Martin had picked himself up from where the bullet had knocked him and
addressed the lieutenant. "I'm hit, sir," he said.
The lieutenant was very busy. "All right, all right," he said, just
heeding the man enough to learn where he was wounded. "Go over that
way. You ought to see a dressing-station under those trees."
Martin found himself dizzy and sick. The sensation in his arm was
distinctly galvanic. The feeling was so strange that he could wonder at
times if a wound was really what ailed him. Once, in this dazed way, he
examined his arm; he saw the hole. Yes, he was shot; that was it. And
more than in any other way it affected him with a profound sadness.
As directed by the lieutenant, he went to the clump of trees, but he
found no dressing-station there. He found only a dead soldier lying
with his face buried in his arms and with his shoulders humped high as
if he were convulsively sobbing. Martin decided to make his way to the
road, deeming that he thus would better his chances of getting to a
surgeon. But he suddenly found his way blocked by a fence of barbed
wire. Such was his mental condition that he brought up at a rigid halt
before this fence, and stared stupidly at it. It did not seem to him
possible that this obstacle could be defeated by any means. The fence
was there, and it stopped his progress. He could not go in that
direction.
But as he turned he espied that procession of wounded men, strange
pilgrims, that had already worn a path in the tall grass. They were
passing through a gap in the fence. Martin joined them. The bullets
were flying over them in sheets, but many of them bore themselves as
men who had now exacted from fate a singular immunity. Generally there
were no outcries, no kicking, no talk at all. They too, like Martin,
seemed buried in a vague but profound melancholy.
But there was one who cried out loudly. A man shot in the head was
being carried arduously by four comrades, and he continually yelled one
word that was terrible in its primitive strength,--"Bread! Bread!
Bread!" Following him and his bearers were a limping crowd of men less
cruelly wounded, who kept their eyes always fixed on him, as if they
gained from his extreme agony some balm for their own sufferings.
"Bread! Give me bread!"
Martin plucked a man by the sleeve. The man had been shot in the foot,
and was making his way with the help of a curved, incompetent stick. It
is an axiom of war that wounded men can never find straight sticks.
"What's the matter with that feller?" asked Martin.
"Nutty," said the man.
"Why is he?"
"Shot in th' head," answered the other, impatiently.
The wail of the sufferer arose in the field amid the swift rasp of
bullets and the boom and shatter of shrapnel. "Bread! Bread! Oh, God,
can't you give me bread? Bread!" The bearers of him were suffering
exquisite agony, and often they exchanged glances which exhibited their
despair of ever getting free of this tragedy. It seemed endless.
"Bread! Bread! Bread!"
But despite the fact that there was always in the way of this crowd a
wistful melancholy, one must know that there were plenty of men who
laughed, laughed at their wounds whimsically, quaintly inventing odd
humours concerning bicycles and cabs, extracting from this shedding of
their blood a wonderful amount of material for cheerful badinage, and,
with their faces twisted from pain as they stepped, they often joked
like music-hall stars. And perhaps this was the most tearful part of
all.
They trudged along a road until they reached a ford. Here under the
eave of the bank lay a dismal company. In the mud and in the damp shade
of some bushes were a half-hundred pale-faced men prostrate. Two or
three surgeons were working there. Also, there was a chaplain,
grim-mouthed, resolute, his surtout discarded. Overhead always was that
incessant maddening wail of bullets.
Martin was standing gazing drowsily at the scene when a surgeon grabbed
him. "Here, what's the matter with you?" Martin was daunted. He
wondered what he had done that the surgeon should be so angry with him.
"In the arm," he muttered, half-shamefacedly.
After the surgeon had hastily and irritably bandaged the injured member
he glared at Martin and said, "You can walk all right, can't you?"
"Yes, sir," said Martin.
"Well, now, you just make tracks down that road."
"Yes, sir." Martin went meekly off. The doctor had seemed exasperated
almost to the point of madness.
The road was at this time swept with the fire of a body of Spanish
sharpshooters who had come cunningly around the flanks of the American
army, and were now hidden in the dense foliage that lined both sides of
the road. They were shooting at everything. The road was as crowded as
a street in a city, and at an absurdly short range they emptied their
rifles at the passing people. They were aided always by the over-sweep
from the regular Spanish line of battle.
Martin was sleepy from his wound. He saw tragedy follow tragedy, but
they created in him no feeling of horror.
A man with a red cross on his arm was leaning against a great tree.
Suddenly he tumbled to the ground, and writhed for a moment in the way
of a child oppressed with colic. A comrade immediately began to bustle
importantly. "Here," he called to Martin, "help me carry this man, will
you?"
Martin looked at him with dull scorn. "I'll be damned if I do," he
said. "Can't carry myself, let alone somebody else."
This answer, which rings now so inhuman, pitiless, did not affect the
other man. "Well, all right," he said. "Here comes some other fellers."
The wounded man had now turned blue-grey; his eyes were closed; his
body shook in a gentle, persistent chill.
Occasionally Martin came upon dead horses, their limbs sticking out and
up like stakes. One beast mortally shot, was besieged by three or four
men who were trying to push it into the bushes, where it could live its
brief time of anguish without thrashing to death any of the wounded men
in the gloomy procession.
The mule train, with extra ammunition, charged toward the front, still
led by the tinkling bell-mare.
An ambulance was stuck momentarily in the mud, and above the crack of
battle one could hear the familiar objurgations of the driver as he
whirled his lash.
Two privates were having a hard time with a wounded captain, whom they
were supporting to the rear, He was half cursing, half wailing out the
information that he not only would not go another step toward the rear,
but that he was certainly going to return at once to the front. They
begged, pleaded at great length as they continually headed him off.
They were not unlike two nurses with an exceptionally bad and
headstrong little duke.
The wounded soldiers paused to look impassively upon this struggle.
They were always like men who could not be aroused by anything further.
The visible hospital was mainly straggling thickets intersected with
narrow paths, the ground being covered with men. Martin saw a busy
person with a book and a pencil, but he did not approach him to become
officially a member of the hospital. All he desired was rest and
immunity from nagging. He took seat painfully under a bush and leaned
his back upon the trunk. There he remained thinking, his face wooden.
V
"My Gawd," said Nolan, squirming on his belly in the grass, "I can't
stand this much longer."
Then suddenly every rifle in the firing line seemed to go off of its
own accord. It was the result of an order, but few men heard the order;
in the main they had fired because they heard others fire, and their
sense was so quick that the volley did not sound too ragged. These
marksmen had been lying for nearly an hour in stony silence, their
sights adjusted, their fingers fondling their rifles, their eyes
staring at the intrenchments of the enemy. The battalion had suffered
heavy losses, and these losses had been hard to bear, for a soldier
always reasons that men lost during a period of inaction are men badly
lost.
The line now sounded like a great machine set to running frantically in
the open air, the bright sunshine of a green field. To the prut of the
magazine rifles was added the under-chorus of the clicking mechanism,
steady and swift, as if the hand of one operator was controlling it
all. It reminds one always of a loom, a great grand steel loom,
clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red
threads, the cloth of death. By the men's shoulders under their eager
hands dropped continually the yellow empty shells, spinning into the
crushed grass blades to remain there and mark for the belated eye the
line of a battalion's fight.
All impatience, all rebellious feeling, had passed out of the men as
soon as they had been allowed to use their weapons against the enemy.
They now were absorbed in this business of hitting something, and all
the long training at the rifle ranges, all the pride of the marksman
which had been so long alive in them, made them forget for the time
everything but shooting. They were as deliberate and exact as so many
watchmakers.
A new sense of safety was rightfully upon them. They knew that those
mysterious men in the high far trenches in front were having the
bullets sping in their faces with relentless and remarkable precision;
they knew, in fact, that they were now doing the thing which they had
been trained endlessly to do, and they knew they were doing it well.
Nolan, for instance, was overjoyed. "Plug 'em," he said: "Plug 'em." He
laid his face to his rifle as if it were his mistress. He was aiming
under the shadow of a certain portico of a fortified house: there he
could faintly see a long black line which he knew to be a loop-hole cut
for riflemen, and he knew that every shot of his was going there under
the portico, mayhap through the loop-hole to the brain of another man
like himself. He loaded the awkward magazine of his rifle again and
again. He was so intent that he did not know of new orders until he saw
the men about him scrambling to their feet and running forward,
crouching low as they ran.
He heard a shout. "Come on, boys! We can't be last! We're going up!
We're going up." He sprang to his feet and, stooping, ran with the
others. Something fine, soft, gentle, touched his heart as he ran. He
had loved the regiment, the army, because the regiment, the army, was
his life,--he had no other outlook; and now these men, his comrades,
were performing his dream-scenes for him; they were doing as he had
ordained in his visions. It is curious that in this charge he
considered himself as rather unworthy. Although he himself was in the
assault with the rest of them, it seemed to him that his comrades were
dazzlingly courageous. His part, to his mind, was merely that of a man
who was going along with the crowd.
He saw Grierson biting madly with his pincers at a barbed-wire fence.
They were half-way up the beautiful sylvan slope; there was no enemy to
be seen, and yet the landscape rained bullets. Somebody punched him
violently in the stomach. He thought dully to lie down and rest, but
instead he fell with a crash.
The sparse line of men in blue shirts and dirty slouch hats swept on up
the hill. He decided to shut his eyes for a moment because he felt very
dreamy and peaceful. It seemed only a minute before he heard a voice
say, "There he is." Grierson and Watkins had come to look for him. He
searched their faces at once and keenly, for he had a thought that the
line might be driven down the hill and leave him in Spanish hands. But
he saw that everything was secure, and he prepared no questions.
"Nolan," said Grierson clumsily, "do you know me?"
The man on the ground smiled softly. "Of course I know you, you
chowder-faced monkey. Why wouldn't I know you?"