by Thomas Boyd
Thus, he was a sight that no strictly military officer who had received at least ninety days’ training in learning the commands of squads right, slope and shoulder arms, at some officers’ training school could bear.
“Private!” the officer shouted indignantly. “What are you doing out of uniform?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Truthfully, Hicks did not know. He only knew that he had thrown away much of his own equipment and that he was highly pleased with the equipment he had substituted for it.
“Don’t know?” The officer was scandalized. “Private, how long have you been in the service?”
“Since war was declared,” Hicks answered promptly.
“And you don’t yet know how to dress? Nor how to address an officer? Private, you have not saluted me!” The officer was horror-stricken; his tone suggested an utter unbelief in Hicks’s existence.
“You don’t salute officers at the front, sir.”
The officer turned green. “Private, consider yourself under arrest.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Hicks started to walk away.
“And private,” the officer called. “If you aren’t back in uniform by the next time I see you, a charge of disobedience will be added to your offense.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Hicks muttered, walking away.
He sought out the coolest-looking spot in the woods and there lay down. In a moment he was asleep. In another moment he was awakened by a terrific noise. Unwittingly, he had selected for his bed a space not ten yards from where a battery of long-range guns were concealed. When they were fired the earth shook. He rose and fled farther into the woods.
Ahead of him, at the side of a green knoll, several old Frenchmen were pottering around a field kitchen. The coals of the wood fire under a huge black kettle glowed in a warming, friendly fashion. The aroma of black, satisfying coffee steamed from the wide mouth of the caldron. Hicks was enchanted, powerless to move, afraid to approach the benignant genii. He felt like a vagrant, nose pressed against the window of a fashionable restaurant. But no, not like a vagrant. Vagrants were only in cities, in blessed civilizations. He was still undecided, when one of the squat little figures, that somehow reminded him of the characters in “Rip Van Winkle,” looked up. To Hicks he spoke unintelligibly, but his voice was not forbidding. Hicks came nearer. He sniffed. “Café?” he questioned.
“Oui, café,” the man grunted, going on about his business.
“Café bon,” offered Hicks.
“Oui. Café bon, très bon,” the man conceded.
“J’ai faim.”
“O pardon. Vous avez faim. Voulez-vous café?” He scooped a ladleful of hot coffee from the caldron and offered it to Hicks. How simple it was. Hicks thought, as he drained the dipper.
The men gathered around Hicks. “Américain, oui?” They apparently had decided before offering the question. “Pas Anglais? Anglais mauvais.”
They learned that he had been in the attack. “Boche pas bon aussi, non?”
From their bags cakes of chocolate and slices of bread were brought and offered. Hicks ate shyly but greedily.
They were the first Frenchmen whom he had tried to talk with since the day of the first attack of his platoon. Then they were disheartened, not caring whether the Germans drank beer from the Arc de Triomphe or not. Now they had regained heart and were willing to continue the struggle of the advance toward Germany. Hicks learned that he had engaged in the initial attack of a vast offensive, that the goal had been reached, that Soissons had fallen under the storm of the First and Second Regular Divisions, that Château-Thierry had at last been cleared of the enemy by the Third and Twenty-sixth Divisions, that in between the Fourth Regular Division had been successful in its attack. “Fini la guerre?” asked Hicks, and he was frowned upon by the genii. No, they informed him, the war had begun anew and would continue long. The genii spoke of the black forest, of the Kriemhilde Stellung, which had never been passed save by Allied prisoners, of the narrowing front the German retreat would make. No, the war would last one year, two years, three years.
Hicks tramped through the forest, stumbling over large holes that had been torn in the ground by the explosions of German long-range shells. Now all was quiet. The green leaves of the trees fluttered unperturbed, birds trilled from joy or shrieked messages to one another. The boughs of the trees were kind, shielding the men from the rays of the hot summer sun. Soldiers were bustling about, tugging ant-like at heavy caissons which seemed unwilling to budge.
Thoroughly tired out, men were stretched upon the cool grass asleep, forgetful of the void in their stomachs. Suddenly, in the distance, a very erect form stalked through the trees. As it approached, a thin, haughty face, above which a steel helmet jauntily set, was to be seen. At the sight of him all of the sleeping men arose as if by a signal earlier agreed upon. The tired, worn-out, hungry soldiers; the dirty, blood-smeared, lousy soldiers; the red-eyed, gas-eaten, mud-caked soldiers; the stupid, yellow, cowardly soldiers; the pompous, authoritative corporals; the dreamy, valiant, faithful soldiers rose to their feet and stood at attention. As the tall, spare figure advanced nearer, tired hands were smartly raised to their helmets and dropped quickly against the thigh.
Was it General Ulysses S. Pershing who had come? It was not. It was Major Adams, Major John R. Adams, the battalion commander.
“What outfit is this?” The major’s tone was crisp.
“First battalion of the Sixth, sir.”
“Where are the rest of the men?”
“All the men are here, sir.”
“What! This is not a battalion, it’s a platoon. That was a hell of a way to let a bunch of Germans treat you.”
He walked past. The men sank back on the ground, fully one-fifth of the number that had attacked.
That afternoon beer was rationed by the mess sergeant, who had deprived his safe dugout, far in the rear, of his pleasant company for a few hours. The mess sergeant admitted that the beer had been provided by Major Adams.
On this particular afternoon the woods of Villers Cotterets was as quiet and peaceful as a statue of stone. Placid, motionless, the leaves of the trees looked as if they were made of wax. Their branches curved solemnly and prayerfully toward each other, meeting and forming successions of arches. Planted in perpendicular rows, they aspired straight and immutable, while overhead, fat plucked cotton tops, greatly expanded, lay like dead below an impenetrable expanse of blue sky. Upon the fragile blades of grass men were held in the vice of a sleep of exhaustion. Five miles from the woods the guns along the front line, where men waited, anxiously watching the movements of each other, were silent.
Somewhere among the solemn and still branches a huge limb cracked. It fell rapidly and with a horrific sound through the foliage. Down, down it came, rending the small sprigs of green as it fell. Below the limb a soldier slept. When it reached the earth its heavier end struck the soldier on the head, crushing his skull. Instantly the scene was changed to one of frenzied activity. Men leaped to their feet and ran out of the woods.
The treachery, the unexpectedness of the calamity remained unshakable in the mind of Hicks. To him it seemed the height of cruelty, and in some way he interpreted it as an intentional act of the enemy. He knew better. He knew that a shell, probably the day before, during the heavy bombardment, had struck the limb and partly severed it, and afterward its great weight had brought itself down. It preyed upon him dreadfully. That any one could have gone through the punishment of the attack unharmed and then have returned to a place of safety only to be killed was more than he could stand. It was an act of vengeance, and he believed it to be the vengeance of an angry God.
Men returned to the woods from the field under orders of the officers, who feared that their presence in the field might attract the attention of the enemy. Nearly all of them returned and resumed their sleep. But not Hicks. He was firml
y decided against the woods. He would be at hand for as many attacks as general headquarters could devise; he would do his part in advancing the Allied cause; he would help save the world for democracy; he would make war to end war; he would tolerate Y. M. C. A. secretaries; he would go without food, clothing, and sleep—so he told the officers—but he would not return to the woods. He lay down outside in the wheat, every muscle twitching. For him, he felt, life had ended, the world had come to a full stop.
Even the manœuvring of a small German plane around the big French observation balloon failed to draw his attention from himself. The little plane would draw away like some game-cock, and then dash for the balloon, spurting a stream of incendiary bullets as it flew, then draw away again and repeat the operation. At last the basket of the balloon was located and the observer was struck by a piece of hot lead. High above the trees, he leaned from the basket and dropped, clinging to his parachute. The parachute caught in the top of one of the trees. From nowhere a low-hung French automobile, with three men in the seats, dashed forward toward the scene. The men got out, and, after a while, returned with the wounded observer, the white bandage on his arm showing distinctly for a distance. But the sight offered no titillations for Hicks.
Before dusk the battalion was formed and orders were given to march back to the line of reserve. The news that the destination of the battalion was farther from the front was sceptically received. The men adopted the pose of feeling insulted at having been offered so poor a ruse. “Reserve, my eye. Why don’t they say we’re goin’ to one of them rest camps you always hear so much about?”
“Or else tell us that we’re goin’ to get thirty days’ leave each.”
“Yeh, where’s them boats we was goin’ to see?”
“I’d like to know.”
“We may go in reserve, but it’ll be in reserve of the Germans.”
Thus they offered their various comments upon the foolishness of believing that they were to leave the front.
But the talk was borne on weak wings. For the moment the men had little interest in their destination, save that they wanted it to be near. Their legs felt as if they were to be separated from their bodies at the groin. Their feet felt as if their shoes were full of small, sharp pebbles. Major Adams, leading his horse and walking beside the men, encouraged them, saying that they would halt in a short time.
If the battalion as a body troubled little about where they were going, Hicks cared not at all. The incident of the falling tree had broken him. He felt in danger of his life. Where he went mattered not. There was no safety anywhere. He tramped along the road, an atom in the long, lean line, his face showing white as paper through the dirt.
As night came on and a lopsided moon appeared, the battalion turned off in a woods, was halted, and lay down.
In the dark Hicks and Pugh found a place where the grass was thickest. They spread out their blankets and lay down. Pugh was restless, though his body was scourged with fatigue. His was the foraging spirit. There were no supply wagons in sight from which to pilfer, there were no field kitchens, with the cooks stewing a barely edible mess of tomatoes, beef-bones, potatoes, and onions. He got up and silently stole away. Less than an hour afterward he returned, his arms laden with bottles and condiments. He uncorked a bottle, placed the open end under Hicks’s nose, and gently shook him.
“Oh, Hicks, Hicksy, look what daddy’s got.”
Hicks awakened with a start, almost knocking the bottle from Pugh’s hand.
“Cognac?” Hicks greedily asked.
“Naw,” deprecatingly, “but it’s pretty good champagne.”
Hicks drank, passed the bottle to Pugh. The bottle played shuttlecock between them.
Suddenly Hicks felt impelled to talk.
“Jack, I’m all in. I feel sort of sick. I don’t believe I can go up to the front any more.”
“What’s the matter?” sympathetically. “These Big Berthas got you fooled?”
“No,” thoughtfully. “That isn’t it. I can stand that all right. I can even stand to see Kahl and the rest of those fellows get knocked off. I suppose I could even stand it to get killed myself. You don’t make such a hell of a fuss when you get killed. But it seems so damned ridiculous. Take our going over the other day. A full battalion starting off and not even a fifth of them coming back. And what did they do? What did we do? We never even saw a German. They just laid up there and picked us off—direct hits with their artillery every time! That’s hell, . . . you know. Think of being sent out to get killed, and the person who sends you not knowing where you’re going! It looks crazy. Like goin’ up to the Kaiser and saying: ‘Here, chop my head off.’ And I was talking to a Frog to-day, a Frog that gave me some coffee, and he said that this damned thing might keep up for years. Now, it’d be all right if we could go up and clean things up with one big smash, but it’s pretty mean when you go up and come back, go up and come back, until you get knocked off. Gimme another drink.
“And Jack, you know that Frog I was tellin’ you about? When he gave me the coffee he asked me if I was an American. I guess he thought at first that I was an Englishman, and when I told him I wasn’t he looked sort of glad. Then he looked as if he expected me to agree with him and said that the Englishmen were no good.”
“Well, you did, didn’t you? I’d like to take a crack at them lime-juicers.”
“What difference does that make? The point is, the French hate the English and the English hate the Americans and the Americans hate the Germans, and where the hell is it all goin’ to end. Gimme another drink.
“I guess that fellow being killed this afternoon got on my nerves,” he finished.
Hicks drank until he was drunk, not sickeningly drunk, but until his brain was numbed.
Pugh sat awake, watching the stars through the trees and listening to one of the new men singing low some Italian love-songs that he had learned in Rome.
The battalion slept until noon. When they awoke, the field kitchens, drawn up not far from them, were concocting the rations into that particular delicacy known to army folk as slum. The men fell in line before the large metal containers, where soiled-looking ragamuffins slopped a pale, watery substance into the dirty mess-kits that were held out by the men as they passed. The bread was white, there was much coffee that was hot. Further than that the desires of the men did not wing.
Late afternoon found the battalion on the road again, bound farther from the front. They knew that they were leaving the front by the receding boom of the artillery.
They were billeted in a small town from which all of the able-bodied inhabitants had flown. Vacant houses were searched out, armsful of straw were taken from the barns and arranged in neat piles on the stone floors of the houses. By sleeping in pairs, they were able to use one blanket to put over the straw, the other blanket to cover their bodies.
There began the regular soldier’s formula of reveille and morning exercises; a scrawny breakfast and a morning of drill; a heavy, lumpy dinner and an afternoon of skirmishing, alternating with lectures on the manœuvres of war; a thin, skimpy supper, leaving the men free in the evening to bribe the townspeople to sell them eggs, salads, rabbit, cognac, and wine.
Of an evening they would gather in cafés, small, snug ones, with rough boards for tables and several broken chairs, and talk over the grievances that the day had brought; of the rottenness of the Y. M. C. A., upon which all but two were agreed; of what they did before they enlisted in “this man’s army”; of the slackness of the mail delivery; of their hatred and contempt for the military police, and especially those military police in Paris of whom horrifying tales of cruelty were told; of what they were going to do when they were released from the army; of the vengeance they were planning against at least three officers; of how they were going to circumvent being captured for the next war. One, now and again, would shyly bring a pocket-worn photograph forth and show it to those
whom drink had made his closest friends. In all, a fairly pleasant existence.
But Hicks was one of the more silent among them. After the first few nights in the town he began making long, lonely pilgrimages to nearby towns and returning later after taps, at which time he was supposed to be in bed. He also began drinking more heavily, and one morning, when the whistle was blown for drill, Hicks was still drunk from the effects of the liquor of the night before. But being one of the handful of the original members of the platoon, little by way of reprimand was said.
Chapter XII
IMMENSELY imposing by greatness of numbers, three divisions were gathered in ranks on the field. Presenting a huge sight of restless attention, they swayed like the waves of a mud-colored sea. Before them an officer stood on a platform, his hat in his hand, the wind blowing his hair. Not far off, on the outskirts of a ramshackle village, old Frenchmen, their wives, and their grandchildren watched. The officer lifted his hand with a gesture, commanding a silence that none could mistake. He hunched up his shoulders and frowned disapproval; he fastened his thumbs in the strap of his belt. His protuberant belly kept him from being an exact replica of an old turkey-cock. Now, tearing to shreds the phlegm in his gullet, he opened his mouth:
“Men, no doubt some of you, most of you, believe that you are here by chance. That any divisions might have been called in place of you. Men, you are not here by chance. It is because I, personally, requested our distinguished commanding officer that your divisions make up my army corps that you are here.”
Here he paused. He was a major-general and he was wondering how much longer the war would last, hoping that it would continue through the year.
“I have watched you enter the lines, green and unseasoned troops, at Cantigny and Château-Thierry, and assault the enemy with such force that you threw back his most valiant troops, the Prussian Guards. You have shown your sterling mettle at Soissons and Saint Mihiel, advancing far beyond the objective given you. Jaulny and Thiaucourt and Montfaucon have fallen under your irresistible onslaught. Now you may be considered, you are considered, wherever civilization is known, as shock troops, second in valor to none.”