ll of latent energies, full of thoughts and
desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his arm
round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for long walks,
with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night drinking and
talking--and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform half-buried in the
mud of ditches.
"Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fine
May morning?" asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if he had
guessed Martin's thoughts.
"I wonder what they think of it."
"It's not that I'm resigned. . . . Don't think that. Resignation is too
easy. That's why the herd can be driven by a boy of six . . . or a prime
minister!"
Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand were
squeezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel the
smooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would that
feel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? A
momentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomach
contract with nausea.
"I'm not resigned either," he shouted in a laugh. "I am going to do
something some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in all the
circles of hell."
"I'd play the part of Virgil pretty well," said the aspirant, "but I
suppose Virgil was a staff officer."
"I must go," said Martin. "My name's Martin Howe, S.S.U. 84."
"Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You'll
probably carry me back in your little omnibus."
When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the
village square, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:
"D.J.'s to-morrow."
"What's that?"
"The attack. It's to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions are
going to be given out to-night."
A detonation behind them was a blow on the head, making their ear-drums
ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled to the ground.
"The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out
of you."
"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"
A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had
been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from him.
"It's put off," he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D.J.'s not
till day after to-morrow at four twenty. But to-morrow we're going up to
relieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They say it's
hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell at all. The
other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them have broken
down. The posts are shelled all the time."
"Great," said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time."
There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a
heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed amid
the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress tree at
the other end of the village street.
"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin.
"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some."
It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed the
cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen
crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky where
the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam. The rain
made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from the cracked
feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure hung out from the
tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of the rain. Martin was
wiping the mud from his hands after changing a wheel. He stared curiously at
the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes that had meant for some country
sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of pain. Suddenly he noticed that where
the crown of thorns had been about the forehead of the Christ someone had
wound barbed wire. He smiled and asked the swaying figure in his mind:
"And You, what do You think of it?"
For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.
He leaned over to crank the car.
The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops
marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery sunset.
Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat and misery of
troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained and colourless
and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their necks and their
backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the helmets, tilted to one
side or the other, distorted and wooden like the face of the figure that
dangled from the cross.
Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came
occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads at
the edge of the woods.
Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the
column.
One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of
the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up at
the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the sharp
twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.
The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross
with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross fell
forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.
The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the
bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire with
a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then up the
hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green and gold in
the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs covered with
branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors decorated with
rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters made of wattled
sticks, Camp des Pommiers.
A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men
stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and splashing
in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the pong, pong, pong
of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the rustling trees.
"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia," said Tom Randolph,
blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a pole
between them get out of the way.
The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and,
turning into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at
the turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken
and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped off
halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and of
turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.
Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with their
great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the direction
of the lines.
At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a
grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of their
section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to occasional shells
whining far overhead. All through the wood was a continuous ping, pong, ping
of batteries, with the crash of a big gun coming now and then like the growl
of a bullfrog among the sing-song of small toads in a pond at night.
Through the trees from which they lay they could see the close-packed
wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth, and
where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts
piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded and
dragged away again.
Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the
woodland road, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and
cauldrons steaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two
men in heavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's
seat. On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up,
slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise.
Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. A
louder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a new
whirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges along the
rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hind wheels
spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as another roar comes
behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on, speeding through
the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martin remembers the beating legs
of a mule rolling on its back on the side of the road and, steaming in the
fresh morning air, the purple and yellow and red of its ripped belly.
"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it," says Randolph,
drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again.
The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow
leaping flames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of
a shell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragments
swishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in the direction
of the trenches, a white star-shell falls slowly, making the trees and the
guns among their tangle of hiding branches cast long green-black shadows,
drowning the wood in a strange glare of desolation.
"Where the devil's the abri?"
Everything drowned in the detonations of three guns, one after the
other, so near as to puff hot air in their faces in the midst of the
blinding concussion.
"Look, Tom, this is foolish; the abri's right here."
"I haven't got it in my pocket, Howe. Damn those guns."
Again everything is crushed in the concussion of the guns.
They throw themselves on the ground as a shell shrieks and explodes.
There is a moment's pause, and gravel and bits of bark tumble about their
heads.
"We've got to find that abri. I wish I hadn't lost my flashlight."
"Here it is! No, that stinks too much. Must be the latrine."
"Say, Tom."
"Here."
"Damn, I ran into a tree. I found it."
"All right. Coming."
Martin held out his hand until Randolph bumped into it; then they
stumbled together down the rough wooden steps, pulled aside the blanket that
served to keep the light in, and found themselves blinking in the low tunnel
of the abri.
Brancardiers were asleep in the two tiers of bunks that filled up the
sides, and at the table at the end a lieutenant of the medical corps was
writing by the light of a smoky lamp.
"They are landing some round here to-night," he said, pointing out two
unoccupied bunks. "I'll call you when we need a car."
As he spoke, in succession the three big guns went off. The concussion
put the lamp out.
"Damn," said Tom Randolph.
The lieutenant swore and struck a match.
"The red light of the poste de secours is out, too," said Martin.
"No use lighting it again with those unholy mortars. It's idiotic to
put a poste de secours in the middle of a battery like this."
The Americans lay down to try to sleep. Shell after shell exploded
round the dugout, but regularly every few minutes came the hammer blows of
the mortars, half the time putting the light out.
A shell explosion seemed to split the dugout and a piece of clat
whizzed through the blanket that curtained off the door. Someone tried to
pick it up as it lay half-buried in the board floor, and pulled his fingers
away quickly, blowing on them. The men turned over in the bunks and laughed,
and a smile came over the drawn green face of a wounded man who sat very
quiet behind the lieutenant, staring at the smoky flame of the lamp.
The curtain was pulled aside and a man staggered in holding with the
other hand a limp arm twisted in a mud-covered sleeve, from which blood and
mud dripped on to the floor.
"Hello, old chap," said the doctor quietly. A smell of disinfectant
stole through the dugout.
Faint above the incessant throbbing of explosions the sound of a claxon
horn.
"Ha, gas," said the doctor. "Put on your masks, children." A man went
along the dugout waking those who were asleep and giving out fresh masks.
Someone stood in the doorway blowing a shrill whistle, then there was again
the clamour of a claxon near at hand.
The band of the gas-mask was tight about Martin's forehead, biting into
the skin.
He and Randolph sat side by side on the edge of the bunk, looking out
through the crinkled isinglass eye-pieces at the men in the dugout, most of
whom had gone to sleep again.
"God, I envy a man who can snore through a gas-mask," said Randolph.
Men's heads had a ghoulish look, strange large eyes and grey oilcloth
flaps instead of faces.
Outside the constant explosions had given place to a series of swishing
whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less
regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell,
and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the
dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, everyone was quiet.
Several stretchers with wounded men on them were brought in and laid in
the end of the dugout.
Gradually, as the bombardment continued, men began sliding into the
dugout, crowding together, touching each other for company, speaking in low
voices through their masks.
"A mask, in the name of God, a mask!" a voice shouted, breaking into a
squeal, and an unshaven man, with mud caked in his hair and beard, burst
through the curtain. His eyelids kept up a continual trembling and the water
streamed down both sides of his nose.
"O God," he kept talking in a rasping whisper, "O God, they're all
killed. There were six mules on my waggon and a shell killed them all and
threw me into the ditch. You can't find the road any more. They're all
killed."
An orderly was wiping his face as if it were a child's.
"They're all killed and I lost my mask. . . . O God, this gas . . ."
The doctor, a short man, looking like a gnome in his mask with its
wheezing rubber nosepiece, was walking up and down with short, slow steps.
Suddenly, as three soldiers came in drawing the curtain aside, he
shouted in a shrill, high-pitched voice:
"Keep the curtain closed! Do you want to asphyxiate us?"
He strode up to the newcomers, his voice strident like an angry
woman's. "What are you doing here? This is the poste de secours. Are you
wounded?"
"But, my lieutenant, we can't stay outside . . ." "Where's your own
cantonment? You can't stay here; you can't stay here," he shrieked.
"But, my lieutenant, our dugout's been hit."
"You can't stay here. You can't stay here. There's not enough room for
the wounded. Name of God!"
"But, my lieutenant."
"Get the hell out of here, d'you hear?"
The men began stumbling out into the darkness, tightening the
adjustments of their masks behind their heads.
The guns had stopped firing. There was nothing but the constant
swishing and whistling of gas-shells, like endless pails of dirty water
being thrown on gravel.
"We've been at it three hours," whispered Martin to Tom Randolph.
"God, suppose these masks need changing." The sweat from Martin's face
steamed in the eyepieces, blinding him.
"Any more masks?" he asked.
A brancardier handed him one. "There aren't any more in the abri."
"I have some more in the ear," said Martin.
"I'll get one," cried Randolph, getting to his feet. They started out
of the door together. In the light that streamed out as they drew the flap
aside they saw a tree opposite them. A shell exploded, it seemed, right on
top of them; the tree rose and bowed towards them and fell.
"Are you all there, Tom?" whispered Martin, his ears ringing.
"Bet your life."
Someone pulled them back into the abri. "Here; we've found another."
Martin lay down on the bunk again, drawing with difficulty each breath.
His lips had a wet, decomposed feeling.
At the wrist of the arm he rested his head on, the watch ticked
comfortably.
He began to think how ridiculous it would be if he, Martin Howe, should
be extinguished like this. The gas-mask might be defective.
God, it would be silly.
Outside the gas-shells were still coming in. The lamp showed through a
faint bluish haze. Everyone was still waiting.
Another hour.
Martin began to recite to himself the only thing he could remember,
over and over again in time to the ticking of his watch.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time.
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest . . ."
"One, two, three, four," he counted the shells outside exploding at
irregular intervals.
There were periods of absolute silence, when he could hear batteries
pong, pong, pong in the distance.
He began again.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun
In search of that far golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.
"Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go."
Whang, whang, whang; the battery alongside began again, sending out the
light. Someone pulled the blanket aside. A little leprous greyness filtered
into the dugout.
"Ah, it's getting light."
The doctor went out and they could hear his steps climbing up to the
level of the ground.
Howe saw a man take his mask off and spit.
"O God, a cigarette!" Tom Randolph cried, pulling his mask off. The air
of the woods was fresh and cool outside. Everything was lost in mist that
filled the shell--holes as with water and wreathed itself fantastically
about the shattered trunks of trees. Here and there was still a little
greenish haze of gas. It cut their throats and made their eyes run as they
breathed in the cool air of the dawn.
Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the
yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of
wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted
roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the
yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses of telephone wires.
Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against the ardent yellow sky, and
twining among the fantastic black leafless trees, the greenish wraiths of
gas. Along the roads camions overturned, dead mules tangled in their traces
beside shattered caissons, huddled bodies in long blue coats half buried in
the mud of the ditches.
"We've got to pass. . . . We've got five very bad cases."
"Impossible."
"We've got to pass. . . . Sacred name of God!"
"But it is impossible. Two camions are blocked across the road and
there are three batteries of seventy-fives waiting to get up the road."
Long lines of men on horseback with gas-masks on, a rearing of
frightened horses and jingle of harness.
"Talk to 'em, Howe, for God's sake; we've got to get past."
"I'm doing the best I can, Tom."
"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"
"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in this
hollow."
"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way."
"But they can't."
"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel."
"No, sit still and don't get excited."
"You're the one's getting excited."
"Damn this gas."
"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I
have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to get
by."
"God damn him, tell him to hurry."
"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake."
"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask."
"Hah, that did for the two back horses."
"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his
thigh ripped up."
"No room, no room."
"He'll have to go to a poste de secours."
The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener
on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the strands
of barbed wire and the rows of shells.
At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are
feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling of
blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.
Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars
spit yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations.
Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher,
while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except when
the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of the
man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit of
blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the stretcher
with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of the car, his
knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the stretcher, with his
chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm stretched down to keep the limp
bandaged leg still.
The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling
with an articulate groan.
"Softly. . . . Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"
"Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm in a
desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of blood and
filth is misery in his nostrils.
"Softly. . . . Softly. . .. Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid
the bubbling breath.
Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of
the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest,
trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from bouncing
in the broken stretcher.
"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly,
as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern.
"He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."
Chapter VII
SO you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"
Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of grease
on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his knees.
"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."
They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred
everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road beneath
them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor trucks. The wind came
to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of motors.
"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one
morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we
talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was
silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"
"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."
He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.
"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.
Somebody ought to write a book called Heroisms of the Great War. . . ."
"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do it
yourself, Will. But go on."
The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hills
and the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flying low
passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out all other
sound.
"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and
a big 'V.' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time because
lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He tried giving
dinners to the General Staff and everything, but that didn't seem to work.
So there was nothing to it but to get wounded. So he took to going to the
front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of a quiet sector and no
shells ever came within a mile of it. At last somebody made a mistake and a
little Austrian eighty-eight came tumbling in and popped about fifty yards
from his staff car. He showed the most marvellous presence of mind, cause he
clapped his hand over his eye and sank back in the seat with a groan. The
doctor asked what was the matter, but old Duval just kept his hand tight
over his eye and said, 'Nothing, nothing; just a scratch,' and went off to
inspect the posts. Of course the posts didn't need inspecting. And he rode
round all day with a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the
other. But never would he let the doctor even peep at it. Next morning he
came out with a bandage round his head as big as a sheik's turban. He went
to see headquarters in that get-up and lunched with the staff-officers.
Well, he got his Croix de Guerre all right--cited for assuring the
evacuation of the wounded under fire and all the rest of it."
"Some bird. He'll probably get to be a general before the war's over."
Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottle
listlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case and
broke.
"But, Will, you can't like this," he said. "It's all so like an
ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment."
"I suppose it is . . ." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the
grease on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand.
"Damn those dirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is
that life was so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year
in an office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump."
"Look," said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring
straight up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting."
They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits
of mica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white and
others black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel from anti-aircraft
guns.
The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow
larger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished. The
falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, then stopped
suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the hills, leaving an
irregular trail of smoke.
"More garbage," said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet.
"Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!"
"They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie's
bringing in."
There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among
the trees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back.
Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree,
looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there was another
sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud that suddenly spread
and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took off his helmet and
examined it quizzically.
"Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet."
Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that had
rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet.
"God damn, it's hot," he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding's
keepings." He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter.
"That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom."
"You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?"
"Damn hog."
Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he heard
a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with the
crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brown face
with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches.
"A dirty business," he said. "It's idiotic. . . . Name of a dog!"
Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as a
shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road.
"Now look at that." The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've broken
the bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic."
"Been on permission?"
"Don't I look it?"
They sat at the top of the steps again; the man took out bits of wet
glass dripping red wine from his little bag, swearing all the while.
"I was bringing it to the little captain. He's a nice little old chap,
the little captain, and he loves good wine."
"Bordeaux?"
"Can't you smell it? It's Medoc, 1900, from my own vines. . . . Look,
taste it, there's still a little." He held up the neck of the bottle and
Martin took a sip.
The artilleryman drank the rest of it, twisted his long moustaches and
heaved a deep sigh.
"Go there, my poor good old wine." He threw the remnants of the bottle
into the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the road. "Oh, this is a
dirty business! I am a Gascon. . . . I like to live." He put a dirty brown
hand on Martin's arm.
"How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five."
"I am twenty-four. Look at the picture." From a tattered black
note-book held together by an elastic band he pulled a snapshot of a
jolly-looking young man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top
of a wide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tugging
at one of his long moustaches. "Then I was twenty. It's the war." He
shrugged his shoulders and put the picture carefully back into his inside
pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"
"You must have had a tough time."
"It's just that people aren't meant for this sort ofthing," said the
artilleryman quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see the worse
it is. Then you end by going crazy. Oh, it's idiotic!"
"How did you find things at home?"
"Oh, at home! Oh, what do I care about that now? They get on without
you. . . . But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hard on
the vines and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a horse and carriage. I had
the best-looking rig in the department. Sunday it was fun; we'd play bowls
and I'd ride about with my wife. Oh, she was nice in those days! She was
young and fat and laughed all the time. She was something a man could put
his arms around, she was. We'd go out in my rig. It was click-clack of the
whip in the air and off we were in the broad road. . . . Sacred name of a
pig, that one was close. . . . And the Marquis of Montmarieul had a rig,
too, but not so good as mine, and my horse would always pass his in the
road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour to have common people like us
pass him in the road. . . . Boom, there's another. . . . And the Marquis now
is nicely embusqué in the automobile service. He is stationed at Versailles.
. . . And look at me. . . . But what do I care about all that now?"
"But after the war . . ."
"After the war?" He spat savagely on the first step of the dugout.
"They learn to get on without you."
"But we'll be free to do as we please."
"We'll never forget."
"I shall go to Spain . . ." A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin's
ear, cutting off the sentence.
"Name of God! It's getting hot. . . . Spain: I know Spain." The
artilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping his
fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst down
the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of fragments.
"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la
la la-la-la-la, la-la la," he sang, snapping his fingers.
He stopped and spat again.
"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go. . . .
Say, let's change knives--a little souvenir."
"Great."
"Good luck."
The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.
Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees
stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled like
leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and there
guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green cheese-cloth,
and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The ambulance waits
by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans and brass shell-cases,
while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend over a man on a stretcher laid
among the underbrush. The man groans and there is a sound of ripping
bandages. On the other side of the road a fallen mule feebly wags its head
from side to side, a mass of purple froth hanging from its mouth and
wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.
There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the
smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe glances
round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of strange grey men
whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of men from the moon in
a fairy tale.
"Why, they're Germans," he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."
"Ah, they're prisoners." The doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.
The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road,
and piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.
"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and
eyes that burn out of black sockets.
"How should I know?"
"Many prisoners?"
"How should I know?"
The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting
on a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board
propped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri was
excavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station and
of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movable kitchen
not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapple speared with a
knife out of a can. In their manner there is something that makes Martin see
vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a table under the awning of a
café on the boulevards. It has a leisurely ceremoniousness, an ease that
could exist nowhere else.
"No, my friend," the doctor is saying, "I do not think that an
apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palaeolithic man."
"But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific people sometimes
lose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on their
scientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?"
"Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them."
"There are other ways," says the aumonier, smiling.
"One moment. . . ." From under the packing-box the captain produced a
small bottle of anisette. "You'll have a little glass, won't you?"
"With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette."
"But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example." . . .
A shell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind the
dugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few bits
of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "For example,
our life here, which is, as was the life of palaeolithic man, taken up only
with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. You know
yourself that it is not conducive to religion or any emotion except that of
preservation."
"I hardly admit that. . . . Ah, I saved it," the aumonier announces,
catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. An
exploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower of
earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.
"I must go and see if anyone was hurt," says the aumonier, clambering
up the clay bank to the level of the ground; "but you will admit, my
captain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to the
fundamental feelings of religion."
"My dear friend, I admit nothing. . . . Till this evening, good-bye."
He waves his hand and goes into the dugout.
Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of a
deserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a dripping camion
passed along the road, slithering through the mud.
"This is the last summer of the war. . . . It must be," said the little
man with large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat on
Martin's left.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Everyone feels like that."
"I don't see," said Martin, "why it shouldn't last for ten or twenty
years. Wars have before. . ."
"How long have you been at the front?"
"Six months, off and on."
"After another six months you'll know why it can't go on."
"I don't know; it suits me all right," said the man on the other side
of Martin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. "Of course, I don't
like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to it."
"But you are an Alsatian; you don't care."
"I was a baker. They're going to send me to Dijon soon to bake army
bread. It'll be a change. There'll be wine and lots of little girls. Good
God, how drunk I'll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with the women. . .
"
"I should just like to get home and not be ordered about," said the
first man. "I've been lucky, though," he went on; "I've been kept most of
the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once."
"When was that?" asked Martin.
"Near Mont Cornélien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I was
running and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Mon ami,
mon ami,' in French. I ran on because I couldn't stop, and I heard my
bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over something and
fell down."
"You were scared," said the Alsatian.
"Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a
thunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouth open
and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know you have
to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet out."
"And if you're good at it," cried the Alsatian, "you ought to yank it
out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they gave me
the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at drill."
"Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him," went on the other Frenchman.
"When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I have
it." He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he took a
photograph and a bunch of pictures. "Look, this photograph was there, too.
It hurt my heart. You see, it s a woman and two little girls. They look so
nice. . . . It's strange, but I have two children, too, only one's a boy. I
lay down on the ground beside him--I was all in--and listened to the
machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wished I'd let
him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn't it?"
"It's idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them,
the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I've had since the war began, except
my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. I wonder where
he got it, the old corpse-stripper."
"Oh