof, and I wear a
little tin hat that holds just enough warm water to
shave with. It held more—until lately; now there’s a
hole in it that I wouldn’t trade for the Hudson “tube.”
I was starting out with two cans of hot cocoa when the
street was shelled. I spilled the boys’ cocoa and got a
dent in my own, but those Bessemer derbies are certainly
handy shock-absorbers. I woke up with my head in Dr.
Peters’s lap.

Right here I must make you acquainted with Pete. He’s a
hundred-pound hymn-weevil, and the best all-round
reverend that ever snatched a brand from the burning. He
dragged me in under cover all alone, and he used no
hooks. Pretty good for a guy his size, eh?

Pete and I are partners in crime—and, say, the stuff we
pull in this hut! Movies, theatricals, concerts,
boxing-bees—with the half-portion reverend in every
scrimmage. He’s a Syncopated Baptist, or an Episcopalian
Elk, or something; anyhow, he’s nine parts human and one
part divine. That’s the way the Y is wearing them over
here. He’s got the pep, and the boys swear by him. When
the war is over he hopes to get a little church
somewhere, and I’m going to see that he does, if I have
to buy it, for I want to hear him preach. I never have
heard him, but I’ll bet he’s a bear. Take it from me,
he’ll need a modest cathedral with about six acres of
parking-space inside and a nail in the door for the S.
R. O. sign.

We have a piano, and games, and writing-materials, and a
stock of candy and tobacco and chocolate and stuff like
that. I haven’t tasted a single chocolate. Fact! But it
has made an old man of me. Gee! I’d give that loft
building on Sixteenth Street to be alone with an order
of corn-starch pudding. However, barring the fact that I
haven’t lost an ounce in weight, I’m having a grand
time, for there’s always something to do. Details are
constantly passing through, to and from the front-line
trenches, which (whisper) are so close that we can smell
the Germans. That’s the reason we wear nose-bags full of
chloride of lime or something. Pete and I spend our days
making millions of gallons of tea and coffee and cocoa,
and selling canned goods, and sewing on buttons, and
cracking jokes, and playing the piano, and lugging
stretchers, and making doughnuts, and getting the boys
to write home to mother, and various little odd jobs;
then, at night, we take supplies up to the lads in the
front row of the orchestra. That’s a pretty game, by the
way, for a man of my size. Nobody ever undertakes to
pass me in a trench; I lie down and let them climb over.
It keeps the boys good-natured, and that’s part of my
job. “Hill Two Eighty-five”—that’s what they call me.

We had a caller to-day. One of the Krupp family dropped
in on us and jazzed up the whole premises. There is Bull
Durham and rice-papers and chocolate and raspberry jam
all over this village, and one corner of our hut has
gone away from here entirely. We haven’t found the
stove, either, although Pete retrieved the damper, and
the rest of it is probably somewhere near by.

Of course I had nothing hot for the boys when I went up
to-night. It was raining, too, and cold. But they didn’t
mind. They don’t mind anything—they’re wonderful that
way. We all had a good laugh over it, and they pretended
they were glad it was the stove and not I that got
strafed. I really believe they like me. Anyhow, they
made me think they do, and I was so pleased I couldn’t
resist sitting down and writing you. Altogether, it was
a great day and a perfect evening.

Yours till the last “down,”
DIMPLES.

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