five o'clock
In the faint breath of war that came to Henry and me , as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross , there was a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that really get into war as soldiers . Even we were for ever pinching ourselves to see if we were dreaming , as we rode through the strange land , filled with warlike impedimenta , and devoted exclusively to the science of slaughter . By rights we should have been sitting in our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers , wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was a trifle , dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or talking machines , or discussing the ever changing Situation with the local statesmen . At five o'clock Henry should be on his way to the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure , and the sullen roar of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the sunset , where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid sugars , starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my figure . But instead , here we were puffing up a hill in France , through underbrush , across shell holes to a hidden trench choked with telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking the battle of the Champagne . As we puffed and huffed up the hill , we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but a few weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought us the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208 . Among other things the report had declared `` a number of French soldiers were ordered into their own barrage , and several were shot for refusing to go into action thereafter ! ''