CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS OX THE MEUSE 



537 



the man who had led in battle wishing 

 those of us who had served under him 

 the best of luck and a Merry Christmas. 

 He told us to remember the day, to 

 keep it fresh in our minds as one Christ- 

 mas that had been different. He closed 

 with a word about our dead — those who 

 had died, many hundreds of them, our 

 own friends, not because their sacrifice 

 had been necessary at all, but through 

 lack of proper training and preparation 

 in the years before. Every man who had 

 faced death in battle knew that the Gen- 

 eral spoke the simple truth. 



A CHRISTMAS DINNER SURPASSING 

 ALL DREAMS 



In contrast to our usual bully-beef and 

 potatoes, this Christmas dinner far sur- 

 passed anything that we had dreamed of. 

 Turkey — yes, real American turkey — was 

 there ; mashed potatoes, tomatoes, stewed 

 corn, celery, apple pie — it would have 

 been a credit to the best chef in New 

 York — yet every bit of it had been fetched 

 at unbelievable trouble all the way from 

 Paris ; then cooked in an open shed, 

 where the rain dripped down through the 

 holes in the roof upon the small field 

 range that smoked and sputtered in the 

 mud below. Cigars and cigarettes had 

 reached us from the "Y," together with a 

 fine supply of candy. 



No one can appreciate just what that 

 Christmas dinner really meant to us un- 

 less he realizes what had gone before. It 

 sounds like the usual dinner at home, but 

 one must remember that our surroundings 

 were very far from usual. Aside from 

 any of the fighting, any of the horrors of 

 Montfaucon, Nantillois, Wadonville, Hill 

 378, and the rest, this Christmas dinner 

 was the very first meal my men had been 

 able to eat in four months with a place 

 to sit down together and a roof to cover 

 them. 



Since September they had stood in line, 

 day after day, under constant rain, wait- 

 ing for each meal, usually well soaked 

 and muddy. When their kits were filled 

 they had still stood, of necessity, in the 

 rain, or found what uncomfortable shelter 

 they could beneath some leaking shack or 

 dugout pent. Now, on Christmas Day, 

 we were in a warm room, sitting at tables 

 and a real feast laid out before us. 



There was no thought of a mess line. 

 The cooks and kitchen police, though it 

 meant far more work for them, would not 

 hear of that. Volunteers hurried in with 

 the food hot off the field range and served 

 it to us at the tables. 



IN THE SPIRIT OE THE OLD SONG 



It was really an old-fashioned feast, 

 taking the late afternoon and a good part 

 of the evening before coming to an end. 

 Then it was that Tara came into play, 

 finding his long-lost soul, as though it 

 never had fled beneath the scourge of 

 shrapnel and H. E. and endless rain. 



The more we hammered away at him, 

 the looser grew his keys, until at last only 

 a few notes stuck together at a time. 

 'Harry Lauder," "Where the River Shan- 

 non Flows," even "Rosy O'Grady," all 

 the old songs of home and Christmas 

 were sung over and over again. An oc- 

 casional clog or jig, got up offhand, added 

 to the fun. The players took turns, but 

 Tara held out to the last, his blackened 

 keys clicking and clacking away at a great 

 rate, while all his mysterious insides 

 jumped and jiggled about, exposed to 

 public view in a scandalous way. 



Like everything else, Christmas came 

 to an end at last. The mess hall was de- 

 serted and Tara left leaning against the 

 wall once more, as mute as his famous 

 namesake. The trench stoves burned a 

 while, then smoked themselves out. In 

 the morning we had work before us, lots 

 of it. Sudden orders had come in for a 

 march to distant billets. Two days after 

 Christmas we made packs and early in 

 the morning marched away. The mess 

 hall had been used just once. "C'est la 

 guerre !" 



That was the last we ever saw of 

 Reville ; but the picture of our Christmas 

 Day there in the rain and mud of that 

 shell-torn hollow is one that will never 

 fade. It proved, for one thing, that it 

 takes a lot to down the doughboy. It 

 takes more than war and hardship and a 

 longing for home, since in the face of all 

 these, from the little tree at dawn and 

 the carols on to the last cracked note from 

 Tara, we had held our sports and made 

 our feast with the best of them, as the old 

 song says, "keeping our Christinas merry 

 still!" 



