by Willa Cather
When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest in classical studies, but now it was as if he were giving birth to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam. It also drove other ideas into his exclusively engineering brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his countrymen. He travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he had a chance to enlist.
In the Battalion, Owens was called “Julius Caesar,” and the men never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general’s operations in Spain, or Joffre’s at the Marne, he jumped so from one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him; centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French characteristics, coaching and preparing them. It was his legs that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on two short stumps.
“Now you fellows don’t want to forget that the night-life of Paris is not a typical thing at all; that’s a show got up for foreigners. . . . The French peasant, he’s a thrifty fellow. . . . This red wine’s all right if you don’t abuse it; take it two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery. . . . You don’t have to be rough with them, simply firm. Whenever one of them accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her twenty-five francs; then I look her in the eye and say, ‘My girl, I’ve got three children, three boys.’ She gets the point at once; never fails. She goes away ashamed of herself.”
“But that’s so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,” said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such concentration, when snatches of the Captain’s lecture kept breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was something out of the ordinary about him.
The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had particular associations with the air,—melancholy, but beautiful, Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the light, read the inscription:
“Meditation from Thais—Violin solo—David Gerhardt.”
When they were going back along the communication trench in the rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly. “That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin solo, wasn’t it?”
“Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost here.”
“Are there many of your records?”
“Quite a number. Why do you ask?”
“I’d like to write my mother. She’s fond of good music. She’ll get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing closer to her, don’t you see?”
“All right, Claude,” said David good-naturedly. “She will find them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets a little income from them. Here we are, at home.” As he struck a match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared behind the blankets. “Plenty of them around, these wet nights. Get one? Don’t squash him in there. Here’s the sack.”
Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously trampled whatever fell to the bottom. “Where do you suppose the other is?” “He’ll join us later. I don’t mind the rats half so much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his clothes off! Turn in; I’ll go the rounds.” Gerhardt splashed out along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked like on a concert platform, playing his violin.
IX
The following night, Claude was sent back to Division Head-quarters at Q— with information the Colonel did not care to commit to paper. He set off at ten o’clock, with Sergeant Hicks for escort. There had been two days of rain, and the communication trenches were almost knee-deep in water. About half a mile back of the front line, the two men crawled out of the ditch and went on above ground. There was very little shelling along the front that night. When a flare went up, they dropped and lay on their faces, trying, at the same time, to get a squint at what was ahead of them.
The ground was rough, and the darkness thick; it was past midnight when they reached the east-and-west road—usually full of traffic, and not entirely deserted even on a night like this. Trains of horses were splashing through the mud, with shells on their backs, empty supply wagons were coming back from the front. Claude and Hicks paused by the ditch, hoping to get a ride. The rain began to fall with such violence that they looked about for shelter. Stumbling this way and that, they ran into a big artillery piece, the wheels sunk over the hubs in a mud-hole.
“Who’s there?” called a quick voice, unmistakably British.
“American infantrymen, two of us. Can we get onto one of your trucks till this lets up?”
“Oh, certainly! We can make room for you in here, if you’re not too big. Speak quietly, or you’ll waken the Major.” Giggles and smothered laughter; a flashlight winked for a moment and showed a line of five trucks, the front and rear ones covered with tarpaulin tents. The voices came from the shelter next the gun. The men inside drew up their legs and made room for the strangers; said they were sorry they hadn’t anything dry to offer them except a little rum. The intruders accepted this gratefully.
The Britishers were a giggly lot, and Claude thought, from their voices, they must all be very young. They joked about their Major as if he were their schoolmaster. There wasn’t room enough on the truck for anybody to lie down, so they sat with their knees under their chins and exchanged gossip. The gun team belonged to an independent battery that was sent about over the country, “wherever needed.” The rest of the battery had got through, gone on to the east, but this big gun was always getting into trouble; now something had gone wrong with her tractor and they couldn’t pull her out. They called her “Jenny,” and said she was taken with fainting fits now and then, and had to be humoured. It was like going about with your grandmother, one of the invisible Tommies said, “she is such a pompous old thing!” The Major was asleep on the rear truck; he was going to get the V.C. for sleeping. More giggles.
No, they hadn’t any idea where they were going; of course, the officers knew, but artillery officers never told anything. What was this country like, anyhow? They were new to this part, had just come down from Verdure.
Claude said he had a friend in the air service up there; did they happen to know anything about Victor Morse?
Morse, the American ace? Hadn’t he heard? Why, that got into the London papers. Morse was shot down inside the Hun line three weeks ago. It was a brilliant affair. He was chased by eight Boche planes, brought down three of them, put the rest to flight, and was making for base, when they turned and got him. His machine came down in flames and he jumped, fell a thousand feet or more.
“Then I suppose he never got his leave?” Claude asked.
They didn’t know. He got a fine citation.
The men settled down to wait for the weather to improve or the night to pass. Some of them fell into a doze, but Claude felt wide awake. He was wondering about the flat in Chelsea; whether the heavy-eyed beauty had been very sorry, or whether she was playing “Roses of Picardy” for other young officers. He thought mournfully that he would never go
to London now. He had quite counted on meeting Victor there some day, after the Kaiser had been properly disposed of. He had really liked Victor. There was something about that fellow . . . a sort of debauched baby, he was, who went seeking his enemy in the clouds. What other age could have produced such a figure? That was one of the things about this war; it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger, a life like a movie-film,—and then a death like the rebel angels.
A man like Gerhardt, for instance, had always lived in a more or less rose-colored world; he belonged over here, really. How could he know what hard moulds and crusts the big guns had broken open on the other side of the sea? Who could ever make him understand how far it was from the strawberry bed and the glass cage in the bank, to the sky-roads over Verdure?
By three o’clock the rain had stopped. Claude and Hicks set off again, accompanied by one of the gun team who was going back to get help for their tractor. As it began to grow light, the two Americans wondered more and more at the extremely youthful appearance of their companion. When they stopped at a shell-hole and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples, yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes.
“You haven’t been over very long, have you?” Claude asked in a fatherly tone, as they took the road again.
“I came out in ‘sixteen. I was formerly in the infantry.”
The Americans liked to hear him talk; he spoke very quickly, in a high, piping voice.
“How did you come to change?”
“Oh, I belonged to one of the Pal Battalions, and we got cut to pieces. When I came out of hospital, I thought I’d try another branch of the service, seeing my pals were gone.”
“Now, just what is a Pal Battalion?” drawled Hicks. He hated all English words he didn’t understand, though he didn’t mind French ones in the least.
“Fellows who signed up together from school,” the lad piped.
Hicks glanced at Claude. They both thought this boy ought to be in school for some time yet, and wondered what he looked like when he first came over.
“And you got cut up, you say?” he asked sympathetically.
“Yes, on the Somme. We had rotten luck. We were sent over to take a trench and couldn’t. We didn’t even get to the wire. The Hun was so well prepared that time, we couldn’t manage it. We went over a thousand, and we came back seventeen.”
“A hundred and seventeen?”
“No, seventeen.”
Hicks whistled and again exchanged looks with Claude. They could neither of them doubt him. There was something very unpleasant about the idea of a thousand fresh-faced schoolboys being sent out against the guns. “It must have been a fool order,” he commented. “Suppose there was some mistake at Headquarters?”
“Oh, no, Headquarters knew what it was about! We’d have taken it, if we’d had any sort of luck. But the Hun happened to be full of fight. His machine guns did for us.”
“You were hit yourself?” Claude asked him.
“In the leg. He was popping away at me all the while, but I wriggled back on my tummy. When I came out of the hospital my leg wasn’t strong, and there’s less marching in the artillery.
“I should think you’d have had about enough.”
“Oh, a fellow can’t stay out after all his chums have been killed! He’d think about it all the time, you know,” the boy replied in his clear treble.
Claude and Hicks got into Headquarters just as the cooks were turning out to build their fires. One of the Corporals took them to the officers’ bath,—a shed with big tin tubs, and carried away their uniforms to dry them in the kitchen. It would be an hour before the officers would be about, he said, and in the meantime he would manage to get clean shirts and socks for them.
“Say, Lieutenant,” Hicks brought out as he was rubbing himself down with a real bath towel, “I don’t want to hear any more about those Pal Battalions, do you? It gets my goat. So long as we were going to get into this, we might have been a little more previous. I hate to feel small.” “Guess we’ll have to take our medicine,” Claude said dryly, “There wasn’t anywhere to duck, was there? I felt like it. Nice little kid. I don’t believe American boys ever seem as young as that.”
“Why, if you met him anywhere else, you’d be afraid of using bad words before him, he’s so pretty! What’s the use of sending an orphan asylum out to be slaughtered? I can’t see it,” grumbled the fat sergeant. “Well, it’s their business. I’m not going to let it spoil my breakfast. Suppose we’ll draw ham and eggs, Lieutenant?”
X
After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with one of the staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until tomorrow to see Colonel James, who had been called to Paris for a general conference. He had left in his car at four that morning, in response to a telephone message.
“There’s not much to do here, by way of amusement,” said the Major. “A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want at the estaminet,—the one on the square, opposite the English tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden. They try to look out for the civilian population, and we’re on good terms with them. We get their supplies through with our own, and the quartermaster has orders to help them when they run short. You might go up and call on them. They speak English perfectly.”
Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of introduction.
“Oh, yes, they’re used to us! I’ll give you a card to Mlle. Olive, though. She’s a particular friend of mine. There you are: ‘Mlle. Olive de Courcy, introducing, etc.’ And, you understand,” here he glanced up and looked Claude over from head to foot, “she’s a perfect lady.”
Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about presenting himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn’t like Americans; he was always afraid of meeting French people who didn’t. It was the same way with most of the fellows in his battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they hastened to behave as badly as possible, in order to deserve it; then they didn’t feel that they had been taken in—the worst feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a little. It had been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914, after their retreat from the Marne, and they had held it until about a year ago, when it was retaken by the English and the Chasseurs d’Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not one building remained standing.
Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as he followed the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster. There was nothing picturesque about this, as there was in the war pictures one saw at home. A cyclone or a fire might have done just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy water. An American soldier had stepped into one of those holes a few nights before, and been drowned.
This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now the civilian population was about four hundred. There were people there who had hung on all through the years of German occupation; others who, as soon as they heard that the enemy was driven out, came back from wherever they had found shelter. They were living in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers and American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read familiar names and addresses, painted on boards built into the sides of these frail shelters: “From Emery Bird, Thayer Co. Kansas City, Mo.” “Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo.” These inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel lik
e going up and calling on the French ladies.
The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant pools and the weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank, heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the Germans did to it.
Claude paused before a little shanty built against a half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red Cross.
She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. “Vous savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!”
(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the site of the old town hall.)
A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie put her hand in Claude’s and led him off along one of the paths that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show him a church,—evidently one of the ruins of which they were proudest,—where the blue sky was shining through the white arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus had been shot away.