Kaiser or no Kaiser, while the Boche fought we would give them plenty.
The sun dropped lower and the guns talked less and less. The last rays warmed a few red and gold leaves still left on a tree here and there, blanched the slim white birches, and touched with saffron the uniform of a great doughboy who lay behind an oak as he had fallen, his hands gripping the ground under him as if he were trying to open a door which a stronger hand was closing in his face.
An afterflow of molten metal drenched the whole west. In the north and east the guns broke out again in fiery blotches of the same color.
I went back to Romagne, intending to join the Marines farther west on the American front. But a recurrence of grippe sent me back to Paris, and so I missed the end on the front. However, my friend the novelist and war correspondent, Herman Whitaker, who was with the Yanks east of the Meuse, has given me an accurate picture of how the curtain fell. Whitaker himself, though fifty-two years old and lame, went over the top in the last charge armed only with a cane. A machine-gun bullet went through the baggy part of his riding breeches and an officer was killed at each side of him. As I heard a general remark, "Whitaker is some war correspondent!"
"At about nine o'clock on the morning of November 11," says Whitaker, "word came to the
