"So you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"
Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of
grease on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his
knees.
"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."
They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred
everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road
beneath them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor-trucks.
The wind came to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of
motors.
"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one
morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we
talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was
silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"
"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."
He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.
"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.... Somebody ought to write a book
called _Heroisms of the Great War_...."
"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do it
yourself, Will. But go on."
The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hills
and the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flying
low passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out all
other sound.
"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and a
big 'V.' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time
because lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He tried
giving dinners to the General Staff and everything, but that didn't seem
to work. So there was nothing to it but to get wounded. So he took to
going to the front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of a
quiet sector and no shells ever came within a mile of it. At last
somebody made a mistake and a little Austrian eighty-eight came tumbling
in and popped about fifty yards from his staff car. He showed the most
marvellous presence of mind, 'cause he clapped his hand over his eye and
sank back in the seat with a groan. The doctor asked what was the
matter, but old Duval just kept his hand tight over his eye and said,
'Nothing, nothing; just a scratch,' and went off to inspect the posts.
Of course the posts didn't need inspecting. And he rode round all day
with a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the other. But
never would he let the doctor even peep at it. Next morning he came out
with a bandage round his head as big as a sheik's turban. He went to see
headquarters in that get-up and lunched with the staff-officers. Well,
he got his Croix de Guerre all right--cited for assuring the evacuation
of the wounded under fire and all the rest of it."
"Some bird. He'll probably get to be a general before the war's over."
Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottle
listlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case and
broke.
"But, Will, you can't like this," he said. "It's all so like an
ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment."
"I suppose it is ..." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the grease
on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand. "Damn those
dirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is that life was
so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year in an
office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump."
"Look," said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring straight
up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting."
They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits of
mica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white and
others black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel from
anti-aircraft guns.
The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow
larger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished.
The falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, then
stopped suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the
hills, leaving an irregular trail of smoke.
"More garbage," said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet.
* * * * *
"Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!"
"They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie's
bringing in."
There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among the
trees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back.
Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree,
looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there was
another sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud that
suddenly spread and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took off
his helmet and examined it quizzically.
"Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet."
Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that had
rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet.
"God damn, it's hot," he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding's
keepings." He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter.
"That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom."
"You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?"
"Damn hog."
Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he heard
a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with
the crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brown
face with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches.
"A dirty business," he said. "It's idiotic.... Name of a dog!"
Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as a
shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road.
"Now look at that." The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've broken
the bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic."
"Been on permission?"
"Don't I look it?"
They sat at the top of the steps again; the man took out bits of wet
glass dripping red wine from his little bag, swearing all the while.
"I was bringing it to the little captain. He's a nice little old chap,
the little captain, and he loves good wine."
"Bordeaux?"
"Can't you smell it? It's Medoc, 1900, from my own vines.... Look, taste
it, there's still a little." He held up the neck of the bottle and
Martin took a sip.
The artilleryman drank the rest of it, twisted his long moustaches and
heaved a deep sigh.
"Go there, my poor good old wine." He threw the remnants of the bottle
into the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the road. "Oh, this is
a dirty business! I am a Gascon.... I like to live." He put a dirty
brown hand on Martin's arm.
"How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five."
"I am twenty-four. Look at the picture." From a tattered black note-book
held together by an elastic band he pulled a snapshot of a jolly-looking
young man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top of a
wide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tugging
at one of his long moustaches. "Then I was twenty. It's the war." He
shrugged his shoulders and put the picture carefully back into his
inside pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"
"You must have had a tough time."
"It's just that people aren't meant for this sort of thing," said the
artilleryman quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see the
worse it is. Then you end by going crazy. Oh, it's idiotic!"
"How did you find things at home?"
"Oh, at home! Oh, what do I care about that now? They get on without
you.... But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hard
on the vines and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a horse and carriage. I
had the best-looking rig in the department. Sunday it was fun; we'd play
bowls and I'd ride about with my wife. Oh, she was nice in those days!
She was young and fat and laughed all the time. She was something a man
could put his arms around, she was. We'd go out in my rig. It was
click-clack of the whip in the air and off we were in the broad road....
Sacred name of a pig, that one was close.... And the Marquis of
Montmarieul had a rig, too, but not so good as mine, and my horse would
always pass his in the road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour to
have common people like us pass him in the road.... Boom, there's
another.... And the Marquis now is nicely embusqué in the automobile
service. He is stationed at Versailles.... And look at me.... But what
do I care about all that now?"
"But after the war ..."
"After the war?" He spat savagely on the first step of the dugout. "They
learn to get on without you."
"But we'll be free to do as we please."
"We'll never forget."
"I shall go to Spain ..." A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin's ear,
cutting off the sentence.
"Name of God! It's getting hot.... Spain: I know Spain." The
artilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping his
fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst
down the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of
fragments.
"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la la
la-la-la-la, la-la la," he sang, snapping his fingers.
He stopped and spat again.
"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go.... Say,
let's change knives--a little souvenir."
"Great."
"Good luck."
The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.
* * * * *
Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees
stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled
like leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and
there guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green
cheese-cloth, and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The
ambulance waits by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans
and brass shell-cases, while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend
over a man on a stretcher laid among the underbrush. The man groans and
there is a sound of ripping bandages. On the other side of the road a
fallen mule feebly wags its head from side to side, a mass of purple
froth hanging from its mouth and wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.
There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the
smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe
glances round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of
strange grey men whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of
men from the moon in a fairy tale.
"Why, they're Germans," he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."
"Ah, they're prisoners." The doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.
The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road, and
piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.
"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and eyes
that burn out of black sockets.
"How should I know?"
"Many prisoners?"
"How should I know?"
* * * * *
The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting on
a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board
propped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri was
excavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station
and of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movable
kitchen not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapple
speared with a knife out of a can. In their manner there is something
that makes Martin see vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a
table under the awning of a café on the boulevards. It has a leisurely
ceremoniousness, an ease that could exist nowhere else.
"No, my friend," the doctor is saying, "I do not think that an
apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palæolithic man."
"But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific people sometimes
lose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on their
scientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?"
"Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them."
"There are other ways," says the aumonier, smiling.
"One moment...." From under the packing-box the captain produced a small
bottle of anisette. "You'll have a little glass, won't you?"
"With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette."
"But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example." ... A
shell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind the
dugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few
bits of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "For
example, our life here, which is, as was the life of palæolithic man,
taken up only with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelming
odds. You know yourself that it is not conducive to religion or any
emotion except that of preservation."
"I hardly admit that.... Ah, I saved it," the aumonier announces,
catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. An
exploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower
of earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.
"I must go and see if anyone was hurt," says the aumonier, clambering up
the clay bank to the level of the ground; "but you will admit, my
captain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to the
fundamental feelings of religion."
"My dear friend, I admit nothing.... Till this evening, good-bye." He
waves his hand and goes into the dugout.
* * * * *
Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of a
deserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a dripping
camion passed along the road, slithering through the mud.
"This is the last summer of the war.... It must be," said the little man
with large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat on
Martin's left.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Everyone feels like that."
"I don't see," said Martin, "why it shouldn't last for ten or twenty
years. Wars have before...."
"How long have you been at the front?"
"Six months, off and on."
"After another six months you'll know why it can't go on."
"I don't know; it suits me all right," said the man on the other side of
Martin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. "Of course, I don't
like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to
it."
"But you are an Alsatian; you don't care."
"I was a baker. They're going to send me to Dijon soon to bake army
bread. It'll be a change. There'll be wine and lots of little girls.
Good God, how drunk I'll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with the
women...."
"I should just like to get home and not be ordered about," said the
first man. "I've been lucky, though," he went on; "I've been kept most
of the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once."
"When was that?" asked Martin.
"Near Mont Cornélien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I was
running and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Mon
ami, mon ami,' in French. I ran on because I couldn't stop, and I heard
my bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over something
and fell down."
"You were scared," said the Alsatian.
"Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a
thunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouth
open and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know
you have to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet
out."
"And if you're good at it," cried the Alsatian, "you ought to yank it
out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they
gave me the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at
drill."
"Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him," went on the other Frenchman.
"When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I have
it." He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he took
a photograph and a bunch of pictures. "Look, this photograph was there,
too. It hurt my heart. You see, it's a woman and two little girls. They
look so nice.... It's strange, but I have two children, too, only one's
a boy. I lay down on the ground beside him--I was all in--and listened
to the machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wished
I'd let him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn't it?"
"It's idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them,
the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I've had since the war began,
except my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. I
wonder where he got it, the old corpse-stripper."
"Oh, it's shameful! I am ashamed of being a man. Oh, the shame, the
shame ..." The other man buried his face in his hands.
"I wish they were serving out gniolle for an attack right now," said the
Alsatian, "or the gniolle without the attack 'd be better yet."
"Wait here," said Martin, "I'll go round to the copé and get a bottle of
fizzy. We'll drink to peace or war, as you like. Damn this rain!"
* * * * *
"It's a shame to bury those boots," said the sergeant of the
stretcher-bearers.
From the long roll of blanket on the ground beside the hastily-dug grave
protruded a pair of high boots, new and well polished as if for parade.
All about the earth was scarred with turned clay like raw wounds, and
the tilting arms of little wooden crosses huddled together, with here
and there a bent wreath or a faded bunch of flowers.
Overhead in the stripped trees a bird was singing.
"Shall we take them off? It's a shame to bury a pair of boots like
that."
"So many poor devils need boots."
"Boots cost so dear."
Already two men were lowering the long bundle into the grave.
"Wait a minute; we've got a coffin for him."
A white board coffin was brought.
The boots thumped against the bottom as they put the big bundle in.
An officer strode into the enclosure of the graveyard, flicking his
knees with a twig.
"Is this Lieutenant Dupont?" he asked of the sergeant.
"Yes, my lieutenant."
"Can you see his face?" The officer stooped and pulled apart the blanket
where the head was.
"Poor René," he said. "Thank you. Good-bye," and strode out of the
graveyard.
The yellowish clay fell in clots on the boards of the coffin. The
sergeant bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening his book with
a vaguely professional air.
"It was a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays," said
the sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the little
broad shanty they used as a morgue.
* * * * *
Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shell
remained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches of
white and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass and
the intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was no
longer full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it.
The place smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down on
the grass where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain,
you could see nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin
Howe and Tom Randolph would spend there the quiet afternoons when they
were off duty, sleeping in the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily,
pointing out to each other tiny things, the pattern of snail-shells, the
glitter of insects' wings, colours, fragrances that made vivid for them
suddenly beauty and life, all that the shells that shrieked overhead, to
explode on the road behind them, threatened to wipe out.
One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face and
aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.
"Chef says we may go en repos in three days," he said, throwing himself
on the ground beside the other two.
"We've heard that before," said Tom Randolph. "Division hasn't started
out yet, ole boy; an' we're the last of the division."
"God, I'll be glad to go.... I'm dead," said Russell.
"I was up all last night with dysentery."
"So was I.... It was not funny; first it'd be vomiting, and then
diarrhoea, and then the shells'd start coming in. Gave me a merry time
of it."
"They say it's the gas," said Martin.
"God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it," said Russell, stroking his
forehead with his hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me the
night after the attack, up in the woods?"
"No."
"Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P.J. Right and I'd got
just beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is--you know, where
they're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was so
God-damned black you couldn't see your hand in front of you. A camion'd
gone off the road and another had run into it, and everything was
littered with boxes of shells spilt about."
"Must have been real nice," said Randolph.
"The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sick
with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at the post, running
out at both ends like he'd die. Well ... I yelled and shouted like hell
in my bad French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned wounded
inside moaned and groaned. And the shells were coming in so thick I
thought my number'd turn up any time. An' I couldn't get anybody. So I
just climbed up in the second camion and backed it off into the
bushes.... God, I bet it'll take a wrecking crew to get it out...."
"That was one good job.
"But there I was with another square in the road and no chance to pass
that I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to tell you
about happened. I saw a little bit of light in a ditch beside a big car
that seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and there
was a bunch of camion drivers, sitting round a lantern drinking.
"'Hello, have a drink!' they called out to me, and one of them got up,
waving his arms, ravin' drunk, and threw his arms around me and kissed
me on the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud.... Then he
dragged me into the crowd.
"'Ha, here's a copain come to die with us,' he cried.
"I gave him a shove and he fell down. But another one got up and handed
me a tin cup full of that God-damned gniolle, that I drank not to make
'em sore. Then they all shouted, and stood about me, sayin', 'American's
goin' to die with us. He's goin' to drink with us. He's goin' to die
with us.' And the shells comin' in all the while. God, I was scared.
"'I want to get a camion moved to the side of the road.... Good-bye,' I
said. There didn't seem any use talkin' to them.
"'But you've come to stay with us,' they said, and made me drink some
more booze. 'You've come to die with us. Remember you said so.'
"The sweat was running into my eyes so's I could hardly see. I told 'em
I'd be right back and slipped away into the dark. Then I thought I'd
never get the second camion cranked. At last I managed it and put it so
I could squeeze past, but they saw me and jumped up on the running-board
of the ambulance, tried to stop the car, all yellin' at once, 'It's no
use, the road's blocked both ways. You can't pass. You'd better stay and
die with us. Caput.'
"Well, I put my foot on the accelerator and hit one of them so hard with
the mudguard he fell into the lantern and put it out. Then I got away.
An' how I got past the stuff in that road afterwards was just luck. I
couldn't see a God-damn thing; it was so black and I was so nerved up.
God, I'll never forget these chaps' shoutin', 'Here's a feller come to
die with us.'"
"Whew! That's some story," said Randolph.
"That'll make a letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess my
girl'll think I'm heroic enough after that."
Martin's eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream
and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three
boys stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.
* * * * *
The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tell
if he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud
about a slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station for
a gash in his upper arm, and he was being used to help the
stretcher-bearers. Martin sat in the front seat of the ambulance,
watching him listlessly as he walked down the rutted road under the torn
shreds of camouflage that fluttered a little in the wind. Martin
wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all this stench and filth
and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things? Or did
he too burn with loathing and revolt?
And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they thinking?
But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep them
eternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think until
they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but for
laughter and misery and the smell of blood.
The rutted road was empty now. Most of the batteries were quiet.
Overhead in the brilliant sky aeroplanes snored monotonously.
The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged, splintered
boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass
shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind
came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this
was what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this
had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges,
in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension
of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror
of their intelligence. For this!
The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again,
carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous
steps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of
a whip along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the
dugout.
The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and
started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his
shoulder. Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the
rutted road. He wished he knew German so that he might call after the
man and ask him what manner of a man he was.
Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they
exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of
the prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay
still. Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child's
voice the prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled
beside him and tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the
arms. He was very hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their
soaked trousers, where the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy
cloth, stickily. Sweat dripped from Martin's face, on the man's face,
and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as he
clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him
towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was
as if his body were taking part in the agony of this man's body. At last
they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat.
Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every
part, eternally alike.
Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the man's
body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.
As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily rag,
he could still feel the man's ribs and the muscles of the man's arm
against his side. It made him strangely happy.
* * * * *
At the end of the dugout a man was drawing short, hard breath as if he'd
been running. There was the accustomed smell of blood and chloride and
bandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a stretcher wrapped in
his blanket, with his coat over him, trying to sleep. There was very
little light from a smoky lamp down at the end where the wounded were.
The French batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells were
combing through the woods, coming in series of three and four, gradually
nearing the dugout and edging away again. Howe saw the woods as a
gambling table on which, throw after throw, scattered the random dice of
death.
He pulled his blanket up round his head. He must sleep. How silly to
think about it. It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd be
gone before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he might be
dead any minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to go
tearing through his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?
Like the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious, a
shell-shriek shrilled to the crash.
Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away in
the woods the other side of the lines should be shoving a shell into the
breach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!
Like dice thrown on a table, shells burst about the dugout, now one
side, now the other.
"Seem to have taken a fancy to us this evenin'," Howe heard Tom
Randolph's voice from the bunk opposite.
"One," muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen with fear, flat on
his back, biting his trembling lips, "two.... God, that was near!"
A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing loud out of the
distance.
"This is us." He clutched the sides of the stretcher.
A snorting roar rocked the dugout. Dirt fell in his face. He looked
about, dazed. The lamp was still burning. One of the wounded men, with a
bandage like an Arab's turban about his head, sat up in his stretcher
with wide, terrified eyes.
"God watches over drunkards and the feeble-minded. Don't let's worry,
Howe," shouted Randolph from his bunk.
"That probably bitched car No. 4 for evermore," he answered, turning on
his stretcher, relieved for some reason from the icy suspense.
"We should worry! We'll foot it home, that's all."
The casting of the dice began again, farther away this time.
"We won that throw," thought Martin.