The lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the
white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and
scalloped and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men
passing. Now and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin
under a helmet, a head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a
pack alone beside which slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with
its loaf of bread and its pair of shoes and its pots and pans.
Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of
artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the
lamp into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the
village street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tails
from between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition,
huge waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment that
catches fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white
wall of the house.
"Put that light out. Name of God, do you want to have them start
chucking shells into here?" comes a voice shrill with anger. The brisk
trot of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour.
The door of the hut slams to and only a thin ray of orange light
penetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of harness
and clatter of iron and tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson after
caisson, waggon after waggon files by. Now and then the passing stops
entirely and matches flare where men light pipes and cigarettes. Coming
from the other direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions,
huge black oblongs, grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rear
and there are shouts and curses and clacking of reins in the darkness.
Far away where the lowering clouds meet the hills beyond the village a
white glare grows and fades again at intervals: star-shells.
* * * * *
"There's a most tremendous concentration of sanitary sections."
"You bet; two American sections and a French one in this village; three
more down the road. Something's up."
"There's goin' to be an attack at St. Mihiel, a Frenchman told me."
"I heard that the Germans were concentrating for an offensive in the
Four de Paris."
"Damned unlikely."
"Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hole with our
feet in the mud."
"They've got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing through
the middle of it."
"The main thing about this damned war is ennui--just plain boredom."
"Not forgetting the mud."
Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car. The
rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car and
on the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water,
blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growth
of weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering
through the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy of
camions went by and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white
streaming rain.
Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strange
nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.
"_Oh, I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away._"
The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their
knees and hummed the song.
The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the
floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly,
rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured
puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning
self-pity of the old coon song:
"_I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away._"
"Oh, God, something's got to happen soon."
Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section
leader splashed across the road.
"All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night."
"Yay. Where we goin'?"
"Orders haven't come yet. We're to be in readiness to leave at six
to-night...."
"I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentration
of sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me ..."
* * * * *
"They say they have beer," said the aspirant behind Martin in the long
line of men who waited in the hot sun for the copé to open, while the
dust the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the road
settled in a blanket over the village.
"Cold beer?"
"Of course not," said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliant
ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'm
getting it because it's rare, for sentimental reasons."
Martin laughed, looking in the man's brown face, a face in which all
past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and
eyes and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples.
"You don't understand that," said the aspirant again.
"Indeed I do."
Later they sat on the edge of the stone wellhead in the courtyard behind
the store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and
staring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked,
with its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down.
"Is it true that the ninety-second's going up to the lines to-night?"
"Yes, we're going up to make a little attack. Probably I'll come back in
your little omnibus."
"I hope you won't."
"I'd be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. This
is the first time I've gone up to the front that I didn't expect to be
killed. So it'll probably happen."
Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at
ease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought iron
support for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily-veined
hands. Dead he would be different. Martin's mind could hardly grasp the
connection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughts
and desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his
arm round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for
long walks, with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night
drinking and talking--and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform
half-buried in the mud of ditches.
"Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fine
May morning?" asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if he
had guessed Martin's thoughts.
"I wonder what they think of it."
"It's not that I'm resigned.... Don't think that. Resignation is too
easy. That's why the herd can be driven by a boy of six ... or a prime
minister!"
Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand were
squeezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel the
smooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would that
feel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? A
momentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomach
contract with nausea.
"I'm not resigned either," he shouted in a laugh. "I am going to do
something some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in all
the circles of hell."
"I'd play the part of Virgil pretty well," said the aspirant, "but I
suppose Virgil was a staff officer."
"I must go," said Martin. "My name's Martin Howe, S.S.U. 84."
"Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You'll
probably carry me back in your little omnibus."
* * * * *
When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the village
square, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:
"D.J.'s to-morrow."
"What's that?"
"The attack. It's to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions are
going to be given out to-night."
A detonation behind them was like a blow on the head, making their
ear-drums ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled to
the ground.
"The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out of
you."
"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"
"No."
A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had
been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from
him.
"It's put off," he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D.J.'s not
till day after to-morrow at four-twenty. But to-morrow we're going up to
relieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They say
it's hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell at
all. The other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them
have broken down. The posts are shelled all the time."
"Great," said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time."
There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a
heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed
amid the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress
tree at the other end of the village street.
"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin.
"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some."
* * * * *
It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed the
cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen
crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky
where the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam.
The rain made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from
the cracked feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure
hung out from the tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of
the rain. Martin was wiping the mud from his hands after changing a
wheel. He stared curiously at the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes
that had meant for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of
pain. Suddenly he noticed that where the crown of thorns had been about
the forehead of the Christ someone had wound barbed wire. He smiled, and
asked the swaying figure in his mind:
"And You, what do You think of it?"
For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.
He leaned over to crank the car.
The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops
marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery
sunset. Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat
and misery of troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained
and colourless and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their
necks and their backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the
helmets, tilted to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like the
face of the figure that dangled from the cross.
Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came
occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads
at the edge of the woods.
Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the
column.
One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of
the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up
at the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the
sharp twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.
The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross
with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross
fell forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.
* * * * *
The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the
bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire
with a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then
up the hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green
and gold in the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs
covered with branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors
decorated with rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters
made of wattled sticks, _Camp des Pommiers_.
A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men
stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and
splashing in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the
pong, pong, pong of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the
rustling trees.
"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia," said Tom Randolph,
blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a
pole between them get out of the way.
The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and, turning
into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at the
turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken
and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped
off halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and
of turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.
Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with their
great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the
direction of the lines.
At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a
grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of
their section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to
occasional shells whining far overhead. All through the wood was a
continuous ping, pong, ping of batteries, with the crash of a big gun
coming now and then like the growl of a bull-frog among the sing-song of
small toads in a pond at night.
Through the trees from where they lay they could see the close-packed
wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth,
and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled
carts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and
unloaded and dragged away again.
* * * * *
Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the woodland
road, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and cauldrons
steaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two men in
heavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's seat.
On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up,
slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise.
Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. A
louder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a new
whirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges along
the rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hind
wheels spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as another
roar comes behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on,
speeding through the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martin
remembers the beating legs of a mule rolling on its back on the side of
the road and, steaming in the fresh morning air, the purple and yellow
and red of its ripped belly.
"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it," says Randolph,
drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again.
* * * * *
The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow leaping
flames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of a
shell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragments
swishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in the
direction of the trenches, a white star-shell falls slowly, making the
trees and the guns among their tangle of hiding branches cast long
green-black shadows, drowning the wood in a strange glare of desolation.
"Where the devil's the abri?"
Everything drowned in the detonations of three guns, one after the
other, so near as to puff hot air in their faces in the midst of the
blinding concussion.
"Look, Tom, this is foolish; the abri's right here."
"I haven't got it in my pocket, Howe. Damn those guns."
Again everything is crushed in the concussion of the guns.
They throw themselves on the ground as a shell shrieks and explodes.
There is a moment's pause, and gravel and bits of bark tumble about
their heads.
"We've got to find that abri. I wish I hadn't lost my flashlight."
"Here it is! No, that stinks too much. Must be the latrine."
"Say, Tom."
"Here."
"Damn, I ran into a tree. I found it."
"All right. Coming."
Martin held out his hand until Randolph bumped into it; then they
stumbled together down the rough wooden steps, pulled aside the blanket
that served to keep the light in, and found themselves blinking in the
low tunnel of the abri.
Brancardiers were asleep in the two tiers of bunks that filled up the
sides, and at the table at the end a lieutenant of the medical corps was
writing by the light of a smoky lamp.
"They are landing some round here to-night," he said, pointing out two
unoccupied bunks. "I'll call you when we need a car."
As he spoke, in succession the three big guns went off. The concussion
put the lamp out.
"Damn," said Tom Randolph.
The lieutenant swore and struck a match.
"The red light of the poste de secours is out, too," said Martin.
"No use lighting it again with those unholy mortars.... It's idiotic to
put a poste de secours in the middle of a battery like this."
The Americans lay down to try to sleep. Shell after shell exploded round
the dugout, but regularly every few minutes came the hammer blows of the
mortars, half the time putting the light out.
A shell explosion seemed to split the dugout and a piece of éclat
whizzed through the blanket that curtained off the door. Someone tried
to pick it up as it lay half-buried in the board floor, and pulled his
fingers away quickly, blowing on them. The men turned over in the bunks
and laughed, and a smile came over the drawn green face of a wounded man
who sat very quiet behind the lieutenant, staring at the smoky flame of
the lamp.
The curtain was pulled aside and a man staggered in holding with the
other hand a limp arm twisted in a mud-covered sleeve, from which blood
and mud dripped on to the floor.
"Hello, old chap," said the doctor quietly. A smell of disinfectant
stole through the dugout.
Faint above the incessant throbbing of explosions, the sound of a claxon
horn.
"Ha, gas," said the doctor. "Put on your masks, children." A man went
along the dugout waking those who were asleep and giving out fresh
masks. Someone stood in the doorway blowing a shrill whistle, then there
was again the clamour of a claxon near at hand.
The band of the gas mask was tight about Martin's forehead, biting into
the skin.
He and Randolph sat side by side on the edge of the bunk, looking out
through the crinkled isinglass eyepieces at the men in the dugout, most
of whom had gone to sleep again.
"God, I envy a man who can snore through a gas-mask," said Randolph.
Men's heads had a ghoulish look, strange large eyes and grey oilcloth
flaps instead of faces.
Outside the constant explosions had given place to a series of swishing
whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less
regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a
shell, and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns.
In the dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, everyone
was quiet.
Several stretchers with wounded men on them were brought in and laid in
the end of the dugout.
Gradually, as the bombardment continued, men began sliding into the
dugout, crowding together, touching each other for company, speaking in
low voices through their masks.
"A mask, in the name of God, a mask!" a voice shouted, breaking into a
squeal, and an unshaven man, with mud caked in his hair and beard, burst
through the curtain. His eyelids kept up a continual trembling and the
water streamed down both sides of his nose.
"O God," he kept talking in a rasping whisper, "O God, they're all
killed. There were six mules on my waggon and a shell killed them all
and threw me into the ditch. You can't find the road any more. They're
all killed."
An orderly was wiping his face as if it were a child's.
"They're all killed and I lost my mask.... O God, this gas ..."
The doctor, a short man, looking like a gnome in his mask with its
wheezing rubber nosepiece, was walking up and down with short, slow
steps.
Suddenly, as three soldiers came in, drawing the curtain aside, he
shouted in a shrill, high-pitched voice:
"Keep the curtain closed! Do you want to asphyxiate us?"
He strode up to the newcomers, his voice strident like an angry woman's.
"What are you doing here? This is the poste de secours. Are you
wounded?"
"But, my lieutenant, we can't stay outside ..."
"Where's your own cantonment? You can't stay here; you can't stay here,"
he shrieked.
"But, my lieutenant, our dugout's been hit."
"You can't stay here. You can't stay here. There's not enough room for
the wounded. Name of God!"
"But, my lieutenant ..."
"Get the hell out of here, d'you hear?"
The men began stumbling out into the darkness, tightening the
adjustments of their masks behind their heads.
The guns had stopped firing. There was nothing but the constant swishing
and whistling of gas-shells, like endless pails of dirty water being
thrown on gravel.
"We've been at it three hours," whispered Martin to Tom Randolph.
"God, suppose these masks need changing."
The sweat from Martin's face steamed in the eyepieces, blinding him.
"Any more masks?" he asked.
A brancardier handed him one. "There aren't any more in the abri."
"I have some more in the car," said Martin.
"I'll get one," cried Randolph, getting to his feet.
They started out of the door together. In the light that streamed out as
they drew the flap aside they saw a tree opposite them. A shell
exploded, it seemed, right on top of them; the tree rose and bowed
towards them and fell.
"Are you all there, Tom?" whispered Martin, his ears ringing.
"Bet your life."
Someone pulled them back into the abri. "Here; we've found another."
Martin lay down on the bunk again, drawing with difficulty each breath.
His lips had a wet, decomposed feeling.
At the wrist of the arm he rested his head on, the watch ticked
comfortably.
He began to think how ridiculous it would be if he, Martin Howe, should
be extinguished like this. The gas-mask might be defective.
God, it would be silly.
Outside the gas-shells were still coming in. The lamp showed through a
faint bluish haze. Everyone was still waiting.
Another hour.
Martin began to recite to himself the only thing he could remember, over
and over again in time to the ticking of his watch.
"_Ah, sunflower, weary of time.
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest ..._"
"One, two, three, four," he counted the shells outside exploding at
irregular intervals.
There were periods of absolute silence, when he could hear batteries
pong, pong, pong in the distance.
He began again.
"_Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun
In search of that far golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done._
"_Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go._"
Whang, whang, whang; the battery alongside began again, sending out the
light. Someone pulled the blanket aside. A little leprous greyness
filtered into the dugout.
"Ah, it's getting light."
The doctor went out and they could hear his steps climbing up to the
level of the ground.
Howe saw a man take his mask off and spit.
"Oh, God, a cigarette!" Tom Randolph cried, pulling his mask off. The
air of the woods was fresh and cool outside. Everything was lost in mist
that filled the shell-holes as with water and wreathed itself
fantastically about the shattered trunks of trees. Here and there was
still a little greenish haze of gas. It cut their throats and made their
eyes run as they breathed in the cool air of the dawn.
* * * * *
Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the
yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle
of wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long
rutted roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked
woods in the yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses of
telephone wires. Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against the
ardent yellow sky, and twining among the fantastic black leafless trees,
the greenish wraiths of gas. Along the roads camions overturned, dead
mules tangled in their traces beside shattered caissons, huddled bodies
in long blue coats half buried in the mud of the ditches.
"We've got to pass.... We've got five very bad cases."
"Impossible."
"We've got to pass.... Sacred name of God!"
"But it is impossible. Two camions are blocked across the road and there
are three batteries of seventy-fives waiting to get up the road."
Long lines of men on horseback with gas-masks on, a rearing of
frightened horses and jingle of harness.
"Talk to 'em, Howe, for God's sake; we've got to get past."
"I'm doing the best I can, Tom."
"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"
"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in this
hollow."
"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way."
"But they can't."
"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel."
"No, sit still and don't get excited."
"You're the one's getting excited."
"Damn this gas."
"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I
have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to
get by."
"God damn him, tell him to hurry."
"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake."
"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask."
"Hah, that did for the two back horses."
"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his
thigh ripped up."
"No room, no room."
"He'll have to go to a poste de secours."
The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener
on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the
strands of barbed wire and the rows of shells.
At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are
feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling
of blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.
* * * * *
Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars spit
yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations.
Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher,
while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except
when the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of
the man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit
of blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the
stretcher with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of
the car, his knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the
stretcher, with his chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm
stretched down to keep the limp bandaged leg still.
The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling with
an articulate groan.
"Softly.... Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"
"Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm
in a desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of
blood and filth is misery in his nostrils.
"Softly.... Softly.... Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid the
bubbling breath.
Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of
the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest,
trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from
bouncing in the broken stretcher.
"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly,
as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the
lantern. "He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."