When he lifted his left arm to prop open the page of his ledger, it was a stump below the elbow. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; the pale, sharp face, the beak nose, the frowning, uneasy brow. Presently, as if he felt a curious eye upon him, the young man paused in his rapid writing, wriggled his shoulders, put an iron paperweight on the page of his book, took a case from his pocket and shook a cigarette out on the table. Going up to the railing, Claude offered him a cigar. “No, thank you. I don’t use them any more. They seem too heavy for me.” He struck a match, moved his shoulders again as if they were cramped, and sat down on the edge of his desk.
“Where do these wounded men come from?” Claude asked. “I just got in on the Anchises yesterday.”
“They come from various evacuation hospitals. I believe most of them are the Belleau Wood lot.”
“Where did you lose your arm?”
“Cantigny. I was in the First Division. I’d been over since last September, waiting for something to happen, and then got fixed in my first engagement.”
“Can’t you go home?”
“Yes, I could. But I don’t want to. I’ve got used to things over here. I was attached to Headquarters in Paris for awhile.”
Claude leaned across the rail. “We read about Cantigny at home, of course. We were a good deal excited; I suppose you were?”
“Yes, we were nervous. We hadn’t been under fire, and we’d been fed up on all that stuff about it’s taking fifty years to build a fighting machine. The Hun had a strong position; we looked up that long hill and wondered how we were going
