On the way he tried to call up half-remembered snatches of military
lore.
If only he did not disgrace them by a blunder!
He had talked enough to soldiers, French and American, in the last year:
he recalled odd bits of professional wisdom, but he was too excited to
piece them together. He was not in the least afraid of being afraid, but
his heart sank at the dread of doing something stupid, inopportune,
idiotic. His envy of the youths beside him turned to veneration. They
had all been in the front line, and knew its vocabulary, its dangers and
its dodges.
All he could do was to watch and imitate....
Presently they were all tumbled out of the motors and drawn up by the
roadside. An officer bawled unintelligible orders, and the men executed
mysterious movements in obedience.
Troy crept close to the nearest soldier, and copied his gestures
awkwardly--but no one noticed. Night had fallen, and he was thankful for
the darkness. Perhaps by to-morrow morning he would have picked up a few
of their tricks. Meanwhile, apparently, all he had to do was to march,
march, march, at a sort of break-neck trot that the others took as
lightly as one skims the earth in a dream. If it had not been for his
pumping heart and his aching bursting feet, Troy at moments would have
thought it was a dream....
Rank by rank they pressed forward in the night toward a sky-line torn
with intermittent flame.
"We're going toward a battle," Troy sang to himself, "toward a battle,
toward a battle...." But the words meant no more to him than the
doggerel the soldier was chanting at his elbow.
* * * * *
They were in a wood, slipping forward cautiously, beating their way
through the under-growth. The night had grown cloudy, but now and then
the clouds broke, and a knot of stars clung to a branch like swarming
bees.
At length a halt was called in a clearing, and then the group to which
Troy had attached himself was ordered forward. He did not understand the
order, but seeing the men moving he followed, like a mascot dog trotting
after its company, and they began to beat their way onward, still more
cautiously, in little crawling lines of three or four. It reminded Troy
of "playing Indian" in his infancy.
"Careful ... watch out for 'em ..." the soldier next to him whispered,
clutching his arm at a noise in the underbrush; and Troy's heart jerked
back violently, though his legs were still pressing forward.
They were here, then: they might be close by in the blackness, behind
the next tree-hole, in the next clump of bushes--the destroyers of
France, old M. Gantier's murderers, the enemy to whom Paul Gantier had
given his life! These thoughts slipped confusedly through Troy's mind,
scarcely brushing it with a chill wing. His main feeling was one of a
base physical fear, and of a newly-awakened moral energy which had the
fear by the throat and held it down with shaking hands. Which of the two
would conquer, how many yards farther would the resolute Troy drag on
the limp coward through this murderous wood? That was the one thing that
mattered....
At length they dropped down into a kind of rocky hollow overhung with
bushes, and lay there, finger on trigger, hardly breathing. "Sleep a bit
if you can--you look beat," whispered the friendly soldier.
_Sleep!_
Troy's mind was whirling like a machine in a factory blazing with
lights. His thoughts rushed back over the miles he had travelled since
he had caught up the rifle by the roadside.
"My God!" he suddenly thought, "what am I doing here, anyhow? I'm a
deserter."
Yes: that was the name he would go by if ever his story became known.
And how should it not become known? He had deserted--deserted not only
his job, and his ambulance, and Jacks, who might come back at any
moment--it was a dead certainty to him now that Jacks would come
back--but also (incredible perfidy!) the poor worn-out old couple and
the wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance. He, Troy
Belknap, United States Army Ambulance driver, and sworn servant of
France, had deserted three sick and helpless people who, if things
continued to go badly, would almost certainly fall into the hands of the
Germans.... It was too horrible to think of, and so, after a minute or
two, he ceased to think of it--at least with the surface of his mind.
"If it's a court-martial it's a court-martial," he reflected; and began
to stretch his ears again for the sound of men slipping up in the
darkness through the bushes....
But he was really horribly tired, and in the midst of the tension the
blaze of lights in his head went out, and he fell into a half-conscious
doze. When he started into full consciousness again the men were
stirring, and he became aware that the sergeant was calling for
volunteers.
Volunteers for what? He didn't know and was afraid to ask. But it became
clear to him that the one chance to wash his guilt away (was that funny
old-fashioned phrase a quotation, and where did it come from?) was to
offer himself for the job, whatever it might be.
The decision once taken, he became instantly calm, happy and alert. He
observed the gesture made by the other volunteers and imitated it. It
was too dark for the sergeant to distinguish one man from another, and
without comment he let Troy fall into the line of men who were creeping
up out of the hollow.
The awful cannonade had ceased, and as they crawled along single file
between the trees the before-dawn twitter of birds rained down on them
like dew, and the woods smelt like the woods at home.
They came to the end of the trees, and guessed that the dark wavering
wall ahead was the edge of a wheat-field. Some one whispered that the
Marne was just beyond the wheat-field, and that the red flares they saw
must be over Château-Thierry.
The momentary stillness laid a reassuring touch on Troy's nerves, and he
slipped along adroitly at the tail of the line, alert but cool. Far off
the red flares still flecked the darkness, but they did not frighten
him. He said to himself: "People are always afraid in their first
battle. I'm not the least afraid, so I suppose this is not a battle" ...
and at the same moment there was a small shrieking explosion followed
by a horrible rattle of projectiles that seemed to spring up out of the
wheat at their feet.
The men dropped on their bellies and crawled away from it, and Troy
crawled after, sweating with fear. He had not looked back, but he knew
that some of the men must be lying where they had dropped, and suddenly
it occurred to him that it was his business to go and see....
Was it, though? Or would that be disobeying orders again?
The Ambulance driver's instinct awoke in him, and he did not stop to
consider, but turned and crawled back, straight back to the place that
the horrible explosion had come from. The firing had stopped, but in the
thin darkness he saw a body lying in front of him in the flattened
wheat. He looked in the direction from which he had come, and saw that
the sergeant and the rest of the men were disappearing to the right;
then he ramped forward again, forward and forward, till he touched the
arm of the motionless man and whispered: "Hi, kid, it's me...."
He tried to rouse the wounded man, to pull him forward, to tow him like
a barge along the beaten path in the wheat. But the man groaned and
resisted. He was evidently in great pain, and Troy, whom a year's
experience in ambulance work had enlightened, understood that he must
either be carried away or left where he was.
To carry him it was necessary to stand up, and the night was growing
transparent, and the wheat was not more than waist high.
Troy raised his head an inch or two and looked about him. In the east,
beyond the wheat, a pallor was creeping upward, drowning the last
stars. Any one standing up would be distinctly visible against that
pallor. With a sense of horror and reluctance and dismay he lifted the
wounded man and stood up. As he did so he felt a small tap on his back,
between the shoulders, as if some one had touched him from behind. He
half turned to see who it was, and doubled up, slipping down with the
wounded soldier in his arms.