Hicks had gone through the attack without an impression of it remaining
with him. When the platoon was caught between the two lines of barbed
wire and he had arisen, walking toward the enemy, he had been numb. At
that time his act had been brought about more by a great tiredness than
by any courage. He felt no heroism in him at all, only an annoyance at
his having to lie there any longer. It all seemed so senseless. Then,
dazed, he had followed through the woods and into the village because
such action was the formula of his existence.
The sights of the dead in all of their postures of horror, the loss of
those whom he had known and felt affection for, the odor of stinking
canned meat and of dead bodies made alive again by the heat of the
day, the infuriating explosion of artillery; the kaleidoscopic stir of
light and color, had bludgeoned his senses. Now he lay, incapable of
introspection or of retrospection, impervious to the demands of the dead
and the living.
Somewhere in the Cimmerian darkness low voices emanated from vague,
mysterious forms. They talked on and on in a sort of indefinable hum.
Finally it came to Hicks that the platoon commander was searching for him.
“Hicks is over here,” he heard the man next to him say. The platoon
commander approached and bent down beside him.
“Hicks, we’ve got to have an outpost. The captain’s afraid there will be
an attack. Take your gun crew out about five hundred yards and keep your
eye peeled.”
Hicks failed to reply.
“Hicks, did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. All right.” Hicks rose and, followed by two other men, stolidly
tramped off through the murk.
He strode along in the darkness, a little ahead of the others. Abruptly
an illuminating rocket was fired from somewhere in front of them. Each
man stopped motionless, as the incandescent arc fell slowly to the ground.
Stepping forward, Hicks’s foot encountered an empty can. It bumped
over the ground cacophonously. The men behind cursed in a thorough and
dispassionate manner.
For four years the earth over which they were walking had been beaten
and churned by the explosions of shells. A labyrinth of trenches had been
dug in it.
Their bodies brushed against stiff little bushes whose thin, wiry limbs
grasped at their clothing like hands.
The men had reached the brink of a large cavity in the earth when another
flare was fired. They jumped. The hole was wide and deep enough for them
to be able to stand without their heads appearing above the bank.
“Let’s sit here a while. That damned flare didn’t seem to be more than a
hundred yards from here.”
“Yeah, le’s. I don’t want to git my head shot off this late in the game.”
They talked on in undertones, while Hicks, silent, smiled serenely in
the darkness. Suddenly he realized that they were not the only persons
in the trench. A few feet before him two other bodies, huddled together,
were discernible. He had no thought of the fact that he was between both
lines, and that any other persons who were also there must be enemies. He
only knew that he wanted to talk to these strangers in front of him.
“It’s a quiet night, what?”
“Don’t talk so loud,” the men beside him counselled.
He shook his head, annoyed at their interruption, and began again:
“What outfit do you fellows belong to?”
“Who are you talkin’ to, Hicks? What’s the matter with you?” his loader
impatiently asked.
Hicks ignored him. “What outfit did you say you belonged to? What?”—as if
they had answered indistinctly.
He rose and stood in front of them.
“I asked you a civil question. Why can’t you answer me?”
Their silence infuriated him.
“Answer me, damn it.” He grasped the shoulders of one of the bodies,
shaking them. Beneath the clothing the flesh loosened from the body.
“Hell, you’re dead,” Hicks told the body disgustedly. He turned to his
gun crew. “They’re dead. That’s why they didn’t answer me. No damned
good.”
The loader turned to the other man.
“Le’s git outa here, Hicks is nuts.”
“Yeah. He gives me the creeps.”
They climbed out of the trench and scurried back to their places among
the platoon.
Hicks sat down across from the two bodies. His elbows on his knees, his
arms folded, he lowered his head and was soon asleep. He was awakened by
voices crying:
“Hicks! What’s wrong?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Tryin’ to git a cru de geer by stayin’ out alone all night?”
He looked up and through the early dawn saw the faces of his own platoon.
Without answering he picked up his automatic rifle which lay beside him,
and joined them.
* * * * *
The ground over which they were advancing was flat for a long distance,
then it rose in a steep hill that stood majestically in the dawn. Upon
the ground many people had left their marks: a group of bones, a piece of
equipment, a helmet, a rifle barrel from which the stock had rotted.
There was no hindrance to the advance of the platoon. From that point
in the line which for miles was being attacked that morning, even the
rear-guard had withdrawn. But the withdrawal had been made to the top
of the hill, whose crest was a large plateau. Perhaps a thousand yards
from the brink, where a ridge cut the flatness of the ground, the German
lines had intrenched and lay waiting to be attacked.
As the platoon climbed up the hill they could hear the friendly explosion
of their own barrage. It gave them strength to thread their way among the
bushes on the hill, ever nearing the summit, and not knowing the sort of
reception that was waiting for them.
A portly captain, puffing like a porpoise, clambered up with them. From
time to time he would stop and take from his hip pocket a brightly
colored paper sack of scrap tobacco. Then, with a generous amount in the
side of his mouth, he would begin again the ascent. He offered the paper
bag to some of the men nearer to him, and they accepted it gratefully,
but not cramming their mouths so full as he. The portly captain also
invented the fiction that he was a former brewery-wagon driver in St.
Louis and that, “By God, he wished he was back on a brewery wagon again.”
The men laughed obligingly but hollowly.
The platoon reached the summit. Little curls of gray smoke, looking like
shadowy question-marks, rose over the plateau in the distance. Beyond
was the ridge, perhaps a mile from the brink over which the men were
climbing. To the right of the ridge a long, white-sided, red-topped
farmhouse rested. To the left the plateau ended in another hill.
It was not long after the platoon had arrived on the level ground that
machine-guns began pouring a steady stream of lead over the field.
Hesitatingly the platoon advanced. The machine-guns were pointing too
high. Occasionally a bullet, probably a faulty one, struck the ground
beside the slowly advancing line, but without force.
The portly captain shifted his wad of tobacco, spat a thin stream, and
ordered the platoon to halt.
“How many of you men have got shovels?”
There were half a dozen shovels and two picks.
“All right, you men with shovels. Halt right here and dig a trench as
long and as deep as you can. The rest of us—Forward!”
Slowly, warily, they set forth again. Now no one spoke, not even the
garrulous and confidence-breeding captain.
The machine-guns aimed lower, but too low. Only the ricochetting bullets
reached the platoon.
They advanced until they were half-way to the ridge. Then they discovered
that there were Germans much nearer to them than they had supposed. From
little humps on the ground rifle bullets pinged past, shaving near the
ears of the men. From the hill on the left came a whining serenade of
lead. Shots were being fired from every direction but from the rear. The
men threw themselves upon the ground, not knowing what to do.
After a long wait the firing abated and the platoon started to creep
forward. Instantly their movement was met with a hail of bullets. They
lay quite still, their uniforms blending with the russet of the grass, on
which the sun shone with intense vigor.
Hicks, lying at the extreme left of the platoon, was engaged in
corralling those words which entered his mind and placing them into two
classes—words with an even number of letters, words with an uneven number
of letters. He had long held the view that the evenly lettered words were
preponderant.
“P-l-a-t-o-o-n. Seven—that’s uneven. S-e-v-e-n—that’s uneven, too.
U-n-e-v-e-n—six—even. Ha-a s-t-r-a-n-g-e—seven—again the mystic number.
M-y-s-t-i-c—six—that’s even. And n-u-m-b-e-r—six, too. Let’s see,
that’s five even and four—no, five”—he lost track of the number of
unevenly lettered words he had thought of—his activity was interrupted
by the ridiculous words—“oh, when I die—d-i-e—uneven—just bury me
deep—d-e-e-p—even. Deeper, deeper, deeper where the croakers sleep.
S-l-e-e-p—uneven, too, damn it. And tell all the boys that I died brave——”
He broke off. Behind a bush, a few hundred yards distant, an enormous
olive that was supported by legs was hiding. Bellied to the ground,
he started to crawl, his path describing a small arc. His automatic
rifle, grasped in the middle by his right hand, interfered with his
movements. His abstraction was so great that he bruised his knuckles
between the rifle and the ground. The musette bag, filled with ammunition
and suspended from his neck, was another annoyance. When he tried more
quickly to move forward it got in his way.
The olive moved ever so slightly. It now seemed to be a combination of
olive and turtle, with its queer hand rising above its body.
A jagged stone cut through Hicks’s trousers, bringing the blood. He
crawled on, railing at the hot sun.
A shell hole yawned in front of him. Like an alligator slipping into the
water, his body slid down to the bottom. He was almost directly across
from the olive, and now he saw that it was neither olive nor turtle, but
a German with a rifle pointing through the limbs of the bushes toward his
platoon. He stuck the tripod in the bank a foot from the top of the hole.
He adjusted the stock to his shoulder and fired.
The German scurried from his hiding-place out into the open. Hicks fired
again. The German stopped, and, with a queer, hopeless gesture, his arms
flung over his head, sprawled on the ground.
Hicks crawled out of the hole, moving forward. Nearly every one of the
bushes concealed a German. Hicks anticipated a day’s occupation.
Now, other members of the platoon had worked their way along the ground
and near to where Hicks lay. Bullets spattered furiously all around.
Hicks minded them less than the perspiration which ran down his face in
little, itching rivulets. He was near enough to the bullets for them to
sound like breaking violin strings, as they whizzed past.
Wasn’t that another atrocious-looking helmet behind the bush to the
left? He pressed the trigger, and a volley of shots heated the barrel of
his automatic rifle. A bullet struck a few feet from him, kicking up a
puff of dust.
He crawled on over the undulating ground. From another shell hole he
poured out the last of his ammunition at the olive uniforms. Then he
threw his rifle from him.
And now the platoon was scattered over the field, hiding behind bushes,
behind little mounds of dirt, giving away their position by the slight
curls of smoke from their rifle barrels. Not far ahead were the German
snipers, waiting calmly and patiently and firing with rare judgment. The
men on both sides might have been less human than Tin Woodmen, to judge
from their silence.
Smoke from the artillery shells hung in gray volutes over the ridge.
Puffs from the rifles curled thinly skyward, lost in the blue. The men
were, to all appearances, motionless, soundless, only their rifles
speaking for them.
Then, like an express-train rattling over loose ties, machine-guns broke
loose from all sides. Their bullets struck the ground beside the men,
covering the space where they were lying with a thick haze of dust.
The portly captain rose and blew his whistle, commanding the men to
retreat. They needed no command. Already they were dashing off like
frightened rabbits, scampering away to their burrows.
Hicks watched them for a while, felt the angry hail of bullets, then rose
and followed after them.
* * * * *
In their desperation the men with the shovels and picks had dug a trench
deep enough to protect prone bodies from fire, and into it the retreating
platoon fell, released from the fear which, like an angry eagle, beat
its wings behind them, against their heads, in their ears, urging them
on. The men turned, narrowed out grooves in the thrown-up dirt for their
rifles to rest on.
The portly captain walked back and forth behind them, admonishing them to
quickness of action.
“Come on now. I’m a liar, or else the Dutchmen’ll be over here before we
know it. They’ve got the dope on us now.”
He paced in front of them, offering advice, telling one man to dig a
deeper barricade and another not to expose himself. He turned to Hicks,
who was lying still, engaged in nothing.
“Are you an automatic rifleman?” he asked.
Hicks answered that he was.
“Then take your squad out a couple of hundred yards and establish an
outpost. You can’t tell when them devils’ll come sneakin’ up on us.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Hicks turned away.
His loader of the night before approached the portly captain.
“Sir, you hadn’t better send Hicks out on that outpost.”
The captain spat. “Why the devil not?”
“Because, sir, he’s crazy. Last night he got to talkin’ to dead men, and
when they didn’t answer he shook them as if he thought they was alive.”
“Be off with you,” the captain replied, giving the loader no more
attention.
Hicks in the lead, the three men started off toward the German lines, to
halt half-way, thus to be enabled to inform the platoon if the enemy were
attacking. Perhaps four hundreds of yards from the German lines Hicks
stopped beside a mound of earth wide enough to conceal the bodies of the
three men.
“You fellows lie down here. I’ve got to get my gun.”
They looked at him agape as he strode toward the enemy’s line near which
lay his discarded rifle.
* * * * *
An ochre cannon-ball lay suspended in the soft blue sky. Efflorescent
clouds, like fresh chrysanthemums, were piled high atop one another,
their tips transuded with golden beams. The sky was divided into slices
of faint pink, purple, and orange.
On the drab earth, beaten lifeless by carnage and corruption, drab bodies
lay, oozing thin streams of pink blood, which formed dark, mysterious
little pools by their sides. Jaws were slack—dark, objectionable caverns
in pallid faces. Some men still moaned, or, in a tone into which
discouragement had crept, called for help.
Each body was alone, drawn apart from its companions by its separate and
incommunicable misery. The bodies would remain alone until to-morrow or
the day after to-morrow, when they would be furnishing a festival for the
bugs which now only inquisitively inspected them.
In the still air the scrubby bushes rose stiff and unyielding,
antipathetic to the prostrate bodies which were linked to them by
the magic of color. The farmhouse on the gray ridge was a gay-capped
sepulchre.
Hicks tramped on through the field, dimly sensing the dead, the odors,
the scene. He found his rifle where he had thrown it. As he picked it up,
the ridge swarmed with small gray figures, ever growing nearer. He turned
and walked toward his platoon. The breath from his nostrils felt cool.
He raised his chin a little. The action seemed to draw his feet from the
earth. No longer did anything matter, neither the bayonets, the bullets,
the barbed wire, the dead, nor the living. The soul of Hicks was numb.