Part 5

But Kahl only grinned. He was conscious of a feeling as if his face had become frozen and as if his chin were about to drop off. It hung slackly and his teeth came unnaturally together when he clinched his jaws. He tightened the chin-strap of his helmet, guarding against the chance of losing his chin. Next, his feet felt so awfully heavy. They would barely permit themselves to be lifted from the ground. They had become separate identities, and as he became conscious of them he felt them to be unfamiliar.

“Damn this mud,” he told himself, though knowing well that there was no mud weighing down his feet.

After pounding away for fifteen minutes, the smaller artillery stopped. The whistle blew and the men advanced, stepping out in the open where the risen sun made them hideously conspicuous. The field separating the woods stretched far on either side, and was covered with green-stemmed wheat that reached hip-high.

Kahl, glancing over his shoulder, saw the rays of the sun flashing from the clean bayonets, the bayonets the men so often had jabbed into sacks of sand and straw.

The sergeant in charge of the first wave set the pace, which was frightfully slow. Somewhere, farther down the line, men began to object to the snail-like progress.

“Yes,” thought Kahl, “it’s amusing that we walk so slowly when we are right out in plain sight.” It struck him as odd that the line was not being fired upon, and then he explained it to himself by the notion that the heavy barrage had driven the enemy back. But what if it hadn’t—what if the Germans are just waiting until we get right almost into the woods. Wouldn’t that be a mess! And what a bore, this moping through the wet smoky wheat. He wondered whether his knees were bleeding. Curse it! His neck was stiff. Maybe he could limber it up if he shook his head.... No, it couldn’t be done. It didn’t work.

The first wave entered the woods where the enemy was without firing a shot or being fired at. The second wave entered, and the third, and the fourth.

Kahl, parting the leaves with his bayonet, unexpectedly looked out upon a clearing, and the sight he saw made him exclaim to the man next to him:

“Oh, Jimmy, this must be some joke. Look at all those fellows asleep there.”

In the clearing, lying flat on their backs, were five soldiers, their legs stretched out. They wore no shoes over their heavy woollen hose.

Hicks drew over toward him and looked.

“You better get down, you lumphead,” Hicks cautioned; “they aren’t asleep.”

Together they crawled out toward the motionless figures. By this time Lepere, Cole, and Pietrzak had come to the clearing and started to follow.

“Je-sus, Kahl! Here’s a fellow out of the Eighty-third Company that I enlisted with. And he’s dead as hell.”

Rat-t-t-t——

It was a Maxim and the men dropped to their bellies.

“Hey, you poor fool, can’t you shut up?” Kahl said. “That’s a Maxim.”

Hicks made for behind a tree as fast as he could crawl.

“Hey, Pete,” he called in an undertone “where’s the rest of the outfit?”

“I don’t know,” Pietrzak answered him. “That’s the reason we come over here where you fellers are.”

Hicks turned to Kahl. “By God, Kahl, we’re lost!”

The machine-gun bullets shaved the bark from the trunk of the tree behind which Hicks was lying. He flattened out, his face pressed into the grass.

“Oh, Kahl, we’re lost!”

But Kahl did not hear him. Possibly he remembered what he had said earlier in the day. Possibly he was really a hero. Possibly he again saw himself as a little boy playing Indian in the back yard. Whatever were his thoughts, he rose to one knee, and, after peering intently in the direction from which the bullets had come, he raised his rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the shining barrel.

Rat-t-t-t-tat.

A Maxim, but from an oblique direction, was firing, and Kahl sprawled on his face, his right arm falling over the shiny barrel of his rifle. Then other machine-guns rained their bullets into the clearing, and the men clawed at the ground in an effort to lower their bodies beneath the sweep of the lead.

“What’ll we do, Hicks?” asked Pietrzak.

The tender green leaves from the trunk of the tree behind which Hicks was secure fluttered to the ground, clipped by the machine-gun fire.

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here. Why don’t you find the rest of the gang?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Well....” Hicks started to crawl back from the clearing into the woods. After he had wriggled his body about fifty yards he rose to his feet and ran in the general direction of which he had last seen the company. Breaking through the woods, he met Captain Powers.

“Captain Powers, there’s a squad of us up there, and we’re lost. We don’t know what to do. The men are in a clearing, and they’re afraid to move because they’re right in sight of a nest of machine-guns. Do you know where the platoon is? What shall we do?”

And in a Shakespearian voice Captain Powers told Hicks to return to his squad and lead them in a charge on the machine-gun nest.

“Aye, aye, sir.” Hicks turned and squirmed back through the woods to the clearing. “Like hell we’ll advance,” he thought. “The poor fool.”

Hicks reached the clearing at the same time the German machine-guns momentarily stopped.

“Ja find ’em, Hicks?”

“No, but I saw Powers. If we made a half circle back to the left we might find ’em.”

“Sounds good enough to try.”

They were crawling, crawling on their bellies, in single file, when Pugh stopped and called with an exultant lilt in his voice:

“Oh-o, here’s one Squarehead that’s kissed his papa good-by. Right through the eye.”

The men in rear veered off so as not to see the dead body. A short distance away some one was moaning weakly. Hicks stopped. “Another one of our guys hit, I betcha.”

They crawled eagerly and yet fearfully toward the noises. Seen through the trees bandy-legged Funk was supporting the head of little Halvorsen and trying to get him to open his eyes. Beside him was Lieutenant Bedford, saying:

“You’re crazy, Funk. The kid’s gone, but we’ll see if anything can be done.”

Funk was softly calling: “Hank, oh, Hank, ain’t you got anything to say?”

Hicks got to his feet and came beside the group that was staring at the dead face of Halvorsen.

“What’s that? Little Hank get it? Je’s, that’s bad.”

And Pugh: “Poor little fellah. I give him a hunnerd francs the other day. But he sure is welcome to it.”

Funk straightened his body, letting the head of Halvorsen touch the ground. Clinching his fist, he raised it above his head and shook it toward the woods: “We’ll get you, you dirty—” He could not find the word with which he wanted to characterize the inhumanity of the Germans.

Bedford grasped at his arm: “Get down, you damned fool. Do you want to get hit, too?”

* * * * *

The platoon had begun the advance through the woods in good order, but after it had reached the more dense part the German machine-guns commenced firing and four men fell. They tramped on, unable to see the enemy. Suddenly they realized that they had broken contact between themselves and the platoon on their left. Advancing, they wedged themselves into the German lines and made a target for enfillade fire. Then, little more to be done except get killed, they halted.

An orderly from battalion headquarters crawling through the woods carried with him the information for Captain Powers that the company was to intrench for the night. When the news reached them the platoon failed even to comment. For once their garrulous selves were stilled. The realization that they were to spend a night freighted with experiences totally new, that through the darkness they were to lie powerless to defend themselves, stunned them.

A curving line was described by Lieutenant Bedford, and the men were deployed along it at intervals. They unslung their packs, their extra bandoliers of ammunition, and began furiously to dig holes in the ground, deep enough for them to lie in without exposing their bodies. Some used their hand shovels and picks, while others, more careless with their equipment, used their bayonets to loosen the dirt and their mess-kit lids to scoop it out.

Dusk, like powder of old blue, sifted through the trees and wrapped the shallow burrows in a friendly mystery. In their fresh-made beds, peeping through the boughs with which they had covered the tops of their holes, the men waited.

* * * * *

Through the long night that stretched interminably before them they peered into the darkness, fancying, as they had in the trenches, that each tree trunk was an enemy. The least noise was sufficient for overworked nerves to press the trigger of a rifle and send a volley of bullets through the leaves of the trees. The calling of a frightened bird would cause their hearts to throb violently against their ribs. When they spoke it was in the smallest of whispers, and even so conversation was peculiarly lacking.

Hicks, at times, would think of a letter that his mother had written him in which she had offered to send him a quantity of cyanide of potassium. “You know, son,” she had written, “this war is not like the war that grandpapa used to tell you about. Those frightful Germans have liquid fire and deadly gases, and it is only when I think of how you would suffer if you were burned by their infernal liquid fire that I offer to send it. If you want it, just mark a cross at the bottom of your next letter.” But Hicks had not marked any cross. He had laughed at the notion at first, and then, as the months slipped by, he had forgotten entirely about it. Now he wondered if he had done wisely. Suppose he were shot like the fellow in the trench the other day? Or gassed as badly as the Frenchman whom he and Pugh had carried back to the first-aid station. Yes, it would have been comforting.... But he revolted at the thought of poisoning himself. His early religion had been that a suicide does not better his condition. He simply lives in purgatory. It would be hellish to lie gasping forever in purgatory, Hicks thought. Dear old mother. How she had cried when he told her that he had enlisted and was to be sent almost immediately to France. “But, mother, you were such a good patriot before I enlisted, and now you don’t want me to go. What kind of patriotism is that?” he remembered having asked her. And how badly she had felt that he only spent an hour with her before he left for the training camp.

He was amused at the notion of digging holes to lie in. It is insulting, he thought, to ask a person to dig his own grave. It is barbaric.

The leaves of the trees were silvered above by the rays of the sun playing upon the dew. Morning had come.

Somewhere—and it seemed as if it were only ten yards away, a bugle blew a short and unfamiliar call.

“All right, Third Platoon!” Lieutenant Bedford’s voice was hoarse with excitement. “Forward, Third Platoon.”

Hesitatingly and half-whimpering, the platoon climbed out from their holes, over which they had carefully placed boughs of trees to keep reconnoitering airplanes from seeing the freshly dug dirt.

Hicks’s helmet felt as if it were about to come off. It wabbled from one side to the other. His face was frozen, and when he wanted to speak out he felt that he could not because the muscles that controlled his mouth refused to respond. At first he was intensely aware of his legs, but, surging along with the rest of the platoon, he soon forgot them.

Three Germans were rising up in front of him. “Don’t those queer little caps of theirs look funny?” he thought, and, from the hip, he fired his automatic rifle at them. One fell and the others lifted their hands in the air and bellowed: “Kamerad! Kamerad!” Hicks passed by them, unheeding. More Germans. The woods were filled with Germans. But the rest of them wore heavy steel helmets that covered their foreheads and ears.

“You dirty bastards!” Hicks heard some one scream.

By God, he wouldn’t have any liquid fire poured on him. “Johnston!” he called. But Johnston, his leader, was not there. Hicks’s last clip had been emptied of shells. There were no more in his _musette_ bag. It wasn’t possible! Johnston must be some place near, ready to give him more clips. But no! He threw his rifle away in disgust. A few yards farther he saw the back of an olive-drab uniform, and by one of the hands that was connected to the uniform was clutched a rifle. Hicks snatched the rifle, unbuckled the cartridge-belt from the uniform, and hurried blindly on. A deep ravine was in front of him. He half jumped, half stumbled across it, and found himself once more in a wheat-field. There was no one in sight. He scrambled back over the ravine and through the woods again, frightened but defiant. Wherever he looked, as he went back through the woods, men were lying. Some of them lay quite still. Others moaned and cried alternately. But Hicks paid no heed. He was still hurrying on, his head up and his nostrils wide, when some one called:

“Here, Hicks, get busy and round up some of these Squareheads.” It was Ryan.

Hicks felt as if he had been struck in the stomach with a brick. He laughed nervously. “Sure.”

Nine Germans stood together with their hands raised high above their heads. Their knees were shaking badly and they looked first to one side and then to the other. Docile sheep, he led them back to the village where he turned them over to a reserve regiment.

On the way back to join his platoon he met a man who looked familiar. “Say, fellow, don’t you belong to A Company, of the Fifth?”

The man turned. “I did,” he said. “I don’t believe there is any more A Company.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, we attacked this morning through an open space in the woods,” the man told him.

“And they’re all dead? Fellah, I’ve got a cousin in that outfit. Show me where they went over.”

They walked back to the clearing together. Men were lying around in all manner of postures, and much more thickly than the men in the woods.

“What was your cousin’s name, buddy?”

“Williams, Paul Williams,” Hicks jerked out. “He was a tall, dark-haired fellow, about nineteen?”

“Nope. Might have seen him, but I don’t remember his name.”

Hicks covered the entire field, stopping closely to peer into the face of each of the men who was not a German soldier. As he was turning away from a man who was lying upon his back, his arms and legs stretched wide, and over whom he had stood longer than usual because the face reminded him somewhat of his cousin, the man’s eyelids partly opened, and in a voice in which there was little strength, called: “Soldier! Oh, soldier! Don’t let that damned Squarehead get me. Don’t leave me alone with him. He’ll kill me.”

“No, he won’t, buddy. He’s all right.” Hicks spoke reassuringly. For a moment he could not think whom the man was speaking of, but then he recollected that a German Red Cross attendant had been busy in the field, binding the wounds of the soldiers. Hicks looked around and saw the attendant a few yards off. He beckoned to him, and tried to illustrate by motions that he wanted the soldier carried back to the first-aid station.

The German came over, lowered his head to the soldier’s chest. “Nein. Caput.” He pointed to a rust-colored spot on the soldier’s tunic over the heart. While Hicks was standing there, wondering what to do, the soldier’s eyelids fluttered, he breathed once and deeply—and died.

Hicks gave up hope of finding his cousin. He had either been taken prisoner, and that was not at all likely, or else he had been sent back wounded, he thought.

* * * * *

Hicks tramped back through the thick woods that suddenly had become quiet. The rays of the noonday sun were filtering through the boughs of the trees, seeking out the now inanimate bodies, which would soon turn black and bloat out of shape under the intense heat. Before him, on a knoll of green, was a pile of heavy boulders, and, peeping through a crevice, stuck the nose of a Maxim. Climbing the knoll to the right, he looked into the machine-gun nest. Three bodies, motionless as the rocks themselves, were stretched at length. One had fallen face forward, an arm thrown over the stock of the weapon. His back, that swelled under the gray coat, was turned reproachfully toward the sky. Another was sprawled on his back, his hands and legs frozen in a gesture of complete negation. His chin had fallen heavily on his breast and upon his head his small trench cap was tilted forward at a rakish angle. The other man’s face was a clot of blood. Death, camera-like, had caught and held him fast, his body supported by the rocks, his face like a battered sunflower in the evening.

Hicks stooped over and gently drew the Maxim away from the man who had been firing it when he had been killed. Shouldering it, and carrying an extra belt of cartridges and the water-cooler, he left the knoll and walked toward the ravine. The spectacle that he had just witnessed left very little impression upon him.

The platoon was gathered closely together in the ravine. The ravine was deep and wide, and every so often passage along it was obstructed by a huge stone over which the men would have to climb. Evidently, a few days before, the French soldiers had used the ravine as a trench from which to conceal themselves while they fought against the onslaught of the enemy. Little holes had been dug in the side of the ravine nearest to the field in which men could throw themselves to be protected from the bursting shell casings and shrapnel. As he approached, three of the men were scuffing dirt over the body of a dead French soldier who had fallen near one of the small burrows in the ravine.

Sergeant Ryan was pacing along the ravine, pulling at the ends of his pointed mustache. Lieutenant Bedford, chewing speculatively at a sprig of wheat, and Sergeant Harriman were seated on the ground, apparently immersed in a discussion.

Sergeant Ryan walked over to them.

“This is damned foolishness,” he called. “Before very long there are going to be so many shells flying into this place that you won’t be able to count them. And where will we be? In hell, if we loaf around like this much longer.”

Lieutenant Bedford rubbed with the palm of his hand the stubble on his pallid face. “If I knew how much longer we were to be here, Ryan, I would have had the men digging in long ago.”

The company commander broke through the edge of the woods, and stood on the edge of the ravine. “Lieutenant Bedford. I want six of your men right away.”

“Yes, sir,” Bedford answered. “You, Hicks; you, Cole; you, Bullis; you, Johnston; you, Lepere, and Haight. Follow Captain Powers.”

Joined by details from the three other platoons, the men followed along through the woods again and out into a field which was very near to the place where Hicks had searched for Williams that morning.

“Have all of you men your rifles loaded?”

They responded in the affirmative.

“Well,” he hesitated, “you see that little bunch of woods over there? There’s a number of Germans there and we’re going after them.”

Swishing through the heavy wheat, the men now advanced in skirmish order. They were very cautious and, although the sun was making a glaring light and they were directly in an open field, they walked as though they were sneaking toward the enemy. Captain Powers, forgetting his impressive dignity, slunk along, one shoulder low and his hand grasping by the middle a rifle. His eyes were narrowed as if he were registering for the motion-pictures “extreme wariness.” As gently and softly as wading through heavy grass permitted, Captain Powers placed one foot after the other. His manner infected the men. One by one they adopted the crouching attitude, ready to spring upon their unsuspecting prey. They could almost be seen to flex the muscles in the calves of their legs and in their upper arms, rising majestically on their toes when they walked, instead of using the customary flat-footed form of perambulation.

Captain Powers, abandoning his duties as instructor of English at the Texas college, had learned modern warfare from the books supplied by the nearest officers’ training camp. He had learned how to order men about, that he was an officer and a gentleman, as the officer who commissioned him had phrased it. But yet he felt a slight interest in the men of his command. In the officers’ training-school and in the course of the practice skirmishes through which he had been he had learned that the way in which an attack was made by a small party moving forward in full daylight was by running forward in spurts until the objective had been reached.

Being a professor of English, and especially a professor of English in Texas, he sentimentalized the attack. How much finer it is, he thought, to attack as General Sam Houston attacked; to march steadfastly upon the enemy and make them surrender at the point of a sword or a bowie-knife. The only rift came in his realization that he had no sword, not even a bowie-knife.

When the party was still several yards from the edge of the woods, a mass of Germans, outnumbering them twice, emerged with their hands held high in the air and blithely calling: “Kamerad.”

The captain’s disappointment at not being able to make another attack worthy of a Texan was soon lost in his exultant emotion at the thought of the number of prisoners he had captured. Selecting one of the men to go with him, he herded the prisoners back to the regimental headquarters, where he proudly delivered them to another officer.

VIII

In the ravine Hicks was busy trying to place his Maxim in a position from which it would sweep a portion of the field. He had succeeded in making it remain upright on its haunches, and was now experimenting with it in various positions, so that he could swing it back and forth as he fired, and cover the maximum of ground. The water-cooler had been set at its side and the long rubber hose was attached to the machine-gun. A belt filled with cartridges was inserted in the chamber, and the affair was ready to be fired.

“’At’s some gun you got there, Hicksy, old boy. What do you ’spect to do with it? You don’t aim to kill nobody, do you?” Pugh had recovered and was in good humor. As he talked, a black stubble of beard that grew grotesquely on the chin of his elf-like face rose and fell.

“No, Jack. I’m just keepin’ it for a souvenir.”

“Hell, y’ain’t got no souvenir. Lookit, Hicksy.” He produced a small pearl-handled pistol. “Got this offen one of them Dutchmen. Lookit here.” He placed his hand in his blouse and brought out a pair of field-glasses. “Got this from another one. Now all I want to do is to git wounded and I’ll take these babies back and sell ’em for beaucoup francs to them S. O. S. birds.”

“Don’t talk about getting wounded, Pugh,” Harriman requested. “It’s bad luck. Remember what Kitty Kahl said the other night?”

“Naw, how’d I know what Kitty Kahl said? He didn’t say nothin’ to me.”

“He said that he’d either win a decoration or get killed.”

“I don’t care if he did. I want a bon-bless-ey so I can git outta this damn hole.”

“Say, Hicks,” Lepere called, “you’d better take down that confounded gun. The Boche will see it and then we’ll all get killed.”

“Oh, they won’t see it.”

“You can’t tell. One of their aviators is liable to come over here any time.”

“Tyah tyah tyah tyah, you talk like you come from where they have possums for yard dogs, Lepeah,” Pugh sneered. “Hicksy, let’s you and me go out salvagin’. There’s a lot of salmon and stuff in some of them boys’ packs that’ll never want it no more.”

“You mean some of the fellows that have been killed?” Hicks asked. “I don’t like to do that. It seems too ghoulish.”

“I don’t cah what it seems like. I’m hawngry. Le’s go.”

“Maybe Bedford’ll stop us.”

“Naw, he won’t. He’s too damned scared to git out of his hole.”

They climbed out of the ravine and started back through the woods.

“Hicksy! Be damned! Lookit that!”