by Earle Looker
Whatever the cause of Gaspard’s rage, there was no reason for it so far along this path; his anger should have cooled within this distance; then he might have been acting a part? Gaspard had rushed away without explanations; then he had reasons to hide? He had counted upon David to obey; then he had imposed upon friendship? Yet David followed him not without amusement. He thought of Gaspard as the last of a kind, a personality as antique as those pictured in woodcuts of the Franco-Prussian War in the old numbers of the “Century” he had once discovered in an abandoned barn. David remembered the secret trips carrying home that loot, a small thin boy staggering with the weight and how he had laboriously marked each torn and yellowed copy, “Property of David Atwood.”
But here was this French colonel striding toward David’s trenches with a dagger in each hand and evident purpose to use them. Perhaps, David thought, he had gone mad with the sudden peace and was starting a new private war? It was idiotic, but it seemed as if Gaspard had been wound up, and the engine within him would continue to run until it had run itself down. The man was a bundle of hot passions, bubbling and splashing sometimes like a volcanic molten lake. Ordinarily, he was vocal and voluble. David remembered standing beside him at a crossroad when troops were moving forward and hearing his description, not of the passing of men and guns but of the mobilization of force, separating and itemizing the weights of the imponderables as if he could sort the smells of action. David had thought it unwise to be so aware of the field of emotion, the currents and waves of it flowing from the minds of fighting men. Once realized, it had taken time to be rid of the impression along the front line of two great invisible waves of passionate determination, with groundswells reaching back a thousand miles each way, continually rising and smashing together as if in constant conflict over the heads of troops even while they slept. It seemed not impossible now that this heaving action in the minds of men was continuing despite the armistice command and that Gaspard might be moved by such a tide still running toward the enemy.
David loosened the catch of his holster, felt the butt of his still loaded automatic. He might be forced to arrest Gaspard. Yet he had seen this man actually laugh into the muzzle of a Mauser in an enemy hand. David was so close a friend he might have to fire a shot into the air to show he meant business. But now, in the stillness of this armistice, a single shot would reverberate through the woods like the crash of a fieldpiece. With outposts pushed up to grenade distance, with German nerves doubtless as raw as American, what might happen? David began to sweat.
Gaspard halted and looked back. He was well pleased with himself. The young American Commandant was following. Shadow and sunlight were alternating across his helmet and the bronze face beneath it. Gaspard grinned in his beard. David had been more in the nature of a bonne aubaine than a discovery. He was a full statured commander by fighting standards, yet with that strange naiveté of youthful North Americans, as verified again and again by the tests Gaspard had applied. How characteristically, Gaspard thought, the blush had come, not at the most extravagant soldierly cursing but at those ideas Gaspard had expressed in just such degrees beyond indelicacy … as to determine with exactness his quality of mind.
Gaspard turned and went on, reflecting that so far every detail was right, even to the item David was wearing, a well-worn officer’s tunic with ribbons, belt, whipcord breeches and boots rather than the rough issue kit of the simple soldier with only the pin of his insignia upon his right cuff to mark his rank, as was the habit of American commanders in the actual line. Therefore, there would be no delay changing from one uniform to another. The American would be presentable enough; he was always as clean shaven as an Englishman; a little trench mud would add that touch of authenticity.
Gaspard shut out from his mind those details no longer relevant, yet he gave one backward glance to the basic conclusion that now motivated him, regarding them no longer with astonishment but with appreciation of his ability to see through and beyond the fog of action. He reflected that not until he had led the furthest rushing wave of his lunging bayonets in that last successful attack, felt the completeness of his mastery of the enemy, put his foot upon what had been considered the unattainable parapets of the enemy defense, stamped the sandbag down with his boot, felt like putting his heel upon the neck of the vanquished, known he had reached his ultimate in striking force – that not until then had he really come to complete understanding of the inevitable result of this victory. Like all experience, it was cumulative.
And now every detail of the denouement of the greatest campaign of them all confirmed the absolute truth of his estimate. Here was truth, he felt, which in all likelihood was understood by but a few, not by one in a thousand of such men as himself and not even by Foch himself. Yet it was obvious, certain, of supreme importance, yet somehow unpatriotic and seditious. He must not allow himself to be weakened by his conclusions. Speak a word of it and – phutt to his career. That, indeed, was the tragedy of it. It would have to remain a deeply concealed personal conviction. But with every step he took, he felt more and more his genius in initiating without delay that action, that brilliant conception that seemed most likely to lead to a quick achievement of desire that now, of course, must be his main concern.
“Hey! Gaspard! Wait!” David was shouting and waving his arms.
Gaspard, affecting not to hear, pressed on. He was unchallenged. His visits to David had made him a familiar figure to the battalion. The man was unforgettable; he would be especially remembered as he appeared today, David thought, as he passed men in the trench who seemed to be recovering from this vision of an apparition. Gaspard was lumbering through the trench like a war chariot down a highway, a blade upon each wheel.
Suddenly, amazement halted David. Gaspard had crawled up out of the trench, since he was no longer in fear of fire, and was making a shortcut across the surface of the ground unbroken by shell-craters. David scrambled out also, so as not to lose distance.
At the reserve line, Gaspard plunged down into the trench again, his broad blue shoulders brushing the sides of it, arms and daggers swinging with each stride. Without hesitation, for these had been his own trenches, and he knew every inch of the way, he turned sharply left into the trench called “De la Baltique” and right again at the signpost “Tr. De Suzette.”
Suzette’s Trench. David had passed that sign a hundred times without its full significance dawning upon him. Now, when there was no time for abstract thought, when whatever his action it must be swift and decisive. He was aware he had divided the forces of his mind by thinking of a Suzette whom he had never seen. She would have a copper head; that was his association with the name. He imagined her cat’s eyes softening when Gaspard had said to her, “I captured that trench. Named it for you. Do you think I could ever forget you?” David remembered there were half a dozen trenches in Gaspard’s system known by women’s names.
Somewhere near the middle of Suzette’s Trench, Gaspard emerged above ground again, striding out into no-man’s-land with the purpose, apparently, of covering the distance of about a hundred yards to the German trenches as quickly as possible.
David ran, now, down the slippery duckboards. But by the time he had pushed past a paralyzed platoon in Suzette, came out at Number Seven Post and looked over the parapet again, Gaspard was standing at full height gesticulating violently to the enemy trenches. David saw he had slipped the knives into the belt at his back, concealing them from the opposite trench. Over there a row of heads watched him curiously, first four coming up out of such an outpost and then those of what he judged to be a half-platoon upon the firing-step of the trench beyond.
“Mein Kompliment!” Gaspard shouted in German, with which David was roughly enough familiar. “Let some soldier here come. Message carry. Your colonel …”
There was a pause, a colloquy among the helmets in the German outpost. Many hands pushed a lone soldier over the top, a short, fat, evidently none too willing
emissary. As he shambled out into the open, buttoning his coat and straightening his helmet, he looked a fool bullied into danger.
“Voulez-vous parlez français?” Gaspard called, receiving an affirmative answer. “Bon! Bon! You advance toward me and I toward you. I have two trench knives in my belt to make up for your pistol,” he continued in French.
A cold voice spoke into David’s ear. “Out there,” said the dour Donovan, David’s senior captain, “those men are like two demolition bombs t’blow th’armistice t’hell. F’th’love av …”
“Think of the worst!” David said shortly, knowing it to be true.
“But anyway, Major, you’re here and in command.”
David had a sudden new perception of Donovan; his face seemed too long, his lips too straight and bloodless, his jaw too set, his Boston Irish accent too predictable.
“Pass the buck,” David said. “Nobody has ever had to pass the buck to me. I always take my share and more as you … know.” It was fact enough but a statement he immediately regretted. “Responsibility’s mine,” he added. “I’d a damn sight better chance to halt him than you …”
“Yes sirr!” Donovan said, adding covertly, David thought, the last word in the argument, “Now you’re here, hadn’t y’better take preecautions?”
“Yes, you’d better. Machine guns. Go easy!”
“Rivets!” Donovan’s metallic voice hurled out back to the rear. “One! Seven! One! Seven! F’th’love av God, don’t open firre unless I give th’orderr three times. But bring t’ bear on anny mass y’may see and stand by.” He deferred to David, “That right, sir?” and receiving no answer, added to the gunners, “Now stand away. Orderr b’whistle. Three blasts. Not til afterr th’thirrd. Three. After.”
David felt his heart pump a chilling mixture, for a single accidental burst from either gun would start a fight across the battalion front, throw the regiment into action, perhaps the entire brigade. The muzzles of the guns, forty yards to his rear, seemed now to be prodding cold at the back of his head to make him fully aware whatever occurred would be his fault. Yet now his reason, as if to prove to him that the fighting had destroyed all but his primitive instincts, suddenly cried out that he could actually do nothing and that what was happening before him was entirely an action of fate.
There seemed a breathless pause like another armistice. It was such a segment of time as was supposed to be filled, in the minds of men about to die, with images of the past. Instead, David felt the danger more appalling than in any combat on his record, together with a constraint holding him more helpless.
“Lord God,” he heard himself say, “halt this … stop the whistle … jam the guns. . . “and immediately he was touched by an intense desire to laugh. It was a naive appeal unless he believed the Lord God took a special interest in directly overlooking him and the fate of the men in these two battalions. Once again he felt all his mind revolt, as in his first fights, against his feebleness and his dependence upon outside forces. But now he realized more clearly than ever before, if not fully for the first time, that he must act in defiance of all ideas upon a fate of gods either to halt circumstance or to allow it. He must act, for once, like a complete man who had been taught by experience that the only possible control over events lay in whatever power resided within.
CHAPTER 2
The Mad Frenchman
“I am a born antinomian.
I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.
But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does,
I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.”
~ Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings
American flag brought home from France by Earle Looker in 1918
Still, there seemed nothing to be done. David’s decision was suspended while the disheveled German private and the elegant Gaspard slowly advanced toward each other. Gaspard’s horizon blue contrasted with unexpected sharpness against the mud of no-man’s-land. His helmet was cocked arrogantly enough to tempt a shot merely as a practical joke. It was all so newly possible in this place. David found himself once more inclined to doubt reality.
Even the background of desolation seemed strange. It failed to resemble the reflections of it in the periscope David had so often raised up out of this same outpost hole. He was surprised to discover how he had over-estimated the depth of the field of fire. Within less than two hundred yards from the morass of the enemy’s first trenches, and probably within his reserve line, there was a sparse line of trees. The forest thickened more quickly than David had supposed. Even upon the first close rising east to west, live trees gave the effect of holding the hills together. And there in the haze beyond, David realized, as never during the fighting, lay the most complex system opposing civilization that had ever been organized to feed men and materiel into their foul frontier ditches. His attention wandered to the faintly sickening stench clinging to his trenches as closely as mustard gas to underbrush. He thought how lucky the men had considered themselves, so short a time ago, to be spattered only by mud and putrefaction from the sanitation pits when barrages flung them up. And how now, in peace, morale would require the battalion to be moved back into village billets as quickly as possible. Observation, he reflected, seemed to be sharper and thinking quickened, but his ability of decision, just what to do with this mad Frenchman, had disappeared.
A metallic clink came from his left rear and he started, but it was only a canteen slipped home into its cup.
“. . . and Jerry’s got a strange look to ’im,” Donovan was saying closely into David’s ear. “I don’ think his officers ever got their hold back after this morning.”
“But they’re Prussians!” David heard himself say in disbelief. “Well, what?”
“I’m only tellin’ you,” Donovan said irritably.
David looked at him; the man’s words seemed to mirror the vibration of his nerves.
Gaspard was shouting to the German: “Gegen Ihre Linie gehe ich; toward my line you come.”
David felt the blood rush into his head. This line was his own, not Gaspard’s; the man strutted about as if he owned the earth. Gaspard had practically assumed command of this battalion front. David found his voice, heard himself shouting thickly into the still air. “Gaspard! Break this off. Come back. Come in. This is against orders. You’re in my line, the American line. Get the hell out of there!”
“Nom de Dieu! J’en ai rien branler!” Gaspard flung over his shoulder. “My command is not four hundred meters to the left. They cannot see me, that knoll is in the way, but my voice would carry. All I wish is to be left alone. Make too much noise and they swarm out to stand with me!” He paused, David suspected, for the warning to be digested, then continued, “Your trenches! Name of a name! Did I not dig them? Is not every sacred spadeful mine? Have not my friends been killed where you stand? Did you not take over my trenches? You are merely the tenant of my trenches! I wish no advice from you. I need no help. What I do regards myself.”
A cold dour voice spoke into David’s ear. “Out there,” said Donovan, now David’s senior captain, “those men are like two demolition bombs t’ blow the armistice t’hell. I’ll swear he disobeyed your order to come in. You’re in command here. His rank makes no difference. He’s a Frog. It looks bad with your men.”
David had a sudden new look at Donovan. His face seemed too long, his lips too bloodless, his jaw too taut. “You took long enough getting here,” David said shortly and immediately realized the injustice of the comment.
“I’ll let that pass,” he said, “I had a better chance t’ halt the Frenchman than you.”
David looked back at the line, “Are your two machine guns ready to go into action?”
“The Lewis’?!”
“Belts filled?”
Donovan gasped and said, “Yes. But I think …”
“See to it,” David said, feeling himself back upon his own ground. “You’re to go back to order them to prepare for trouble. Explain its’s only a precaution. But they’re to be ready to go into action. Careful with the men. I mean, get a sergeant to pass along the line himself to say that I say something’s screwy going on out here and that I’m going to clear it up as fast as I can without trouble but that precautions are in order.
“I want a complete stand-to but without any hurry or fuss or whistles. Like night. Warn the gun crews that on no account are they to go into action on their own initiative. Only on orders from me. Put an officer in command of each gun. They’re to bear on any mass of men that might come up out of enemy trenches – whether they look friendly or not.”
And to keep on the largest targets. If I want fire – I see we’ve got a box of smoke signals here – I’ll throw a smoke. Make these dispositions and return to me here.”
“Yes sir,” Donovan said and scuttled back.
David felt his heart pump a chilling mixture. A single burst from either gun might start a fight across the battalion front, throw the regiment into action, perhaps the whole brigade.
Meanwhile, Gaspard had switched again to German. “Confused do not be,” he called. “That I can trust you they are telling me. Close enough almost we are.”
The two were making a slow advance over relatively level ground. But soon both would be impeded by wire, iron stakes and splintered tree trunks. Gaspard disappeared into a shell crater, reappearing with mud on his elbow. Presently, both halted and seemed to speak. Then they came together. Gaspard gestured. The German hunched his shoulders in response. Suddenly Gaspard’s head went up, and the German was caught at his belly. David went cold again. It looked as though Gaspard had stabbed the German. But now they were laughing together. Amazingly, they shook hands. The German turned his back upon Gaspard and began returning to his own trenches.