Through the Wheat

by Thomas Boyd

  The action was repeated. “Rotten!” yelled the sergeant. “What the hell are you going to do when you get up to the front? Do you think this is an afternoon tea? You act like a bunch of ribbon-counter clerks, and that’s what I believe most of you are. Now let’s try the butt stroke.”

  “Butt stroke. One—two—three. Oh, hell. Where are you aiming, Gillespie? Remember, you’ve missed him with the bayonet and you’re trying to soak him in the crotch—in the crotch, mind you, with the butt of your rifle.”

  Several of the men caught the frenzy of the sergeant, and at each command they ran, gritting and grinding their teeth, and grunted at the pieces of straw. From the terrific onslaught one of the dummies was severed from the scaffold, and the sergeant cried out:

  “That’s the first real spirit I’ve seen to-day. That’s the way to kill them!” he called to the man who had wrested the dummy from its place. “Come up here and show these dopes how to kill.”

  Exultant, the man left his place and strutted over to the sergeant. Taking a position before one of the dummies, he proceeded to show the rest of the platoon how really and frightfully to stab the dummies until their stuffing broke through the sacks.

  “He’s working to be a corporal, the dirty scut. And oh, if he does get to be a two-striper won’t he make us step around. Boy!” Hicks muttered to Pugh, who was standing next to him and whose bayonet had failed even to pierce the covering of the sack.

  “He won’t pull none of that old stuff on me. Ah’ll tell Lieutenant Bedford and he’ll make him be good or I won’t give him any more money to gamble with,” Pugh drawled.

  “You sure have got a stand-in with Bedford, Pugh. I often wondered how you did it.”

  “Hell, that’s easy. When he was down at St. Nazaire I lent him ’bout a thousand francs to gamble with, and he ain’t never paid me.”

  The platoon assembled and marched back to their billets.

  Chapter III

  THREE days were spent by the platoon at the little village. On the evening of the third day, just as the men had formed in a long, impatient line before the field kitchen, with their aluminum food receptacles held out to catch the thin, reddish stew surlily thrown at them, the company commander walked among them bearing words of dour import. Captain Powers talked softly and gently, wringing the words from his heart, burnishing them with a note of sadness:

  “Stay close to your billets to-night after chow, men. We’re moving up to the front some time to-night.”

  He passed by them, and those whom he passed shuffled their feet, looking furtively at the ground. There was very little comment. The shuffling line was funereal. Men smiled at Captain Powers, but their smiles lacked certitude.

  When they had packed their belongings in the stipulated military manner the pall remained, vaguely hanging over them, drawing them together in their common aversion from the future. In the rooms they sat on their packs, nervously waiting to move.

  The moonlight streamed in through the window and showed the gray whitewashed walls of the deserted room. The fireplace was a black maw.

  Night fell in mysterious folds, giving the appearance of unfamiliarity to the squat French houses, the spired Gothic church, the trees which drooped their boughs in a stately canopy over the smooth gray road. The men, their feet striking against the cobblestones, clumped through the village streets and along the road.

  The sector toward which the platoon was moving had once been the scene of violent conflict, but of late, with the more important military manœuvres taking place farther west, it had dropped into a peaceful desuetude. It lay a few miles from Verdun, among the green-covered concealed fortresses, from which the noses of mammoth artillery unexpectedly rose. Tops of thickly wooded hills reared evenly in an unbroken line. Between the crests the shadow-hidden valleys rested serene, content with their secrets of the dead. Along the base of the mauve chain of hills wound a trench from which French soldiers, most of whom were on the farther side of fifty, sat around in dugouts and drank their ration of Pinard or squatted, their shirts off, hunting lice in the seams.

  The platoon marched up in the pitch-black night, slipping, from time to time, off the slimy duck boards which had been placed in the bottom of the trench to prevent traffic from being buried in the mud. Their packs, with hip rubber boots, bandoliers of ammunition, bombs, and shovels, bowed them over as they cautiously and cursingly made their way through the communication trench.

  Somewhere ahead a white light flared with a sputtering noise.

  “Stand fast!” Lieutenant Bedford called out peremptorily.

  The men stood as rocks, their arms crooked, covering their faces. The light dropped slowly and unemotionally to the ground, dying out. Again all was blackness.

  Sergeant Harriman, who had gone ahead as billeting officer, now joined the platoon and piloted the men into the trench. The main trench was much wider than the communication trench, but passage along it was difficult because of the half-checkered manner in which it had been laid out.

  Not waiting to be relieved, the French soldiers one by one had disappeared into the night. Now the platoon stood silent and ill at ease. No one knew where to go, and so the entire body was ordered to remain standing in the firing bays until morning.

  Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the gray of the horizon.

  He experienced a strange feeling of awe, as if he were looking upon another world. The early sun threw the trees and barbed wire into a queer perspective and gave them a harsh, unreal aspect.

  In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many parts of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the picture. Ordinarily he would have been contemplating such a pastoral scene from the window of a railway train or from a northern Michigan farmhouse, where he would have been spending his summer vacation. He would have been dressed in a blue flannel suit, with a sailor hat, a white shirt of some soft summery material and a rather striking tie. His hose would have been of silk and his cool white underclothes would have been of the “athletic” type, Hicks mused.

  Then he became aware of himself. In place of the straw sailor there lay very heavily on his head a steel helmet that, though he had thought it chic for a while, was now no more distinguished-looking than the aluminum dish in which his food was rationed to him. He had worn his drab shirt for two weeks, and there were black rings around the collar and wrists. His gas-mask, girded over his chest, looked foul and unclean; he had used it for a pillow, for a dining-table, and often, he realized, it had been thrown in some muddy place when he had sickened of having it about him like an ever-present albatross. The knees of his breeches were as soiled and as uncomfortable as his shirt, and his puttees and shoes were crusted thickly with dried mud.

  His stock-taking of his dress was interrupted by the knowledge that a persistent vermin was exploring the vicinity of his breast. He could not apprehend it because of his gas-mask, which, suspended from his neck, was strapped to his chest.

  After the first few days life in the trenches became inordinately dull, so dull that an occasional shell fired from the artillery of either side was a signal for the members of the platoon to step into the trench and speculate where it struck.

  Every night two squads of the platoon stood watch while the others slept. Hicks, with Bullis, was stationed in a shell ho
le a few yards ahead of the front line. The shell hole was half filled with water and it was cold. After three or four hours the hip rubber boots made Hicks think that his feet were a pair of dead fish in a refrigerator.

  It was customary for the corporal of the guard and the lieutenant each night to inspect the outposts, but because the ground was wet and because of the strands of unmanageable barbed wire the lieutenant had stayed in his dugout, permitting the corporal of the guard to have the honor of inspecting.

  One night, when the dampness seemed like a heavily draped ghost that wanted to kiss Hicks’s entire body, and when his eyes had completely tired from the strain of imagining that the stumps and posts in the field were moving, Hicks fell asleep. In his cramped position, sitting on a board over a shell hole, with his feet in the icy water, Hicks’s sleep was full of fantastic dreams. He might have slept until the noonday sun awakened him, had he not slipped from his seat and sprawled into the water. This awakened Bullis, who invariably went to sleep, remaining so until the watch was over.

  “What the hell’s coming off?” Hicks awakened with a jerk. “Christ, it’s time to go in.”

  They observed the sun, which was slowly climbing over the horizon and shedding the earth with a silvery light. The sky was almost smoked-pearl colored, and before it the trees and barbed wire made sharp sentinels.

  Silently they picked up their rifles and slunk into the trench. Answering the guard’s challenging “Halt, who’s there?” with an “Oh, shut up,” they stepped on the slippery duck board.

  “Say, Hicksy, you’d better look out. What the hell were you guys up to last night?” the guard asked.

  “What do you mean? We weren’t up to anything.”

  “Well, old Hepburn came back here after being out to your hole, a-cussin’ like hell. He said you guys couldn’t take advantage of your friendship with him like that and get away with it.”

  “I don’t know what he meant. Let’s beat it, Bullis.”

  They went to their dugout, where they slept with their shoes beneath their heads, to keep, as Hicks almost truthfully remarked, the rats from carrying them away.

  The major’s orderly, his dignity wrestling with the slippery footing of the duck boards, marched down the trench from battalion headquarters. Stopping in front of the dugout which Hicks and Bullis had entered, he removed his helmet, patted his hair, and called:

  “Is Private Hicks in there? Tell Private Hicks Major Adams wants to see him.”

  His hair a rat’s nest, and a heavy beard on his muddy-looking face, Hicks looked out of the entrance of the dugout.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The orderly turned about and marched back toward battalion headquarters with Hicks following him.

  Major Adams belonged to that type of officer each of which you meet with the feeling that he is the sole survivor of the school of regular soldiers. He was a tall, slim, very erect person. His face was ascetic, though gossip about his personal affairs proclaimed him to be fiercely lustful. He wore his campaign hat adeptly. He limped as he walked, from an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal as the fourth dimension. He was adored and held in awe by half of the battalion.

  Private Hicks stepped inside the major’s dugout and saluted.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Hicks, you were reported this morning to have gone to sleep while on outpost duty.”

  Hicks started visibly. “That’s true, sir.”

  “Well, what the hell kind of a soldier are you, anyway?” Major Adams fairly bit his words loose.

  “I don’t know, sir. I mean, I guess I’ve been a pretty good soldier.”

  “You have like hell, Hicks, and you know it. Now, why did you go to sleep on watch?”

  Hicks knew that if he were court-martialled his sentence might be life imprisonment. It might be anything, he reflected, that the group of morons sitting in solemn judgment might decide to give him.

  Major Adams also knew it.

  “Sir, the hours are too long. Nobody can stay awake when he goes on watch eight hours every night.”

  “Yes?” Major Adams raised an eyebrow forbiddingly.

  “Well, sir, there’s two feet of water in the shell hole where my post is, and I guess I got so numb with cold that I went to sleep.”

  “And you never thought to bail it out? I knew that officers were so damned dumb that they needed dog-robbers, but I didn’t know that enlisted men were. Now, Hicks, you haven’t a case at all. But”—he was silent a moment—“some day you might make a good soldier. You wouldn’t have a chance if you were to get a general court martial, because the judges would have you hung as an example. Hicks,” he said, “I’m going to let this drop. You may go.”

  Mumbling a “thank you, sir,” Hicks very properly about-faced and left the dugout.

  Chapter IV

  THE platoon had been in the trenches for about six weeks. Everything had been quiet, well-ordered. Occasionally a shell from the German batteries would start lazily off and end up with terrific speed in the platoon’s trench. Once or twice men were killed when the shells struck, and their bodies were hurried away to the dressing station; one morning the body of a red-haired German, an immense fellow with a broad forehead, large wide eyes, and a huge mouth, was found fastened to the strands of barbed wire in front of Hicks’s post. There was a hole in his side made by the explosion of a small hand-bomb. Besides that, there was nothing of interest.

  In fact, there was too little of interest. Not even a prisoner had been taken, although the colonel of the regiment had let it be known that the first man to capture a prisoner would be given a fifteen-days leave to Aix-le-Bains. So it was decided that a raiding party was what was needed to resuscitate the platoon from its lethargy.

  It was for this reason that when Hicks and Bullis set out through the trench toward their shell hole one night they were stopped by the lieutenant and told that they had been relieved for the night and were to return to their dugout and await his orders.

  Hicks was disturbed. He felt as if the lieutenant’s orders had in some way to do with his sleeping on watch. He had not minded the consequences so much when he was walking toward battalion headquarters, but now that everything with regard to the affair seemed to have been smouldering, he was fearful. Being rather reckless, probably the first time that Major Adams’s remark that he might get a general court martial was fully realized by him was at the moment when he and Bullis had been sent back to their dugout.

  Now he sat, his head bowed and his hands clasped before him. What the hell was he to do? It was the first time he had thought of his family. What would Maisie say when she discovered that he, William Hicks, was in Fort Leavenworth? What would the gang at the office say? And his mother? Maybe they might order him to be shot! This was a mess. But no, wasn’t there a general order recently made to the effect that no one in the American Expeditionary Forces could be executed without permission of President Wilson? Sure there was. Good of the old horse-face to think of that. But maybe there was a way to get out of it yet. He considered for a moment the advisability of clambering over the trench and setting forth into that unexplored field, never to return unless he brought a German prisoner with him. Let’s see, how had they done it, he mused. There were plenty of heroes who could. They’d just fill their pockets with hand-grenades and blow up a machine-gun nest. “Major Adams, I fulfilled your prediction! Here!”—indicating three fierce-looking Germans with the stump of his left arm, which had been shot off during his single-handed assault. “And there were five more, but I would have had to carry them.” Bunk.

  “All right, Hicks and Bullis. Are you all set?” Lieutenant Bedford, with his aggressive little mustache, was peering into the dugout from the trench. “Here’s some blacking for your bayonets. We’re going on a raiding pa
rty to-night.”

  “Hooray. That’s the stuff.” But the voice of Bullis was weak and shaky. “When do we go?”

  Hicks was nonplussed. He hastily wondered whether he had said a prayer that had been answered. He wanted some source to lay this bit of good fortune to. And at the same time he doubted whether it was unalloyed fortune, whether there were not some disagreeable part to be performed. So he said nothing, but began in a businesslike manner to dim the lustre of his bayonet with the blacking Bedford had given to him.

  “We’ll be ready to start in a half-hour. We’ve got to wait for guides from the Intelligence section.” Lieutenant Bedford walked away.

  When the guides arrived and the representatives from each platoon were assembled it was night, and so dark that one could not see another in front of him. A lieutenant and a sergeant from the Intelligence section led the way, with Hicks and Bullis sandwiched in the middle of the long line that kept from separating by the man in rear holding to the shoulder of the man in front of him.

  Instead of leaving the trench by Hicks’s shell hole, the party turned in the opposite direction, and, after walking along the slippery duck boards for ten or more minutes, climbed over a firing bay and worked their way through a path that a succession of well-placed shells had blown in the barbed wire.

  Their feet, scuffing through the tall grass, hissed like a scythe cutting heavy weeds. That, and an occasional cough, were the only noises of the night. Suddenly Hicks’s foot struck a large, yielding substance. He felt with his feet, prodding into the thing, which caused a fearful stench to rise.

  “Hey, what’s this?” he softly called, and the Intelligence-section sergeant came running back only to exclaim in a voice that had been hardened by one other raiding party: “That? Why, that’s only a dead Boche.”

  A moment afterward an automatic rifle broke nervously into a series of put-put-puts.