Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  Nolan knew that Martin had suddenly fallen. “What — —” he began.

  “They’ve hit me,” said Martin.

  “Jesus!” said Nolan.

  Martin lay on the ground, clutching his left forearm just below the elbow with all the strength of his right hand. His lips were pursed ruefully. He did not seem to know what to do. He continued to stare at his arm.

  Then suddenly the bullets drove at them low and hard. The men flung themselves face downward in the grass. Nolan lost all thought of his friend. Oddly enough, he felt somewhat like a man hiding under a bed, and he was just as sure that he could not raise his head high without being shot as a man hiding under a bed is sure that he cannot raise his head without bumping it.

  A lieutenant was seated in the grass just behind him. He was in the careless and yet rigid pose of a man balancing a loaded plate on his knee at a picnic. He was talking in soothing paternal tones.

  “Now, don’t get rattled. We’re all right here. Just as safe as being in church…. They’re all going high. Don’t mind them…. Don’t mind them…. They’re all going high. We’ve got them rattled and they can’t shoot straight. Don’t mind them.”

  The sun burned down steadily from a pale blue sky upon the crackling woods and knolls and fields. From the roar of musketry it might have been that the celestial heat was frying this part of the world.

  Nolan snuggled close to the grass. He watched a grey line of intrenchments, above which floated the veriest gossamer of smoke. A flag lolled on a staff behind it. The men in the trench volleyed whenever an American shell exploded near them. It was some kind of infantile defiance. Frequently a bullet came from the woods directly behind Nolan and his comrades. They thought at the time that these bullets were from the rifle of some incompetent soldier of their own side.

  There was no cheering. The men would have looked about them, wondering where was the army, if it were not that the crash of the fighting for the distance of a mile denoted plainly enough where was the army.

  Officially, the battalion had not yet fired a shot; there had been merely some irresponsible popping by men on the extreme left flank. But it was known that the lieutenant-colonel who had been in command was dead — shot through the heart — and that the captains were thinned down to two. At the rear went on a long tragedy, in which men, bent and hasty, hurried to shelter with other men, helpless, dazed, and bloody. Nolan knew of it all from the hoarse and affrighted voices which he heard as he lay flattened in the grass. There came to him a sense of exultation. Here, then, was one of those dread and lurid situations, which in a nation’s history stand out in crimson letters, becoming a tale of blood to stir generation after generation. And he was in it, and unharmed. If he lived through the battle, he would be a hero of the desperate fight at —— ; and here he wondered for a second what fate would be pleased to bestow as a name for this battle.

  But it is quite sure that hardly another man in the battalion was engaged in any thoughts concerning the historic. On the contrary, they deemed it ill that they were being badly cut up on a most unimportant occasion. It would have benefited the conduct of whoever were weak if they had known that they were engaged in a battle that would be famous for ever.

  IV

  Martin had picked himself up from where the bullet had knocked him and addressed the lieutenant. “I’m hit, sir,” he said.

  The lieutenant was very busy. “All right, all right,” he said, just heeding the man enough to learn where he was wounded. “Go over that way. You ought to see a dressing-station under those trees.”

  Martin found himself dizzy and sick. The sensation in his arm was distinctly galvanic. The feeling was so strange that he could wonder at times if a wound was really what ailed him. Once, in this dazed way, he examined his arm; he saw the hole. Yes, he was shot; that was it. And more than in any other way it affected him with a profound sadness.

  As directed by the lieutenant, he went to the clump of trees, but he found no dressing-station there. He found only a dead soldier lying with his face buried in his arms and with his shoulders humped high as if he were convulsively sobbing. Martin decided to make his way to the road, deeming that he thus would better his chances of getting to a surgeon. But he suddenly found his way blocked by a fence of barbed wire. Such was his mental condition that he brought up at a rigid halt before this fence, and stared stupidly at it. It did not seem to him possible that this obstacle could be defeated by any means. The fence was there, and it stopped his progress. He could not go in that direction.

  But as he turned he espied that procession of wounded men, strange pilgrims, that had already worn a path in the tall grass. They were passing through a gap in the fence. Martin joined them. The bullets were flying over them in sheets, but many of them bore themselves as men who had now exacted from fate a singular immunity. Generally there were no outcries, no kicking, no talk at all. They too, like Martin, seemed buried in a vague but profound melancholy.

  But there was one who cried out loudly. A man shot in the head was being carried arduously by four comrades, and he continually yelled one word that was terrible in its primitive strength,—”Bread! Bread! Bread!” Following him and his bearers were a limping crowd of men less cruelly wounded, who kept their eyes always fixed on him, as if they gained from his extreme agony some balm for their own sufferings.

  “Bread! Give me bread!”

  Martin plucked a man by the sleeve. The man had been shot in the foot, and was making his way with the help of a curved, incompetent stick. It is an axiom of war that wounded men can never find straight sticks.

  “What’s the matter with that feller?” asked Martin.

  “Nutty,” said the man.

  “Why is he?”

  “Shot in th’ head,” answered the other, impatiently.

  The wail of the sufferer arose in the field amid the swift rasp of bullets and the boom and shatter of shrapnel. “Bread! Bread! Oh, God, can’t you give me bread? Bread!” The bearers of him were suffering exquisite agony, and often they exchanged glances which exhibited their despair of ever getting free of this tragedy. It seemed endless.

  “Bread! Bread! Bread!”

  But despite the fact that there was always in the way of this crowd a wistful melancholy, one must know that there were plenty of men who laughed, laughed at their wounds whimsically, quaintly inventing odd humours concerning bicycles and cabs, extracting from this shedding of their blood a wonderful amount of material for cheerful badinage, and, with their faces twisted from pain as they stepped, they often joked like music-hall stars. And perhaps this was the most tearful part of all.

  They trudged along a road until they reached a ford. Here under the eave of the bank lay a dismal company. In the mud and in the damp shade of some bushes were a half-hundred pale-faced men prostrate. Two or three surgeons were working there. Also, there was a chaplain, grim-mouthed, resolute, his surtout discarded. Overhead always was that incessant maddening wail of bullets.

  Martin was standing gazing drowsily at the scene when a surgeon grabbed him. “Here, what’s the matter with you?” Martin was daunted. He wondered what he had done that the surgeon should be so angry with him.

  “In the arm,” he muttered, half-shamefacedly.

  After the surgeon had hastily and irritably bandaged the injured member he glared at Martin and said, “You can walk all right, can’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Martin.

  “Well, now, you just make tracks down that road.”

  “Yes, sir.” Martin went meekly off. The doctor had seemed exasperated almost to the point of madness.

  The road was at this time swept with the fire of a body of Spanish sharpshooters who had come cunningly around the flanks of the American army, and were now hidden in the dense foliage that lined both sides of the road. They were shooting at everything. The road was as crowded as a street in a city, and at an absurdly short range they emptied their rifles at the passing people. They were aided always by the over-
sweep from the regular Spanish line of battle.

  Martin was sleepy from his wound. He saw tragedy follow tragedy, but they created in him no feeling of horror.

  A man with a red cross on his arm was leaning against a great tree. Suddenly he tumbled to the ground, and writhed for a moment in the way of a child oppressed with colic. A comrade immediately began to bustle importantly. “Here,” he called to Martin, “help me carry this man, will you?”

  Martin looked at him with dull scorn. “I’ll be damned if I do,” he said. “Can’t carry myself, let alone somebody else.”

  This answer, which rings now so inhuman, pitiless, did not affect the other man. “Well, all right,” he said. “Here comes some other fellers.” The wounded man had now turned blue-grey; his eyes were closed; his body shook in a gentle, persistent chill.

  Occasionally Martin came upon dead horses, their limbs sticking out and up like stakes. One beast mortally shot, was besieged by three or four men who were trying to push it into the bushes, where it could live its brief time of anguish without thrashing to death any of the wounded men in the gloomy procession.

  The mule train, with extra ammunition, charged toward the front, still led by the tinkling bell-mare.

  An ambulance was stuck momentarily in the mud, and above the crack of battle one could hear the familiar objurgations of the driver as he whirled his lash.

  Two privates were having a hard time with a wounded captain, whom they were supporting to the rear, He was half cursing, half wailing out the information that he not only would not go another step toward the rear, but that he was certainly going to return at once to the front. They begged, pleaded at great length as they continually headed him off. They were not unlike two nurses with an exceptionally bad and headstrong little duke.

  The wounded soldiers paused to look impassively upon this struggle. They were always like men who could not be aroused by anything further.

  The visible hospital was mainly straggling thickets intersected with narrow paths, the ground being covered with men. Martin saw a busy person with a book and a pencil, but he did not approach him to become officially a member of the hospital. All he desired was rest and immunity from nagging. He took seat painfully under a bush and leaned his back upon the trunk. There he remained thinking, his face wooden.

  V

  “My Gawd,” said Nolan, squirming on his belly in the grass, “I can’t stand this much longer.”

  Then suddenly every rifle in the firing line seemed to go off of its own accord. It was the result of an order, but few men heard the order; in the main they had fired because they heard others fire, and their sense was so quick that the volley did not sound too ragged. These marksmen had been lying for nearly an hour in stony silence, their sights adjusted, their fingers fondling their rifles, their eyes staring at the intrenchments of the enemy. The battalion had suffered heavy losses, and these losses had been hard to bear, for a soldier always reasons that men lost during a period of inaction are men badly lost.

  The line now sounded like a great machine set to running frantically in the open air, the bright sunshine of a green field. To the prut of the magazine rifles was added the under-chorus of the clicking mechanism, steady and swift, as if the hand of one operator was controlling it all. It reminds one always of a loom, a great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red threads, the cloth of death. By the men’s shoulders under their eager hands dropped continually the yellow empty shells, spinning into the crushed grass blades to remain there and mark for the belated eye the line of a battalion’s fight.

  All impatience, all rebellious feeling, had passed out of the men as soon as they had been allowed to use their weapons against the enemy. They now were absorbed in this business of hitting something, and all the long training at the rifle ranges, all the pride of the marksman which had been so long alive in them, made them forget for the time everything but shooting. They were as deliberate and exact as so many watchmakers.

  A new sense of safety was rightfully upon them. They knew that those mysterious men in the high far trenches in front were having the bullets sping in their faces with relentless and remarkable precision; they knew, in fact, that they were now doing the thing which they had been trained endlessly to do, and they knew they were doing it well. Nolan, for instance, was overjoyed. “Plug ‘em,” he said: “Plug ‘em.” He laid his face to his rifle as if it were his mistress. He was aiming under the shadow of a certain portico of a fortified house: there he could faintly see a long black line which he knew to be a loop-hole cut for riflemen, and he knew that every shot of his was going there under the portico, mayhap through the loop-hole to the brain of another man like himself. He loaded the awkward magazine of his rifle again and again. He was so intent that he did not know of new orders until he saw the men about him scrambling to their feet and running forward, crouching low as they ran.

  He heard a shout. “Come on, boys! We can’t be last! We’re going up! We’re going up.” He sprang to his feet and, stooping, ran with the others. Something fine, soft, gentle, touched his heart as he ran. He had loved the regiment, the army, because the regiment, the army, was his life, — he had no other outlook; and now these men, his comrades, were performing his dream-scenes for him; they were doing as he had ordained in his visions. It is curious that in this charge he considered himself as rather unworthy. Although he himself was in the assault with the rest of them, it seemed to him that his comrades were dazzlingly courageous. His part, to his mind, was merely that of a man who was going along with the crowd.

  He saw Grierson biting madly with his pincers at a barbed-wire fence. They were half-way up the beautiful sylvan slope; there was no enemy to be seen, and yet the landscape rained bullets. Somebody punched him violently in the stomach. He thought dully to lie down and rest, but instead he fell with a crash.

  The sparse line of men in blue shirts and dirty slouch hats swept on up the hill. He decided to shut his eyes for a moment because he felt very dreamy and peaceful. It seemed only a minute before he heard a voice say, “There he is.” Grierson and Watkins had come to look for him. He searched their faces at once and keenly, for he had a thought that the line might be driven down the hill and leave him in Spanish hands. But he saw that everything was secure, and he prepared no questions.

  “Nolan,” said Grierson clumsily, “do you know me?”

  The man on the ground smiled softly. “Of course I know you, you chowder-faced monkey. Why wouldn’t I know you?”

  Watkins knelt beside him. “Where did they plug you, old boy?”

  Nolan was somewhat dubious. “It ain’t much. I don’t think but it’s somewheres there.” He laid a finger on the pit of his stomach. They lifted his shirt, and then privately they exchanged a glance of horror.

  “Does it hurt, Jimmie?” said Grierson, hoarsely.

  “No,” said Nolan, “it don’t hurt any, but I feel sort of dead-to-the-world and numb all over. I don’t think it’s very bad.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said Watkins.

  “What I need is a drink,” said Nolan, grinning at them. “I’m chilly — lying on this damp ground.”

  “It ain’t very damp, Jimmie,” said Grierson.

  “Well, it is damp,” said Nolan, with sudden irritability. “I can feel it. I’m wet, I tell you — wet through — just from lying here.”

  They answered hastily. “Yes, that’s so, Jimmie. It is damp. That’s so.”

  “Just put your hand under my back and see how wet the ground is,” he said.

  “No,” they answered. “That’s all right, Jimmie. We know it’s wet.”

  “Well, put your hand under and see,” he cried, stubbornly.

  “Oh, never mind, Jimmie.”

  “No,” he said, in a temper. “See for yourself.” Grierson seemed to be afraid of Nolan’s agitation, and so he slipped a hand under the prostrate man, and presently withdrew it covered with blood. “Yes,” he said, hiding his
hand carefully from Nolan’s eyes, “you were right, Jimmie.”

  “Of course I was,” said Nolan, contentedly closing his eyes. “This hillside holds water like a swamp.” After a moment he said, “Guess I ought to know. I’m flat here on it, and you fellers are standing up.”

  He did not know he was dying. He thought he was holding an argument on the condition of the turf.

  VI

  “Cover his face,” said Grierson, in a low and husky voice afterwards.

  “What’ll I cover it with?” said Watkins.

  They looked at themselves. They stood in their shirts, trousers, leggings, shoes; they had nothing.

  “Oh,” said Grierson, “here’s his hat.” He brought it and laid it on the face of the dead man. They stood for a time. It was apparent that they thought it essential and decent to say or do something. Finally Watkins said in a broken voice, “Aw, it’s a dam shame.” They moved slowly off toward the firing line.

  In the blue gloom of evening, in one of the fever-tents, the two rows of still figures became hideous, charnel. The languid movement of a hand was surrounded with spectral mystery, and the occasional painful twisting of a body under a blanket was terrifying, as if dead men were moving in their graves under the sod. A heavy odour of sickness and medicine hung in the air.

  “What regiment are you in?” said a feeble voice.

  “Twenty-ninth Infantry,” answered another voice.

  “Twenty-ninth! Why, the man on the other side of me is in the Twenty-ninth.”