by Thomas Boyd
It was a night for love, a night for beautifully mantillaed women to rest their elbows on the window casement of picturesque houses and lend their ears to the serenade of their troubadours—a night to wander listlessly through unreal woods and offer words of love beneath the benediction of a round moon.
Through a long, tortuous trench which, now and again, had been partially obliterated by the explosion of a large shell. Hicks tramped. He had been sent out by the platoon commander to find the French army, whose left flank was supposed, according to orders issued before the attack, to adjoin the right of the platoon. Picking his way through the barbed wire over the rough ground, he swung along with large strides. Importantly he adjusted the strap of his helmet more tightly about his chin. He girded his pistol belt tighter, until his waist was wasp-like. To his leg he buckled his holster until it interfered with the circulation of his blood. He liked the feel of the pistol against his thigh. It made him feel equal to any danger. He was a Buffalo Bill, a Kit Carson, a D’Artagnan.
Progress, walking in the trench, was too dreary for his mood. He climbed out and commenced to stride along the field, his chest inflated, his chin high. He thought of the men lying along the trench, huddled together, three men under one blanket, and he felt motherly toward them. He thought of the Allied armies waiting for the war to be over, so that they might return to their homes and children, and he felt protective toward them. He thought of President Wilson, bearing the burden of the saving of civilization on his thin, scholarly shoulders, and he felt paternal toward him. Hicks it was who had been ordered to find the French army, to link it up with the American army so that there might be no gaps in the ranks when the attack began on the morrow. He walked on and on and somehow in the dim light he lost the direction of the trench.
The blasted French army was not going to be as easy to find as he had imagined. He had now walked much farther than he had been told to walk, and still there was no sight or sound of them. A little farther on his attention became divided between the French army and the trench. If he lost the direction of the trench, how could he find the army, he thought.
Out of the stillness of the night a Maxim sputtered. Hicks started, then ran as swiftly as he could. He fell into the trench, quite breathless. Feeling forlorn, he crept along the trench, with all his native cunning. After he had been walking he knew not how long, a form was vaguely seen to move ahead. Hicks halted. “Français soldat?” he questioned. “Who the devil is that?” a voice answered. He had returned unwittingly to his own platoon. The platoon commander, hearing the voices, came up.
“Is that Hicks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, where have you been? I told you to come back if the Frogs weren’t near here. They probably haven’t arrived yet.”
Hicks sought out Pugh and lay down beside him underneath his blanket. Their heads covered, they talked in whispers.
“Gimme a cigarette,” Hicks commanded.
The cigarette, badly crumpled, was produced from one of Pugh’s pockets.
“Now give me a match.”
After waiting a while Pugh produced a box of matches. Then with a sigh: “Ah doan mind givin’ you cigarettes, Hicksy, but I hate like hell to carry ’em around for you.”
Silence.
“Where ya been?”
“Oh, out tryin’ to find some damned Frogs.”
“When do we go over again?”
“In the morning, I guess.”
Hicks, having been in touch with the commanding officer to the extent of carrying out an order of the lieutenant’s, was expected to know these things.
The obverse bank of the large ridge was barren of foliage. No trees reared their protecting heads, shielding the men who slipped quietly down the side. Nor did there seem to be any need of shelter. In the half light of the gray dawn men moved without the usual accompaniment of firing from the enemy. To the silently advancing men it seemed as if there were no enemy in front of them, nothing to hinder their progress into the town that rested in delicate contours on the near bank of the hill ahead. Warily they proceeded nearer to the lines of jagged barbed wire that ran like a gantlet, one near the low point of the ridge, the other several hundreds of yards away, where the hill rose to the town. The ground, with the deep green of long, untrampled grass, was springy under the feet of the men. Their mouths tasted as if they had eaten mud. Breathless, the blunt air lay against them. From the sombre purple trees on the hill, the unnatural stillness of the village, there was a portent of evil.
Carefully, as if they were dressed for inspection, the men avoided the barbs of the wire that reached out to grasp and tear their clothing. There was no hurry. Every movement was made calmly and a trifle ponderously. Under the silence the platoon had acquired a fictitious dignity.
The last man through the tangled wire, the platoon formed in line again, moving forward. And then, in the dim light, the trees shot sparks of fire. Bullets sizzled hotly into the pen. They struck with an ugly hiss. In consternation the platoon stood for a moment, then fell to the ground. Their hearts flopped—and stood still. Inside their heads wings of mammoth windmills were revolving. Bullets spattered on, demanding, screeching for, death. The whole sound was reminiscent of ivory dice being frantically shaken in a metal box.
Hicks, by sheer straining, tried to force his body into the ground. He felt that his helmet was a magnet for the flying pieces of steel. His shoulders felt bare, the flesh undulating over his body. A bullet struck at the right of him, throwing up a puff of dust in his face. Cautiously, counting every move, he unfastened his respirator from his neck and wriggled it in front of him. He dropped his chin, letting his helmet fall from his head upon the respirator box. A group of bullets struck near his elbow. It hastened his piling his bandoliers of ammunition in front of him. Then he regretted his action. Supposing a bullet should strike the bandoliers and set off the cartridges! How many? Two hundred and twenty. And what would be left of him? He threw the bandoliers to the side. The bullets hailed, beating fiercely like an early spring storm. He crossed his arms in front of him, hiding his head and shutting his eyes. But the desire to see, to witness, was strongest, and he guardedly twisted his neck.
Around him men were whining for stretcher bearers. Plaintive and despondent, their cries reached his ears. He did not care. A dead man was a dead man. He grew sulky, restive, at their repeated cries for assistance.
“Why can’t they let a fellow alone.” he thought. The enemy continued with their torrent of fire.
God, this was ticklish business, lying here like a bump on a log! Could nothing be done about it?
He crooked his neck, looking to the right, where the platoon commander lay. The platoon commander was so still that for a moment Hicks thought he was dead. Then something in his tense position informed him that he was alive.
“Why doesn’t he do something? What the devil is he good for?” Hicks wondered.
Pugh was lying in a spot thoroughly without shelter. Around him the bullets spat viciously, covering him with fine dirt. Ahead of him a small hump of ground enticed him. It was small, not much bigger than the crown of a hat, but to Pugh it looked mountainous. He had watched it now seemingly for hours, afraid to move, believing that if he lay quite still the enemy would think he was dead and not fire at him. But ever the bullets came closer. He wriggled a few inches on his belly, and stopped. He tried it again. If only the machine-guns would let up for a moment he was sure that he could make it. He twisted a few more inches, working his body snakelike. Now he could almost touch the mound of dirt. He reached out his hand and grasped at the hump. The fingers of his hand had been stretched out. Now they slowly crumpled, making a weak, ineffectual fist. His arm remained outstretched. His head flattened against the earth, his body relaxing. From the left side of his head blood dripped, forming a little pool that was quickly absorbed by the dirt. Slowly his body stiffened out.
Hicks had watched him, fascinated, wanting to cry out warning, yet fearing that his effort to help would be a hindrance. He felt himself, with Pugh, striving to attain shelter behind the absurd little mound. It was his hand that reached out to touch it!
“Pugh!” he called. “Oh, Pugh!” He was excited. “Can’t you make it, Pugh?” In his consciousness the thought pounded that Pugh was dead, but he combated it. “Why, Jack can’t be dead,” he argued with himself. “Why, he just gave me a cigarette last night!” There was total unbelief of the possibility of connecting death with Pugh in his tone. “Jack Pugh dead? Damn foolishness.” But he was dead, and Hicks knew it. It made him sick to think of it. “That’s right. It’s something you can’t fool yourself about.”
He rose straight as any of the posts from which was strung the fatal barbed wire. He stooped over and picked up his bandolier of ammunition. He looked around at the men lying there on the ground and a sneer came over his face. Methodically, as if he were walking home, he started toward the end of the barbed-wire pen. A bullet neatly severed the fastening of his puttee. He was unmindful of the fact that it unrolled the folds of the cloth falling about his feet.
Now, along the line, other men had got to their feet. They were all in a daze, not knowing what was happening. They sensed an enemy in front of them, but they were not fully aware of his presence.
Whizzing past, the machine-gun bullets were annoying little insects. Hicks struck at his face, trying to shoo the bothering little creatures away. How damned persistent they were! He reached the strands of barbed wire which lay between him and the enemy and calmly picked out a place where the wire had been broken, and walked through. Now he had entered the fringe of the forest. Dimly he recognized a face before him to be that of a German. There was the oddly shaped helmet covering the head, the utilitarian gray of the German uniform. The face did not at all appear barbaric. It was quite youthful, the chin covered with a white down. He veered the muzzle of his rifle toward the face, and, without raising his rifle to his shoulder, pulled the trigger. The face disappeared.
Gray uniforms, with helmets like distorted flower-pots, fled through the woods, in front of the mass of men that now surged forward. Hicks followed after them, not particularly desirous of stopping them, but wanting to overtake them before they reached the crest of the hill.
Men poured into the woods, making a firm wall studded with bristling bayonets. On their faces was a crystallized emotion, presumably hate. Lying out on the ground but a short time ago they had been frozen with fear. They were hounds on a leash being tortured. The leash had snapped and the fear was vanishing in the emotion of a greater fear—the maddened fight for self-preservation. And so they scoured the woods, charging the Germans with a white fury, recklessly throwing hand-grenades in front of them.
Their cowardice made them brave men, heroes. Pushing on, they swung to the right toward the town. Through the open field they ran in little spurts, falling on their faces, rising and rushing on. From the windows of the houses and beside the walls bullets zinged past, stopping men and sending them headlong upon the ground. A small number of them rushed into the town.
Bullets flew in every direction. Men toppled down from the windows of houses. Others raced up the steps of the dwellings. Men ran through the streets, wild and tumultuous. They returned to the pavement, guarding their captives. Men poured the hate of their beings upon the town. They wept and cursed like lost souls in limbo. All of their fear, all of their anxiety, all of the restraint which had been forced on them during the morning when they lay like animals in a slaughter-house and their brains numbed with apprehension, came out in an ugly fury.
Once the Germans found that the town was invaded, that the men had broken through the woods and barbed wire, they offered a weak and empty resistance. They would readily have given themselves up to be marched in an orderly procession back to a prison camp. There was only a section holding the town. But the men did not know this. All of the stories of German frightfulness, of German courage, of the ruthlessness of the German foot troops, made them battle on in fear.
At last two squads of worn, frightened Germans were assembled in the town square and, threats following after them, were marched back to the rear. It was pitiful to see the Germans reaching in their breast pockets and bringing forth cigars which they cherished, and offering them to their captors as an act of amelioration. Some had bars of chocolate which they readily gave and which the men readily accepted. Some of the Germans tried even to smile, their efforts proving pathetic because of their fear.
The afternoon sun threw wan rays on the distorted bodies which fear and surprise had drawn out of shape. As had been the case with life, death had not fashioned their features identically. Some wore expressions of peace, as if they were about to enjoy a long and much-needed rest; others sprawled with sagging chins, from which a stream of saliva had flown; one face grinned like an idiot’s. The shadows lengthened, blanketing the unresisting bodies. The men marched out of the town, leaving it to the dead and the night.
The ground over which they were advancing looked stunted, blighted by the incessant bursting of shells, the yellow layers of gas that, now and again, had covered it. The grass was short and wiry, with bare spots of earth showing. A desultory firing was being kept up by the artillery; every now and then machine-guns would cut loose, spattering their lead through the air. But the front was comparatively quiet. In an hour at most the advancing line would have to halt. The sun already had made its retiring bow in a final burst of glory, and now dusk curtained the movements of the men.
Orderlies hurried wearily through the rough field, carrying messages which would affect the activities of the troops in the morning. Officers, indistinguishable from enlisted men, moved along, their air of command forgotten in the effort to keep spirit and flesh together. Their lineaments expressed a dumb horror, through which appeared an appreciation of the grim, comic imbecility of the whole affair. When spoken to, the men grinned awkwardly, trying to mask the horror of war with a joke.
Some of the more energetic among them attacked the hard ground with their shovels; the older and wiser men sought out shell holes large enough to protect their bodies in case of a counter-attack.
The front was still, save for a nervous tremor running through the opposing line and manifesting itself in the jerky firing of flare pistols.
Through the dull purple dusk three airplanes circled overhead, snowy angry geese. From their present altitude it was not discernible which were engaged in the assault, which the attacked. The motors, which distinguished to the experienced ear whether the airplane was German or Allied, were not to be heard. Red streaks traced a brilliant course through the sky, forming a network of crimson between the fluttering planes. The airplanes drew near each other, then darted away. They revolved in circles, each trying to rise higher, directly over the other, and pour from that point of vantage volleys of lead.
Detached, the men lying on the ground watched the spectacle, enjoying it as they would have enjoyed a Fourth of July celebration.
Without warning, the airplane that circled beneath the other two rose straight in the air. Above, it volleyed streams of bullets into the backs of the others. The pilot of one of the planes beneath seemed to lose control. Wing over wing, it fell like a piece of paper in a tempered wind. The two remaining planes raced each other out of sight.
Chapter XIV
HICKS had gone through the attack without an impression of it remaining with him. When the platoon was caught between the two lines of barbed wire and he had arisen, walking toward the enemy, he had been numb. At that time his act had been brought about more by a great tiredness than by any courage. He felt no heroism in him at all, only an annoyance at his having to lie there any longer. It all seemed so senseless. Then, dazed, he had followed through the woods and into the village because such action was the formula of his existence.
The sights of the dead in all
of their postures of horror, the loss of those whom he had known and felt affection for, the odor of stinking canned meat and of dead bodies made alive again by the heat of the day, the infuriating explosion of artillery; the kaleidoscopic stir of light and color, had bludgeoned his senses. Now he lay, incapable of introspection or of retrospection, impervious to the demands of the dead and the living.
Somewhere in the Cimmerian darkness low voices emanated from vague, mysterious forms. They talked on and on in a sort of indefinable hum. Finally it came to Hicks that the platoon commander was searching for him.
“Hicks is over here,” he heard the man next to him say. The platoon commander approached and bent down beside him.
“Hicks, we’ve got to have an outpost. The captain’s afraid there will be an attack. Take your gun crew out about five hundred yards and keep your eye peeled.”
Hicks failed to reply.
“Hicks, did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. All right.” Hicks rose and, followed by two other men, stolidly tramped off through the murk.
He strode along in the darkness, a little ahead of the others. Abruptly an illuminating rocket was fired from somewhere in front of them. Each man stopped motionless, as the incandescent arc fell slowly to the ground.
Stepping forward, Hicks’s foot encountered an empty can. It bumped over the ground cacophonously. The men behind cursed in a thorough and dispassionate manner.
For four years the earth over which they were walking had been beaten and churned by the explosions of shells. A labyrinth of trenches had been dug in it.
Their bodies brushed against stiff little bushes whose thin, wiry limbs grasped at their clothing like hands.
The men had reached the brink of a large cavity in the earth when another flare was fired. They jumped. The hole was wide and deep enough for them to be able to stand without their heads appearing above the bank.