On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel
Scott's battalion was streaming along one of the dusty,
well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind
them. The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods,
little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people
came out to watch the soldiers go by.
The Americans went through every village in march step, colours
flying, the band playing, "to show that the morale was high," as
the officers said. Claude trudged on the outside of the
column,--now at the front of his company, now at the
rear,--wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his
satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.
They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were
reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and
torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half
concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth,
bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the
road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty
barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,--with
no purpose at all.
"Begins to look like we're getting in, Lieutenant," said Sergeant
Hicks, smiling behind his salute.
Claude nodded and passed forward.
"Well, we can't arrive any too soon for us, boys?" The Sergeant
looked over his shoulder, and they grinned, their teeth flashing
white in their red, perspiring faces. Claude didn't wonder that
everybody along the route, even the babies, came out to see them;
he thought they were the finest sight in the world. This was the
first day they had worn their tin hats; Gerhardt had shown them
how to stuff grass and leaves inside to keep their heads cool.
When they fell into fours, and the band struck up as they
approached a town, Bert Fuller, the boy from Pleasantville on the
Platte, who had blubbered on the voyage over, was guide right,
and whenever Claude passed him his face seemed to say, "You won't
get anything on me in a hurry, Lieutenant!"
They made camp early in the afternoon, on a hill covered with
half-burned pines. Claude took Bert and Dell Able and Oscar the
Swede, and set off to make a survey and report the terrain.
Behind the hill, under the burned edge of the wood, they found an
abandoned farmhouse and what seemed to be a clean well.
It had a solid stone curb about it, and a wooden bucket hanging
by a rusty wire. When the boys splashed the bucket about, the
water sent up a pure, cool breath. But they were wise boys, and
knew where dead Prussians most loved to hide. Even the straw in
the stable they regarded with suspicion, and thought it would be
just as well not to bed anybody there.
Swinging on to the right to make their circuit, they got into
mud; a low field where the drain ditches had been neglected and
had overflowed. There they came upon a pitiful group of humanity,
bemired. A woman, ill and wretched looking, sat on a fallen log
at the end of the marsh, a baby in her lap and three children
hanging about her. She was far gone in consumption; one had only
to listen to her breathing and to look at her white, perspiring
face to feel how weak she was. Draggled, mud to the knees, she
was trying to nurse her baby, half hidden under an old black
shawl. She didn't look like a tramp woman, but like one who had
once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was still
young. The children were tired and discouraged. One little boy
wore a clumsy blue jacket, made from a French army coat. The
other wore a battered American Stetson that came down over his
ears. He carried, in his two arms, a pink celluloid clock. They
all looked up and waited for the soldiers to do something.
Claude approached the woman, and touching the rim of his helmet,
began: "Bonjour, Madame. Qu'est que c'est?"
She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only
able to gasp, "'Toinette, 'Toinette!"
'Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and
seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face
with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy,
crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced
than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at
making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign
soldiers,--spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.
She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty
farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night.
How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been
staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying
to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick,
presque morte and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard
people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their
own cellar,--and so could they if they once got there. The point
was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die
chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French
soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans
were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to
be toujours gentils.
While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to
howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl
shrugged. "Il est toujours en colère," she muttered. The woman
turned it around with difficulty--it seemed a big, heavy baby,
but white and sickly--and gave it the other breast. It began
sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were
famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this
exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men
away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her
after them.
"Il faut que votre mère--se reposer," he told her, with the grave
caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French
sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue
surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed
in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English,
Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind,
and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.