Military Madness

OVER in Poverty Hollow sumer is i-cummen in.

Poverty Hollow? That’s the soldiers’ quarters. There is a group of fifteen little wooden shacks, quite ancient; the ‘cellar,’ a space of two inches between the floor and the ground, is the home of thrifty and agile rodents of large proportions and rakish appearance. The view to the west is a magnificent mountain of soft coal, towering into the blue; it is sublime; its base is twenty feet away as the crow flies, or twenty miles as the man fetching in the coals will tell you. To the south lies a splendid railroad embankment; laborers are at work on it nearly every day to keep it from crumbling into ruin. To the north you can clearly make out, ten feet away, the rusty girders that uphold the great, rumbling cranes overhead; through them you behold the gaunt ribs of submarines, from which the riveting hammers roar at you incessantly. From your eastern doorway you can, in a single hop, land on another railroad track, and, without undue energy, two more hops will land you in a doorway of a combination paint-andmachine-shop. Indeed, the machineshop has already reached out and spread its tinware department into one of the shacks, and is doing a clattering business there.

But here in Poverty Hollow, in spite of all obstacles, sumer is surely i-cummen in; the baseball is i-cummen out; and old spring beds, broken washbasins, discarded chairs, and antique knick-knacks of all sorts are i-cummen out too, and the joys of intermittent house-cleaning are in full swing.

Here abides Albert who, on a rainy day, was sent over to ‘Siberia,’ that most desolate of yard-wildernesses, where steel piles stretch for acres. There is a restaurant, however, on the way there. Albert was to carry a message to a fellow soldier on guard. The trip was scheduled to consume half an hour. A shower came on just after the departure of the expedition, and lasted three hours. Back comes Albert as the sun comes out.

‘That’s a long half-hour,’ observes the sergeant, pondering.

‘Many a mile I’ve walked,’ says Albert.

‘I’ve never yet seen a soldier with an umbrella,’ murmurs the sergeant.

Following the sergeant’s gaze Albert surveyed the dryness of his uniform.

‘Oh!’ says he, ‘when the rain began to pour down I just looked up and said, “Quack!” ’

Now he is Albert the Duck.

And the next day he brought in from the Outside World the theorem that the Kaiser is an example of energy and will-power exerted in the wrong direction. Simultaneously Billy Moffit arrived with a goat, which would have been promptly christened after its new owner, if it had not been for the pat application of the Duck’s theorem to the case.

Said Moffit, on hearing this view of the Prussian madman, ‘Old son,’ — thus the preliminary of his lecture to his new protégé, — ‘we can’t have you a-jeopardizing of the world like that. We must start you right.’ He hitched the phlegmatic animal to the foot of his cot, sat down, and took off his hat.

‘Philip,’ he commanded, ‘out with your ink-horn, quill, and tablets and inscribe that word Kaiser — ’

‘He ain’t on my correspondence list,’ interrupted the injured scribe emphatically.

‘Now,’ continued Moffit, as if his orders were no sooner given than obeyed, ‘now, write it backwards.—That’s,’ he spelled slowly, ‘R-E-S-I-A-K, Resiak. Reezy,’ he continued, patting the goat’s head, ‘you’re named. We’ll start you right, and, if the Kaiser insists on going on in the wrong direction, why, when you’ve each gone half-way around the globe, you’ll meet, and that’ll be the end of the war — I ’ll bank on that, Reezy; we’ll give you a helmet with a spike on it, so’s you can meet him even.’

The next day, Reezy wandered out, helmetless (it had not yet arrived from his costumiére’s, the tin-shop in the end shack), and wreaked considerable damage on traffic, tulips, and labor progress. Toward the end of a perfect day he met the Duck with a nicely calculated abruptness that left the Duck ruffled and outraged. For there had been, where the Duck landed, a pail of red paint; it is a flaring red paint; a pail of it looks like a pail of fire. An army uniform will absorb paint like a blotter. Apparently Resiak knew this. But he had started wrong; he had not traveled half-way around the globe, and the Duck was not the Kaiser.

The next day his helmet arrived from the tin-shop, and promptly did Resiak commence to live up to it.

In the cracks of the floor, between the deviltry of the soldiers, and the deep sea of the rats, dwell crickets.

Irish, a red-headed, martial imp, vies with Moffit as the practical joker of the outfit. He, too, must needs possess a mascot; such was the result of deep thought in the sunshine of the front doorstep. Out of his bag he brought a spool of thread; from the restaurant he brought a cracker-box. This latter he fashioned into a miniature house, with two windows, a door, and a door-mat. Over the door he put up a sign: ‘The Cheer-up Inn.’ Then he got down on his hands and knees, and with infinite patience pursued crickets; he would stop for long periods and listen, then would move stealthily toward the merry chirping of his quarry.

‘Is n’t he a daisy?’ asked Moffit of the others, watching Irish at his manœuvres. ‘I’m going to take him pheasant-shooting in the fall. See his point! Just a few dog-biscuits and he’ll be the finished article!’

Irish proceeded, deaf to all but the chirping in the cracks. Toward evening he won his reward, and with gentle dexterity slipped a loop of thread over his cricket’s leg; while the other end of the thread was fastened to the doorway of the cracker-box house.

‘What’s his name?’ queried Moffit dubiously, eyeing the cricket through the window of his cracker-box residence.

‘Kitchener,’ replied Irish solemnly. He folded up the door-mat against the doorway, thus closing it, and thrust in a bit of wire to secure it.

‘Taps!’ said he.

But the cracker-box windows were open; and in the dead of night Kitchener hopped out one window, listened to the snore of Company E, and, dismayed, hopped in through the other window on the other side of the door. His thread tether followed him and left him scant leeway; he kicked; the cracker-box resounded with the scratching. Resiak, rousing himself, came sniffing over to the window-sill where Kitchener’s abode was placed. His investigating nose soon displaced the cricket’s house, tumbling it to the floor. Kitchener became desperate and rattled about in his house like a bee inside a bass-drum; Resiak nosed the box about, his interest growing rapidly. His bumping roused Philip from slumber. Philip sat up on the edge of his cot and groped in the dark for the mysterious visitor. Resiak resented the competition and became violently belligerent, Philip landing on the peaceful Moffit. Thus the turmoil grew, reaching a mad climax when Irish, who profited by the leniency of yard-discipline to affect a hammock, was capsized on to the back of the careering Resiak.

At the door were heard the fist and voice of a yard watchman; with a hasty decision the watchman opened the door; out shot Resiak, who had begun to find the interior of the shack a mad and dangerous place for a proper goat to roam. He overturned the watchman as he shot forth and sped, teetering, out into the searchlight beams and blackness of the night.

‘Masons?’ queried the watchman.

‘Dainty little shepherds,’ retorted Irish, glaring at the watchman and rubbing a rapidly growing bump on his head.

Down by the dock was a huge cargoboat, reeling from stem to stern with weird fantastic streaks of colored paints, designed to outwit the Prussian. Down upon it charged Resiak; probably in the mad, chaotic coloring of the ship’s side he saw a repetition of the scene he had just left, and with a vast, renewed courage and great joy, he lowered his head and charged furiously against this nautical windmill.

Near the dock, at the side of the pipe-shop door is a bit of a box; it bears an inscription; ‘Stretcher Inside’; thus was Resiak toted by Philip, Moffit, and an attending throng of wondering night-workers, to the yard First-Aid station. His first and last lapse from total abstinence left him gasping and kicking; the brandy was all that was needed. Pondering over its fiery power and with an aching head where he had hit the ship, he returned, wobbling and tethered to Moffit, to Poverty Hollow.

Kitchener had escaped; his tether had worn through and he had returned to his haunts in the cracks of the floor, pondering over the madness of man. His old habit of chirping, however, gradually returned with his confidence, and with the undeniable fact that, as mascot, he had the shack to himself. As mascot of the interior, he could now chirp in the joy of sole possession.

For outside, tethered to a trolley that runs between two shacks, and, for ‘fatigue,’ wearing his helmet through the drill-hour, Resiak trots demurely back and forth and nibbles at the grass; for sumer is i-cummen in, and peace dwells again in Poverty Hollow.