Читать книгу Over There with the Marines at Chateau Thierry онлайн

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“Hooray!” said Phil jocularly. “That’s what I call war philosophy. Get me? War Phil-osophy for a fighting Phil of Philadelphia.”

“Philosophy nothing,” Tim snapped back. “You make me ashamed of your name with your jesting pun. I thought you understood me better than that, Phil. Wartime is no time for philosophy. That’s what got a lot of pacifists into trouble and some of them in prison. They weren’t philosophers enough to realize that you can’t stop to philosophize when somebody is punching you in the nose.”

“Gas masks!” yelled Phil suddenly, and similar cries came from others along the timber-sheltered line.

But the warning was not needed by Tim.

Even as he uttered the last word of his soldier’s common-sense lecture, he caught a faint whiff of mustard. Instinctively he held his breath, and eight seconds later he was inhaling the pure, safe lung-fuel, “canned oxygen,” contained in the reservoir of his mask.

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That settled it in Phil’s mind. There would be no “over the top” from the enemy lines that night. Probably, after all, he was mistaken in assuming that the boches, conscious of their own insufficiency of reserves, would hesitate to make a morning attack. They were planning to harass the Yanks all night with gas and a hurricane of shells, and in the morning make a charge that would sweep everything before it.