From this deep slumber Jeb was aroused by the very incarnation of
doomsday noises that sent him bounding to the floor with nerves aquiver.
The blanket dragging after him hung from his shoulders, even as
bewilderment and sleep clung to his mind. His senses knew that it was
night, although details about him were brought into sharp relief by a
thousand flashes spasmodically flooding the dug-out with fiendish
brilliancy; and he knew that his body was cold, although the walls and
timbers seemed to be consumed by raging fires. He felt the ground
trembling in the throes of a titanic upheaval, while his entire being
seemed to be hammered and torn by the frightful cataclysm of sounds. He
stood as though paralyzed, unmindful that bits of earth and gravel were
sifting through chinks between the ceiling timbers and falling on his
head.
Other members of the unit had staggered into wakefulness and sat staring
at him, he thought, with greenish, flickering faces--accusingly, as if
he were responsible. Each knew the French guns had searched out and were
crumbling up the German defenses, but none had previously suspected that
an artillery bombardment could reach such fury. The desultory firing of
yesterday might well be understood as a _moment decalme_!
In this instant of terrified amazement Jeb and his comrades remained as
statues, simply staring with owlish eyes devoid of intelligence, since
it was well nigh impossible for men, uninitiated, to master their
faculties until the first shock had been absorbed.
'Twas not so much the roar of cannon from their distant places in the
rear--although these alone might doubtless have been startling
enough--but the shower of projectiles falling on the doomed line only
six hundred yards across No Man's Land. In answer to this bombardment
from an eight-mile line of guns accurately trained the day before, enemy
guns, trained with lesser accuracy, did their best to inflict an equal
punishment. The effect was a combination of the solemnity and the
littleness of man which defies every knack of human expression to
depict.
The seasoned soldier could have told some things; he could have
distinguished calibre from calibre as readily as the skillful fox hunter
knows the position of his racing hounds by the quality of their voices.
He could have spotted the vindictive crash of "75's," the deep-toned
bellowing of "heavies," or, nearer by--had they been in action--the
banging of trench mortars. In the sky he could have told from white or
greenish-orange flashes, from lace-like wreaths or fixed-star blasts,
where shrapnel or high explosive shells had burst; from the ringing of a
gas gong he could tell where "green cross" shells were falling; he
could, and gladly would, have explained--to his own satisfaction, at
least--the many freak phenomena: a solitary light spirally ascending
upward until lost in the clouds; sprays of fire and spark-showers
illumining the sky; rainbow arcs of angry red that flickered, as an
aurora borealis, from horizon to horizon.
But the uninitiated Medical Corps unit, numbed to inertia, was only
sensible to an overhead riot of screeching demons, as shells hurtling
forward were passed and answered by shells hurtling back--a sky of
flying steel and a horizon of blasted earth! In moments of greatest
concussion, simultaneous with the most blinding flashes, the air about
their faces seemed to jump; crazy little vortexes scurried past the
dug-out opening, or flew in across the floor, like phantom kittens
seized by some curious madness. To Jeb's highly imaginative, and now
half-crazed, mind these represented newly liberated souls, in anguish
seeking refuge from the hurricane of death and its drenching rain of
fire. He had not then found out how many hundreds of shells must be
fired to wound one man!
On the Allied side the bombardment, with growing intensity, became a
_barrage_. Explosions came as thick as drum taps when a roll is sounded.
There seemed to be no intermission, really; no more, at any rate, than
one's ear can detect between clicks in a telegraph room when the
instruments work rapidly.
Barrow and Bonsecours ran in. They looked weirdly grotesque in the
fitful playing of lights, and Bonsecours shouted something, although no
voice seemed to issue from his lips. Then with vigorous gestures he
beckoned the men up to him--having come especially to get this new unit
straightened out, since his own veterans knew exactly what to do.
Jeb had not moved, for the blanket still hung from his shoulders.
Neither had the others arisen from their bunks, so bewildered were they
also by the chorus of death engines.
"Up now, and active!" the great surgeon yelled. "Stretchers! You go out
shortly!"
"Go out!" Jeb screamed, finding his voice in a burst. "Go out!" he
screamed again. "God Almighty, no one can go out _there_!"
His face was ghostlike, his eyes were large, staring, vacant. Bonsecours
stepped nearer and studied him, bellowing in a tone that had made more
than one man obey:
"There are twenty thousand fine fellows, _mon chere enfant_, each about
to spring from his trench with the firm belief that if he gets hit we
shall bring him in. No man dares break faith with a friend who thus
relies on him!" He had put both hands on Jeb's shoulders and now
continued to look steadfastly, honestly into his eyes. Then quickly he
kissed him on both cheeks, saying: "I'll believe in you tonight, to do
as I would do were my duty not back here!"
A strange feeling of warmth and strength passed through Jeb's veins, but
he was given no time for reply, because this man of iron turned to the
assembled unit, shouting:
"At dawn this curtain of shells will be lifted and dropped on the Boche
second line. That instant our boys go over the top, across No Man's
Land. But Germans burrow under ground in a _barrage_, or run out forward
and lie down to escape it; so there will still be many with machine-guns
left to rake the open stretch, and not all of our brave fellows will get
across. It is those," he added, in a voice of thunder, "whom the good
God expects us to bring in!"
There was no disobeying this man. Jeb felt sick through and through, but
as the others filed out, every second one with a folded stretcher, he,
also, followed. Yet he wanted to hold back; he wanted to dash into the
darkest niche of the dug-out, bury his face there and--well, die! To
die at once, outright, was preferable to the mental torture of expected
laceration and suffering; nor could even the great Bonsecours have
convinced him that these two monsters were not crouching, waiting
especially for the moment when he should step forth.
While the dressing-station shelters opened into a roomy quadrangle, that
in turn connected with trenches, there had also been cut narrow roadways
up past the side of each dug-out, ascending sharply toward the front. By
this rough and gravelly, though more direct, means, stretcher-bearers
could be upon the crest in a twinkling, thence forward and downward over
narrow bridges spanning the first line trench to No Man's Land itself.
As the stretcher-bearers of Barrow's unit poured out beneath the sky--or
what would have been a sky had not incarnate fiends usurped it--Jeb
found himself moving next to Bonsecours. Even in this strain, when men
were thinking in terms of armies, the famous surgeon with infinite tact
went about supporting the props of one human atom. After all, he had
been trained to mend one man at a time! He spoke no word until they had
climbed the sloping roadway and laid flat, peeping over; then, with his
lips close to Jeb's ear, he shouted:
"Have no fear! When man calls on the highest expression of his will, he
becomes indomitable; he succeeds in the highest terms of success--and
thus will you succeed, _mon pauvre enfant_! Look!"
He sprang up, pointing where the fringe of that French fire curtain
touched this great stage. The blinding lights flickered over his face
and made him supreme at that moment. In the continuous, head-splitting
noises of three thousand shells per minute, bursting on an eight-mile
segment, he looked more like a war god than an agent of mercy.
The German position was crumbling--rather, it was being blasted out of
existence. To Jeb it might have marked the very brink of hell. The
flashes were almost as a steady white and greenish-orange blaze, and
showed the earth spurting in great bunches upward; stiff winds that had
sent clouds scurrying the day before now caught the ground smoke and
drew it, as a sweeping prairie fire, back upon the enemy. This was a
propitious wind, and on its wings the death gas sped.
Between the armies lay No Man's Land in utter desolation, but each
little detail, each inconspicuous bit of wreckage left from earlier
struggles, stood boldly outlined in the calcium glare. This was the
stretch of ground he would be searching when the curtain lifted--except
that its surface would then be strewn with men; some drawn up in pain,
some moaning, some whimpering, some cursing, some terribly still. Had
ever a curtain lifted on more poignant tragedy! Was there a parallel in
crime to this wholesale slaughter which a treacherous nation thrust upon
a peaceful world! Jeb tried to wonder how many dead might be there, but
found that his mind would not leave the point of destruction; it had
become riveted, as a bird is said to be mesmerized by a slowly
approaching snake.
Lying just behind the ridge, feeling the earth tremble beneath his body,
waiting for Bonsecours' command to dash into that cockpit of suffering
and there mingle with the torn, the dying and the dead, he repeated
over and over the great surgeon's words which bit into him like acid:
"It is those whom the good God expects us to bring in!"
The dawn was coming! No sun appeared, but the flashes grew less
blinding; the ground close to his face began to show natural browns
where formerly had been flickering greens, and his hands looked more
alive than dead. Also did the whole scene change as sky and earth
increased their fury in this blending of the real and unreal; for, now
added to the noises and fitful lights, were huge balls of white smoke,
and brown, springing into quick existence; some expanded to balloon size
and swept majestically onward, upward; some, caught in a vortex of
madness,--swirling, writhing, darting,--formed devilishly gruesome
arabesques that yet were formless; some burst like pon-pons; some
released long streamers and darted earthward. Jeb's eyes were held by
this appalling grandeur; his soul was chained, numbed, by its unlicensed
braggadocio.
As though some invisible hand touched the spring of a jumping-jack box
eight miles in length and released twenty thousand monkeys, the trench
beneath Jeb seemed to open with a snap. Even above the cannonading he
could hear men give vent to savage cheering. But his blood congealed and
his fingers dug into the earth, his breath came in agonized gasps, as he
watched them rush pell-mell, with bayonets fixed, across that deadly
strip of ground.
Then suddenly the artillery ceased. The far-off German guns still
roared, but they were as taps of rain upon a roof to ears that had
almost bled from other detonations. For a moment Jeb thought he had been
stricken deaf, and turned a questioning glance at Bonsecours, whose eyes
were staring ahead in strained expectancy.
"See, Americans! The curtain has raised for our brave fellows, and it
will now fall on the second line!"
In the immediate silence his voice seemed to be bellowing--then the
mighty guns, having lifted the range, crashed out again. Yet, mingled
with the blasting of this second line, could be heard the spiteful
rattling of machine-guns, the fusillade of rifle fire, as the enemy,
scrambling to places from the punishment they had just been through,
poured death into the headlong charge.
The scene to Jeb now became a phantasmagoria of horrors. Men running
with the speed of deer suddenly, and without apparent cause, pitched
forward, rose and again went down; some stumbled awkwardly and did not
try to rise. But the great wave, like a breaker rolling inward, swept
irresistibly. Tired and encumbered though each man was who made up this
wave, in a prodigiously short time they were pouring into the German
trench.
Such is the accuracy of modern warfare--and of the French, who are the
finest artillerymen in the world--that at the expiration of six minutes
another appalling silence filled the air. The curtain of fire had again
been lifted, to fall this time still farther back; even as the sweeping
wave of infantry, without apparently a check, rolled on to take the
second German line just emerging from its bath of fire.
Bonsecours seemed too fascinated to give or think of orders, yet he knew
the time was not quite ripe, for part of a division had yet to come up
from the assembly trenches in the rear, to form another wave which would
go barging after the first.
Streams of these steel-helmeted fellows now began to pass--as the fluid
line had passed in yesterday's twilight--close below Jeb. In the
broadening daylight he could distinctly see their bronzed, immobile
faces; their swinging gait, suggesting abundant reserve power, and their
eyes that bespoke an utter disregard of dangers. They were men, second
to none in determination and reckless personal valor, who did not endure
hardship, but rode upon it; who did not work, without first laughing it
into play. If the sun was hot, they sweated good humor; and, if the sky
rained torrents, good humor trickled in rivulets down their backs. They
had learned to treat flying shells with contempt, except when any of
their comrades fell--and then a cold fury would burst amidst their
ranks, exploding, not into tears, but oaths! Those oaths!--snapped
barkingly from mouth to mouth while death was bursting right and left
and overhead, and bayonets were fixing for a greater toll!
Jeb felt, with an uncanny sense of prophecy, that in this marching line
was depicted a new phase of man growing out of war. The individual
preferment which many of them enjoyed four years ago had thinned to
nothingness in the welding of this great warrior-force of comrades, who
never again would quite resume their former status. For, when a clubman
eats and sleeps and jokes and fights beside the waiter who used to bring
his cocktail, he learns to love that man, and the love is mutual; when a
millionaire is dragged to shelter by the husky grocer's boy who used to
leave a basket at his kitchen door, he also loves that boy, and the boy
loves him. Each finds in the other values which are not measured by
worldly goods, or the stamp of birth, or family influence; each sees in
the naked soul of each truer riches which transcend what formerly had
been false. And thus, in the armies of those supermen who after the war
march home to lasting peace, the stamp of aristocracy will be the
Aristocracy of Worth. It was many months before Jeb realized that,
almost unconsciously, he had read this prophecy in the fire of
death-dealing shells.
Again the range lifted, this time past a hamlet that stood in partial
ruins on a hill. It had been spared complete destruction at German
hands, doubtless because the enemy had left it hurriedly, and now the
French artillerymen carefully avoided it lest a few old folk and
children might be there. The human wave would sweep it clean enough of
aliens! Yet that wave had come upon a rocky shore, and Jeb imagined he
could hear the metallic clash and rasp of bayonet on bayonet, the gasps
and sobs and curses of men fighting without quarter.
The new division just brought up now scrambled over the top, but No
Man's Land had been largely stripped of dangers. Victory sparkled in the
air; safety smiled at Jeb; with these fellows carrying the battle ever
away from him, performing the unbelievable in pluck and endurance, he
did not so much mind the thought of going for the wounded! But the
uplift was transient--it fled in a panic as Bonsecours called:
"Quick, _mes chere enfants_, be after them! Overlook no one! Let the
walking cases get in alone, and bring the others with all haste!
There's one of your American girls in my unit who bids you God-speed!
Go!"
The time had come! Dripping sweat from every pore, desperately seized
again with trembling, Jeb staggered to his feet and started forward.