The squad of men to which Dorn belonged had to be on the lookout
continually for an attack that was inevitable. The Germans were feeling
out the line, probably to verify spy news of the United States troops
taking over a sector. They had not, however, made sure of this fact.
The gas-shells came over regularly, making life for the men a kind of
suffocation most of the time. And the great shells that blew enormous
holes in front and in back of their position never allowed a relaxation
from strain. Drawn and haggard grew the faces that had been so clean-cut
and brown and fresh.
* * * * *
One evening at mess, when the sector appeared quiet enough to permit of
rest, Rogers was talking to some comrades before the door of the dugout.
"It sure got my goat, that little promenade of ours last night over into
No Man's Land," he said. "We had orders to slip out and halt a German
patrol that was supposed to be stealing over to our line. We crawled on
our bellies, looking and listening every minute. If that isn't the
limit! My heart was in my mouth. I couldn't breathe. And for the first
moments, if I'd run into a Hun, I'd had no more strength than a rabbit.
But all seemed clear. It was not a bright night--sort of opaque and
gloomy--shadows everywhere. There wasn't any patrol coming. But Corporal
Owens thought he heard men farther on working with wire. We crawled some
more. And we must have got pretty close to the enemy lines--in fact, we
had--when up shot one of those damned calcium flares. We all burrowed
into the ground. I was paralyzed. It got as light as noon--strange
greenish-white flare. It magnified. Flat as I lay, I saw the German
embankments not fifty yards away. I made sure we were goners. Slowly the
light burned out. Then that machine-gun you all heard began to rattle.
Something queer about the way every shot of a machine-gun bites the air.
We heard the bullets, low down, right over us. Say, boys, I'd almost
rather be hit and have it done with!... We began to crawl back. I wanted
to run. We all wanted to. But Owens is a nervy guy and he kept
whispering. Another machine-gun cut loose, and bullets rained over us.
Like hail they hit somewhere ahead, scattering the gravel. We'd almost
reached our line when Smith jumped up and ran. He said afterward that he
just couldn't help himself. The suspense was awful. I know. I've been a
clerk in a bank! Get that? And there I was under a hail of Hun lead,
without being able to understand why, or feel that any time had passed
since giving up my job to go to war. Queer how I saw my old desk!...
Well, that's how Smith got his. I heard the bullets spat him, sort of
thick and soft.... Ugh!... Owens and I dragged him along, and finally
into the trench. He had a bullet through his shoulder and leg. Guess
he'll live, all right.... Boys, take this from me. Nobody can _tell_ you
what a machine-gun is like. A rifle, now, is not so much. You get shot
at, and you know the man must reload and aim. That takes time. But a
machine-gun! Whew! It's a comb--a fine-toothed comb--and you're the
louse it's after! You hear that steady rattle, and then you hear bullets
everywhere. Think of a man against a machine-gun! It's not a square
deal."
Dixon was one of the listeners. He laughed.
"Rogers, I'd like to have been with you. Next time I'll volunteer. You
had action--a run for your money. That's what I enlisted for. Standing
still--doing nothing but wait--that drives me half mad. My years of
football have made action necessary. Otherwise I go stale in mind and
body.... Last night, before you went on that scouting trip, I had been
on duty two hours. Near midnight. The shelling had died down. All became
quiet. No flares--no flashes anywhere. There was a luminous kind of glow
in the sky--moonlight through thin clouds. I had to listen and watch.
But I couldn't keep back my thoughts. There I was, a soldier, facing No
Man's Land, across whose dark space were the Huns we have come to regard
as devils in brutality, yet less than men.... And I thought of home. No
man knows what home really is until he stands that lonely midnight
guard. A shipwrecked sailor appreciates the comforts he once had; a
desert wanderer, lost and starving, remembers the food he once wasted; a
volunteer soldier, facing death in the darkness, thinks of his home! It
is a hell of a feeling!... And, thinking of home, I remembered my girl.
I've been gone four months--have been at the front seven days (or is it
seven years?) and last night in the darkness she came to me. Oh yes! she
was there! She seemed reproachful, as she was when she coaxed me not to
enlist. My girl was not one of the kind who sends her lover to war and
swears she will die an old maid unless he returns. Mine begged me to
stay home, or at least wait for the draft. But I wasn't built that way.
I enlisted. And last night I felt the bitterness of a soldier's fate.
All this beautiful stuff is bunk!... My girl is a peach. She had many
admirers, two in particular that made me run my best down the stretch.
One is club-footed. He couldn't fight. The other is all yellow. Him she
liked best. He had her fooled, the damned slacker.... I wish I could
believe I'd get safe back home, with a few Huns to my credit--the Croix
de Guerre--and an officer's uniform. That would be great. How I could
show up those fellows!... But I'll get killed--as sure as God made
little apples I'll get killed--and she will marry one of the men who
would not fight!"
It was about the middle of a clear morning, still cold, but the sun was
shining. Guns were speaking intermittently. Those soldiers who were off
duty had their gas-masks in their hands. All were gazing intently
upward.
Dorn sat a little apart from them. He, too, looked skyward, and he was
so absorbed that he did not hear the occasional rumble of a distant gun.
He was watching the airmen at work--the most wonderful and famous
feature of the war. It absolutely enthralled Dorn. As a boy he had loved
to watch the soaring of the golden eagles, and once he had seen a great
wide-winged condor, swooping along a mountain-crest. How he had envied
them the freedom of the heights--the loneliness of the unscalable
crags--the companionship of the clouds! Here he gazed and marveled at
the man-eagles of the air.
German planes had ventured over the lines, flying high, and English
planes had swept up to intercept them. One was rising then not far away,
climbing fast, like a fish-hawk with prey in its claws. Its color, its
framework, its propeller, and its aviator showed distinctly against the
sky. The buzzing, high-pitched drone of its motor floated down.
The other aeroplanes, far above, had lost their semblance to mechanical
man-driven machines. They were now the eagles of the air. They were
rising, circling, diving in maneuvers that Dorn knew meant pursuit. But
he could not understand these movements. To him the air-battle looked as
it must have looked to an Indian. Birds of prey in combat! Dorn recalled
verses he had learned as a boy, written by a poet who sang of future
wars in the air. What he prophesied had come true. Was there not a sage
now who could pierce the veil of the future and sing of such a thing as
sacred human life? Dorn had his doubts. Poets and dreamers appeared not
to be the men who could halt materialism. Strangely then, as Dorn gazed
bitterly up at these fierce fliers who fought in the heavens, he
remembered the story of the three wise men and of Bethlehem. Was it only
a story? Where on this sunny spring morning was Christ, and the love of
man for man?
At that moment one of the forward aeroplanes, which was drifting back
over the enemy lines, lost its singular grace of slow, sweeping
movement. It poised in the air. It changed shape. It pitched as if from
wave to wave of wind. A faint puff of smoke showed. Tiny specks, visible
to Dorn's powerful eyes, seemed to detach themselves and fall, to be
followed by the plane itself in sheer downward descent.
Dorn leaped to his feet. What a thrilling and terrible sight! His
comrades stood bareheaded, red faces uplifted, open-mouthed and wild
with excitement, not daring to disobey orders and yell at the top of
their lungs. Dorn felt, strong above the softened wonder and thought of
a moment back, a tingling, pulsating wave of gushing blood go over him.
Like his comrades, he began to wave his arms and stamp and bite his
tongue.
Swiftly the doomed plane swept down out of sight. Gone! At that instant
something which had seemed like a bird must have become a broken mass.
The other planes drifted eastward.
Dorn gasped, and broke the spell on him. He was hot and wet with sweat,
quivering with a frenzy. How many thousand soldiers of the Allies had
seen that downward flight of the boche? Dorn pitied the destroyed
airman, hated himself, and had all the fury of savage joy that had been
in his comrades.
* * * * *
Dorn, relieved from guard and firing-post, rushed back to the dugout. He
needed the dark of that dungeon. He crawled in and, searching out the
remotest, blackest corner, hidden from all human eyes, and especially
his own, he lay there clammy and wet all over, with an icy, sickening
rend, like a wound, in the pit of his stomach. He shut his eyes, but
that did not shut out what he saw. "_So help me God!_" he whispered to
himself.... Six endless months had gone to the preparation of a deed
that had taken one second! That transformed him! His life on earth, his
spirit in the beyond, could never be now what they might have been. And
he sobbed through grinding teeth as he felt the disintegrating,
agonizing, irremediable forces at work on body, mind, and soul.
He had blown out the brains of his first German.
Fires of hell, in two long lines, bordering a barren, ghastly, hazy
strip of land, burst forth from the earth. From holes where men hid
poured thunder of guns and stream of smoke and screeching of iron. That
worthless strip of land, barring deadly foes, shook as with repeated
earthquakes. Huge spouts of black and yellow earth lifted,
fountain-like, to the dull, heavy bursts of shells. Pound and jar,
whistle and whine, long, broken rumble, and the rattling concatenation
of quick shots like metallic cries, exploding hail-storm of iron in the
air, a desert over which thousands of puffs of smoke shot up and swelled
and drifted, the sliding crash far away, the sibilant hiss swift
overhead. Boom! Weeeee--eeeeooooo! from the east. Boom!
Weeeee--eeeeooooo! from the west.
At sunset there was no let-up. The night was all the more hideous. Along
the horizon flashed up the hot sheets of lightning that were not of a
summer storm. Angry, lurid, red, these upflung blazes and flames
illumined the murky sky, showing in the fitful and flickering intervals
wagons driving toward the front, and patrols of soldiers running toward
some point, and great upheavals of earth spread high.
This heavy cannonading died away in the middle of the night until an
hour before dawn, when it began again with redoubled fury and lasted
until daybreak.
Dawn came reluctantly, Dorn thought. He was glad. It meant a charge.
Another night of that hellish shrieking and bursting of shells would
kill his mind, if not his body. He stood on guard at a fighting-post.
Corporal Owens lay at his feet, wounded slightly. He would not retire.
As the cannons ceased he went to sleep. Rogers stood close on one side,
Dixon on the other. The squad had lived through that awful night.
Soldiers were bringing food and drink to them. All appeared grimly gay.
Dorn was not gay. But he knew this was the day he would laugh in the
teeth of death. A slumbrous, slow heat burned deep in him, like a
covered fire, fierce and hot at heart, awaiting the wind. Watching
there, he did not voluntarily move a muscle, yet all his body twitched
like that of the trained athlete, strained to leap into the great race
of his life.
An officer came hurrying through. The talking hushed. Men on guard,
backs to the trench, never moved their eyes from the forbidden land in
front. The officer spoke. Look for a charge! Reserves were close behind.
He gave his orders and passed on.
Then an Allied gun opened up with a boom. The shell moaned on over. Dorn
saw where it burst, sending smoke and earth aloft. That must have been a
signal for a bombardment of the enemy all along this sector, for big and
little guns began to thunder and crack.
The spectacle before Dorn's hard, keen eyes was one that he thought
wonderful. Far across No Man's Land, which sloped somewhat at that point
in the plain, he saw movement of troops and guns. His eyes were
telescopic. Over there the ground appeared grassy in places, with green
ridges rising, and patches of brush and straggling trees standing out
clearly. Faint, gray-colored squads of soldiers passed in sight with
helmets flashing in the sun; guns were being hauled forward; mounted
horsemen dashed here and there, vanishing and reappearing; and all
through that wide area of color and action shot up live black spouts of
earth crowned in white smoke that hung in the air after the earth fell
back. They were beautiful, these shell-bursts. Round balls of white
smoke magically appeared in the air, to spread and drift; long, yellow
columns or streaks rose here, and there leaped up a fan-shaped, dirty
cloud, savage and sinister; sometimes several shells burst close
together, dashing the upflung sheets of earth together and blending
their smoke; at intervals a huge, creamy-yellow explosion, like a
geyser, rose aloft to spread and mushroom, then to detach itself from
the heavier body it had upheaved, and float away, white and graceful, on
the wind.
Sinister beauty! Dorn soon lost sight of that. There came a gnawing at
his vitals. The far scene of action could not hold his gaze. That dark,
uneven, hummocky break in the earth, which was a goodly number of rods
distant, yet now seemed close, drew a startling attention. Dorn felt his
eyes widen and pop. Spots and dots, shiny, illusive, bobbed along that
break, behind the mounds, beyond the farther banks. A yell as from one
lusty throat ran along the line of which Dorn's squad held the center.
Dorn's sight had a piercing intensity. All was hard under his grip--his
rifle, the boards and bags against which he leaned. Corporal Owens rose
beside him, bareheaded, to call low and fiercely to his men.
The gray dots and shiny spots leaped up magically and appallingly into
men. German soldiers! Boches! Huns on a charge! They were many, but wide
apart. They charged, running low.
Machine-gun rattle, rifle-fire, and strangled shouts blended along the
line. From the charging Huns seemed to come a sound that was neither
battle-cry nor yell nor chant, yet all of them together. The gray
advancing line thinned at points opposite the machine-guns, but it was
coming fast.
Dorn cursed his hard, fumbling hands, which seemed so eager and fierce
that they stiffened. They burned, too, from their grip on the hot rifle.
Shot after shot he fired, missing. He could not hit a field full of
Huns. He dropped shells, fumbled with them at the breech, loaded wildly,
aimed at random, pulled convulsively. His brain was on fire. He had no
anger, no fear, only a great and futile eagerness. Yell and crack filled
his ears. The gray, stolid, unalterable Huns must be driven back. Dorn
loaded, crushed his rifle steady, pointed low at a great gray bulk, and
fired. That Hun pitched down out of the gray advancing line. The sight
almost overcame Dorn. Dizzy, with blurred eyes, he leaned over his gun.
His abdomen and breast heaved, and he strangled over his gorge. Almost
he fainted. But violence beside him somehow, great heaps of dust and
gravel flung over him, hoarse, wild yells in his ears, roused him. The
boches were on the line! He leaped up. Through the dust he saw charging
gray forms, thick and heavy. They plunged, as if actuated by one will.
Bulky blond men, ashen of face, with eyes of blue fire and brutal mouths
set grim--Huns!
Up out of the shallow trench sprang comrades on each side of Dorn. No
rats to be cornered in a hole! Dorn seemed drawn by powerful hauling
chains. He did not need to climb! Four big Germans appeared
simultaneously upon the embankment of bags. They were shooting. One
swung aloft an arm and closed fist. He yelled like a demon. He was a
bomb-thrower. On the instant a bullet hit Dorn, tearing at the side of
his head, stinging excruciatingly, knocking him down, flooding his face
with blood. The shock, like a weight, held him down, but he was not
dazed. A body, khaki-clad, rolled down beside him, convulsively flopped
against him. He bounded erect, his ears filled with a hoarse and
clicking din, his heart strangely lifting in his breast.
Only one German now stood upon the embankment of bags and he was the
threatening bomb-thrower. The others were down--gray forms wrestling
with brown. Dixon was lunging at the bomb-thrower, and, reaching him
with the bayonet, ran him through the belly. He toppled over with an
awful cry and fell hard on the other side of the wall of loaded bags.
The bomb exploded. In the streaky burst Dixon seemed to charge in
bulk--to be flung aside like a leaf by a gale.
Little Rogers had engaged an enemy who towered over him. They feinted,
swung, and cracked their guns together, then locked bayonets. Another
German striding from behind stabbed Rogers in the back. He writhed off
the bloody bayonet, falling toward Dorn, showing a white face that
changed as he fell, with quiver of torture and dying eyes.
That dormant inhibited self of Dorn suddenly was no more. Fast as a
flash he was upon the murdering Hun. Bayonet and rifle-barrel lunged
through him, and so terrible was the thrust that the German was thrown
back as if at a blow from a battering-ram. Dorn whirled the bloody
bayonet, and it crashed to the ground the rifle of the other German.
Dorn saw not the visage of the foe--only the thick-set body, and this he
ripped open in one mighty slash. The German's life spilled out horribly.
Dorn leaped over the bloody mass. Owens lay next, wide-eyed, alive, but
stricken. Purcell fought with clubbed rifle, backing away from several
foes. Brewer was being beaten down. Gray forms closing in! Dorn saw
leveled small guns,, flashes of red, the impact of lead striking him.
But he heard no shots. The roar in his ears was the filling of a gulf.
Out of that gulf pierced his laugh. Gray forms--guns--bullets--
bayonets--death--he laughed at them. His moment had come. Here
he would pay. His immense and terrible joy bridged the ages
between the past and this moment when he leaped light and swift,
like a huge cat, upon them. They fired and they hit, but Dorn sprang on,
tigerishly, with his loud and nameless laugh. Bayonets thrust at him
were straws. These enemies gave way, appalled. With sweep and lunge he
killed one and split a second's skull before the first had fallen. A
third he lifted and upset and gored, like a bull, in one single stroke.
The fourth and last of that group, screaming his terror and fury, ran in
close to get beyond that sweeping blade. He fired as he ran. Dorn
tripped him heavily, and he had scarcely struck the ground when that
steel transfixed his bulging throat.
Brewer was down, but Purcell had been reinforced. Soldiers in brown came
on the run, shooting, yelling, brandishing. They closed in on the
Germans, and Dorn ran into that mêlée to make one thrust at each gray
form he encountered.
Shriller yells along the line--American yells--the enemy there had given
ground! Dorn heard. He saw the gray line waver. He saw reserves running
to aid his squad. The Germans would be beaten back. There was whirling
blackness in his head through which he seemed to see. The laugh broke
hoarse and harsh from his throat. Dust and blood choked him.
Another gray form blocked his leaping way. Dorn saw only low down, the
gray arms reaching with bright, unstained blade. His own bloody bayonet
clashed against it, locked, and felt the helplessness of the arms that
wielded it. An instant of pause--a heaving, breathless instinct of
impending exhaustion--a moment when the petrific mace of primitive man
stayed at the return of the human--then with bloody foam on his lips
Dorn spent his madness.
A supple twist--the French trick--and Dorn's powerful lunge, with all
his ponderous weight, drove his bayonet through the enemy's lungs.
"_Ka--ma--rod!_" came the strange, strangling cry.
A weight sagged down on Dorn's rifle. He did not pull out the bayonet,
but as it lowered with the burden of the body his eyes, fixed at one
height, suddenly had brought into their range the face of his foe.
A boy--dying on his bayonet! Then came a resurrection of Kurt Dorn's
soul. He looked at what must be his last deed as a soldier. His mind
halted. He saw only the ghastly face, the eyes in which he expected to
see hate, but saw only love of life, suddenly reborn, suddenly surprised
at death.
"God save you, German! I'd give my life for yours!"
Too late! Dorn watched the youth's last clutching of empty fingers, the
last look of consciousness at his conqueror, the last quiver. The youth
died and slid back off the rigid bayonet. War of men!
A heavy thud sounded to the left of Dorn. A bursting flash hid the face
of his German victim. A terrific wind, sharp and hard as nails, lifted
Dorn into roaring blackness....