Martin, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft, woke
with a start.
"Say, Howe!" Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand. "I
think I heard a shell go over."
As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion that
shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face.
"Say, fellers, that was damn near," came a voice from the floor of the
barn.
"We'd better go over to the quarry."
"Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!"
A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.
"Gee, that was in the house behind us...."
"I smell gas."
"Ye damn fool, it's carbide."
"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas."
"All right, fellers, put on your masks."
Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely
with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the
stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in
a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched
the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept
up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked at
two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the
village on the other side of the valley.
"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice.
"Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?...
They must be tired like we are."
A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they
saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that
followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.
* * * * *
Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of
a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against
the mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men
chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he
worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell
trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died
away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and
shuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far above
his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow a
cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over
which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.
The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was a
small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of
a long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about
in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and
began talking briskly.
"We are exactly four hundred and five mètres from the Boche.... Five
hundred mètres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der
Kaiser.'"
"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la République', I should say."
"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in
Paris."
"The sky is very beautiful to-night."
"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusqués;
it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."
Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and
five mètres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was
the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous
stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had
been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that
zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the
crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and had
clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the
level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the
tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the
German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay
were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men
with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom
as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the
shell-holes.
"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a serious
case all day."
"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb....
You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."
"It was the Boche who did that.... We took that slope from them two
months ago.... How does it grow?"
"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.
He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the
sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept
asking himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoop
gently out of the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where he
could lie amid the amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously
down at the spinning ball of the earth? It might have beauty if he were
far enough away to clear his nostrils of the stench of pain.
"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much
nearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to
anyone else."
"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the
people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."
The little doctor nodded.
"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's
fighting about anything.... God, it's so hideously stupid!" cried
Martin, suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his passionate
revolt.
"Life is stupid," said the little doctor sententiously.
Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns.
"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'd
better get your car ready, my friend."
The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that led
to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the
lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of
the wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of
blood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle
of the man had been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals,
where the thighs had joined with a strong swerving of muscles to the
trunk, was a depression, a hollow pool of blood, that glinted a little
in the cold diffusion of grey light from the west.
* * * * *
The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed
down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green
smoke. At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and Tom
Randolph, Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nails
spread flat and his head resting on the table between them, so that
Martin could see the stiff black hair on top of his head and the dark
nape of his neck going into shadow under the collar of the flannel
shirt.
"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide and
no damned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.
"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were God
and could look at it like that ... Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred
so?"
"A question of taste ... as the lady said when she kissed the cow."
"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't
be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, like
Higgins, who believes that the Bible was written in God's own
handwriting and that the newspapers tell the truth."
"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those
hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."
"It is a stupid affair, _la vie_, as the doctor at P.1. said
yesterday...."
"Hell, yes...."
They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in
sparkling finger-like streams.
"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back his
head and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about what
happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"
"No."
"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plum-tree, a wonderfully nice place
near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane ... You know the
one that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at the
corner of the road.... Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look in
her eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' match
gettin' away from her."
"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman."
"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why down where I come from a drunken
mulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of not
wantin' your attentions." His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed his
deep ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set an
omelette before them.
"Voilà, messieurs," she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar's
head that she was serving.
Three French infantrymen came into the café, shaking the rain off their
shoulders.
"Nothing to drink but champagne at four francs fifty," shouted Howe.
"Dirty night out, isn't it?"
"We'll drink that, then!"
Howe and Randolph moved up and they all sat at the same table.
"Fortune of war?"
"Oh, the war, what do you think of the war?" cried Martin.
"What do you think of the peste? You think about saving your skin."
"What's amusing about us is that we three have all saved our skins
together," said one of the Frenchmen.
"Yes. We are of the same class," said another, holding up his thumb.
"Mobilised same day." He held up his first finger. "Same company." He
held up a second finger. "Wounded by the same shell.... Evacuated to the
same hospital. Convalescence at same time.... Réformé to the same depôt
behind the lines."
"Didn't all marry the same girl, did you, to make it complete?" asked
Randolph.
They all shouted with laughter until the glasses along the bar rang.
"You must be Athos, Porthos, and d'Artagnan."
"We are," they shouted.
"Some more champagne, madame, for the three musketeers," sang Randolph
in a sort of operatic yodle.
"All I have left is this," said the withered woman, setting a bottle
down on the table.
"Is that poison?"
"It's cognac, it's very good cognac," said the old woman seriously.
"C'est du cognac! Vive le roi cognac!" everybody shouted.
"_Au plein de mon cognac
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,
Au plein de mon cognac
Qu'il fait bon dormir._"
"Down with the war! Who can sing the 'Internationale'?"
"Not so much noise, I beg you, gentlemen," came the withered woman's
whining voice. "It's after hours. Last week I was fined. Next time I'll
be closed up."
The night was black when Martin and Randolph, after lengthy and
elaborate farewells, started down the muddy road towards the hospital.
They staggered along the slippery footpath beside the road, splashed
every instant with mud by camions, huge and dark, that roared grindingly
by. They ran and skipped arm-in-arm and shouted at the top of their
lungs:
"_Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu'il fait bon dormir._"
A stench of sweat and filth and formaldehyde caught them by the throat
as they went into the hospital tent, gave them a sense of feverish
bodies of men stretched all about them, stirring in pain.
* * * * *
"A car for la Bassée, Ambulance 4," said the orderly.
Howe got himself up off the hospital stretcher, shoving his flannel
shirt back into his breeches, put on his coat and belt and felt his way
to the door, stumbling over the legs of sleeping brancardiers as he
went. Men swore in their sleep and turned over heavily. At the door he
waited a minute, then shouted:
"Coming, Tom?"
"Too damn sleepy," came Randolph's voice from under a blanket.
"I've got cigarettes, Tom. I'll smoke 'em all up if you don't come."
"All right, I'll come."
"Less noise, name of God!" cried a man, sitting up on his stretcher.
After the hospital, smelling of chloride and blankets and reeking
clothes, the night air was unbelievably sweet. Like a gilt fringe on a
dark shawl, a little band of brightness had appeared in the east.
"Some dawn, Howe, ain't it?"
As they were going off, their motor chugging regularly, an orderly said:
"It's a special case. Go for orders to the commandant."
Colours formed gradually out of chaotic grey as the day brightened. At
the dressing-station an attendant ran up to the car.
"Oh, you're for the special case? Have you anything to tie a man with?"
"No, why?"
"It's nothing. He just tried to stab the sergeant-major."
The attendant raised a fist and tapped on his head as if knocking on a
door. "It's nothing. He's quieter now."
"What caused it?"
"Who knows? There is so much.... He says he must kill everyone...."
"Are you ready?"
A lieutenant of the medical corps came to the door and looked out. He
smiled reassuringly at Martin Howe. "He's not violent any more. And
we'll send two guardians."
A sergeant came out with a little packet which he handed to Martin.
"That's his. Will you give it to them at the hospital at Fourreaux? And
here's his knife. They can give it back to him when he gets better. He
has an idea he ought to kill everyone he sees.... Funny idea."
The sun had risen and shone gold across the broad rolling lands, so that
the hedges and the poplar-rows cast long blue shadows over the fields.
The man, with a guardian on either side of him who cast nervous glances
to the right and to the left, came placidly, eyes straight in front of
him, out of the dark interior of the dressing-station. He was a small
man with moustaches and small, good-natured lips puffed into an o-shape.
At the car he turned and saluted.
"Good-bye, my lieutenant. Thank you for your kindness," he said.
"Good-bye, old chap," said the lieutenant.
The little man stood up in the car, looking about him anxiously.
"I've lost my knife. Where's my knife?"
The guards got in behind him with a nervous, sheepish air. They answered
reassuringly, "The driver's got it. The American's got it."
"Good."
The orderly jumped on the seat with the two Americans to show the way.
He whispered in Martin's ear:
"He's crazy. He says that to stop the war you must kill everybody, kill
everybody."
* * * * *
In an open valley that sloped between hills covered with beech-woods,
stood the tall abbey, a Gothic nave and apse with beautifully traced
windows, with the ruin of a very ancient chapel on one side, and
crossing the back, a well-proportioned Renaissance building that had
been a dormitory. The first time that Martin saw the abbey, it towered
in ghostly perfection above a low veil of mist that made the valley seem
a lake in the shining moonlight. The lines were perfectly quiet, and
when he stopped the motor of his ambulance, he could hear the wind
rustling among the beech-woods. Except for the dirty smell of huddled
soldiers that came now and then in drifts along with the cool
wood-scents, there might have been no war at all. In the soft moonlight
the great traceried windows and the buttresses and the high-pitched roof
seemed as gorgeously untroubled by decay as if the carvings on the cusps
and arches had just come from under the careful chisels of the Gothic
workmen.
"And you say we've progressed," he whispered to Tom Randolph.
"God, it is fine."
They wandered up and down the road a long time, silently, looking at the
tall apse of the abbey, breathing the cool night air, moist with mist,
in which now and then was the huddled, troubling smell of soldiers. At
last the moon, huge and swollen with gold, set behind the wooded hills,
and they went back to the car, where they rolled up in their blankets
and went to sleep.
Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trap
door in the broken tile roof, from which you could climb to the
observation post in the lantern. Here, half on the roof and half on the
platform behind the trap-door, Martin would spend the long summer
afternoons when there was no call for the ambulance, looking at the
Gothic windows of the lantern and the blue sky beyond, where huge soft
clouds passed slowly over, darkening the green of the woods and of the
weed-grown fields of the valley with their moving shadows.
There was almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple of
times a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fives
of the battery behind the Abbey, and the woods would resound like a
shaken harp as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of the
hill that blocked the end of the valley where the Boches were.
Martin would sit and dream of the quiet lives the monks must have passed
in their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of the Argonne,
digging and planting in the rich lands of the valley, making flowers
bloom in the garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds of
sunflowers and orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of the
dormitory. In a room in the top of the house he had found a few torn
remnants of books; there must have been a library in the old days, rows
and rows of musty-smelling volumes in rich brown calf worn by use to a
velvet softness, and in cream-coloured parchment where the finger-marks
of generations showed brown; huge psalters with notes and chants
illuminated in green and ultramarine and gold; manuscripts out of the
Middle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure vivid colours;
lives of saints, thoughts polished by years of quiet meditation of old
divines; old romances of chivalry; tales of blood and death and love
where the crude agony of life was seen through a dawn-like mist of
gentle beauty.
"God! if there were somewhere nowadays where you could flee from all
this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous
reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred ..." he would say to
himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in
quaint letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the
deep-throated passionate chanting of the endless offices of the Church.
One afternoon towards evening as he lay on the tiled roof with his shirt
open so that the sun warmed his throat and chest, half asleep in the
beauty of the building and of the woods and the clouds that drifted
overhead, he heard a strain from the organ in the church: a few deep
notes in broken rhythm that filled him with wonder, as if he had
suddenly been transported back to the quiet days of the monks. The
rhythm changed in an instant, and through the squeakiness of shattered
pipes came a swirl of fake-oriental ragtime that resounded like mocking
laughter in the old vaults and arches. He went down into the church and
found Tom Randolph playing on the little organ, pumping desperately with
his feet.
"Hello! Impiety I call it; putting your lustful tunes into that pious
old organ."
"I bet the ole monks had a merry time, lecherous ole devils," said Tom,
playing away.
"If there were monasteries nowadays," said Martin, "I think I'd go into
one."
"But there are. I'll end up in one, most like, if they don't put me in
jail first. I reckon every living soul would be a candidate for either
one if it'd get them out of this God-damned war."
There was a shriek overhead that reverberated strangely in the vaults of
the church and made the swallows nesting there fly in and out through
the glassless windows. Tom Randolph stopped on a wild chord.
"Guess they don't like me playin'."
"That one didn't explode though."
"That one did, by gorry," said Randolph, getting up off the floor, where
he had thrown himself automatically. A shower of tiles came rattling off
the roof, and through the noise could be heard the frightened squeaking
of the swallows.
"I am afraid that winged somebody."
"They must have got wind of the ammunition dump in the cellar."
"Hell of a place to put a dressing-station--over an ammunition dump!"
The whitewashed room used as a dressing-station had a smell of blood
stronger than the chloride. A doctor was leaning over a stretcher on
which Martin caught a glimpse of two naked legs with flecks of blood on
the white skin, as he passed through on his way to the car.
"Three stretcher-cases for Les Islettes. Very softly," said the
attendant, handing him the papers.
Jolting over the shell-pitted road, the car wound slowly through
unploughed weed-grown fields. At every jolt came a rasping groan from
the wounded men.
As they came back towards the front posts again, they found all the
batteries along the road firing. The air was a chaos of explosions that
jabbed viciously into their ears, above the reassuring purr of the
motor. Nearly to the abbey a soldier stopped them.
"Put the car behind the trees and get into a dugout. They're shelling
the abbey."
As he spoke a whining shriek grew suddenly loud over their heads. The
soldier threw himself flat in the muddy road. The explosion brought
gravel about their ears and made a curious smell of almonds.
Crowded in the door of the dugout in the hill opposite they watched the
abbey as shell after shell tore through the roof or exploded in the
strong buttresses of the apse. Dust rose high above the roof and filled
the air with an odour of damp tiles and plaster. The woods resounded in
a jangling tremor, with the batteries that started firing one after the
other.
"God, I hate them for that!" said Randolph between his teeth.
"What do you want? It's an observation post."
"I know, but damn it!"
There was a series of explosions; a shell fragment whizzed past their
heads.
"It's not safe there. You'd better come in all the way," someone shouted
from within the dugout.
"I want to see; damn it.... I'm goin' to stay and see it out, Howe. That
place meant a hell of a lot to me." Randolph blushed as he spoke.
Another bunch of shells crashing so near together they did not hear the
scream. When the cloud of dust blew away, they saw that the lantern had
fallen in on the roof of the apse, leaving only one wall and the tracery
of a window, of which the shattered carving stood out cream-white
against the reddish evening sky.
There was a lull in the firing. A few swallows still wheeled about the
walls, giving shrill little cries.
They saw the flash of a shell against the sky as it exploded in the part
of the tall roof that still remained. The roof crumpled and fell in, and
again dust hid the abbey.
"Oh, I hate this!" said Tom Randolph. "But the question is, what's
happened to our grub? The popote is buried four feet deep in Gothic
art.... Damn fool idea, putting a dressing-station over an ammunition
dump."
"Is the car hit?" The orderly came up to them.
"Don't think so."
"Good. Four stretcher-cases for 42 at once."
* * * * *
At night in a dugout. Five men playing cards about a lamp-flame that
blows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs every now
and then down the mouth of the dugout and whirls round it like something
alive trying to beat a way out.
Each time the lamp blows the shadows of the five heads writhe upon the
corrugated tin ceiling. In the distance, like kettle-drums beaten for a
dance, a constant reverberation of guns.
Martin Howe, stretched out in the straw of one of the bunks, watches
their faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience to
play too. No, perhaps it is better to look on; it would be so silly to
be killed in the middle of one of those grand gestures one makes in
slamming the card down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all
the lives that must, in these last three years, have ended in that grand
gesture. It is too silly. He seems to see their poor lacerated souls,
clutching their greasy dog-eared cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and
there, in tobacco-stinking, sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the
little cafés behind the lines, sit in groups of five, shuffling,
dealing, taking tricks, always with the same slam of the cards on the
table, pausing now and then to scratch their louse-eaten flesh.
At this moment, how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretches
from Belfort to the sea, must be trying to cheat their boredom and their
misery with that grand gesture of slamming the cards down to take a
trick, while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of the
guns.
Martin lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling of
the dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in fantastic
shapes. Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when they
take a trick?