Three days were spent by the platoon at the little village. On the
evening of the third day, just as the men had formed in a long, impatient
line before the field kitchen, with their aluminum food receptacles held
out to catch the thin, reddish stew surlily thrown at them, the company
commander walked among them bearing words of dour import. Captain Powers
talked softly and gently, wringing the words from his heart, burnishing
them with a note of sadness:
“Stay close to your billets to-night after chow, men. We’re moving up to
the front some time to-night.”
He passed by them, and those whom he passed shuffled their feet, looking
furtively at the ground. There was very little comment. The shuffling
line was funereal. Men smiled at Captain Powers, but their smiles lacked
certitude.
When they had packed their belongings in the stipulated military manner
the pall remained, vaguely hanging over them, drawing them together in
their common aversion from the future. In the rooms they sat on their
packs, nervously waiting to move.
The moonlight streamed in through the window and showed the gray
whitewashed walls of the deserted room. The fireplace was a black maw.
Night fell in mysterious folds, giving the appearance of unfamiliarity
to the squat French houses, the spired Gothic church, the trees which
drooped their boughs in a stately canopy over the smooth gray road. The
men, their feet striking against the cobblestones, clumped through the
village streets and along the road.
The sector toward which the platoon was moving had once been the scene of
violent conflict, but of late, with the more important military manœuvres
taking place farther west, it had dropped into a peaceful desuetude.
It lay a few miles from Verdun, among the green-covered concealed
fortresses, from which the noses of mammoth artillery unexpectedly rose.
Tops of thickly wooded hills reared evenly in an unbroken line. Between
the crests the shadow-hidden valleys rested serene, content with their
secrets of the dead. Along the base of the mauve chain of hills wound
a trench from which French soldiers, most of whom were on the farther
side of fifty, sat around in dugouts and drank their ration of Pinard or
squatted, their shirts off, hunting lice in the seams.
The platoon marched up in the pitch-black night, slipping, from time to
time, off the slimy duck boards which had been placed in the bottom of
the trench to prevent traffic from being buried in the mud. Their packs,
with hip rubber boots, bandoliers of ammunition, bombs, and shovels,
bowed them over as they cautiously and cursingly made their way through
the communication trench.
Somewhere ahead a white light flared with a sputtering noise.
“Stand fast!” Lieutenant Bedford called out peremptorily.
The men stood as rocks, their arms crooked, covering their faces. The
light dropped slowly and unemotionally to the ground, dying out. Again
all was blackness.
Sergeant Harriman, who had gone ahead as billeting officer, now joined
the platoon and piloted the men into the trench. The main trench was much
wider than the communication trench, but passage along it was difficult
because of the half-checkered manner in which it had been laid out.
Not waiting to be relieved, the French soldiers one by one had
disappeared into the night. Now the platoon stood silent and ill at ease.
No one knew where to go, and so the entire body was ordered to remain
standing in the firing bays until morning.
* * * * *
Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly
to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and
stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and
that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to
the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away
were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that
was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the
gray of the horizon.
He experienced a strange feeling of awe, as if he were looking upon
another world. The early sun threw the trees and barbed wire into a queer
perspective and gave them a harsh, unreal aspect.
In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like
one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many parts
of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the
grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was
quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the picture. Ordinarily he
would have been contemplating such a pastoral scene from the window of
a railway train or from a northern Michigan farmhouse, where he would
have been spending his summer vacation. He would have been dressed in a
blue flannel suit, with a sailor hat, a white shirt of some soft summery
material and a rather striking tie. His hose would have been of silk and
his cool white underclothes would have been of the “athletic” type, Hicks
mused.
Then he became aware of himself. In place of the straw sailor there lay
very heavily on his head a steel helmet that, though he had thought it
chic for a while, was now no more distinguished-looking than the aluminum
dish in which his food was rationed to him. He had worn his drab shirt
for two weeks, and there were black rings around the collar and wrists.
His gas-mask, girded over his chest, looked foul and unclean; he had used
it for a pillow, for a dining-table, and often, he realized, it had been
thrown in some muddy place when he had sickened of having it about him
like an ever-present albatross. The knees of his breeches were as soiled
and as uncomfortable as his shirt, and his puttees and shoes were crusted
thickly with dried mud.
His stock-taking of his dress was interrupted by the knowledge that a
persistent vermin was exploring the vicinity of his breast. He could not
apprehend it because of his gas-mask, which, suspended from his neck, was
strapped to his chest.
* * * * *
After the first few days life in the trenches became inordinately dull,
so dull that an occasional shell fired from the artillery of either side
was a signal for the members of the platoon to step into the trench and
speculate where it struck.
Every night two squads of the platoon stood watch while the others slept.
Hicks, with Bullis, was stationed in a shell hole a few yards ahead of
the front line. The shell hole was half filled with water and it was
cold. After three or four hours the hip rubber boots made Hicks think
that his feet were a pair of dead fish in a refrigerator.
It was customary for the corporal of the guard and the lieutenant each
night to inspect the outposts, but because the ground was wet and because
of the strands of unmanageable barbed wire the lieutenant had stayed in
his dugout, permitting the corporal of the guard to have the honor of
inspecting.
One night, when the dampness seemed like a heavily draped ghost that
wanted to kiss Hicks’s entire body, and when his eyes had completely
tired from the strain of imagining that the stumps and posts in the field
were moving, Hicks fell asleep. In his cramped position, sitting on a
board over a shell hole, with his feet in the icy water, Hicks’s sleep
was full of fantastic dreams. He might have slept until the noonday sun
awakened him, had he not slipped from his seat and sprawled into the
water. This awakened Bullis, who invariably went to sleep, remaining so
until the watch was over.
“What the hell’s coming off?” Hicks awakened with a jerk. “Christ, it’s
time to go in.”
They observed the sun, which was slowly climbing over the horizon and
shedding the earth with a silvery light. The sky was almost smoked-pearl
colored, and before it the trees and barbed wire made sharp sentinels.
Silently they picked up their rifles and slunk into the trench. Answering
the guard’s challenging “Halt, who’s there?” with an “Oh, shut up,” they
stepped on the slippery duck board.
“Say, Hicksy, you’d better look out. What the hell were you guys up to
last night?” the guard asked.
“What do you mean? We weren’t up to anything.”
“Well, old Hepburn came back here after being out to your hole, a-cussin’
like hell. He said you guys couldn’t take advantage of your friendship
with him like that and get away with it.”
“I don’t know what he meant. Let’s beat it, Bullis.”
They went to their dugout, where they slept with their shoes beneath
their heads, to keep, as Hicks almost truthfully remarked, the rats from
carrying them away.
The major’s orderly, his dignity wrestling with the slippery footing of
the duck boards, marched down the trench from battalion headquarters.
Stopping in front of the dugout which Hicks and Bullis had entered, he
removed his helmet, patted his hair, and called:
“Is Private Hicks in there? Tell Private Hicks Major Adams wants to see
him.”
His hair a rat’s nest, and a heavy beard on his muddy-looking face, Hicks
looked out of the entrance of the dugout.
“What’s the matter?”
The orderly turned about and marched back toward battalion headquarters
with Hicks following him.
* * * * *
Major Adams belonged to that type of officer each of which you meet
with the feeling that he is the sole survivor of the school of regular
soldiers. He was a tall, slim, very erect person. His face was ascetic,
though gossip about his personal affairs proclaimed him to be fiercely
lustful. He wore his campaign hat adeptly. He limped as he walked, from
an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons
were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal
as the fourth dimension. He was adored and held in awe by half of the
battalion.
Private Hicks stepped inside the major’s dugout and saluted.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Hicks, you were reported this morning to have gone to sleep while on
outpost duty.”
Hicks started visibly. “That’s true, sir.”
“Well, what the hell kind of a soldier are you, anyway?” Major Adams
fairly bit his words loose.
“I don’t know, sir. I mean, I guess I’ve been a pretty good soldier.”
“You have like hell, Hicks, and you know it. Now, why did you go to sleep
on watch?”
Hicks knew that if he were court-martialled his sentence might be life
imprisonment. It might be anything, he reflected, that the group of
morons sitting in solemn judgment might decide to give him.
Major Adams also knew it.
“Sir, the hours are too long. Nobody can stay awake when he goes on watch
eight hours every night.”
“Yes?” Major Adams raised an eyebrow forbiddingly.
“Well, sir, there’s two feet of water in the shell hole where my post is,
and I guess I got so numb with cold that I went to sleep.”
“And you never thought to bail it out? I knew that officers were so
damned dumb that they needed dog-robbers, but I didn’t know that enlisted
men were. Now, Hicks, you haven’t a case at all. But”—he was silent a
moment—“some day you might make a good soldier. You wouldn’t have a
chance if you were to get a general court martial, because the judges
would have you hung as an example. Hicks,” he said, “I’m going to let
this drop. You may go.”
Mumbling a “thank you, sir,” Hicks very properly about-faced and left the
dugout.