International 佛山桑拿会所美女图片 Telephone & Telegraph, for example, announcedon Sunday that the devaluation would not affect its 1967earnings, because “management anticipated the possibility 南海大沥桑拿 ofdevaluation for some time.” International Harvester and TexasInstruments reported that they had protected themselves bymaking what amounted to short sales of sterling. The SingerCompany said it might even have accidentally made a profit onthe deal. Other American companies let it be known that theyhad come out all right, but declined to elaborate, on theground that if they revealed the methods they had used theymight be accused of taking advantage of Britain in its extremity.
“Let’s just say we were smart” was the way a spokesman forone company put it. And perhaps that, if lacking in grace andelegance, was fair enough. In the jungle of internationalbusiness, hedging on a weak foreign currency is considered awholly legitimate use of claws for self-defense. Selling short forspeculative purposes enjoys less respectability, and it 佛山桑拿按摩qq isinteresting to note that the ranks of those who speculatedagainst sterling on Friday, and talked about it afterward,included some who were far from Zurich. A group ofprofessional men in Youngstown, Ohio—veteran stock-marketplayers, but never before international currencyplungers—decided on Friday that sterling was about to bedevalued, and sold short seventy thousand pounds, netting aprofit of almost twenty-five thousand dollars over the weekend.
The pounds sold had, of course, ultimately been bought withdollars by the Bank of England, thus adding a minuscule dropto Britain’s reserve loss. Reading about the little coup in theWall Street Journal, to which the group’s broker hadreported it, presumably with pride, I hoped the apprenticegnomes of Youngstown had at least grasped the implications ofwhat they were doing.
So much for Sunday and moral speculation. On Monday, thefinancial 佛山夜生活约炮 world, or most of it, went back to work, and thedevaluation began to be put to its test. The test consisted oftwo questions. Question One: Would the devaluation accomplishits purpose for Britain—that is, stimulate exports and reduceimports sufficiently to cure the international deficit and put anend to speculation against the pound? Question Two: Would it,as in 1931, be followed by a string of competitive devaluationsof other currencies, leading ultimately to a devaluation of thedollar in relation to gold, worldwide monetary chaos, andperhaps a world depression? I watched the answers beginningto take shape.
On Monday, the banks and exchanges in London remainedfirmly closed, by government order, and all but a few traderselsewhere avoided taking positions in sterling in the Bank ofEngland’s absence from the market, so the answer to thequestion of the pound’s strength or 佛山夜生活交友社区 weakness at its newvaluation was postponed; On Threadneedle and ThrogmortonStreets, crowds of brokers, jobbers, and clerks milled aroundand talked excitedly—but made no trades—in a city where theunion Jack was flying from all flagstaffs because it happened tobe the Queen’s wedding anniversary. The New York stockmarket opened sharply lower, then recovered. (There was noreally rational explanation for the initial drop; securities menpointed out that devaluation just generally sounds depressing.)By nightfall on Monday, it had been announced that elevenother currencies—those of Spain, Denmark, Israel, Hong Kong,Malta, Guyana, Malawi, Jamaica, Fiji, Bermuda, andIreland—were also being devalued. That wasn’t so bad, becausethe disruptive effect of a currency devaluation is in directproportion to the importance of that currency in world trade,and none of those currencies were of great importance. Themost ominous move was Denmark’s, because 佛山桑拿飞机网 Denmark mighteasily be followed by its close economic allies Norway, Sweden,and the Netherlands, and that would be pretty serious. Egypt,which was an instant loser of thirty-eight million dollars onpounds held in its reserves at the time of devaluation, heldfirm, and so did Kuwait, which lost eighteen million.
On Tuesday, the markets everywhere were going full blast.
The Bank of England, back in business, set the new tradinglimits of the pound at a floor of $2.38 and a ceiling of $2.42,whereupon the pound went straight to the ceiling, like a balloonslipped from a child’s hand, and stayed there all day; indeed,for obscure reasons inapplicable to balloons, it spent much ofthe day slightly above the ceiling. Now, instead of paying dollarsfor pounds, the Bank of England was supplying pounds fordollars, and thereby beginning the process of rebuilding itsreserves. I called Waage to share what I thought would be hisjubilation, but found him taking it all calmly. The pound’sstrength, he said, was “technical”—that is, it was caused by theprevious week’s short sellers’ buying pounds back to cash intheir profits—and the first objective test of the new poundwould not come until Friday. Seven more small governmentsannounced devaluations during the day. In Malaysia, which haddevalued its old sterling-backed pound but not its new dollar,based on gold, and which continued to keep both currencies incirculation, the injustice of the situation led to riots, and overthe next two weeks more than twenty-seven people were killedin them—the first casualties of devaluation. Apart from thispainful reminder that the counters in the engrossing game ofinternational finance are people’s livelihoods, and even theirlives, so far so good.
But on Wednesday the twenty-second a less localized portentof trouble appeared. The speculative attack that had so longbattered and at last crushed the pound now turned, aseveryone had feared it might, on the dollar. As the one nationthat is committed to sell gold in any quantity to the centralbank of any other nation at the fixed price of thirty-five dollarsan ounce, the United States is the keystone of the worldmonetary arch, and the gold in its Treasury—which on thatWednesday amounted to not quite thirteen billion dollars’
worth—is the foundation. Federal Reserve Board ChairmanMartin had said repeatedly that the United States would underany condition continue to sell it on demand, if necessary downto the last bar. Despite this pledge, and despite PresidentJohnson’s reiteration of it immediately after Britain’s devaluation,speculators now began buying gold with dollars in hugequantities, expressing the same sort of skepticism toward officialassurances that was shown at about the same time by NewYorkers who took to accumulating and hoarding subway tokens.
Gold was suddenly in unusual demand in Paris, Zurich, andother financial centers, and most particularly in London, theworld’s leading gold market, where people immediately began totalk about the London Gold Rush. The day’s orders for gold,which some authorities estimated at over fifty million dollars’
worth, seemed to come in from everywhere—except,presumably, from citizens of the United States or Britain, whoare forbidden by law to buy or own monetary gold. And whowas to sell the stuff to these invisible multitudes so suddenlyrepossessed by the age-old lust for it? Not the United StatesTreasury, which, through the Federal Reserve, sold gold only tocentral banks, and not other central banks, which did notpromise to sell it at all. To fill this vacuum, still anotherco?perative international group, the London gold pool, had beenestablished in 1961. Provided by its members—the United States,Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany,Belgium, and, originally, France—with gold ingots in quantitiesthat might dazzle a Croesus (fifty-nine per cent of the totalcoming from the United States), the pool was intended to quellmoney panics by supplying gold to non-governmental buyers inany quantity demanded, at a price effectively the same as theFederal Reserve’s, and thereby to protect the stability of thedollar and the system.
And that is what the pool did on Wednesday. Thursday,though, was much worse, with the gold-buying frenzy in bothParis and London breaking even the records set during theCuban missile crisis of 1962, and many people, high British andAmerican officials among them, became convinced of somethingthey had suspected from the first—that the gold rush was partof a plot by General de Gaulle and France to humble first thepound and now the dollar. The evidence, to be sure, was allcircumstantial, but it was persuasive. De Gaulle and hisMinisters had long been on record as wishing to relegate thepound and the dollar to international roles far smaller thantheir current ones. A suspicious amount of the gold buying,even in London, was traceable to France. On Monday evening,thirty-six hours before the start of the gold rush, France’sgovernment had let slip, through a press leak, that it intendedto withdraw from the gold pool (according to subsequentinformation, France hadn’t contributed anything to the poolsince the previous June anyhow), and the French governmentwas also accused of having had a hand in spreading falserumors that Belgium and Italy were about to withdraw, too.
And now it was coming out, bit by bit, that in the days justbefore the devaluation France had been by far the mostreluctant nation to join in another credit package to rescuesterling, and that, for good measure, France had withheld untilthe very last minute its assurance that it would maintain itsown exchange rate if Britain devalued. All in all, there was agood case for the allegation that de Gaulle & Co. had beenplaying a mischievous part, and, whether it was true or not, Icouldn’t help feeling that the accusations against them wereadding a good deal of spice to the devaluation crisis—spice thatwould become more piquant a few months later, when thefranc would be in dire straits, and the United States forced bycircumstances to come to its aid.
ON Friday, in London, the pound spent the whole day tight upagainst its ceiling, and thus came through its first reallysignificant post-devaluation test with colors flying. Only a fewsmall governments had announced devaluations since Monday,and it was now evident that Norway, Sweden, and theNetherlands were going to hold firm. But on the dollar frontthings looked worse than ever. Friday’s gold buying in Londonand Paris had far exceeded the previous day’s record, andestimates were that gold sales in all markets over the precedingthree days added up to something not far under thebillion-dollar mark; there was near pandemonium all day inJohannesburg as speculators scrambled to get their hands onshares in gold-mining companies; and all over Europe peoplewere trading in dollars not only for gold but for othercurrencies as well. If the dollar was hardly in the position thatthe pound had occupied a week earlier, at least there wereuncomfortable parallels. Subsequently, it was reported that inthe first days after devaluation the Federal Reserve, soaccustomed to lending support to other currencies, had beenforced to borrow various foreign currencies, amounting toalmost two billion dollars’ worth, in order to defend its own.
Late Friday, having attended a conference at which Waagewas in an unaccustomed mood of nervous jocularity that mademe nervous, too, I left the Federal Reserve Bank half believingthat devaluation of the dollar was going to be announced overthe weekend. Nothing of the sort happened; on the contrary,the worst was temporarily over. On Sunday, it was announcedthat central-bank representatives of the gold-pool countries,Hayes and Coombs among them, had met in Frankfurt andformally agreed to continue maintaining the dollar at its presentgold-exchange rate with their combined resources. This seemedto remove any doubt that the dollar was backed not only bythe United States’ thirteen-billion-dollar gold hoard but also bythe additional fourteen billion dollars’ worth of gold in thecoffers of Belgium, Britain, Italy, the Netherland, Switzerland,and West Germany. The speculators were apparently impressed.
On Monday, gold buying was much lower in London andZurich, continuing at a record pace only in Paris—and this inspite of a sulphurous press audience granted that day by deGaulle himself, who, along with bemusing opinions on variousother matters, hazarded the view that the trend of events wastoward the decline of the dollar’s international importance. OnTuesday, gold sales dropped sharply everywhere, even in Paris.
“A good day today,” Waage told me on the phone thatafternoon. “A better day tomorrow, we hope.” On Wednesday,the gold markets were back to normal, but, as a result of theweek’s doings, the Treasury had lost some four hundred andfifty tons of gold—almost half a billion dollars’ worth—in fulfillingits obligations to the gold pool and meeting the demands offoreign central banks.
Ten days after devaluation, everything was quiet. But it wasonly a trough between succeeding shock waves. FromDecember 8th to 18th, there came a new spell of wildspeculation against the dollar, leaching another four hundredtons or so of gold out of the pool; this, like the previous wave,was eventually calmed by reiterations on the part of the UnitedStates and its gold-pool partners of their determination tomaintain the status quo. By the end of the year, the Treasuryhad lost almost a billion dollars’ worth of gold since Britain’sdevaluation, reducing its gold stock to below thetwelve-billion-dollar mark for the first time since 1937. PresidentJohnson’s balance-of-payments program, announced January1st, 1968 and based chiefly on restrictions on American banklending and industrial investments abroad, helped keepspeculation down for two months. But the gold rush was notto be quelled so simply. All pledges notwithstanding, it hadpowerful economic and psychological forces behind it. In alarger sense, it was an expression of an age-old tendency todistrust all paper currencies in times of crisis, but morespecifically it was the long-feared sequel to sterling devaluation,and—perhaps most specifically of all—it was a vote of noconfidence in the determination of the United States to keep itseconomic affairs in order, with particular reference to a level ofcivilian consumption beyond the dreams of avarice at a timewhen ever-increasing billions were being sent abroad to supporta war with no end in sight. The money in which the worldwas supposed to be putting its trust looked to the goldspeculators like that of the most reckless and improvidentspendthrift.
When they returned to the attack, on February29th—choosing that day for no assignable reason except that asingle United States senator, Jacob Javits, had just remarked,with either deadly seriousness or casual indiscretion, that hethought his country might do well to suspend temporarily allgold payments to foreign countries—it was with such ferocitythat the situation quickly got out of hand. On March 1st, thegold pool dispensed an estimated forty to fifty tons in London(as against three or four tons on a normal day); on March5th and 6th, forty tons per day; on March 8th, overseventy-five tons; and on March 13th, a total that could not beaccurately estimated but ran well over one hundred tons.
Meanwhile, the pound, which could not possibly escape afurther devaluation if the dollar were to be devalued in relationto gold, slipped below its par of $2.40 for the first time. Stillanother reiteration of the now-familiar pledges, this time fromthe central-bankers’ club at Basel on March 10th, seemed tohave no effect at all. The market was in the classic state ofchaos, distrustful of every public assurance and at the mercy ofevery passing rumor. A leading Swiss banker grimly called thesituation “the most dangerous since 1931.” A member of theBasel club, tempering desperation with charity, said that thegold speculators apparently didn’t realize their actions wereimperilling the world’s money. The New York Times, in aneditorial, said, “It is quite clear that the international paymentssystem … is eroding.”
On Thursday, March 14th, panic was added to chaos. Londongold dealers, in describing the day’s action, used the un-Britishwords “stampede,” “catastrophe,” and “nightmare.” The exactvolume of gold sold that day was unannounced, asusual—probably it could not have been precisely counted, in anycase—but everyone agreed that it had been an all-time record;most estimates put the total at around two hundred tons, ortwo hundred and twenty million dollars’ worth, while the WallStreet Journal put it twice that high. If the former estimatewas right, during the trading day the United States Treasuryhad paid out through its share of the gold pool alone onemillion dollars in gold every three minutes and forty-twoseconds; if the Journal figure was right (as a subsequentTreasury announcement made it appear to be), a million everyone minute and fifty-one seconds. Clearly, this wouldn’t do.
Like Britain in 1964, at this rate the United States would havea bare cupboard in a matter of days. That afternoon, theFederal Reserve System raised its discount rate from four anda half to five per cent—a defensive measure so timid andinadequate that one New York banker compared it to apopgun, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as theSystem’s foreign-exchange arm, was moved to protest byrefusing to go along with the token raise. Late in the day inNew York, and toward midnight in London, the United Statesasked Britain to keep the gold market closed the next day,Friday, to prevent further catastrophe and clear the way to theweekend, when face-to-face international consultations could beheld. The bewildered American public, largely unaware of thegold pool’s existence, probably first sensed the general shape ofthings when it learned on Friday morning that Queen ElizabethII had met with her Ministers on the crisis between midnightand 1 A.M.
On Friday, a day of nervous waiting, the London marketswere closed, and so were foreign-exchange desks nearlyeverywhere else, but gold shot up to a big premium in theParis market—a sort of black market, from the Americanstandpoint—and in New York sterling, unsupported by thefirmly locked Bank of England, briefly fell below its officialbottom price of $2.38 before rallying. Over the weekend, thecentral bankers of the gold-pool nations (the United States,Britain, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, andBelgium, with France still conspicuously missing and, indeed,uninvited this time) met in Washington, with Coombsparticipating for the Federal Reserve along with ChairmanMartin. After two full days of rigidly secret discussions, whilethe world of money waited with bated breath, they announcedtheir decisions late on Sunday afternoon. Thethirty-five-dollar-an-ounce official monetary price of gold wouldbe kept for use in all dealings among central banks; the goldpool would be disbanded, and the central banks would supplyno more gold to the London market, where privately tradedgold would be allowed to find its own price; sanctions would betaken against any central bank seeking to profit from the pricedifferential between the central-bank price and the free-marketprice; and the London gold market would remain closed for acouple of weeks, until the dust settled. During the first fewmarket days under the new arrangements, the pound ralliedstrongly, and the free-market price of gold settled at betweentwo and five dollars above the central-bank price—a differentialconsiderably smaller than many had expected.
The crisis had passed, or that crisis had. The dollar hadescaped devaluation, and the international monetary mechanismwas intact. Nor was the solution a particularly radical one; afterall, gold had been on a two-price basis in 1960, before thegold pool had been formed. But the solution was a temporary,stopgap one, and the curtain was not down on the drama yet.
Like Hamlet’s ghost, the pound, which had started the action,was offstage now. The principal actors onstage as summerapproached were the Federal Reserve and the United StatesTreasury, doing what they could in a technical way to keepthings on an even keel; the Congress, complacent withprosperity, preoccupied with coming elections, and thereforeresistant to higher taxes and other uncomfortable retrenchingmeasures (on the very afternoon of the London panic, theSenate Finance Committee had voted down an income-taxsurcharge); and, finally, the President, calling for “a program ofnational austerity” to defend the dollar, yet at the same timecarrying on at ever-increasing expense the Vietnam war, whichhad become as menacing to the health of America’s money as,in the view of many, it was to that of America’s soul.
Ultimately, it appeared, the nation had just three possibleeconomic courses: to somehow end the Vietnam war, root ofthe payments problem and therefore heart of the matter; toadopt a full wartime economy, with sky-high taxes, wage andprice controls, and perhaps rationing; or to face forceddevaluation of the dollar and perhaps a depression-breedingworld monetary mess.
Looking beyond the Vietnam war and its incredibly broadworldwide monetary implications, the central bankers went onplugging away. Two weeks after the stopgap solution of thedollar crisis, those of the ten most powerful industrial countriesmet in Stockholm and agreed, with only France dissenting, onthe gradual creation of a new international monetary unit tosupplement gold as the bedrock underlying all currencies. It willconsist (if action follows on resolution) of special drawing rightson the International Monetary Fund, available to nations inproportion to their existing reserve holdings. In bankers’ jargonthe rights will be called S.D.R.’s; in popular jargon they were atonce called paper gold. The success of the plan in achieving itsends—averting dollar devaluation, overcoming the worldshortage of monetary gold, and thus postponing indefinitely thethreatened mess—will depend on whether or not men andnations can somehow at last, in a triumph of reason, achievewhat they have failed to achieve in almost four centuries ofpaper money: that is, to overcome one of the oldest and leastrational of human traits, the lust for the look and feel of golditself, and come to give truly equal value to a pledge written ona piece of paper. The answer to that question will come in thelast act, and the outlook for a happy ending is not bright.
AS the last act was beginning to unfold—after the sterlingdevaluation but before the gold panic—I went down to LibertyStreet and saw Coombs and Hayes. I found Coombs lookingbone-tired but not sounding disheartened about three yearsspent largely in a losing cause. “I don’t see the fight for thepound as all having been in vain,” he said. “We gained thosethree years, and during that time the British put through a lotof internal measures to strengthen themselves. If they’d beenforced to devalue in 1964, there’s a good chance thatwage-and-price inflation would have eaten up any benefit theyderived and put them back in the same old box. Also, overthose three years there have been further gains in internationalmonetary co?peration. Goodness knows what would havehappened to the whole system with devaluation in 1964.
Without that three-year international effort—that rearguardaction, you might say—sterling might have collapsed in muchgreater disorder, with far more damaging repercussions thanwe’ve seen even now. Remember that, after all, our effort andthe effort of the other central-banks wasn’t to hold up sterlingfor its own sake. It was to hold it up for the sake ofpreserving the system. And the system has survived.”
Hayes, on the surface, seemed exactly as he had when I lastsaw him, a year and a half earlier—as placid and unruffled asif he had been spending all that time studying up on Corfu. Iasked him whether he was still living up to his principle ofkeeping bankers’ hours, and he replied, smiling very slightly,that the principle had long since yielded to expediency—that, asa time consumer, the 1967 sterling crisis had made the 1964crisis seem like child’s play, and that the subsequent dollarcrisis was turning out to be more of the same. A side benefitof the whole three-and-a-half-year affair, he said, was that itsfrequently excruciating melodrama had contributed something toMrs. Hayes’ interest in banking, and even something, if not somuch, to the position of business in Tom’s scale of values.
When Hayes spoke of the devaluation, however, I saw thathis placidity was a mask. “Oh, I was disappointed, all right,” hesaid quietly. “After all, we worked like the devil to prevent it.
And we nearly did. In my opinion, Britain could have gotenough assistance from abroad to hold the rate. It could havebeen done without France. Britain chose to devalue. I thinkthere’s a good chance that the devaluation will eventually be asuccess. And the gain for international co?peration is beyondquestion. Charlie Coombs and I could feel that at Frankfurt inNovember, at the gold-pool meeting—a sense everyone therehad that now is the time to lock arms. But still …” Hayespaused, and when he spoke again his voice was full of suchquiet force that I saw the devaluation through his eyes—not asjust a severe professional reverse but as an ideal lost and anidol fallen. He said, “That day in November, here at the bank,when a courier brought me the top-secret British documentinforming us of the decision to devalue, I felt physically sick.
Sterling
would not be the same. It would never again commandthe same amount of faith around the world.”
The End
CHAPTER I GAS VALLEY
“Gas!”
Briefest and biggest of all words thrust by the Great War into the fore-ranks of speech, the word rang aloud upon the summer air.
A kernel of compressed menace, it burst explosively, spread elastically, until the very sky–the peaceful, lamb’s-wool New England sky–seemed darkened by its threat, until the brown buds, withered in their tender youth, and the rags of yellow grasses blighted before by its poisoned breath, trembled and wilted, as it were, anew!
It even withered the morning-glory bloom upon the faces of a quartette of young girls, who stood a few yards to windward of a little red-and-white post labeled “Danger Zone,” on the other side of which the warning was given.
Breathlessly,
nervously, they shrank together until their shoulders touched, like fledgling birds struck by the terrors of the first storm that assails them in the nest, seeking for contact and comfort.
“Now the party is beginning–the ball opening, as our boys say over in France, when a gas attack is being launched against them. That smoke-candle off there on the edge of the trench, which is doing more than’s required of it–bursting into flame as well as smoke–that’s the illumination for ‘Fritzie’s’ party! And the rattle–you hear the policeman’s rattle, don’t you, shaking its teeth down in the trenches–that’s the opening stunt of the orchestra. See?”
It was a young lieutenant, a boy-officer of twenty-three, who spoke, with a silver dart in his gray eye matching the gleaming bars upon his shoulders, as he bent towards the tallest of the four girls whose face was paling under her velvet hat, uniquely embroidered by her own hand with certain silken emblems, typifying her name and symbol, together with the rank she held as a Camp Fire Girl.
“Smoke-candle! D’you mean that foot-high metal thing flaring away there behind the sand-bags, one of a dozen or so, stationed along the trench-brim? They don’t look much like ordinary candles, but they certainly can smoke! Such horrid, blinding sulphur smoke, too! Bah!”
She caught her breath a little, that oldest girl, her wide dark eyes watering, as a tiny yellow feather of the sulphur fumes, stealing stealthily to windward, wafted from the wing of the main cloud drifting off to leeward, tickled her throat in teasing fashion.
“Yes, it is blinding thick, isn’t it? We must move farther to windward, away from it.” The lieutenant smiled down at her, thinking the hat with its wide brim, and its delicate, emblematic frontispiece against the rich velvet–representing crossed logs, a tongue of flame rising from them and shading into a pearly pinion purporting to be smoke–was the prettiest headgear he had ever seen.
“Thick! So thick that you could drink it, if–if it wasn’t so horridly pea-soupy and pungent, eh?” laughed another girl, who stood next to the tallest one, their shoulders touching. “It’s as dense as the fog our Captain Andy used to tell us about; the fog out on the fishing banks–Grand Banks–which he declared was so thick at times that the poor fish didn’t know when they were atop of the water; they went on swimming up in the fog. Don’t you remember, Olive?” she asked as she merrily nudged the older, dark-eyed girl who wore the Torch Bearer’s insignia 佛山桑拿女qq电话 of logs, flame, and smoke–an insignia that stood for a high-beating heart, as ready and eager to do its share in this moment of world conflict, as that typified by the silver bars on the lieutenant’s shoulders and the cross-gun on his khaki collar.
It was he, Lieutenant Iver Davenport, or, to come down to detail, Lieutenant Iver O. P. Davenport, who, thanks to his middle initials and that keen silver of scrutiny between his narrowed eyelids, was christened in his infantry company “O Pips,” the camp nickname for an observation post, he who answered, with brotherly freedom, glancing over the Torch Bearer’s shoulder at the brown-eyed girl beyond her.
“Yes, sis, it’s as thick as the fogged-fish yarn, or as the fabled fog that the half-breed pathfinder who was attached to our Boy Scout troop used to tell of when he’d begin 佛山夜生活地址 quite modestly that he ‘hadn’t seen fog ver’ tick–non–only one time he see fog so tick dat one mans try for drink eet an’ mos’ choke hisself; and wen dey take out dat fog wat dat mans try for drink, dey take dat for make broomstick–yaas!’ Oh! you couldn’t get ahead of Toiney; he who–was it three summers ago?–pulled one of your Camp Fire Group out of dangerous quicksands, eh?”
“Yes, that will be three years ago next August and we’re going to camp in that same region of white sand-dunes this coming summer, too, under the spell of the Green Com Moon,” returned the boy-officer’s sister, Sara Davenport, named by the Council Fire Sesooā, the Flame.
“Well! we won’t see Toiney again.” The eyes of the taller girl, Olive Deering, watered, but in their dark, liquid depths shone Toiney’s gold star, never to be eclipsed. “He sleeps 黄岐桑拿体验 under the daisies of France. You should have heard him march off to enlist, singing:
“‘C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
Eet’s a long way forre go-o–
C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
To dat chèrie girl–I–know!
Adieu, Peekadil-lee!
Adieu Leicestaire Square,
C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
But my heart–she’s dere!’”
“Bravo! Ah, well, he’s gone on the longue chemin now–the long trail–a trail of light it must be,” murmured Lieutenant O Pips half under his breath, his eyes, keen and misty, searching that dense yellow cloud to leeward, billowing down into a ziggagging maze of trenches–the cloud thrown off by the smoking sulphur candles, of which here and there one did more than was required of it, yielded complete combustion and burst into a ragged, rose-red banner of flame, that added weirdness to the 佛山桑拿黄岐 daylight scene.
Speaking of Toiney–light-hearted, raggedly romantic half-breed–who had made the supreme sacrifice, presently drew the girls’ thoughts to those living comrades-in-arms of Toiney, the American soldiers now lined up under that baleful yellow cloud, down in the invisible trenches, undergoing the training of being “put through gas,” in order to render them expert in adjusting their gas-masks directly the warning was given–the rattle sprung.
“‘Fritzie’s party,’ as you call it, seems rather halting; they haven’t brought on all the fireworks yet, have they?” suggested a third girl, known by the Council Fire as Munkwon, the Rainbow, in every-day life, as now, Arline Champion, the shell-like tint of her cheeks deepening to a hectic flush from the same expectant emotion which had paled her sisters.