was the cogitation or the drinks or the effect of the racket of war, his
head began to ache dully. When McDermott's scar ached, it was his custom
to take another drink. After a while there came a stage at which, if it
still ached, he at least ceased to feel it aching any more.
“The hotel here,” he remarked, “is filled wid hospitality and midical
tratement, and where bet-ther c'u'd I be?”
And presently, once more, a deep sleep overtook him. A deeper, more
profound sleep, indeed, than his former one. And this time the war came
still nearer to McDermott.
The British were driven back again and again occupied the town, the
Germans in close pursuit. From house to house and from wall to wall
the struggle went on, with grenade, rifle and bayonet. A German, with
a Scotchman's steel in his chest, fell screaming, back through the open
window, and his blood as he died soaked McDermott's feet. But McDermott
slept. Full night came, thick and cloudy, and both sides sent up
floating flares. The square was strewn with the bodies of the dead and
the bodies of the maimed in increasing numbers; the wounded groaned and
whimpered in the shadows of the trampled Place, crawling, if they still
could crawl, to whatever bit of broken wall seemed to offer momentary
shelter and praying for the stretcher bearers to be speedy. But still
McDermott slept.
At ten o'clock that night two Englishmen once more brought a machine gun
into the Hôtel Fauçon; they worked the weapon for twenty minutes from
the window within ten feet of which McDermott now lay with his brandy
bottle beside him. Once McDermott stirred; he sat up sleepily on the
floor and murmured: “An' where is that war now? Begad, an' I don't
belave there is anny war!”
And he rolled over and went to sleep again. The men with the machine gun
did not notice him; they were too busy. A moment later one of them sank
with a bullet through his heart. His comrade lasted a little longer, and
then he, too, went down, a wound in his lungs. It took him some weary
minutes to choke and bleed to death, there in that dark place, upon the
floor, among the dead men and McDermott's brandy bottles and the heap
of ammunition he had brought with him. Hist struggle did not wake
McDermott.
By midnight the British had been driven back until they held the houses
at the west end of the town and the end of the spur railroad that came
eastward from Hazebrouck. The Germans were in the eastern part of the
village, and between was a “no man's land,” of which the Grande Place
was a part. What was left of the Hôtel Faucon, with the sleeping
McDermott in it, was toward the middle of the south side of the square.
In the streets to the north and south of the Place patrols still clashed
with grenade and bayonet and rifle, but the Germans attempted no further
advance in any force after midnight. No doubt they were bringing up more
men; no doubt, with the first morning light, they would move forward a
regiment or two, possibly even a division, against the British who
still clung stubbornly to the western side of the town. All the way from
Wytschaete south to Givenchy the battle-line was broken up into many
little bitter struggles of this sort, the British at every point facing
great odds.
When dawn came, there came with it a mist. And three men of a German
patrol, creeping from house to house and ruin to ruin along the south
side of that part of “no man's land” which was the Grande Place, entered
the open door of the Hôtel Fauçon.
One of them stepped upon McDermott's stomach, where he lay sleeping and
dreaming of the war he had come to look at.
McDermott, when he had been drinking, was often cross. And especially
was he cross if, when sleeping off his liquor, some one purposely or
inadvertently interfered with his rightful and legitimate rest. When
this coarse and heavy-footed intruder set his boot, albeit unwittingly,
upon McDermott's stomach, McDermott sat up with a bellow of rage,
instinctively and instantaneously grabbed the leg attached to the boot,
rose as burning rocks rise from a volcano, with the leg in his hands,
upset the man attached to the leg, and jumped with two large feet
accurately upon the back of that person's neck. Whereupon the Boche went
to Valhalla. McDermott, though nearer fifty than forty years old, was a
barroom fighter of wonderful speed and technique, and this instinctive
and spontaneous maneuver was all one motion, just as it is all one
motion when a cat in a cellar leaps over a sack of potatoes, lands upon
a rat, and sinks her teeth into a vital spot. The second German and
the third German hung back an instant toward the door, and then came
on toward the moving shadow in the midst of shadows. For their own good
they should have come on without hanging back that second; but perhaps
their training, otherwise so efficient, did not include barroom tactics.
Their hesitation gave McDermott just the time he needed, for when he
faced them he had the first German's gun in his hands.
“No war,” said McDermott, “can come into me slapin' chamber and stand on
me stomach like that, and expict me to take it peaceful!”
With the words he fired the first German's rifle into the second
German. The third German, to the rear of the second one, fired his gun
simultaneously, but perhaps he was a hit flurried, for he also fired
directly into the second German, and there was nothing the second German
could do but die; which he did at once. McDermott leaped at the third
German with his rifle clubbed just as the man pressed the trigger again.
The bullet struck McDermott's rifle, splintered the butt of it and
knocked it from his hands; but a second later McDermott's hands were on
the barrel of the German's gun and the two of them were struggling for
it.
There is one defect in the German military system, observers say: the
drill masters do not teach their men independent thinking; perhaps the
drill-masters do not have the most promising material to work upon.
At any rate, it occurred to McDermott to kick the third German in the
stomach while the third German was still thinking of nothing else than
trying to depress the gun to shoot or bayonet McDermott. Thought and
kick were as well coordinated as if they had proceeded from one of
McDermott's late mules.
The Boche went to the floor of the Hôtel Faucon with a groan. “Gott!” he
said.
“A stomach f'r a stomach,” said Mc-Dermott, standing over him with the
rifle. “Git up!”
The German painfully arose.
“Ye are me prisoner,” said McDermott, “an' the furst wan I iver took.
Hould up y'r hands! Hould thim up, I say! Not over y'r stomach, man, but
over y'r head!”
The Boche complied hurriedly.
“I see ye understhand United States,” said McDermott. “I was afraid ye
might not, an' I w'u'd have to shoot ye.”
“_Kamerad!_” exclaimed the man.
“Ye are no comrade av mine,” said McDermott, peering at the man's face
through the eery halflight of early morning, “an' comrade av mine ye
niver was! I know ye well! Ye are Goostave Schmidt b' name, an' wanst ye
tinded bar in a dive down b' the Brooklyn wather front!”
The man stared at McDermott in silence for a long minute, and then
recollection slowly came to him.
“MagDermodd!” he said. “Batrick MagDermodd!”
“The same,” said McDermott.
“_Gott sei dank!_” said the German. “I haf fallen into der hands of
a friend.” And with the beginning of a smile he started to lower his
hands.
“Put thim up!” cried McDermott. “Don't desave y'silf! Ye are no fri'nd
av mine!”
The smile faded, and something like a look of panic took its place on
the German's face.
“Th' last time I saw ye, ye was in bad company, f'r ye was alone,” said
McDermott. “An' I come over here lookin' f'r ye, an' I find ye in bad
company ag'in!”
“Looking?” said the German with quite sincere perplexity. “You gome here
_looking_ for me?”
The wonder on the man's face at this unpremeditated jest of his having
crossed the Atlantic especially to look for Gustave Schmidt titillated
McDermott's whole being. But he did not laugh, and he let the German
wonder. “And phwy sh'u'd I not?” he said.
The German thought intensely for a while. “Why _should_ you gome all der
vay agross der Adlandic looking for _me?_” he said finally.
“Ye have a short mimory,” said McDermott. “Ye do not recollict the time
ye hit me on the head wid a bung starter whin I was too soused to defind
m'silf? The scar is there yet, bad luck to ye!”
“But dot was nudding,” said the German. “Dot bung-starder business was
all a bart of der day's vork.”
“But ye cript up behint me,” said McDermott; “an' me soused!”
“But dot was der bractical vay to do it,” said the German. “Dot was
nuddings at all, dot bung-starder business. I haf forgodden it long
ago!”
“The McDermotts remimber thim compliments longer,” said McDermott. “An'
b' rights I sh'u'd give ye wan good clout wid this gun and be done wid
ye. But I'm thinkin' I may be usin' ye otherwise.”
“You gome all der vay agross der Adlandic yoost because I hit you on der
head mit a bung starder?” persisted the German, still wondering. “Dot,
MagDermodd, I cannot belief--_Nein!_”
“And ye tore up y'r citizenship papers and come all the way across
the Atlantic just to jine this gang av murtherin' child-killers,” said
McDermott. “That I c'n belave! Yis!”
“But I haf not dorn up my American cidizen papers--_Nein!_” exclaimed
the German, earnestly. “Dose I haf kept. I gome across to fight for mein
Faderland--dot vas orders. _Ja!_ But mein American cidizenship papers I
haf kept, and ven der war is ofer I shall go back to Brooklyn and once
more an American citizen be, undill der next war. _Ja!_ You haf not
understood, but dot is der vay of it. _Ja!_”
“Goostave,” said McDermott, “ye have too many countries workin' f'r ye.
But y'r takin' ordhers from m'silf now--do ye get that? C'n ye play that
musical insthrumint there by the window?”
“_Ja!_” said Gustave. “Dot gun I can vork. Dot is der Lewis machine gun.
Id is not so good a gun as our machine gun, for our machine gun haf been
a colossal sugcess, but id is a goot gun.”
“Ye been fightin' f'r the Kaiser f'r three or four years, Goostave,”
said McDermott, menacing him with his rifle, “but this mornin' I'll be
afther seein' that ye do a bit av work f'r thim citizenship papers, an',
later, ye can go to hell, if ye like, an' naturalize y'rsilf in still a
third country. Ye will shoot Germans wid that gun till I get the hang
av the mechanism m'silf. And thin I will shoot Germans wid that gun. But
furst, ye will give me that fancy tin soup-bowl ye're wearin'.”
Gustave handed over his helmet. McDermott put it on his red head.
“I've been thinkin',” said McDermott, “will I jine this war, or will I
not jine it. An' the only way ye c'n tell do ye like a thing or do ye
not is to thry it wance. Wid y'r assistance, Goostave, I'll thry it this
mornin', if anny more av it comes my way.”
More of it was coming his way. The Germans, tired of trifling with the
small British force which held the village, had brought up the better
part of a division during the night and were marshaling the troops for
their favorite feat of arms, an overwhelming frontal attack _en masse_.
The British had likewise received reinforcements, drawing from the north
and from the south every man the hard-pressed lines could spare. But
they were not many, perhaps some three thousand men in all, to resist
the massed assault, with the railroad for its objective, which would
surely come with dawn. If troops were needed in the village they were
no less needed on the lines that flanked it. The little town, which
had been the scene of so much desperate skirmishing the day before and
during the first half of the night, was now about to become the ground
of something like a battle.
“There's a French division on the way,” said the British colonel in
command in the village to one of his captains. “If we can only hold them
for an hour----”
He did not finish the sentence. As he spoke the German bombardment,
precedent to the infantry attack, began to comb the western fringes
of the town and the railroad line behind, searching for the
hurriedly-digged and shallow trenches, the improvised dugouts, the
shell holes, the cellars and the embankments where the British lay. The
British guns to the rear of the village made answer, and the uproar tore
the mists of dawn to tatters. A shell fell short, into the middle of the
Grande Place, and McDermott saw the broken motor car against which the
sleeping lieutenant had leaned the day before vanish into nothingness;
and then a house directly opposite the Hôtel Fauçon jumped into flame
and was no more. Looking out across the back of the stooping Gustave at
the window, McDermott muttered, “I dunno as I w'u'd want to jine that
war.” And then he bellowed in Gustave Schmidt's ear: “Cut loose! Cut
loose wid y'rgun! Cut loose!”
“I vill not!” shrieked Gustave. “Mein Gott! Dat is mein own regiment!”
“Ye lie!” shouted McDermott. “Ye will!” He thrust a bit of bayonet into
the fleshiest part of the German's back.
“I vill! I vill!” cried Gustave.
“Ye will that,” said McDermott, “an' the less damned nonsinse I hear
from ye about y'r own rigimint the betther f'r ye! Ye're undher me
own ordhers till I c'n make up me mind about this war.” The mists were
rising. In the clearing daylight at the eastern end of the square, as if
other clouds were moving forward with a solid front, appeared the first
gray wave of the German infantry. Close packed, shoulder to shoulder,
three deep, they came, almost filling the space from side to side of the
Grande Place, moving across that open stretch against the British fire
with a certain heavy-footed and heavy-brained contempt of everything
before them. Ten steps, and the British machine guns and rifles caught
them. The first wave, or half of it, went down in a long writhing
windrow, across the east end of the square, and in the instant that he
saw it squirm and toss before the trampling second wave swept over it
and through it, the twisting gray-clad figures on the stones reminded
McDermott of the heaps of heaving worms he used to see at the bottom of
his bait-can when he went fishing as a boy.
“Hold that nozzle lower, Goostave!” he yelled to his captive. “Spray
thim! Spray thim! Ye're shootin' over their heads, ye lumberin'
Dutchman, ye!”
“_Gott!_” cried Gustave, as another jab of the bayonet urged him to his
uncongenial task.
And then McDermott made one of the few errors of his military career.
Whether it was the French brandy he had drunk to excess the night
before, or whether it was the old bung-starter wound on his head, which
always throbbed and jumped when he became excited, his judgment deserted
him for an instant. For one instant he forgot that there must be no
instants free from the immediate occupation of guiding and directing
Gustave.
“Let me see if I can't work that gun m'self,” he cried.
As he relaxed his vigilance, pushing the German to one side, the Boche
suddenly struck him upon the jaw. McDermott reeled and dropped his
rifle; before he could recover himself, the German had it. The weapon
swung upward in the air and--just then a shell burst outside the open
window of the Hôtel Fauçon.
Both men were flung from their feet by the concussion. For a moment
everything was blank to McDermott. And then, stretching out his hand to
rise, his fingers encountered something smooth and hard upon the floor.
Automatically his grasp closed over it and he rose. At the same instant
the German struggled to his feet, one hand behind his back, and the
other extended, as if in entreaty.
“_Kamerad_,” he whined, and even as he whined he lurched nearer and
flung at McDermott a jagged, broken bottle. McDermott ducked, and
the dagger-like glass splintered on his helmet. And then McDermott
struck--once. Once was enough. The Boche sank to the floor without a
groan, lifeless. McDermott looked at him, and then, for the first time,
looked at what he held in his own hand, the weighty thing which he had
wielded so instinctively and with such ferocity. It was the bung starter
of the Hôtel Fauçon.
“Goostave niver knowed what hit him,” said McDermott. And if there had
been any one to hear, in all that din, a note of regret that Gustave
never knew might have been remarked in his voice.
McDermott turned his attention to the machine gun, which, with its
tripod, had been knocked to the floor. He squatted, with his head below
the level of the window sill, and looked it over.
“'Tis not broken,” he decided, after some moments of examination. “Did
Goostave do it so? Or did he do it so?” He removed his helmet and rubbed
the scar under his red hair reflectively. “If I was to make up me mind
to jine that war,” mused McDermott, “this same w'u'd be a handy thing to
take wid me. It w'u'd that! Now, did that Goostave that used to be here
pull this pretty little thingumajig so? Or did he pull it so? Ihaveut!
He pulled it so! And thim ca'tridges, now--do they feed in so? Or do
they feed in so? 'T w'u'd be a handy thing, now, f'r a man that had anny
intintions av jinin' the war to know about all thim things!”
And, patiently, McDermott studied the mechanism, while the red sunlight
turned to yellow in the Grande Place outside, and the budding green
vines withered along the broken walls, and the stones ran blood, and the
Hôtel Fauçon began to fall to pieces about his ears. McDermott did not
hurry; he felt that there was no need to hurry; he had not yet made up
his mind whether he intended to participate in this war. By the time he
had learned how to work that machine gun, and had used it on the Germans
for a while, he thought, he might be vouchsafed some light on that
particular subject. It was one of McDermott's fixed beliefs that he
was an extremely cautious sort of man, though many of his acquaintances
thought of him differently, and he told himself that he must not get too
far into this war until he was sure that it was going to be congenial.
So far, it promised well.
And also, McDermott, as he puzzled over the machine gun, was not quite
the normal McDermott. He was, rather, a supernormal McDermott. He had
been awakened rudely from an alcoholic slumber and he had been rather
busy ever since; so many things had taken place in his immediate
neighborhood, and were still taking place, that he was not quite sure
of their reality. As he sat on the floor and studied the weapon, he was
actually, from moment to moment, more than half convinced that he was
dreaming--he might awaken and find that that war had eluded him again.
Perhaps he is scarcely to be chided for being in what is sometimes known
as a state of mind.
And while McDermott was looking at the machine gun, the British
commander prayed, as a greater British commander before him had prayed
one time, for assistance, only this one did not pray for night or
Blucher as Wellington had done. Night was many hours beyond all
hope and would probably bring its own hell when it came, and as for
Prussians, there were too many Prussians now. His men would hold on;
they had been holding on for epic days and unbelievable nights, and they
would still hold while there was breath in their bodies, and when their
bodies were breathless they would hold one minute more. But--God! For
Foch's _poilus!_ There is a moment which is the ultimate moment; the
spirit can drag the body until--until spirit and body are wrenched into
two things. No longer. His men could die in their tracks; they were
dying where they stood and crouched and lay, by dozens and by scores and
by heroic hundreds--but when they were dead, who would bar the way to
Hazebrouck, and beyond Hazebrouck, to the channel ports?
That way was all but open now, if the enemy but realized it. Any moment
they might discover it. A half-mile to the south of the village the line
was so thinly held that one strong, quick thrust must make a gap. Let
the enemy but fling a third of the troops he was pounding to pieces in
the bloody streets of the town, in the torn fields that flanked it, and
in the shambles of the Grande Place that was the center of this action,
at that weak spot, and all was over. But with a fury mechanical,
insensate, the Germans still came on in direct frontal attacks.
The British had slain and slain and slain, firing into the gray masses
until the water boiled in the jackets of the machine guns. Five attacks
had broken down in the Grande Place itself--and now a sixth was forming.
Should he still hold fast, the colonel asked himself, or should he
retire, saving what machine guns he might, and flinging a desperate
detachment southward in the attempt to make a stronger right flank? But
to do that might be the very move that would awaken the Germans to their
opportunity there. So long as they pounded, pounded at his center, he
would take a toll of them, at least--but the moment was coming--
“I have ut!” cried McDermott, and mounted his gun at the window.
“It is time to retire,” said the British colonel, and was about to give
the order.
“Right in their bloody backs,” said McDermott to himself.
And so it was. For the sixth advance of the German masses had carried
them well into the Grande Place. McDermott, crouched at his window, cut
loose with his gun at pointblank range as the first wave, five men deep,
passed by him, splashing along the thick ranks from behind as one might
sweep a garden hose down a row of vegetables. Taken thus in the rear,
ambushed, with no knowledge of the strength of the attacking force
behind them, the German shock troops swayed and staggered, faced about
and fell and broke. For right into the milling herd of them, and
into the second advancing wave, the British poured their bullets. The
colonel, who had been about to order a retreat, ordered a charge,
and before the stampeded remnant of the first two waves could recover
themselves the British were on them with grenades and bayonets, flinging
them back into the third wave, just advancing to their support, in a
bleeding huddle of defeat.
McDermott saw the beginning of that charge, and with his bung starter in
his hand he rushed from the door to join it. But he did not see the
end of it, nor did he see the _poilus_, as they came slouching into the
village five minutes later to give the repulse weight and confirmation,
redolent of onions and strange stews, but with their bayonets--those
bayonets that are part of the men who wield them, living things,
instinct with the beautiful, straight, keen soul of France herself.
McDermott did not see them, for some more of the Hôtel Fauçon had fallen
on him, crushing one of his ankles and giving him a clout on the head.
“Whoever it was turned loose that machine gun from the inn window, did
the trick,” said the colonel, later. “It's hardly too much to say that
he blocked the way to Hazebrouck--for the time, at least, if one man can
be said to have done such a thing--what's that?”
“That” was McDermott, who was being carried forth, unconscious, to an
ambulance. It was his blue overalls that had occasioned the colonel's
surprise. He was neither French nor British nor German; palpably he was
a civilian, and a civilian who had no business there. And in his hand he
clasped a bung starter. His fingers were closed over it so tightly that
in the base hospital later they found difficulty in taking it away from
him.
Owing, no doubt, to the blow on his head, McDermott was unable to recall
clearly anything that had taken place from the moment he had first
fallen asleep under the influence of French brandy until he awakened in
the hospital nearly four weeks later. During this period there had been
several intervals of more open-eyed dreaming, succeeded by lapses into
profound stupor; but even in these open-eyed intervals, McDermott
had not been himself. It was during one of these intervals that a
representative of the French Government bestowed the Croix de Guerre
upon McDermott, for it had been learned that he was the man behind the
machine gun that had turned the tide of combat.
McDermott, his eyes open, but his mind in too much of a daze even to
wonder what the ceremony was about, sat in a wheel chair, and in company
with half a dozen other men selected for decoration, listened to a brief
oration in very good French, which he could not have understood had he
been normal. In answer he muttered in a low tone, rubbing his broken and
bandaged head: “I think maybe I will jine that war, afther all!”