“Duck,” I said, “you explain your presence here by telling me that you enlisted while drunk. How do you explain my being here?”
“You’re a Doc. I guess there must be big money into it,” he returned with a wink.
“I draw no pay.”
“I believe you,” he remarked, leering. “Say, don’t you do that to me, Doc. I may be unfortunit; I’m a poor damn fool an’ I know it. But don’t tell me you’re here for your health.”
“I won’t repeat it, Duck,” I said, smiling.
“Much obliged. Now for God’s sake let’s talk business. You think you’ve got me cinched. You think you can go home an’ raise hell in the 50th while I’m doin’ time into these here trenches. You sez to yourself, ‘O there ain’t nothin’ to it!’ An’ then you tickles yourself under the ribs, Doc. You better make a deal with me, do you hear? Gimme mine, and you can have yours, too; and between us, if we work together, we can hand one to Mike the Kike that’ll start every ambulance in the city after him. Get me?”
“There’s no use discussing such things — —”
“All right. I won’t ask you to make it fifty-fifty. Gimme half what I oughter have. You can fix it with Curley Tim Brady — —”
“Duck, this is no time — —”
“Hell! It’s all the time I’ve got! What do you expec’ out here, a caffy dansong? I don’t see no corner gin-mills around neither. Listen, Doc, quit up-stagin’! You an’ me kick the block off’n this here Kike-Wop if we get together. All I ask of you is to talk business — —”
I moved aside, and backward a little way, disgusted with the ratty soul of the man, and stood looking at the soldiers who were digging out bombproof burrows all along the trench and shoring up the holes with heavy, green planks.
Everybody was methodically busy in one way or another behind the long rank of Legionaries who stood at the loops, the butts of the Lebel rifles against their shoulders.
Some sawed planks to shore up dugouts; some were constructing short ladders out of the trunks of slender green saplings; some filled sacks with earth to fill the gaps on the parapet above; others sharpened pegs and drove them into the dirt façade of the trench, one above the other, as footholds for the men when a charge was ordered.
Behind me, above my head, wild flowers and long wild grasses drooped over the raw edge of the parados, and a few stalks of ripening wheat trailed there or stood out against the sky — an opaque, uncertain sky which had been so calmly blue, but which was now sickening with that whitish pallor which presages a storm.
Once or twice there came the smashing tinkle of glass as a periscope was struck and a vexed officer, still holding it, passed it to a rifleman to be laid aside.
Only one man was hit. He had been fitting a shutter to the tiny embrasure between sandbags where a machine gun was to be mounted; and the bullet came through and entered his head in the center of the triangle between nose and eyebrows.
A little later when I was returning from that job, walking slowly along the trench, Pick-em-up Joe hailed me cheerfully, and I glanced up to where he and Heinie stood with their rifles thrust between the sandbags and their grimy fists clutching barrel and butt.
“Hello, Heinie!” I said pleasantly. “How are you, Joe?”
“Commong ça va?” inquired Heinie, evidently mortified at his situation and condition, but putting on the careless front of a gunman in a strange ward.
Pick-em-up Joe added jauntily: “Well, Doc, what’s the good word?”
“France,” I replied, smiling; “Do you know a better word?”
“Yes,” he said, “Noo York. Say, what’s your little graft over here, Doc?”
“You and I reverse rôles, Pick-em-up; you stop bullets; I pick ’em up — after you’re through with ‘em.”
“The hell you say!” he retorted, grinning. “Well, grab it from me, if it wasn’t for the Jack Johnsons and the gas, a gun fight in the old 50th would make this war look like Luna Park! It listens like it, too, only this here show is all fi-nally, with Bingle’s Band playin’ circus tunes an’ the supes hollerin’ like they seen real money.”
He was a merry ruffian, and he controlled the “coke” graft in the 50th while Heinie was perpetual bondsman for local Magdalenes.
“Well, ain’t we in Dutch — us three guys!” he remarked with forced carelessness. “We sure done it that time.”
“Did you do business with Duck?” inquired Pick-em-up, curiously.
“Not so he noticed it. Joe, can’t you and Heinie rise to your opportunities? This is the first time in your lives you’ve ever been decent, ever done a respectable thing. Can’t you start in and live straight — think straight? You’re wearing the uniform of God’s own soldiers; you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with men who are fighting God’s own battle. The fate of every woman, every child, every unborn baby in Europe — and in America, too — depends on your bravery. If you don’t win out, it will be our turn next. If you don’t stop the Huns — if you don’t come back at them and wipe them out, the world will not be worth inhabiting.”
I stepped nearer: “Heinie,” I said, “you know what your trade has been, and what it is called. Here’s your chance to clean yourself. Joe — you’ve dealt out misery, insanity, death, to women and children. You’re called the Coke King of the East Side. Joe, we’ll get you sooner or later. Don’t take the trouble to doubt it. Why not order a new pack and a fresh deal? Why not resolve to live straight from this moment — here where you have taken your place in the ranks among real men — here where this army stands for liberty, for the right to live! You’ve got your chance to become a real man; so has Heinie. And when you come back, we’ll stand by you — —”
“An’ gimme a job choppin’ tickets in the subway!” snarled Heinie. “Expec’ me to squeal f’r that? Reeform, hey? Show me a livin’ in it an’ I carry a banner. But there ain’t nothing into it. How’s a guy to live if there ain’t no graft into nothin’?”
Joe touched his gas-mask with a sneer: “He’s pushin’ the yellow stuff at us, Heinie,” he said; and to me: “You get yours all right. I don’t know what it is, but you get it, same as me an’ Heinie an’ Duck. I don’t know what it is,” he repeated impatiently; “maybe it’s dough; maybe it’s them suffragettes with their silk feet an’ white gloves what clap their hands at you. I ain’t saying nothin’ to you, am I? Then lemme alone an’ go an’ talk business with Duck over there — —”
Officers passed rapidly between the speaker and me and continued east and west along the ranks of riflemen, repeating in calm, steady voices:
“Fix bayonets, mes enfants; make as little noise as possible. Everybody ready in ten minutes. Ladders will be distributed. Take them with you. The bomb-throwers will leave the trench first. Put on goggles and respirators. Fix bayonets and set one foot on the pegs and ladders ... all ready in seven minutes. Three mines will be exploded. Take and hold the craters.... Five minutes!... When the mines explode that is your signal. Bombers lead. Give them a leg up and follow.... Three minutes....”
From a communication trench a long file of masked bomb-throwers appeared, loaded sacks slung under their left arms, bombs clutched in their right hands; and took stations at every ladder and row of freshly driven pegs.
“One minute!” repeated the officers, selecting their own ladders and drawing their long knives and automatics.
As I finished adjusting my respirator and goggles a muffled voice at my elbow began: “Be a sport, Doc! Gimme a chanst! Make it fifty-fifty — —”
“Allez!” shouted an officer through his respirator.
Against the sky all along the parapet’s edge hundreds of bayonets wavered for a second; then dark figures leaped up, scrambled, crawled forward, rose, ran out into the sunless, pallid light.
Like surf bursting along a coast a curtain of exploding shells stretched straight across the débris of what had been a meadow — a long line of livid obscurity split with flame and storms of driving sand and gravel. Shrapnel
leisurely unfolded its cottony coils overhead and the iron helmets rang under the hail.
Men fell forward, backward, sideways, remaining motionless, or rolling about, or rising to limp on again. There was smoke, now, and mire, and the unbroken rattle of machine guns.
Ahead, men were fishing in their sacks and throwing bombs like a pack of boys stoning a snake; I caught glimpses of them furiously at work from where I knelt beside one fallen man after another, desperately busy with my own business.
Bearers ran out where I was at work, not my own company but some French ambulance sections who served me as well as their own surgeons where, in a shell crater partly full of water, we found some shelter for the wounded.
Over us black smoke from the Jack Johnsons rolled as it rolls out of the stacks of soft-coal burning locomotives; the outrageous din never slackened, but our deafened ears had become insensible under the repeated blows of sound, yet not paralyzed. For I remember, squatting there in that shell crater, hearing a cricket tranquilly tuning up between the thunderclaps which shook earth and sods down on us and wrinkled the pool of water at our feet.
The Legion had taken the trench; but the place was a rabbit warren where hundreds of holes and burrows and ditches and communicating runways made a bewildering maze.
And everywhere in the dull, flame-shot obscurity, the Legionaries ran about like ghouls in their hoods and round, hollow eye-holes; masked faces, indistinct in the smoke, loomed grotesque and horrible as Ku-Klux where the bayonets were at work digging out the enemy from blind burrows, turning them up from their bloody forms.
Rifles blazed down into bomb-proofs, cracked steadily over the heads of comrades who piled up sandbags to block communication trenches; grenade-bombs rained down through the smoke into trenches, blowing bloody gaps in huddling masses of struggling Teutons until they flattened back against the parados and lifted arms and gun-butts stammering out, “Comrades! Comrades!” — in the ghastly irony of surrender.
A man whose entire helmet, gas-mask, and face had been blown off, and who was still alive and trying to speak, stiffened, relaxed, and died in my arms. As I rolled him aside and turned to the next man whom the bearers were lowering into the crater, his respirator and goggles fell apart, and I found myself looking into the ashy face of Duck Werner.
As we laid him out and stripped away iron helmet and tunic, he said in a natural and distinct voice.
“Through the belly, Doc. Gimme a drink.”
There was no more water or stimulant at the moment and the puddle in the crater was bloody. He said, patiently, “All right; I can wait.... It’s in the belly.... It ain’t nothin’, is it?”
I said something reassuring, something about the percentage of recovery I believe, for I was exceedingly busy with Duck’s anatomy.
“Pull me through, Doc?” he inquired calmly.
“Sure....”
“Aw, listen, Doc. Don’t hand me no cones of hokey-pokey. Gimme a deck of the stuff. Dope out the coke. Do I get mine this trip?”
I looked at him, hesitating.
“Listen, Doc, am I hurted bad? Gimme a hones’ deal. Do I croak?”
“Don’t talk, Duck — —”
“Dope it straight. Do I?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you’d say that,” he returned serenely. “Now I’m goin’ to fool you, same as I fooled them guys at Bellevue the night that Mike the Kike shot me up in the subway.”
A pallid sneer stretched his thin and burning lips; in his ratty eyes triumph gleamed.
“I’ve went through worse than this. I ain’t hurted bad. I ain’t got mine just yet, old scout! Would I leave meself croak — an’ that bum, Mike the Kike, handin’ me fren’s the ha-ha! Gawd,” he muttered hazily, as though his mind was beginning to cloud, “just f’r that I’ll get up an’ — an’ go — home—” His voice flattened out and he lay silent.
Working over the next man beyond him and glancing around now and then to discover a brancardier who might take Duck to the rear, I presently caught his eyes fixed on me.
“Say, Doc, will you talk — business?” he asked in a dull voice.
“Be quiet, Duck, the bearers will be here in a minute or two — —”
“T’hell wit them guys! I’m askin’ you will you make it fifty-fifty— ‘r’ somethin’—” Again his voice trailed away, but his bright ratty eyes were indomitable.
I was bloodily occupied with another patient when something struck me on the shoulder — a human hand, clutching it. Duck was sitting upright, eyes a-glitter, the other hand pressed heavily over his abdomen.
“Fifty-fifty!” he cried in a shrill voice. “F’r Christ’s sake, Doc, talk business—” And life went out inside him — like the flame of a suddenly snuffed candle — while he still sat there....
I heard the air escaping from his lungs before he toppled over.... I swear to you it sounded like a whispered word— “business.”
“Then came their gas — a great, thick, yellow billow of it pouring into our shell hole.... I couldn’t get my mask on fast enough ... and here I am, Gray, wondering, but really knowing.... Are you stopping at the Club tonight?”
“Yes.”
Vail got to his feet unsteadily: “I’m feeling rather done in.... Won’t sit up any longer, I guess.... See you in the morning?”
“Yes,” said Gray.
“Good-night, then. Look in on me if you leave before I’m up.”
And that is how Gray saw him before he sailed — stopped at his door, knocked, and, receiving no response, opened and looked in. After a few moments’ silence he understood that the “Seed of Death” had sprouted.
CHAPTER XIII
MULETEERS
Lying far to the southwest of the battle line, only when a strong northwest wind blew could Sainte Lesse hear the thudding of cannon beyond the horizon. And once, when the northeast wind had blown steadily for a week, on the wings of the driving drizzle had come a faint but dreadful odour which hung among the streets and lanes until the wind changed.
Except for the carillon, nothing louder than the call of a cuckoo, the lowing of cattle or a goatherd’s piping ever broke the summer silence in the little town. Birds sang; a shallow river rippled; breezes ruffled green grain into long, silvery waves across the valley; sunshine fell on quiet streets, on scented gardens unsoiled by war, on groves and meadows, and on the stone-edged brink of brimming pools where washerwomen knelt among the wild flowers, splashing amid floating pyramids of snowy suds.
And into the exquisite peace of this little paradise rode John Burley with a thousand American mules.
The town had been warned of this impending visitation; had watched preparations for it during April and May when a corral was erected down in a meadow and some huts and stables were put up among the groves of poplar and sycamore, and a small barracks was built to accommodate the negro guardians of the mules and a peloton of gendarmes under a fat brigadier.
Sainte Lesse as yet knew nothing personally of the American mule or of Burley. Sainte Lesse heard both before it beheld either — Burley’s loud, careless, swaggering voice above the hee-haw of his trampling herds:
“All I ask for is human food, Smith — not luxuries — just food! — and that of the commonest kind.”
And now an immense volume of noise and dust enveloped the main street of Sainte Lesse, stilling the quiet noon gossip of the town, silencing the birds, awing the town dogs so that their impending barking died to amazed gurgles drowned in the din of the mules.
Astride a cream-coloured, wall-eyed mule, erect in his saddle, talkative, gesticulating, good-humoured, famished but gay, rode Burley at the head of the column, his reckless grey eyes glancing amiably right and left at the good people of Sainte Lesse who clustered silently at their doorways under the trees to observe the passing of this noisy, unfamiliar procession.
Mules, dust; mules, dust, and then more mules, all enveloped in dust, clattering, ambling, trotting, bucking, shying, kicking, halting, backing; and
here and there an American negro cracking a long snake whip with strange, aboriginal ejaculations; and three white men in khaki riding beside the trampling column, smoking cigarettes.
“Sticky” Smith and “Kid” Glenn rode mules on the column’s flank; Burley continued to lead on his wall-eyed animal, preceded now by the fat brigadier of the gendarmerie, upon whom he had bestowed a cigarette.
Burley, talking all the while from his saddle to whoever cared to listen, or to himself if nobody cared to listen, rode on in the van under the ancient bell-tower of Sainte Lesse, where a slim, dark-eyed girl looked up at him as he passed, a faint smile hovering on her lips.
“Bong jour, Mademoiselle,” continued Burley, saluting her en passant with two fingers at the vizor of his khaki cap, as he had seen British officers salute. “I compliment you on your silent but eloquent welcome to me, my comrades, my coons, and my mules. Your charming though slightly melancholy smile bids us indeed welcome to your fair city. I thank you; I thank all the inhabitants for this unprecedented ovation. Doubtless a municipal banquet awaits us — —”
Sticky Smith spurred up.
“Did you see the inn?” he asked. “There it is, to the right.”
“It looks good to me,” said Burley. “Everything looks good to me except these accursed mules. Thank God, that seems to be the corral — down in the meadow there, Brigadeer!”
The fat brigadier drew bridle; Burley burst into French:
“Esker — esker — —”
“Oui,” nodded the brigadier, “that is where we are going.”
“Bong!” exclaimed Burley with satisfaction; and, turning to Sticky Smith: “Stick, tell the coons to hustle. We’re there!”
Then, above the trampling, whip-cracking, and shouting of the negroes, from somewhere high in the blue sky overhead, out of limpid, cloudless heights floated a single bell-note, then another, another, others exquisitely sweet and clear, melting into a fragment of heavenly melody.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 847