Beneath Gray Skies by Hugh Ashton

through the door of each stateroom, together with the shouted order to “Take off your uniforms, find some clothes for yourselves and put them on.”
    Wrinkling their noses, the soldiers of David’s stateroom hunted through the mass of clothing to find something that fitted tolerably and didn’t smell too bad.
     
    Brian, by far the tallest of them, came off worst. His pants stopped short a few inches above his shoes, and his shirt sleeves seemed to barely cover his elbows. It had proved impossible to find any kind of coat that fitted him at all properly, but he wore an overcoat that served as a kind of jacket. The sergeant inspecting them took one look and burst out laughing.
     
    “Reckon we’ll have to find you something better when we step ashore. That’ll have to do you for now, I guess.”
     
    Next, they packed their uniforms into their Army knapsacks, and tied their rifles to the knapsacks, with their names and units written on labels, also attached to the knapsacks. Two soldiers from each stateroom were assigned to take the bundles of each group to the mess-room.
     
    “And now?” asked Tom, returning. He’d been one of the bundle-carriers.
     
    “We wait,” explained David. “Far as I can remember from what it said on them orders.”
     
    “Armies the world over, what?” said Brian. “Hurry up and wait. Always the way.”
     
    And so they waited. When they were finally told to get out of the stateroom and go down the gangplank, the sun had set. David noticed that the Stars and Bars was no longer flying from the mast of the ship, and another flag he didn’t recognize was flapping in the breeze. They were ordered to walk, not march, across the quay into an enormous warehouse.
     
    “How long do we stay here?” whispered Tom to David.
     
    “Don’t know. Never saw anything what talked about after this.”
     
    “C Company orderly, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Alabama, over here at the double,” came the call.
     
    “That’s me,” said David, and slipped away to join the Captain.
     
    -o-
     
    M uch to everyone’s surprise, everything was well-organized inside the warehouse, contrasting with the usual Confederate army muddle. “You have to hand it to Jerry, he knows how to keep things clean and tidy,” were Brian’s words when he returned from the row of field latrines that took up a goodly portion of one end of the warehouse. And the food, when it arrived, although the potato soup seemed to consist mainly of water, and the portion of sausage was tiny, was served in unnaturally clean mess tins, and the portions exactly matched the number of men. Usually in the Army of the Confederacy, it seemed that the last thirty or so men in the mess line were fighting for three portions between them.
    “Wonder where they’re getting this stuff from,” remarked Brian. “I know chaps in London who thought the Huns were down to their last horse,” picking shreds of sausage from his teeth. “Never thought I’d see the day when I’d be eating Jerry’s food as his guest.”
     
    David was kept busy during the next day. Once, when he took papers from the Captain to the Colonel, a good-looking stranger in a helmet and leather coat, with an red armband bearing a strange black hooked cross on a white circle, rose to greet him.
     
    “Congratulations,” he said, in a strange accent that reminded somewhat David of Mr. Jacobs, his hometown barber. “You are the boy who writes his words so wonderfully.” Like Mr. Jacobs, his “w”s had a tendency to become “v”s.
     
    “Yes, Major Gurring,” (at least, that’s how the stranger’s name sounded to David), replied the Colonel, “this is the boy who writes so well.”
     
    “Would you please make your best writing to copy these words onto this card? It is a present to my new wife,” asked the German. He handed a piece of paper to David, who looked at it. He could read the letters, but it made no sense to him at all.
     
    “Sir, I don’t rightly understand