“They hit my officer friend. ‘Git out,’ he says again to me, ‘Git out quick.’ His fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so bad; hit in the stomach. Then he kind of smiled once and pulled off a poppy flower and held it up to me. ‘Here’s a red poppy--the blood of France,’ he says. ‘Take it as a souvenir, and git out.’
“They got me, though--the Germans did. I was in Mardeevay” (I have no idea what the name of the town was) “when they come in. After all the fightin’ I’d seen I went to sleep in a church, and along come the Germans. They was massacreein’ the people. They wanted to shoot me, too, but one of ’em understood my lingo and he took me to the gen’ral. ‘So you’re an English spy,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll examine you a little bit, and then we’ll have you shot. Good-day,’ he says. Then they drug me into a little room in the town hall and kep’ me there. But next day come a man who spoke You-nited States; he’d been in Birmingham, Alabama--funny, ain’t it, how they travel?--and he found out I wasn’t no spy.
“You went to Paris from inside the German lines?”
Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like smile. “Yes, suh. It wasn’t hard a-tall. I was captured by the French. You see, suh, it ain’t hard to travel about in the war so long as the fightin’ is goin’ on. Them French peesants was captured by the Germans, then captured by the French, then captured by the Germans again, then captured by their own people again. It’s when the armies sits down and quits fightin’ on their feet that you cain’t git around. I could a-gone from Berlin right to Paris through all the fightin’ durin’ the first month of the war, before the battle of the Marne.
“Funny thing about that battle. I was all through it, and I never knowed till afterward in Paris that it was the battle of the Marne.
“Then I got to Paris. Paris was awful, half dead, Zeppelins comin’ over most every night, government in Bordoo. I got to the Embassy----”
“Mr. Solslog,” I interrupted, “how on earth did you get about knowing not a word of French?”
“Oh, I made mistakes, in course. But an American can do anything, suh; can git anywhere he has a mind to, I mean. They was always some one who could say a few words of my language--English Tommies, American reporters--they was everywhere I went.”