So Little Time

by John P. Marquand

  There was the sense that nothing had been settled, but Jeffrey was sure that Madge had not noticed it. Her eyes were on the meandering curve of the Meuse River. She was looking at the clustered little houses of the villages to the north—a pretty, peaceful picture in the sunlight.

  “My husband,” Madge said, “was an aviator of the American Army. He fought here for La France.”

  Jeffrey thought her remark completely uncalled for. The soldier did not give a continental whether or not Jeffrey had fought for La France. His nose was running and he was waiting for his tip, which he would necessarily have to turn over to his sergeant, who watched him sharply from a distance.

  “Truly?” the soldier said, and rubbed his sleeve across his nose.

  But Madge did not notice. She was getting the most out of an interesting visit.

  “My husband’s airplane,” she said, “was shot down over there. Jeffrey, it was over there somewhere, wasn’t it?”

  “Truly?” the soldier said, and his eyes met Jeffrey’s. The franc at the time was two cents, fifty to the dollar, and the soldier wanted his pourboire. The French no longer had that warm gratitude toward Americans which they had evinced in other days. When the war had been fought, that soldier had been wearing a black smock and marching with his books to some country school.

  “Here,” Jeffrey said in English, and gave him twenty francs. Ten francs would have been sufficient, but if he had given ten, the man would have told his squad that no Americans were generous, bloated with gold though they were, having sucked the very vitals of La France. Now that he had given twenty, the lad would doubtless say that Americans were wealthy fools, insulting France by treating their money like wrapping paper. It would be one thing or the other.

  “Jeffrey,” he heard Madge saying, “where was it that your plane was shot down?”

  He wished to heaven that he had never brought her there. The soldier was giving him his thanks, and asking him if he could be of further service, and Jeffrey told him no. He did not want the soldier, he did not want Madge, he did not want to speak to anyone.

  “Jeffrey,” he heard her say again, “where was it?”

  He had to control himself. That experience belonged to him and not to her. The day had been very hard, and he had seen enough of it.

  “It’s a little hard to point it out,” he said. “It was away off, over there.”

  He waved his arm anywhere at all. He was trying to remember where it was himself. It was somewhere beyond the woods and the rolling hills. The footsteps and voices of some of his countrymen were sounding behind him. They had come by bus, shepherded by a courteous uniformed attendant, to see the battlefields. Doubtless they had been to the cemetery at Belleau Wood. He did not want to see them. He wanted to get away.

  He had crashed—though he must have come out of his dive in time, so that it was not entirely a crash—somewhere up there beyond the scrubby squares of forest land on the heights to the south and west of a ruined town known as Brieulles-sur-Meuse. What had actually happened was guesswork. He believed that the motor was still going, although it had been acting badly. That was why he left formation and left for home before the Fokkers came. They had come out of the sun, seemingly out of nowhere, the way they often did. It was impossible to explain to anyone who had never been in air combat how difficult it was to be aware of an enemy when you were a small point eight thousand feet above the earth with all of space to watch. The first he saw of them was over his right shoulder when Stanley Rhett had shouted to him. Three of them were diving at his tail and he had pulled on the stick. There was nothing to do but dive as straight as he dared without losing his wings. He could hear Stan’s guns going above the motor and all the other noise. It was a Brequet two-place day bomber. There were no self-sealing gas tanks, no metal wings, only yellow fabric, and there was no way of bailing out. He saw the bullets striking. His windshield smashed, and then it was covered with oil. Then the tracers must have hit the gas tank. The whole business was afire. They were for it—and they would be dead in a matter of seconds, but he was only thinking of flattening out from the dive. There was no time to experiment with the controls. When the plane began to burn, the Fokkers must have considered it over, because they did not bother to follow. He could see the terrain rising up to meet them through the smashed and spattered windshield. The ground, which seconds before had looked like a beautifully drawn staff map, was suddenly very near. The nearest town he saw was Brieulles. There was a bare brownish hill and woods and a stretch of whitish road, completely vacant. He even recalled identifying the road as one which led westward toward Cunel and Romagne. He must have loosened his belt and he must have flattened out, but he had probably drawn a blank because he had no recollection of jumping or being thrown. First he was in the air and then he was writhing on his left side on the grass, facing the burning plane that seemed to be rising to heaven in a pillar of smoke. He was choking and gasping for his breath, because the wind had been knocked out of him, and then he saw Stan Rhett crawling away from the side of the plane slowly on his hands and knees.

  During those years after the war, Jeffrey had read much of the fiction connected with it. He had read The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings, which at one time he had looked upon as an intellectual’s artistic whimpering, and later had grown to admire. Then there was Dos Passos, and his three maladjusted soldiers. War was no place for sensitive, social-minded intellectuals. There was Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd and The Spanish Farm and No More Parades and Chevrons and A Farewell to Arms. In the late Twenties and even the early Thirties, a lot of good writers had taken a crack at it; but in his opinion the net result of their efforts added up to almost nothing. They tried to give dramatic significance to something in which significance was utterly lacking. They tried to give an interpretation to something which actually offered nothing for an artist to interpret.

  The trouble was that no one with an artistic sense could do anything about a war. Artists and scholars were utterly unnecessary in a war. There used to be loud complaints from bright boys who had shown exceptional ability in officers’ training school that they were always kept behind as instructors or sent to Corps Headquarters. If you had any brains, they said, you were not wanted at the front, but then, perhaps the Army was right. There was such a thing as too much imagination, and a too highly developed critical sense. Jeffrey often thought that he would have been quite useless in the Artillery or the Infantry. If he had been there, he would have been like the rest of them—he would have tried to write about the war.

  It surprised Jeffrey that no one was near the burning plane, because he knew that the lines were somewhere near Brieulles. There seemed to be no other sound except the roaring flames and he was sitting up alone in a sunny field, and Stan Rhett was crawling toward him. He remembered that Stan’s face was streaked with oil, and his hair was singed and the sleeve of his coat was smoking.

  “Hey,” Stan said, “I got one of them. Did you see me?”

  There was a hideous levity in the remark as though it were all a game. Jeffrey pulled himself up to his knees. He had thought that something would be broken, but he felt all right.

  “I got one,” Stan said again. They were alone in a field, but someone must have seen the plane. If they were behind the German lines it was time to get away.

  “Can you walk?” he asked Stan. “We’d better get going.”

  “Hell, yes,” Stan said. “I always walk.”

  There was a patch of woods about fifty yards away. They had fallen in a meadow of long brownish grass and Jeffrey could see that people had been there, although no one was there now. He could see a pot-shaped German helmet on the ground and an American web belt and a blanket. There had been fighting in the field, but he could not tell where the lines were. It would be better to get to the woods, for no one would think they had come out of the plane alive. He watched Stan draw his feet under him and stand up, but something gave way and he sat down.

  “Jesus,” Stan sai
d, and he laughed. “Something isn’t working.”

  It was exactly what Minot Roberts would have done—try to make a joke of it. It might have been a fine gesture, but it was not so funny then because blood was streaming down Stan’s right leg. His breeches were sodden with it, and the grass was growing red.

  “Get your arm around me,” Jeffrey said.

  When he heard aviators long afterwards discuss the war, Jeffrey realized that most of them had only observed a battlefield from the air. Most of them had never stood on the ground in an advanced position. Few of them had ever walked through the hideous terrain where there had been fighting. The sights and sounds of that place came up to hit him now almost the way the ground did when he had crashed. He had been through the war, without ever facing war’s full implications except for that one day. Stan Rhett leaned his full weight on Jeffrey’s shoulder, moving his legs with the vague mechanism of someone who is drunk, and Jeffrey staggered beneath his weight, drenched with perspiration, still fighting for his breath.

  “Does it hurt you?” he asked Stan.

  “No,” he heard Stan say, and Stan laughed again. “I just feel like passing out.” And then he added a moment later, “Let’s call a taxi, Jeff.”

  Jeffrey wanted to get out of the sunlight. They were near a thicket of saplings, with some taller trees among them, the branches of which were twisted and broken, as though they had been struck by a high wind. He pushed his way through the saplings, looking for a cleared place—which was not hard to find, since the French were neat about their forests. He did not look around him, until he sat Stan down, with his back against a tree. Then he saw that three dead men were lying about ten feet in front of him, two in German field-gray, and one in olive-drab. He had never encountered the dead on a battlefield, and his reaction must have been the same as that of anyone who first saw war dead—the same instinctive spasm of fear that makes a horse shy and bolt away from death. He knew at once that they were not asleep. They lay sprawled as though a strong gust of wind had struck them. A number of others had been there, too, who had dropped things and had forgotten to pick them up, but it was no common sort of human forgetfulness. They were personal belongings which could only have been dropped because of panic or death.

  The sunbeams cut through the leaves and branches of the trees, making uneven spots upon that disorder on the ground, and moving with the breeze, erratically centering on new objects. He never forgot the moving light first touching a regulation mess kit, which had burst open, then a roll of toilet paper festooned across the bushes, then a mess tin and a letter stamped into the earth, a muddy blanket, a hand grenade, a torn section of an olive-drab puttee, a rifle with a pair of socks near it, a canteen—a combination that was senseless and indecent; and the dead had collapsed in the same disorder. One lay with his head lower than his heels, with the rim of his helmet jammed against the bridge of his nose, and the mouth gaping. If there were wounds on the two Germans, he did not see them, and he did not care to look, but there was no doubt how the doughboy had died. A fragment of a high explosive shell had blown the top of his head clear off, just above the eyes, leaving all that was left of the head and face turned upward toward the trees. The blasted skull was like a cross section from a book of physiology, and for a moment, Jeffrey could not take his eyes from the spectacle, although there was too much which no living decent person was meant to look at. It was an effort to draw his glance away and to turn to Stanley Rhett, who leaned against the tree.

  “Company,” Stan said, “got company.” His face was white, but he smiled at Jeffrey when Jeffrey knelt beside him and began pulling down his breeches. Jeffrey had read about administering to the wounded, but he had no vestige of practical experience. The right leg of Stan’s breeches was full of blood, which spilled over the dead leaves when he pulled it down, and the sight made Jeffrey gasp and retch.

  “Stuck pig,” Stan said. “It’s up there,” and he moved his right hand vaguely. It was a bullet wound in the middle of the right thigh. Jeffrey picked up a web belt, and ripped open a First Aid packet. It was lucky it was there, for he had never thought of carrying one, but the gauze bandages and iodine could not stop the bleeding. He always thought later that he had done as well as he could, given the time and place. The first tourniquet which he made out of a piece of gauze and a stick broke and then he used a spiral puttee which was lying in the bushes. It was one of the larger arteries, and as he turned the blood kept spurting, but finally the stream died down.

  “Boy,” Stan said, “I’ll give you a drink for that when we get home.” His face was dead white and his voice was very faint.

  “How are you feeling?” Jeffrey asked. “It’s stopped now.”

  “Cold,” Stan said, and Jeffrey laid him down and brought a blanket from one of the abandoned infantry packs to cover him. There was nothing else that he could think of doing, and so he walked carefully to the edge of the wood and looked through the thicket at the plane. The patch of wood had seemed still except for the breeze in the trees, but now far behind him he could hear artillery fire and the machine guns were rattling somewhere to his right. He knew that if they could move south, they might be safe; they had a chance of getting out if they stayed there until dark. The glass of his wrist watch was shattered and the mechanism must have stopped when he had fallen. The hands pointed to half-past seven, so that it must have still been early morning, and this surprised him, for he had thought it was late afternoon. He had lost all sense of time.

  He could see the black smoke still billowing above the plane and he heard voices. He heard the voices before he saw the men. First he saw their helmets, streaked with yellow paint, above the crest of the yellow hill, and then he saw four German infantrymen walking carefully toward the plane, and glancing toward the woods. That lack of assurance made Jeffrey very sure that he was near the lines. He only found out later that he was in no man’s land, and that the lines were very fluid. The men held their rifles ready as they approached the burning plane, and the sight of the rifles made Jeffrey move his hand to his side very slowly. He touched the holster of his forty-five regulation automatic which he had strapped over his leather flying coat that morning. He had not fired one since he left officers’ school in the States, but now he drew it.

  As the soldiers stood there examining the plane, Jeffrey heard a sound carefully described by war correspondents—something like a train of cars crossing a trestle bridge. He knew it was a shell before it struck. It landed in the field near the crest of the hill and burst in a wave of dirt and smoke. The four men by the plane threw themselves on their faces, then were up, running for the crest of the hill, and then were gone, but the shellfire continued. There was nothing erratic about the fire; the shells seemed to be groping blindly for something to destroy, moving methodically up the slope, and over the crest and out of sight. Someone told him later that it must have been artillery searching for machine-gun nests, and that he was lucky that the woods were not the target. Stan opened his eyes when Jeffrey touched him. It was necessary to lean close over him to hear what he said.

  “What,” Stan asked him, “God-damned sort of management is this?”

  Jeffrey told him to keep still and asked him how he felt.

  “Boy,” Stan said, “how about a drink?”

  As a matter of fact there was a full canteen on the doughboy’s belt. When Jeffrey took it off, he felt completely familiar with everything. Reaction was setting in on him so that nothing upset him any longer. He did not give a damn about anything, except to get out of there. His mind and body felt filthy dirty, and he wanted to get out of there, but they had to wait for night.

  All that he could remember were snatches of that day—odd moments spent crawling through the thickets and looking for a path. The burst of firing kept drumming in his ears, the rattle of machine guns, the sound of light artillery, but nothing stirred in the wood. He never forgot the smell of it, a combination of moldy leaves and of vanished human beings and the cordite fumes fro
m the shelling, and the faint antiseptic odor of mustard gas. The shadows finally told him that it was late afternoon and that he had been asleep. Stan was beside him, ashy white, with his eyes closed, breathing slowly. It must have been the rustling in the bushes that awakened Jeffrey because he remembered the sound before he saw what caused it. Everything had been black until he opened his eyes, and then he saw a figure of a man not ten feet away. The shadows and the sunlight mottled his gray uniform. It was a German soldier, probably some confused straggler looking for his outfit.

  It would have been different if the man had seen him first, but as it was, the face was turned sideways when Jeffrey opened his eyes. It gave him the opportunity to reach his holster and get the automatic out of it. His only thought was that the soldier must be kept quiet for reasons of safety, that there must be others where he came from, and that he must not get back to the others. The sound he made had caused the soldier to turn. The German’s shoulders had been stooped forward as he pushed his way through the thicket, and he was holding his rifle ready. Jeffrey could see the face, wan, and drawn with fatigue and covered with a dusty stubble of blackish beard. He could see the lips draw back. He could hear the startled intake of breath and Jeffrey remembered speaking, without any thought that the other might not understand his language; and he even remembered that his voice had a thin, unpleasant treble.

  “Drop that gun,” he said.

  Though the expression came to him naturally, it sounded melodramatic. Jeffrey wanted to get it down to common sense and reason; he always thought that if they could only have talked they could have reached some understanding, for they were two human beings. As it was there was no opportunity to consider either action or consequence. He was often ashamed, not for what he did, because that was a question of survival, but for the way he acted afterwards. When the muzzle of the rifle jerked in his direction, he did not know he had fired until he heard the shot. The impact of the bullet hurled the man backwards. He was on his back, kicking in the bushes, by the time Jeffrey was on his feet. Jeffrey could hear the other’s breath coming in snoring gasps and the sound made him bend forward and retch. That was when he knew that Stan Rhett had seen it all, for he heard his voice.