Part 1

Chapter 14,142 wordsPublic domain

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THROUGH THE WHEAT

BY THOMAS BOYD

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK · LONDON 1923

Printed in the United States of America

Published April, 1923

THROUGH THE WHEAT

Dusk, like soft blue smoke, fell with the dying spring air and settled upon the northern French village. In the uncertain light one and two story buildings set along the crooked street showed crisply, bearing a resemblance to false teeth in an ash-old face. To young Hicks, disconsolate as he leaned against the outer wall of the French canteen, upon whose smooth white surface his body made an unseemly blot, life was worth very little.

For nine interminable months William Hicks had been in France, shunted from one place to another, acting out the odious office of the military police, working as a stevedore beside evil-odored blacks, helping to build cantonments and reservoirs for new soldiers ever arriving from the United States.

And he was supposed to be a soldier. He had enlisted with at least the tacit understanding that he was some day to fight. At the recruiting office in Cincinnati the bespangled sergeant had told him: “Join the marines and see some real action.” And the heart of William Hicks had fled to the rich brogue and campaign ribbons that the sergeant professionally wore.

But was this action? Was this war? Was this for what William Hicks had come to France? Well, he told himself, it was not. Soldiering with a shovel. A hell of a way to treat a white man. There were plenty of people to dig holes in the ground, but not many of them could qualify as sharpshooters. And Hicks swelled his chest a trifle, noticing the glint of the metal marksmanship badge on his tunic.

Resting beside him on the ground was a display of unopened food tins above which rose the slender necks of bottles. Of the bottles there were four, prisoning the white wine of the northern French vineyards. Excessive in number were the cans, and they looked as if their contents were edible. But Hicks was not sure. He had bought them from the wizened little French clerk who had regarded him with suspicion through the window of the canteen. For this suspicion, this slight hostility, Hicks did not blame the little Frenchman. He had, he realized, made an ass of himself by pointing to ambiguously labelled cans piled on the shelves inside the canteen and saying: “la, combien?” Now he possessed a choice array of cans of whose contents he knew nothing. All that he asked was that he might be able to eat it.

That morning he had marched into the town with his tired platoon from a small deserted railway station some miles distant. Once assigned to the houses in which they were to be billeted, the men had unstrapped their blankets and fallen asleep. But not Hicks. He had explored the village with an eye to disposing of the mass of soiled and torn franc-notes which he carried in his pocket. In the French canteen he had found the place for which he was looking. And so he had stood before the clerk, demanding to buy as much of the stock as he could carry.

But the clerk had closed the window, leaving Hicks with a handful of French money and the tinned food and four bottles of vin blanc. Hence his disconsolation. The roll of paper felt unnatural, superfluous in his pocket. He was tempted to fling it away. In the morning the platoon would find the canteen and buy the last can, the last bottle.

Restive, he ran his lean fingers through his uncombed hair, wondering vaguely whether it were true that his regiment was soon to depart for the front.

It must be true, he decided. There had been an untoward attitude on the part of his officers since the moment that the departure of the platoon had been made known. Their destination had been scrupulously kept from them. In corroboration, a long-range gun boomed sullenly in the distance.

The noise produced in him a not unpleasant shiver of apprehension. He met it, summoning a quiet smile of scorn. Yes, he would be glad to go to the front, to that vague place from which men returned with their mutilated bodies. Not that he was vengeful. His feeling for the German army was desultory, a blend of kaleidoscopic emotions in which hate never entered. But in conflict, he felt, would arise a reason for his now unbearable existence.

The grinning weakness which men called authority had followed him since the day of his enlistment at the beginning of the war. It had turned thoughts of valor into horrible nightmares, the splendor of achievement into debased bickering. Most of the men, it seemed to him, had not entered the army to further the accomplishment of a common motive; they had enlisted or had been made officers and gentlemen—Congress had generously made itself the cultural father of officers—for the purpose of aiding their personal ambitions.

It had darkened. Hicks gathered up his sorry feast and sauntered off through the shaking, mysterious shadows to his pallet of straw.

* * * * *

Stretched out upon individual beds of straw which had been strewn over the stone floor, the members of the platoon were lying before a huge fireplace that drew badly in the early spring wind. In all of their nine months in France this was the first time that they had thus lain, not knowing what was to come on the following day, nor caring, being only satisfied by the warmth which came from the fireplace, by their sense of feeling intact and comfortable.

In this sense of reconciliation John Pugh, the Mississippi gambler, forgot his everlasting dice-throwing, which every pay-day that the platoon had thus far known had won for him more money than his company commander received from the United States Government.

He sighed, elongating his limbs beneath his blanket. He made an effort to rise, and succeeded in resting the weight of his torso on his arm which he had crooked under him. Cautiously he felt for a cigarette beneath his tunic, which he was using for a pillow. He got the cigarette and a match, then held them in his hand, hesitant.

His eyes, large and dolorous, searched the dimly lighted room, scanning the recumbent figures to discover whether they were asleep. Men were lying, their shoes beside their heads, their army packs, rifles, leaning against the wall and the remainder of their equipment scattered near by. They were silent, motionless.

“I guess I can risk it,” thought Pugh, and he carefully struck the match and lighted his cigarette.

As the match was rubbed over the floor heads appeared; the stillness was broken.

“Oh, Jack, thought you didn’t have any more cigarettes.”

“You got fifty francs offa me last month. I think you ought to give me a smoke!” The voice was reproachful.

Effectually and instantly Pugh checked the avalanche of reproach:

“Hey, you fellas, there’s beaucoup mail up at regimental headquahtas.”

The clumsy shadows in the darkened room answered:

“Aw bunk.”

“Cut out that crap.”

“How do you get that way, Jack? You know there ain’t no mail up at regimental.”

“Well,” Pugh sighed, “if you all don’ wanna heah f’m your mammy I don’ give a damn.... Oh-o. What you all got, Hicks?”

Hicks had arrived at his billet, his arms filled with the bottles of wine and the cans of the questionable contents.

Candles were lighted and set on the helmets of the men. Bodies rose to a sitting posture, eyes on Hicks.

“Gimme a drink, Hicksy!”

“Hooray, look what Hicks’s got.”

“Yeh, gimme a drink.”

The voices were clamorous.

“Gimme, gimme? Was your mouth bored out with a gimlet,” Hicks jeered. “Why didn’t you buy some?”

They formed a semicircle around the fireplace in front of which Hicks sat with his plunder.

Over the bottles they grew noisily talkative.

“Say, have you fellows seen any of these new guys here?” asked Hicks. “I was walkin’ down one of the streets by the Frog canteen and one of ’em asked me if I was in the balloon corps. I told him yes, and asked him how he guessed it, and he said, ‘Oh, I saw that balloon on your cap.’”

“They sure are a bunch of funny birds. I ast one of ’em how long he’d been over on this side and he said: ‘About three weeks—seen anybody that’s come over lately?’”

A contingent of soldiers which had arrived in the village that afternoon were, therefore, objects of scorn and hostility.

“Aw, they’re some of them fellahs that the wind blew in. Pretty soon they’ll have the home guards over here.”

“They will like hell! If you could git them home guards away from home you’d sure have to hump. They’re home guards—they guard our women while we’re over here.” The speaker seemed afraid that his listeners would not understand that he was stressing the word _home_.

“Yeh, they’s one of ’em guardin’ my gal too close. I got a lettah....”

“You’re lucky to get any kind of a letter. Here I been for three months and not a word. I don’t know whether they all died or what,” Hicks ended gloomily.

“Aw cheer up, Hicksy, old boy. Maybe your mail was on that transport that got sunk.”

A head was thrust in the door. It was the first sergeant.

“Pipe down, you damned recruits. Lights are supposed to be out at eight o’clock. If you guys want to git work detail for the rest of your lives——”

“All right, you dirty German spy. Git the hell out of here and let us sleep.”

All of the candles had been put out as soon as the voice of the first sergeant was heard. The men had flung themselves on their beds. Now each one pretended to be asleep.

“Who said that?” The first sergeant was furious. “I’ll work you birds till your shoes fall off.”

The room answered with loud and affected snores. The first sergeant, in all of his fierceness, disappeared.

It was morning.

Sergeant Kerfoot Harriman, bearing with proud satisfaction the learning and culture he had acquired in the course of three years at a small Middle-Western university, walked down the Rue de Dieu in a manner which carried the suggestion that he had forgotten the belt of his breeches.

Approaching a white two-story stone building which age and an occasional long-distance German shell had given an air of solemn decrepitude, Sergeant Harriman unbent enough to shout stiltedly: “Mailo! Mailo-ho!”

His reiterated announcement was unnecessary. Already half-dressed soldiers were rushing through the entrance of the building and toward the approaching sergeant.

“All right, you men. If you can’t appear in uniform get off of the company street.” Sergeant Harriman was commanding.

In their eagerness to hear the list of names called out the men forgot even to grumble, but scrambled back through the doorway overflowing the long hall off of which were six rooms, devoid of furniture, which had been converted into barracks.

Sergeant Harriman, feeling the entire amount of pleasure to be had from the added importance of distributing the mail—the first the platoon had received in two months—cleared his throat, took a steadfast position and gave his attention to the small bundle of letters which he held in his hand.

He deftly riffled them twice without speaking. Then he separated the letters belonging to the non-commissioned officers, the corporals, and sergeants from those addressed to the privates. The non-commissioned officers received their letters first.

At last:

“Private Hicks,” he read off.

“Here, here I am. Back here.” Private Hicks was all aflutter. Separated from the letter by a crowd of men, he stood on tiptoe and reached his arm far over the shoulder of the man in front of him.

“Pass it back to him? Pass it back to him?” voices impatiently asked.

“No!” Sergeant Harriman was a commander, every inch of him. “Come up and get it, Hicks.”

“Hey, snap out of it, will ya! Call off the rest of the names.”

A path was made, and Hicks finally received the letter.

Harriman looked up. “If you men don’t shut up, you will never get your mail!”

“Private Pugh!”

“Hee-ah. Gimme that lettah. That’s f’m mah sweet mammah.” Pugh wormed his small, skinny body through the men, fretfully calling at those who did not make way quickly enough. He grasped the letter. Then he started back, putting the letter in his pocket unopened.

“Poor old Pugh. Gets a letter and he can’t read.”

“Ain’t that a waste of stationery?”

“Why don’t you ask the captain to write an’ tell your folks not to send you any more mail? Look at all the trouble you cause these mail clerks.”

Several men offered to read the letter to Pugh, but he did not answer.

An hour later the first sergeant was walking up and down in front of the billets, blowing his whistle. Bugle-calls were taboo.

“Shake it up, you men. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be ready for drill at nine o’clock?”

“Drill! I thought we come up here to fight,” voices grumbled, muttering obscene phrases directed at General Pershing, the company commander, and the first sergeant.

Men scurried out of their billets, struggling to get on their packs and to fall in line before the roll was called.

“Fall in!” the little sergeant shouted, standing before the platoon. “Right dress!” he commanded sharply and ran to the right of the platoon, from where he told one man to draw in his waist and another to move his feet, and so on, until he was satisfied that the line was reasonably straight. “Steady, front!” And in a very military manner he placed himself in the proper place before the company and began to call the roll.

“All present or accounted for, sir,” he reported to the captain, a note of pride and of a great deed nobly done ringing in his voice.

The sergeants fell back in rear of the platoons and the commander ordered “squads right.” The hobnailed boots of the men on the cobblestones echoed hollowly down the street.

Stupid-looking old Frenchmen, a few thick-waisted women, and a scattering of ragged children dully watched the company march down the street. For the most part they were living in the advance area because they had no other place to go and because they feared to leave the only homes that they had ever known.

The platoon marched out of the town along a gravel road and into a green, evenly plotted field, where they were deployed and where, to their surprise, a number of sacks, filled with straw, had been hung from a row of scaffolding.

The platoon faced the sacks, were manœuvred so that each man would be standing in front of one of the dummies and were ordered to fix bayonets. Sergeant Harriman, the nostrils of his stubby nose flaring wide with zeal, began his instructions.

“All right, you men. Now you want to forget that these are sacks of straw. They are not at all. They are dirty Huns—Huns that raped the Belgians, Huns that would have come over to the good old U. S. A. and raped our women if we hadn’t got into the war. Now, men, I want to see some action, I want to see some hate when you stick these dirty Huns. I want to see how hard you can _grunt_.”

“All ready now. Straight thrust. One, two, three—now——”

As a body the platoon lunged their bayonets into the cloth-covered straw.

“Great God! Is that all the pep you’ve got? Why, you men are stale. What the hell did you come over here to fight for? Did you ever hear that you were supposed to be saving the world for democracy? Now, try it again, and put some punch in it this time. Let’s hear your _grunt_.”

The action was repeated. “Rotten!” yelled the sergeant. “What the hell are you going to do when you get up to the front? Do you think this is an afternoon tea? You act like a bunch of ribbon-counter clerks, and that’s what I believe most of you are. Now let’s try the butt stroke.”

“Butt stroke. One—two—three. Oh, hell. Where are you aiming, Gillespie? Remember, you’ve missed him with the bayonet and you’re trying to soak him in the crotch—in the _crotch_, mind you, with the butt of your rifle.”

Several of the men caught the frenzy of the sergeant, and at each command they ran, gritting and grinding their teeth, and grunted at the pieces of straw. From the terrific onslaught one of the dummies was severed from the scaffold, and the sergeant cried out:

“That’s the first real spirit I’ve seen to-day. That’s the way to kill them!” he called to the man who had wrested the dummy from its place. “Come up here and show these dopes how to kill.”

Exultant, the man left his place and strutted over to the sergeant. Taking a position before one of the dummies, he proceeded to show the rest of the platoon how really and frightfully to stab the dummies until their stuffing broke through the sacks.

“He’s working to be a corporal, the dirty scut. And oh, if he does get to be a two-striper won’t he make us step around. Boy!” Hicks muttered to Pugh, who was standing next to him and whose bayonet had failed even to pierce the covering of the sack.

“He won’t pull none of that old stuff on me. Ah’ll tell Lieutenant Bedford and he’ll make him be good or I won’t give him any more money to gamble with,” Pugh drawled.

“You sure have got a stand-in with Bedford, Pugh. I often wondered how you did it.”

“Hell, that’s easy. When he was down at St. Nazaire I lent him ’bout a thousand francs to gamble with, and he ain’t never paid me.”

The platoon assembled and marched back to their billets.

III

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.