It was nearly eleven o’clock when Kendall and his companions arrived in
the old cathedral town of Meaux and found accommodations in the Hôtel
Sirène, that rather quaint and down-at-heel hostelry which hides in a
courtyard behind huge gates that close at an hour so early as to
astonish Americans. Kendall was to discover that this was the universal
custom in the smaller towns of the country—that the hotels closed
themselves to guests in the early evening, and that to effect an
entrance thereafter was an achievement.
They contrived, however, to find huddled accommodations, but Kendall did
not find sleep for a long hour. Events were imminent, events both of the
soul and material, and his imagination insisted upon handling them and
scrutinizing them. Speculations upon the proximity of war mingled with
anticipations and apprehensions of his relations with Andree.... He
fancied she, too, was suffering a wakeful night....
In the morning he awoke and breakfasted in a dining-room filled with
American newspaper correspondents, for Meaux was at that date one of
their headquarters, with French and American officers and a few English
Red Cross nurses.... Presently he was in his car again and moving
through the narrow, crowded streets toward Montreuil. The open country,
rolling, beautiful, rich, lay before him.
Here, indeed, were indications of war. The roads were crowded with the
traffic of warfare, with vehicles of all sorts and descriptions moving
toward the front or returning from the front. The greater part of them
were huge French camions driven by _poilus_ who looked out upon the
world with eyes that had seen such sights as alter the fabric of a man’s
soul during the four years that were drawing to a close. They were all
in haste. American camions and camionettes and side-cars were rumbling
or whizzing by. Refugees driving cows, urging on weary horses that
dragged enormous two-wheeled carts heaped high with household treasures,
appeared now and then.... These seemed to Kendall to savor more of the
thing that was war than even such jolting, bumping pieces of artillery
as he encountered now and then....
Kendall was within hearing of the big guns on the battle-line, yet all
about him, spread in peaceful beauty, was a country apparently secure,
apparently untouched by the devastation of an invading army. Yet, a few
weeks before, German cavalry patrols had penetrated almost to this
point. The fields were green and beautiful, promising abundant crops.
Children were entering a little school-house just as children enter
school-houses in America. Farmers were working in their fields.... If it
had not been for the mass of military vehicles upon the roads and for an
occasional distant rumble that might have been thunder, but was not the
thunder of heaven, Kendall could not have sensed the proximity of war.
French soldiers on bicycles were frequent. Now a Frenchman on a bicycle
is one of the sights of the war. Somehow he never seems to master the
contrivance in all its intricacies. He can ride furiously in a straight
line, coattails standing out straight behind, eyes fixed and determined,
jaws set. So long as he follows a bee-line all is well, but you can read
on his face that he realizes the uncertainty of life. Let him be
compelled to swerve from his course, to turn a corner, or even to stop
the machine to alight, and there is none so rash as to prophesy what
will be forthcoming. Kendall saw one stocky poilu attempt to turn
around. It was amazing! The man ricochetted off a camion against a stone
pile, off the stone pile into a donkey-cart, off the donkey-cart into
the arms of a troop of his marching comrades, scattering them like
chickens, thence through the _poilus_ in zigzag to a ditch, from which
he presently rebounded, facing in the direction in which he had
originally traveled. He did not turn. He had had enough of turning. Now
he would keep on his way without meddling with Providence, doubtless
intending to reach his destination by circumnavigating the globe....
Now Ken was passing long mule-teams driven by American boys whose faces
were so incrusted in dust as to give them the appearance of figures
carved out of ghastly rock. Ken could see the dust in drifts on their
eyebrows, and their eyelashes had a strange albino-look. Again his car
edged over to give space to a truck carrying to the rear the remnants of
a destroyed German avion. This moved by to disclose a long column of
Italian troops, armed not with rifles, but with picks and shovels—each
man wearing on his cap a vivid red star. Not a hundred yards beyond was
visible the gray rump of an observation balloon, kneeling on the ground
in the midst of a cluster of trees like some unbelievably monstrous
elephant, its back incrusted with something that might have been the
green moss of great age. This was the camouflage to make it
indistinguishable from the foliage of the trees.... Presently Kendall
was passing groups of hangars, aeroplanes standing before them in the
fields. Now it was a huge howitzer grunting and straining to be at its
business farther ahead and lumberingly eager to join its voice with the
roars of its companions. Once in a while by the roadside nestled a
little plot of graves above which waved the tricolor of France....
An hour’s drive brought them to Montreuil and Kendall’s car descended
the steep and crooked road that led into the valley where the tiny
village, teeming with American soldiers, lay in all its morning
charm.... It was not quiet. There sounded, every minute or so, the sharp
crack of the marvelous little seventy-five sending its word of defiance
to the German army which crouched behind the hills, making ready for
another leap at the throat of France.
There was no stopping here. On they went along roads whose wooded sides
concealed American artillerymen and artillery. Here was the edge of the
front. Guns were actually firing over Kendall’s head at the distant and
invisible enemy. He thrilled to this realization.... In a few moments
they passed on their left a beautiful château, historic because it had
been occupied by von Kluck as headquarters when his armies were rushing
onward to meet their defeat at the Marne. The car passed through Bezu,
where was an American field hospital occupying a tiny church, its
operating-room now in the adjoining building, which had been, a few
weeks before, the school crowded with urchins.... But there was neither
priest nor school-boy now. All were gone; all had fled before the Hun
and were scattered, God knew where, over the face of France.
Now Kendall’s driver turned off the main road and shortly another hamlet
lay before them—the remnants of the place that had been Domptin. Here a
military policeman halted them, demanded credentials and destination.
“You walk from here,” he said. “No cars pass over this road by day.”
“You know the way?” Ken asked his driver.
“Yes.”
So they alighted and trudged along the road. Ken observed many little
craters by the roadside and in the fields, and, without asking, knew
they had been caused by hostile shells.... It was very noisy—or so
Kendall fancied. Artillery was at work on all sides of him, but it was
only the desultory fire of the quiet day. Though the voices of the guns
were audible, neither guns nor the men who served them were to be seen.
Kendall’s pulse increased; he felt in the pit of his stomach that
electric sensation which always came to him while he stood waiting for
the referee’s whistle at the start of a football game.
They walked on. Even here, where the affairs of war were unmistakable,
there was that exotic sense of peace. The woods were still green, the
bushes thick and covered with foliage, the crops, almost ready for the
reaper, waving and undulating as the breezes crossed the fields.... No
human being was visible. Yet here ahead, to the right and to the left,
was the locale of one of the most savage struggles of the war; here it
was that the American Second Division was thrown into the line to stop
the German as he marched, victory-flushed, upon Paris.... And here the
German had stopped.... Just beyond were fields of wheat and woodlands
tenanted by no living being, but nevertheless tenanted. In their depths,
concealed from the eye, not reachable by any human hand, were the
unburied bodies of American dead....
“Here we are,” said Kendall’s driver, pointing to a gray rectangular
mass of buildings just ahead. “Paris Farms. Regimental headquarters of
the Ninth Infantry.”
They entered the gates, passed the saluting sentry, and found themselves
in a square courtyard surrounded by barns and farm buildings, with the
old farm-house at the opposite end. Groups of men in khaki sat close to
the walls. None were in the middle of the courtyard, and Kendall’s
driver, instead of leading him up the path that ran directly to the
door, conducted him in a round-about way, his shoulder rubbing the
wall.... In the air above was the intermittent throb of a German
aeroplane reconnoitering, and it was the duty as well as the desire of
all men to remain invisible....
Life, for the most part, is made up of small matters, of small joys and
small griefs, of little pleasurable surprises and minor catastrophes. In
the ratio as the little joys outnumber the little sorrows we are happy.
Tremendous events, crashing climaxes, occur in few lives. But we like to
fancy ourselves participants in astonishing doings, and as the victims
of beneficiaries of amazing coincidences. We are so constituted that we
can be amazed at the slightest deviation from the normal, and the
arrival of a genuine surprise can set us all by the ears with
excitement.... A benevolent surprise awaited Kendall inside the door of
the ancient farm-house. It was of not the least importance in the scheme
of the universe and would not modify Kendall’s life by the breadth of a
hair, yet it was potent to overshadow everything else in his mind for
hours and to make him feel that he had been singled out by the powers
for especial grace.
There was a broad hallway, cluttered with bedding rolls and occupied by
a group of lounging soldiers. At the right was a room occupied as the
office of the adjutant, which Kendall entered a trifle diffidently as a
stranger, wondering what manner of men he would be required to have
dealings with.... And then....
“Ken Ware!” shouted a voice, and a young second lieutenant with the most
pitiable of mustaches—a yellow and yearning mustache—leaped from a desk
at his right to greet him. “Where did you rain down from, and where did
you get all those bars on your shoulders?”
It was Jimmy Martin, whom Kendall had last known as a newspaper man in
Detroit, with whom he had been familiar in those affairs of young
manhood which make for friendships to be looked back upon with longing
and regret when the days and the affairs of young manhood have been
engulfed in the past.
“What are you doing? What are you doing _here_?” Jimmy demanded.
“I’m in the Intelligence. And you—?”
“Intelligence officer of this regiment.... And only a second lieutenant.
Ought to be a captain. Doing a captain’s work. Say”—he was a sudden
young man—“wait till I get my tin lid and cane and we’ll go to see the
sights. How long are you here?”
“Bring on your sights,” said Kendall. “While you are exhibiting I can
get from you what I came for.”
“Wish you could stay. We’ve got a darn good mess. Not as good as we had
the first few days, but good.”
“Why the first few days?”
“We went out and gathered up stuff to eat—to save it from the _boche_.”
“Foraging, eh?”
“Not exactly. We gathered it in and ate it to prevent its giving aid and
comfort to the enemy. One day we got a pig at eleven-thirty and had
chops for lunch at one. The colonel said that pork was too close to
being pig for him. Next day we had rabbits. Speared them with
pitchforks. There was a bully strawberry-patch up the line and we had
plenty until a regiment of Senegalese moved in and looted it. There’s a
patch of gooseberries in No Man’s Land, and we have the devil’s own time
keeping the men from going out after them.”
As they passed out and through the barn into the woods Kendall explained
his errand, and the conversation became technical. Whatever else he
might have been, Jimmy Martin was engrossed in his particular job and,
apparently, was admirably efficient. The greater part of the data
Kendall wanted was at Jimmy’s tongue’s end; the rest would be readily
obtainable from available records of Martin’s work.
By this time they had traversed a plainly marked road which led along
the end of a field bordering the woods, and Jimmy complained bitterly of
its evidence. “We’ve made that road since we came here. It’ll show up
plain on their photographs and show a lot of circulation here.... You
can see they’ve been droppin’ shells on it now.”
They entered the denseness of the woods to find it teeming with American
soldiery who occupied the quiet of the day in enlarging and making more
comfortable the makeshift dugouts they inhabited.... These were not such
dugouts as Kendall had seen described in books about the war; they were
such affairs as he had made himself when he was a boy and called
“coojees,” where he had played robber and baked potatoes. They were
hastily dug and as hastily covered with a mat of boughs and a layer of
earth—flimsy sanctuaries, able to shelter from spraying shrapnel, but of
no effect whatever against explosive shell.
Suddenly an invisible seventy-five was discharged almost at Kendall’s
elbow, and Jimmy laughed to see his friend’s reaction to the unexpected
sound. They parted the bushes and examined the beautiful little gun—that
weapon which one may almost say has been the salvation of France!
A captain of artillery issued belligerently from a timbered dugout and
confronted Martin. “Say,” he demanded, “you’re the ding-donged
Intelligence officer that had me pinched the other night. Ain’t you?”
“Oh, was it you? Sorry. The boys are sort of stirred up about spies.
They didn’t savvy you. When a strange officer comes poking around these
woods looking for a place to light and asking oodles of questions about
whether there’s artillery here and such like, somethin’s goin’ to
happen. A couple of boys came rushin’ up to me to ask what to do, and I
told them to pinch you. This place is full of spy rumors. Everybody’s
seein’ them. The doughboy that hasn’t seen somethin’ darn mysterious and
suspicious in the last twenty-four hours is hard to find.”
“Forget it. I was some lost. Should have reported before I came down.”
“Where was it they got Lieutenant Small last night?”
“Down this path about a hundred yards. His horse is there yet.”
Kendall and Martin walked that way. Under a shelter of boughs stood the
handsome horse of which the dead lieutenant had been so fond; he stood
quietly switching his tail and nibbling the leaves about him, all
unconscious that his back would never again bear the weight of a gentle
master.... And thirty feet away was the spot where Small had met his
death, met it because he had scorned the shelter of a dugout, but with
his French orderly had slept on the surface of the earth, with no
shelter except a lean-to of brushwood.... On the surrounding bushes were
gruesome shreds....
So this was war at last! On this spot a man had been killed by the enemy
and the blood of him was not yet dry!... Somehow it convinced Kendall
that he was at the front, that there was actual danger where he stood.
He was experiencing the thing he had come to France hoping to
experience.... And yet it was difficult to feel the fact. He had fancied
the line of battle to be a constant tumult, horrible with tremendous
showers of bursting shells and glorious with charges and defenses. In
its stark actuality it was quite different. Affairs were gone about
nonchalantly and methodically. Even the artillerymen who sent a shell
now and then at some target they could not see served their guns in a
bored manner.
It was only by a certain tingling of the nerves that he, a tenderfoot in
this business, sensed the presence of war; that war was here about him,
within reach of his arm. Those seventy-fives which spoke with such a
vicious, through-the-teeth bark were sending lethal shells across the
sunlit landscape, causing death and wounds. Possibly that very shell
which he could hear as it sped on its way might kill an enemy.... And
these boys killed with an air of detachment and _ennui_....
And the infantrymen! Scattered through the woods about their
rabbit-warren of dugouts, they looked and acted like boys on holiday, on
some camping excursion. They chatted and frolicked, and grumbled about
the food, and because they were not relieved and sent to rest billets,
and because the enemy did not try to advance, and because they
themselves were not sent against the enemy. Kendall absorbed a feeling
that they rather liked the whole thing, that it was just the life they
were born to and were fitted to live—and that they knew it.
It was a picture, there in the _bois_, a picture that touched the
imagination of that young man from the peaceful Middle West and would
not soon be erased from his memory. The trees grew closely, admitting
only patches of sunlight here and there, with an effect of peaceful,
lazy, restful shade. One saw dimly. The scene was soothing to the eyes,
alive as it was with movement. The brown of uniforms blended with the
yellow-green of the foliage and with the red-yellow of the upturned soil
where it had been broken by hundreds of shovels in the fashioning of
shelters.... Kendall stood and watched and knew that he was beholding a
sight which, in the years of his age, he would see again and describe
again, and live again in the telling.... It excited him, yet he wondered
why it should excite him more than it had done when he had seen other
khaki-clad boys in camps in America.... It was because these boys slept
with death for a blanket-mate. It was because no man of them knew what
minute might call him with awful suddenness over the threshold of life
and into the mysteries of death....
There had been no fire from the enemy. Since the dawn their guns had
been silent, but now, without warning, the air was filled with a threat,
with a sound which Kendall had never heard before, but which he
recognized by the instinct of self-preservation which resided in him. It
was the rushing, shrieking, rending, express-train rush of a big
shell—not of a shell going, but of one coming. It startled Kendall. For
an instant he was blind and deaf to everything in the universe but the
approach of that shell, and it seemed to him to be directing itself
exactly at the small of his back. He wanted to dodge, to run, to
obliterate himself from that portion of the earth, but there was no
place to betake himself. It was a matter of seconds, of parts of a
second. The shell screeched over their heads and detonated over toward
the farm-house.... And Ken became fully conscious again, a bit surprised
that he was still in the same spot and that he had not made himself
ridiculous.
And now pictures came to him that he had seen in that interval, pictures
seen but registering now for the first time. He laughed.... The woods
had resolved itself into a prairie-dog village at the first instant of
alarm. The air had been full of diving legs as soldiers plunged headlong
into the earth. Everywhere Ken’s eyes had looked they had seen an
American soldier disappearing with comical haste into the bowels of the
earth.
“It was about time for them to start,” said Martin. “We’d better get
back to headquarters. I may be wanted.”
They walked back hurriedly while shell after shell screamed down at them
as it rushed over their heads. Ken was silent. He was thinking: “I’m
under fire. I’m really under fire. The enemy is shooting at _me_....
They are trying to kill _me_.” It was not easy to convince his mind.
As they entered the farm-house the shells were coming in rapid
succession and exploding in the vicinity with tremendous detonations.
Young Martin cocked his ear and hazarded an opinion as to their
caliber.... A jagged fragment, hurtled from an explosion a hundred feet
away, crashed through the roof and came to rest on the second floor.
Young Martin was delighted; he rushed up-stairs after the bit, carrying
it down gingerly wrapped in a cloth, for it was still hot, and then with
joy applied gauges and calipers to it so that he might identify it
exactly.... He was happy. The gauge was as he had named it.
“Say,” he said over his shoulder to several officers who were gathered
in the room, “listen here: now comes this man with orders for us to
report on the crops of the neighborhood. Kind of crops. Quantity.
Quality. How many kernels of wheat to the head.... My business is
collecting information about the Germans....”
“Huh!” grunted the lieutenant-colonel, who evidently in civilian life
had been acquainted with market reports, “snails weak to medium. Frogs
strong. Give it to ’em, boy. Full particulars.”
“Say, colonel, you know that woods we were talking about.” Martin
pointed to a map on the wall. “The boches are using it. My men have
reported circulation there, and they’ve been putting up camouflage. How
many shells will it take to gas ’em out? I’d like to get ’em out of
there.”
“Have to have brigade orders to use gas....”
_Blammm!_ came a detonation unpleasantly near, but still beyond the
headquarters. The colonel cocked his ear. “Boy, don’t you make them no
shorter,” he drawled.
The adjutant entered. “General’s here. Come to mess. He and the colonel
are coming down-stairs now. All in.”
All filed into the mess-room. The younger officers had been full of
boyish spirits and pranks, but decorum settled on them as they entered
the door. They seemed suddenly to grow up and to acquire the demeanor of
maturity, and stood erect in stately manner while Kendall was presented
to the general and the colonel.... And then the meal proceeded. Kendall
wondered where the food came from, but asked no embarrassing questions
about the source of supplies. There was chicken, there were potatoes,
there was fresh asparagus, there was custard pudding, there were cheese
and coffee and cherries—and then cigars.
“Don’t get the idea we pass cigars at every mess,” whispered a daring
lieutenant in Kendall’s ear. “Just throwin’ ourselves in honor of the
general....”
The bombardment had increased in violence during the meal, had increased
to such a degree that Kendall thought rather more of falling shells than
of food.... There was absolutely no protection. A shell might crash down
upon them through the frail structure at will.... But nobody appeared to
mind. Kendall reflected that he, perhaps, did not appear to mind, and
wondered if the others were experiencing the same sensations as he. He
did not see how it could be otherwise. Or had they found some magic
philosophy which rendered them immune to reflections upon sudden
death?... The general told the colonel a humorous anecdote, and the
colonel replied to it with another equally pointless to Kendall’s way of
thinking. Why in thunder, he wondered, didn’t they get through with this
meal and go to a place a bit more sheltered?... But the seniors chatted
on, apparently with placid enjoyment of Philippine and Cuban
reminiscences, all to the accompaniment of bursting high-explosive
shells, one of which could have obliterated that farm-house and all the
men it contained.
But an end arrived. The general and the colonel arose, and it became
etiquette for the juniors to arise as well. The dignitaries disappeared
to the colonel’s quarters up the stairs, and a few of the younger
officers went to the adjutant’s office across the hall, Kendall and
Jimmy with them. The telephone on Martin’s desk buzzed and Jimmy lifted
the receiver. He looked up with a frown.
“This nut down the road wants to know if the general’s killed yet.”
“Did he say _general_ over that ’phone?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can sit down and expect to get really shelled now.”
It was then that Kendall learned that the general theory was that the
enemy had found means to tap all our telephone wires and to listen in to
our conversations—a theory which has given rise to much quaint telephone
conversation, couched in a language not hitherto known on this or any
other planet.
Darkness was falling without, and with the darkness came a
multiplication of the shells designed by the enemy for the discomfort of
the regiment.... Kendall, to his surprise, was growing accustomed to the
shells. He was conscious of them, but had lost something of his
consciousness of the danger that was in them.... He was interested. It
was an interesting spot and an interesting moment, and he sat quiet and
wide of eye to miss no thrill that might be there for him.... Telephones
were busy with messages coming and going, messages camouflaged by
strange words and code numbers and weird names. When plain English was
necessary the longest and most erudite words in the dictionary were
sought, doubtless on the theory that the German was not educated to the
point of comprehending them.
Everybody had his job, and everybody seemed to believe his especial
piece of work to be the most important in the army. A lieutenant came in
with a scowl of tremendous ferocity.
“Colonel,” he said, “we’ve got a damn bad situation. It’s that doctor.
He refuses to give some of my wounded men wound chevrons. Says they
aren’t wounded enough.... How bad has a man got to be shot before he’s
wounded, anyhow?”
“My understanding,” said the lieutenant-colonel, “is that any man who is
hurt enough to require medical attention is entitled to a chevron.... It
doesn’t make any difference if he’s hurt by high explosive or hooked by
a bull.”
The din was now terrific. French and American artillery had opened fire
all along the line. So quickly did report follow explosion and explosion
report that the whole mingled into one continuous and mighty sound. And
during it all the young Intelligence officer quarreled with a sergeant
who was his draftsman, as they tried to reconcile maps drawn from
observers’ sketches with photographs taken from aeroplanes.
“Aw, hell!” growled the draftsman, “this guy’s made a conventionalized
design. What we’re lookin’ for is what’s on the ground, not some guy’s
pretty ideas. You want me to make a map to send up to the general, and
what the devil have I got to make it from? I’m S.O.L.... There hain’t no
damn woods like that.”
“Here,” declared Jimmy, indicating on maps and photographs, “this woods
is supposed to be that woods, and this trench is supposed to be that
trench.”
“_Supposed!_”
“Yes.”
“Expect me to send a map to the general and label it ‘Supposed?...’ That
map’s pretty, all right, but it hain’t worth a hoot in Hoboken. Call him
up and ask him what the blazes—”
Kendall laughed, and was surprised to discover that he could laugh, that
anything would seem humor in this place with death showering down on all
sides.
Now the attentions of the enemy seemed to take on the aspect of a
serious effort, for the officers of experience began to gather and to
hold consultations and to listen with marked interest.
“Gas!” somebody said. “Listen! Hear it?”
Kendall listened, but could not distinguish the bursting of the
gas-shell, so easily to be identified by the practised ear.
“Gas-masks at _alerte_,” was the order.
The telephone rang. “Shrapnel and gas here,” said an observer some place
out in the darkness.
“Got your mask on?” demanded Jimmy.
“No. It ain’t bad yet.”
“You get that mask on and keep it on. Now. While I’m waiting.... Is it
on? ... There. You can telephone as well through a mask as without it.
Try it.... All right.”
There was a moment of comparative inactivity, then the telephone again.
“Mustard gas to the right,” was reported, and after a few moments a call
from a certain company of infantry which had become unhappy in its
position: “Say, we want a retaliatory barrage. We’re getting everything
here—big, little, and gas.”
“They want a barrage,” reported Jimmy.
“Where do they want it?” asked the lieutenant-colonel.
“I don’t know. Wake George up; that’s _his_ business.... Say, let’s
notify the gas officer; we’re beginning to get it pretty close here.”
Jimmy called the person designated as George. “Hey!” he said,
irreverently. “Get your pants on and come down. The adjutant wants you.”
It was very chilly. Ken shivered with the cold, and was rather thankful
it was cold, because it gave him honest reason for shivering. He was
keyed to a high pitch, nerves taut, imagination straining its leash, but
he was enjoying himself after a strange fashion, reveling in this
experience, in the sensations of peril, in the fact that he was at the
very center of things. The artillery activity continued to increase, and
the ear-shattering, sweeping, rolling gusts of infernal clamor seemed to
reach a very climax of sound.... Again and again he could feel upon his
own body the shock of adjacent explosions. It required but a few feet
difference in the fall of one of those shells to mean all that stood
between life and death for him.... And yet he was not afraid. He was not
conscious of fear, only of that queer electric sensation, and of an
elevation of spirits due to intense excitement.
The telephone insisted with a new insistence each moment. “Gas reported
to the right.... Gas reported to the left....”
“What shall we do about it?” Jimmy asked the lieutenant-colonel.
“How about a little interdiction?” They spoke casually, as one would
say, “The road is dusty,” and the other reply, “It might be well to
sprinkle it.”
“It’ll be all right if we can get enough.... I’ll call up and ask for
it.”
Then: “Hello!... Hello! Is this Hoboken?... They’re giving us more gas
than we like ... at right and left and in front.... Yes.... Been coming
twenty minutes.... Is it worth while to retaliate?... Orders to use gas
have to come from you.”
“We’re in for _beaucoup_ casualties,” somebody said out of a moment’s
pause.
“Say, you were too mild with Hoboken. I’d ’a’ told him we was gettin’
gas to beat the devil, and we had to have some doin’s of our own. Them
birds don’t worry about what _we’re_ gettin’ unless we holler loud.”
This from the draftsman-sergeant.
“There!” The adjutant looked up at the ceiling. “Listen!... _Boche_
aeroplane. I’ve heard it quite a spell. Directing their fire by the
flash of our batteries.... Gawd! Why don’t we get more aeroplanes of our
own!”
The telephone again, and Jimmy reported with what Kendall conceived to
be relief, “He says he’ll have the hundred and fifty-fives and gas going
in ten minutes.”
“Say,” somebody complained, “that _boche_ aeroplane must be mired in a
cloud. It sounds like it was standing still in one spot.”
“Stuck or not, she’s up there without any friendly intentions.... Say,
we ought to go over to the States and shoot them peace-talkin’ pups.” It
was the sergeant speaking again. “Anybody that wants to make peace with
the _boche_!... They hain’t got no right pollutin’ the atmosphere....”
There came a pause while all waited hopefully for the “big stuff” that
had been promised them—and presently it came. Kendall had believed the
ultimate in sound had been achieved before, but this—this was
impossible. Such an extreme from silence could not be. It was cosmic. It
was awful. He seemed to be standing in the very center of such an
upheaval as might have created worlds.... It upreared to a very ultimate
climax of sound, to a single note made up of a multitude of gigantic
sub-tones. It was amazing, it was terrifying, it was gratifying....
“Fritz is gettin’ his good,” said the sergeant, with profound
satisfaction.
This continued an hour, and then gradually subsided. The German fire had
become desultory—and then ceased. They had drawn upon themselves more
than they liked by their evening’s strafing.... The silence that ensued
was startlingly loud. One could hear it....
“I’m for some grub if we can rustle it,” said a raw-boned lieutenant.
The lieutenant-colonel yawned and stretched his arms high over his head.
“Oh-hum!... Darn these quiet nights,” he said, with sincerity. “I
thought for a while there was going to be something stirring.”
“Oh, I’m willing to have a rest once in a while,” said Jimmy. “I’m going
to sleep. Gimme all these quiet nights you want to....”
Kendall looked at his watch. It was half past two in the morning....
Quiet nights! He wondered if they were making game of him, but as he
looked back on the conduct of these young men during that night he was
persuaded of their sincerity.... And he—he had fancied himself present
at the unloosing of Inferno....
Presently he was lying on a bundle of hay on a stone floor, wrapped in
his blankets.... A sentence, a scrap from the talk of the night,
repeated itself to him, “We’re in for casualties.” He pondered it.
Casualties—that meant wounded and dead; men mangled and men in the
horrible agonies that follow the breathing of mustard gas.... Some of
those boys he had seen a few hours ago down in the woods—only a few
hundred feet away—were dead ... _dead_! He had been near to death—had
sat for hours where death might reach out and touch him upon the
shoulder.... So this was war ... this was how the thing was done!
It seemed so futile. What had been accomplished by this night’s
slaughter? Neither side had advanced a foot; nothing had been won or
lost.... But hundreds of lives had been wasted, hundreds of thousands of
dollars’ worth of munitions had been expended—and why? For nothing that
he could see, for no purpose except the desire of each side to make the
other side uncomfortable.... That night could have been erased from the
history of the war, and its absence would never have been noticed. Its
activities had no more effect upon the course of the war than the
barking of a dog would have had—and yet hundreds of bodies were
tenantless, and hundreds of mothers would mourn their sons.
“War is scientific waste,” he said to himself, and repeated the phrase.
He hated war because it was waste.... He wondered how many men had given
their lives on just such futile nights as this during the years since
August, 1914. Thousands upon thousands, doubtless.... How many of those
girls he had seen in Paris had been deprived of husbands—of the men who
would some day have been their husbands—in just such affairs? It was
wrong—_wrong_.... War was a horrid disease, or was it the German nation
which was a horrid disease? He could not think clearly.... He had
thought little of mankind in the mass, but now he considered it, and his
sympathy attached to it. It was futile to pity an individual, any
individual, but one’s heart might bleed for mankind.... And most of all
it might bleed for that portion of mankind whose duty it is to be the
mothers of forthcoming generations—who were deprived by war of the right
to fulfil that duty.
Then he found himself repeating over and over a phrase: “Little moments
of happiness.... Little moments of happiness....” If men were to be
wasted as they had been wasted this night, and if God could sit
quiescent in His heaven, tolerating such wastage, then could that God
deny to women their little moments of happiness as a partial, an
infinitesimal, balm for the agony He permitted? Could He frown upon
those little moments, or decree them to be evil?... He wondered how God
stood on this question of morals. In a moment came an answer, but
Kendall could not assert it to be a true answer. It was this: “_God
demands another generation of mankind._”