The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-01-19
Greatest Danger to Ddvis
 Riding 60 Miles dn Hour
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 "seventy-fves" spoke with their mart, sharp crack, that always seems to say l Take that" and to add with aristocratic 1 Iinsolence And be damned to you!" one could not conceive what they were firing at. In Champaige, where the Germans were as near as 100 to 40 yards, in Artois, where they were mile distant, but
 where their trench was as clearly in sight
 as the butts of 8 rifle range, you could understand. You knew that that dark l line over there" was the enemy.
 In other little wars you had watched l the shells destroy blockhouse, a village, 1 or burst upon a column of men. But | from hill 516 you could see no enemy; | only mountains draped in snow, silent empty inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous ] to be attacking 50 miles of landscape with | tiny pills of steel. But although we could 1 not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and, from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very close, and, like children being sent to bed just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away. While on ''516' we had been in Bulgaria, now we return to Servia and were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been ceremony there that afternoon. A general whose name we may not mention had received the metallic militaire One of the French correspondents asked him in
 recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general pos- sessed a snappy temper.
 The medal was given me- he said,
 "because I was the only general with cut it, and I was becoming conspicuous"
 NIGHT IN HOSPITAL TENT
 T. cI-, o1,. .7 Stroumnitza station where we were to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as barn, with a stove, a cot for each and fresh linen sheets. All these good things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and snow. l felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps in his bed. There was another tent with a pas- sageway filled with medical supplies con- meeting it with ours
 It was in darkness, and we thought it empty until someone exploring found it crowded with wounded and men with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us through the passageway making no sign, certainly making no complaint. John Bass collected all our newspapers, candles and boxes of cigarettes. which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we returned from dinner our neighborS were still wide awake and holding smoking concert But when in the morning the bugles woke us, we found that during the night the wounded had been spirited away and by rail transferred to the hospital ships. We should have known then that the army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely that it seemed like merely a shifting from one point of the front to another.
 We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men con- templating retreat, for the mess hall in which dinner was served had been com pleted only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, and as John Me Cutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the white wash. There were 20 men around the dinner table, seated on ammunition boxes and Standard Oil cans and so close to- gether you could use only one hand So, you gave up trying to cut your food and used the free hand solely in drinking toasts to the army, to France and the allies. Then, to each ally individually You were glad there were so many allies. For it was not Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army was retreating. What the French army offers it's guests when it is advancing it is difficult to imagine.
 We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with fez as tall as giant firecracker. Waiting single handed on 20 men is a serious matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes, his feelings were hurt. It was explained that "Chocolat'' in his own country was 0 prince and that unless treated with tact, he might get the idea hot finp n11o f1h ic moi rogative.
 One of the officers was a genius at writ ing impromptu verses. During one course he would write them and while Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then, by the light of candle on the back of scrap of paper he would write another and sing that He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts and made speeches in response especially by the officer who that day had received the Croix de Guerre and wound
 I sat next to young man who had been talking learnedly of dum-dun bullets and Parisian restaurants. They asked him to recite, and to my horror he rose. Until that moment he had been a serious young officer, talking boulevard French. In an instant he was transformed. He was a clown. To look at him was to laugh. He was an old roue, senile, pitiable, bour- geois, an apache, lover, and his voice was so beautiful that each sentence sang. He used words so difficult that to avoid them even Frenchmen will cross the street. He mastered them, played with them, caressed them, slipped of them as connoisseur sips Madeira he tossed them int othe air like radiant bubble or flung them at us with the rattle of mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat down I asked him, when not in uniform, who the devil he happened to be.
 Again he was the bored young man. In low tone, so as not to expose my ignor- ance to the others, he said:
 q? I am Barielles of the Theatre Odeon.'
 M'CUTCHEON ENTERTAINS
 We were receiving so $much that to make no return seemed 'ungracious, and we insisted that John T. McCutcheon should decorate the wall of the new mess room with the caricatures that made the Chicago Tribune famous. Our hosts were delighted, but it was hardly fair to Me- Cutcheon. Instead of his own choice of weapons, he was asked to prove his ge- nius on wet whitewash with stick of charred wood. It was like asking Me- Laughlin to make good on a plowed field But in spite of the fact that the white wash fell off in flakes, there grew upon the wall tall, gaunt figure with gleam-