Top Sergeant Phil Speed did not know exactly where he was when the long train of trucks bearing hundreds of khaki-clad American Marines stopped at a small town within easy gun-roar of the battle front in France.
They were making little demonstration now. For weeks they had been cheering and been cheered until their throats became sore and well again—calloused, as it were. With the noise of battle becoming more and made distinct through the rumble, roar, and rattle of trucks and ordnance racing toward the scene of conflict into which they themselves 8 were about to plunge, the hearts of these messengers of liberty were not so gay as they had been for weeks, aye, months, before.
As if in reply to his musing, Timothy Turner, a training-camp chum, who stood at his elbow 9 in the midst of the throng of soldiers waiting for orders to move along, spoke thus rather grimly:.
I guess what we need is the explosion of a few bombs in our midst to get us good and mad. Do you think an explosion a few feet away from you would make you mad, Tim? But in spite of his bullet-headness, Tim was anything but dull. Both officers and fellow soldiers regarded him hopefully as one of the prospective star fighters of the regiment because of his mental keenness as well as his physical prowess. Phil was built along different lines. He was 10 strong and athletic, but he would hardly have been expected to be able to push over a stone wall.
Whether or not he was more intelligent than Tim may be a matter for debate. It may be admitted, perhaps, that he was not so shrewd, but if they had both lived in the middle ages, Phil undoubtedly would have listened with interest to the first declaration that the world was round, while Tim would just as surely have repelled it with derision. So here we have a double-barreled standard for measuring intelligence among men and among boys. Shall we call Phil more intelligent than Tim, or vice versa?
