Not Very Furious

It was the eve of Waterloo, and the British troops were lined up on parade. The inspecting Seargeant was the terror of every man in the regiment except a certain Sam Small, a Lancashire man. Sam dropped his musket as the Sergeant passed.

"Pick it oop!" roared the Sergeant.

"Seein' as thou knocked it out of me 'and," said Sam, "p'raps thou'll pick the thing oop instead."

A Lieutenant, and after him a Captain, a Major and a Colonel all came up to see what the fuss was about. Sam was adamant. " 'E knocked it down. Reckon 'e picks it oop or it stays where it is--at me feet."

Along came the Duke of Wellington. "Sam, Sam," he said, "pick up 'e musket. Come on, lad, just to please me."

"All right, Duke, just for thee I'll oblige." And Sam picked it up.

"Let battle commence!" cried the Duke.*

Some Lancashire Sam dropped his musket somewhere on the Western Front last week. And by what seemed a mutual agreement with the enemy, no officer pleaded with him to pick it up and get on with the battle. All was quiet. There was here a scouting party, there an exchange of salvos. But even those had an unreal quality. "It is not a very furious war at present," remarked a French officer to a group of newspapermen visiting the front (see p. 57).

Describing a night fusillade, the New York Times War Correspondent G. H. Archambault caught the eerie nature of this war of waiting: "A watcher in some trench may fire at what he imagines to be shadowy shapes crawling toward him. His shot proves contagious. Machine guns begin their battle, field guns lay down a barrage, howitzers begin pounding the rear zone to immobilize reinforcements. Fire answers fire, and the entire sector is ablaze.

"But the shadowy shapes are still there--a patch of long grass billowing in wind."

British troops moved up to quiet frontline positions. Germany was thought to have brought her Siegfried Position force to 1,400,000. Reconnaissance flights continued. Soldiers said they knew it was a war because the cooties were biting. But it looked as if the Allies wanted to stall along with Herr Hitler's peace drive until November, when weather begins to get too severe for extensive, daily air activity. Then a whole winter on the economic front might strengthen the Allies' military position.

However, if Herr Hitler should lose his temper over these dilatory tactics, if the presence of French troops on German soil should suddenly strike him as intolerable, if he should decide to solve a tactical problem by restoring order in The Netherlands, or protecting a minority in Luxembourg, then Sam would quickly be prevailed upon to pick up his musket.

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