THE interminable voyage was over and Peter debarked to spend still more
interminable days at Brest. Dr. Meriwether Bye left immediately for La
Courtine, where Peter later caught sight of him once more on his way to
the front. The somewhat exalted mood to which his long and intimate
talks with Meriwether had raised him vanished completely under the
strain of the dirt, the racial and national clashes, and above all the
persistent bad weather of Brest.
This town, the end of Brittany and the furthest western outpost of
France, always remained in Peter’s memory as a horrible prelude to a
most horrible war. Brest up to the time that Europe had gone so
completely and so suddenly insane, had been the typical, stupid,
monotonous French town with picturesquely irregular pavements, narrow
tortuous streets, dark, nestling little shops and the inevitable public
square. Around and about the city to all sides stretched well ordered
farms.
Then came the march of two million American soldiers across the town and
the surrounding country. Under their careless feet the farms became mud,
so that the name Brest recalls to the minds of thousands nothing if not
a picture of the deepest, slimiest, stickiest mud that the world has
known. All about were people, people, too many people, French and
Americans. And finally the relations between the two nations, allies
though they were, developed from misunderstandings into hot irritations,
from irritations into clashes. First white Americans and Frenchmen
clashed; separate restaurants and accommodations had to be arranged.
Then came the inevitable clash between white and colored Americans;
petty jealousies and meannesses arose over the courtesies of Frenchwomen
and the lack of discrimination in the French cafés. The Americans found
a new and inexplicable irritation in the French colored colonials. Food
was bad, prices were exorbitant; officers became tyrants. Everyone was
at once in Brest and constantly about to leave it; real understanding
and acquaintanceship were impossible.
Peter thought Dante might well have included this place in the
description of his Inferno. Here were Disease and Death, Mutilation and
Murder. Stevedores and even soldiers became cattle and beasts of burden.
Many black men were slaves. The thing from which France was to be
defended could hardly be worse than this welter of human
misunderstandings, the clashing of unknown tongues, the cynical
investigations of the government, the immanence of war and the awful,
persistent wretchedness of the weather.
The long wait turned into sudden activity and Peter’s outfit was ordered
to Lathus, thence to La Courtine, one of the large training centers. It
was at this latter place that he caught sight once more of Meriwether
Bye. He seemed unusually alert and cheerful, Peter thought, and when the
two got a chance to speak to each other, this impression was confirmed.
The young white physician had the look of a man who sees before him a
speedy deliverance.
“He thinks he’s going to die and chuck this whole infernal business,”
Peter said to himself. “Wish I could be as sure of getting out of it as
he is.” Somehow the brief encounter left him more dispirited than ever.
“Come out of it, ole hoss,” Harley Alexander used to say to him. “What’d
your ‘grand white’ friend do to you?”
“Oh, you shut up!” Peter barked at him.
His real depression, however, dated back to the time immediately after
his company had left Brest. The awful condition of things in the seaport
town was general rather than specific, and for the first time since
Peter had entered the war he was feeling comparatively calm. His long
and intimate talks with Meriwether had produced their effect. He had not
realized that any such man as the young Quaker physician had existed in
the white world. He had too much sense and too many cruel experiences to
believe that there were many of Meriwether’s kind to be found in a
lifetime’s journey, but somehow his long bitterness of the years had
been assuaged. Henceforth, he told himself, he would try to be more
generous in his thoughts of white men—perhaps his attitude invited
trouble which he was usually only too willing to meet halfway.
At Lathus, Harley Alexander met him in the little _place_. “Seems to me
you’re got up regardless,” Peter had commented. Alexander, one of the
trimmest men in the regiment, was looking unusually shipshape, almost
dapper.
The other struck him familiarly across the shoulder. “And that ain’t
all. Say, fellow, there’s a band concert to-night right here in this
little old square. I’m goin’ and I’m goin’ to take a lady.”
“Lady! Where’d you get her?”
“Right here. These girls are all right. Not afraid of a dark skin. ‘How
should we have fear, m’soo,’ one of them says to me, ‘when you fight for
our _patrie_ and when you are so _beau_?’ ‘_Beau_’ that’s handsome,
ain’t it? Say this is some country to fight for; got some sense of
appreciation. Better come along, old scout. There’s a pile of loots
getting ready to come, each with a French dame in tow.”
“I’ll be there,” Peter told him, laughing. “But count me out with the
ladies. I can’t get along with the domestic brand and I know I’ll be out
of luck with the foreign ones.”
Some passing thought wiped the joy of anticipation from Harley’s face.
“My experience is that these foreign ones are a damn sight less foolish
than some domestic ones I’ve met. Well, me for the concert.”
But that band concert never came off. At sunset a company of white
American Southerners marched into Lathus down the main street, past the
little _place_. There was a sudden uproar.
“Look! Darkies and white women! Come on, fellows, kill the damned
niggers!”
There was a hasty onslaught in which the colored soldiers even taken by
surprise gave as good as they took. Between these two groups from the
same soil there was grimmer, more determined fighting than was seen at
Verdun. The French civil population stood on the church-steps opposite
the square and watched with amazement.
“_Nom de dieu!_ Are they crazy, then, these Americans, that they kill
each other!”
The next day saw Peter’s company on its way to La Courtine, a training
center, where there were no women. Thence they moved presently to the
front in the Metz Sector.
The injustice and indignity rendered the colored troupes at Lathus, plus
the momentary glimpses which he caught of Meriwether and his exaltation,
plunged Peter into a morass of melancholy and bitter self-communing
which shut him off as effectually as a smoke-screen from any real
appreciation of the dangers which surrounded him on the front.
In the midst of all that ineffable danger, that hellish noise, he was
harassed by the inextricable confusion, the untidiness of his own life.
God, to get rid of it all! Once he spent forty-eight hours with nine
other men on the ridge of a hill under fire. The other fellows told
stories and swapped confidences. But he stayed unmoved through it all,
impervious alike to the danger and the good man-talk going on about him.
When the call came for a reconnoitering party, he was one of the first
to step forward. He went out that night into the blackness, the
hellishness of No Man’s Land. He saw a dark figure rise in front of him,
heard a guttural sound and the next moment his left arm, drenched with
blood, hung useless at his side. Raising himself he shot at the legs
which showed a solid blackness against the thinner surrounding darkness.
Wriggling on his belly, he pushed forward to where he thought he heard
sounds, a struggle. “Something doing,” he told himself, “might as well
get in on that.”
But when he drew near the darkness was so intense that he did not dare
interfere. Two men, at least, were struggling terribly but he could not
tell which was which. They were breathing in terrific grunts, so heavily
that they had not noticed the approach of his smoothly sliding body.
Suddenly what he had hoped for, happened. A rocket shot up in the air
flared briefly and showed him the two men. One was Meriwether Bye, the
other was a German, his hand in the act of throwing a hand grenade.
Peter lurched forward and at that ghastly short range shot the German
through the stomach. But he was too late, the grenade had left the man’s
hand. The earth rocked about him, he could see Meriwether fall, a
toppling darkness in the darkness. He started toward him but his foot
caught in a depression and he himself fell sideways on his wounded arm.
There was a moment of exquisite pain and then the darkness grew even
more dark about him, the silent night more silent.
When he came to, it was still dark, though the day, he felt, rather than
saw, was approaching. His arm hurt unmercifully. He had never known such
pain. He raised himself on his one arm, and felt around with his foot.
Yes, there was a body, he prayed it might not be the German. Crawling
forward he plunged his hand into blood, a depthless pool of sticky
blood. Sickened, he drew back and dried it, wiping it on his coat. More
cautiously, then, he reached out again, searching for the face, yes,
that was Meriwether’s nose. Those canny finger-tips of his recognized
the facial structure. His hand came back to Meriwether’s chest. The
heart was beating faintly and just above it was a hole, with the blood
gushing, spurting, hot and thick.
He sat upright and wrenching open his tunic tore at his shirt. The stuff
was hard to tear but it finally gave way under the onslaught of teeth
and fingers. Faint with the pain of his left arm and the loss of his own
blood, he set his lips hard, concentrating with all his strength on the
determination not to lose consciousness again. Finally grunting,
swearing, almost crying, he got Meriwether’s head against his knee, then
against his shoulder, and staunched the wound with the harsh, unyielding
khaki. His canteen was full and he drenched the chilly, helpless face
with its contents. All this time he was sitting with no support for his
back and the strain was telling on him.
Against the surrounding gray of the coming morning, southward toward his
own lines, he caught sight of darker shapes, trees perhaps, perhaps
men—if he could only get to them! Placing Meriwether’s face upwards he
caught him about his lean waist, buckling him to his side with an arm of
steel, and rising to his knees he crawled for what seemed a mile toward
that persistent blackness. Twice he fell, once he struck his left arm
against a dead man’s boot. The awful throbbing in his shoulder
increased. But at last he was there, at last in the shelter of a clump
of low, stunted trees. With a sob he braced himself against them,
letting Meriwether’s head and shoulders rest against his knees. The
blood had begun to spurt again and Meriwether stirred. Peter whispered:
“Bye, for God’s sake, speak to me. This is Peter, Peter Bye, you
remember?”
The young doctor repeated the name thickly. “Yes, Peter. I know. I’m
dying.”
“Not yet. Man, it’s almost day, they’ll come to us. Pull yourself
together. We’ll save you somehow.”
Meriwether whispered, “I’m cold.”
Could he get his coat off? How could he ever pull it off that shattered
arm? Still he achieved even this, wrapping it around the white man’s
shivering form, raising that face, gray as the gray day above them, high
on his chest, cradling him like a baby.
The chill was the chill of death, a horrible death. Meriwether coughed
and choked; Peter could feel the life struggling within the poor torn
body. Once the cold lips said: “Peter, you’re a good scout.”
Just before a merciful unconsciousness enveloped him for the last time,
Meriwether sat upright in the awful agony of death. “Grandfather,” he
called in a terrible voice, “this is the last of the Byes.”
When the stretcher-bearers found them, Meriwether was lying across
Peter’s knees, his face turned childwise toward Peter’s breast. The
colored man’s head had dropped low over the fair one and his black curly
hair fell forward straight and stringy, caked in the blood which lay in
a well above Meriwether’s heart.
“Cripes!” said one of the rescue men, “I’ve seen many a sight in this
war, but none ever give me the turn I got seein’ that smoke’s hair
dabblin’ in the other fellow’s blood.”
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