As they ate they slowly decided several things. First of all, they decided they were cursed; but that, such being the case and since it was their fate to die like this, forgotten in this bloodstained hole, they would die like men, like Frenchmen. Then they decided that this hole was their property. Back of them lay France and her millions of acres and her millions of men; but right here in the very forefront of the fighting was this sanguinary pit; it belonged to them, all six of them, and they would die defending it. Then, finally, as soldiers of experience, they decided many things about modern warfare that all the thousand and one generals and ministers did not know. They decided that knapsacks were useless, and rifles also. What one wanted was a knife, a long knife—look, about as long as that, well, perhaps a little longer—a revolver, bombs, and endless machine-guns, light and easy to carry. They agreed it was a pity none of them would survive to give these valuable conclusions to the others back there.
But after the six had finished their meal and had smoked up all the tobacco of the only man who had any left, they decided that death was not so hard upon them as they first thought. They could still meet it as it should be met. They rose stiffly and found here a spade, there a rifle, and eventually the machine-gun. Under De Barsac’s direction they threw up once more a semblance of a bulwark along the top of the hollow, and to show that there was still some fight left in them, fired a few volleys at the Germans, that is to say, all the cartridges they had left, save a full magazine for that last minute when one goes under, killing as many as one can. But whether because the Germans had grown to be a trifle frightened of them, or for some other reason, they received no reply to their taunts beyond an occasional bullet—just a sweet little afternoon when people in cities flock about, straighten their shoulders, sniff the soft atmosphere, and inform each other that Spring is coming. After a time they slumped down where they were, all of them, and stretching out their wet, mud-soaked legs, fell asleep like tired children, and slept on and on until they were awakened in the dark by scores of mysterious figures who patted them on the back, told them they were all heroes, and explained how each time the German artillery had driven them back, and how all they had to do now was to take hold of the rope there and go home to Bray.
So they got up slowly and, hands upon the rope, wandered off. Once they stopped. They heard men digging away busily toward them. They said nothing. They wandered on.
But before the six could reach even the men digging toward them, the darkness was suddenly rent with stupefying explosions, and shell fragments slashed among them. They fell apart, tumbled into shell holes, rose up, fell down again, lost touch with each other, and what became of them all no one will ever know. One or two must have been killed outright; the others must have crawled about in the dark until Fate decided what she wished to do with them. It was rather a sad end; for they deserved better than this, and the Germans did not prevent reinforcements from coming up. But thus ended the six; who they were and what became of them the world will never know.
De Barsac fell flat upon his stomach and put his hands over his head. The ground shook under him. The darkness was a bedlam of endless explosions and death hisses. He rose up again and made a dash for it, a wild, frenzied dash for life and safety. But though he ran on some distance, it was blind work and the ground was littered with obstacles, and suddenly he was lying half buried under a pile of earth. He was in great pain; such that he moaned and moaned; yet he could not move, and now it was less cold and it was morning. Slowly he extricated his right arm, but his left he could not move, and he had to take the dirt away handful by handful, until the sun made his head ache. When his arm was at last uncovered, he could not move it. His whole sleeve was a mass of blood, and the sun had gone of a sudden and it was raining, and the wet ground was tossing him about again like a man in a blanket, and his leg was broken and blood was trickling into his eyes. He moaned upon his arm until the sun again made his head ache, and Jules and his father had disappeared. He asked them to stay there a little longer, but the man next [to] him was so repulsive he could not die thus beside him. Leaning on his right elbow and pushing with his left foot, he moved away inch by inch; only the dead man followed him, or it was his brother, and he was repelled as before, so he took the canteen away from the dead man across his path and drank the stuff down. Then he began to shout at the top of his lungs. A race of bullets swished by over his head. He fell back again on his side and cried weakly into his arm. But presently he crawled on, inch by inch, until even the sun got tired watching him, and he fell down into a sort of trench. There were a lot of dead men there, but all their canteens were empty except one, and he had a great loaf of bread strapped on his knapsack. It was very good inside under the crust.
He sat up and looked around slowly. Just an empty trench, not a living soul, just the dead. How he had got here he could not remember, except that it had taken days, weeks. If his leg were not broken, he might get up now and walk away somewhere. Ah, what dirty luck! As if his arm were not enough! He judged it was late afternoon. He wondered what had happened to the others—well, he would get the machine-gun into place all by himself and kill, kill, right up to the end. Then he remembered that, of course, that was over. Yes, of course.
“I’m out of my head.”
He took some more cognac out of the canteen. He found his knife and his emergency roll. Slowly he cut off his sleeve, and slowly over the great bloody hole in his arm he wound the bandage; then he emptied the iodine bottle over it, and yelled and moaned with pain. But by and by he felt better. Some one spoke to him. It was a white face among the black dead men. He gave the fellow cognac. They sat up together and ate bread and drank cognac. They talked together. All the friend had was a bullet through his chest, just a little hole, but he said it hurt him every time he tried to breathe. He belonged to the 45th. The trench here had been taken by the Germans, only the Germans had to abandon it because they had lost a trench over there to the left.
“Yes,” said De Barsac. “That was us.”
By and by De Barsac asked the friend if he could get up and walk. The friend said he thought he could now. So he got up and fell down, and got up and fell down, until the third time he did not fall.
“Wait,” said De Barsac, “my leg’s broken.”
They helped each other. They went along scraping the sides of the channel. De Barsac moaned in constant agony. But they saw two men with a stretcher in the fields above. De Barsac halloed feebly. The men turned around with a start; then one of them said, with a scowl: “All right, wait a minute.” Then there was the ordinary explosion overhead. They saw nothing more of the two men; just a bit of broken stretcher and canvas sticking up out of the ground and a large cloud of dark smoke rolling away fainter and fainter. The trench was muddy. The trench smelled. The whole land smelled. The earth about was all burned yellow. The clay was red. There were boards in the bottom of the trench, but the boards wabbled and one could not hop along them. They slopped and twisted about.
“Here,” said the friend, “lean on me some more.”
But he only fainted. So they both lay huddled up in the mud of the channel, and death came down very near them both. But De Barsac’s face was lying against a tin can in the mud, and he lifted himself up and saw that it was nearly dark and he shivered with cold. He remembered the cognac. He gulped it all down. It hurt his arm, made it throb, throb, throb; but it somehow also made him feel like laughing. So he laughed; then he cried; then he laughed; all because the friend at his side was dead and he loved him. He had not known him very long, but he loved him. He turned the head up and the friend’s eyes opened. He was not dead, after all. Quickly De Barsac hunted for the cognac and at last he found it. He was horrified. He had drunk it all and not left the friend any. But there were just a few drops.
“Thanks, old camel,” said the friend.
De Barsac slowly got up and, after he had got up, he helped the friend up.
“Com
e on.”
“All right.”
“Here, you get on my back.”
“No, you get on mine.”
But they both fell again. So they decided to crawl along. Only it was growing colder and colder, and the waits were awful. Finally, the white face said:
“I’m—I’m going to sleep a little—you go on—you see—then you call me—then I’ll come along.”
De Barsac wondered why they had not thought of doing it that way before. He crawled on and on. At last he stopped and called back. The friend did not come the way he said he would. He was asleep of course. De Barsac started back to fetch him, only some men came along and stepped on him until they suddenly stepped off.
“Yes, he’s alive.”
De Barsac pointed feebly up the channel.
“He’s back there,” he said.
“Who?”
“The friend.”
“He’s delirious,” said a voice.
“Well, pass him back to the stretcher-bearers and look lively with those machine-guns.”
The dressing-station was all under ground and lined with straw. It was very warm, only it was also very crowded. They gave him some hot soup with vegetables in it. He lay back on the stretcher and perspired; and though he was now in very great pain, he said nothing, because he had nothing to say. The surgeon, sleeves rolled up, bent over him. He set his leg and slapped plaster about. He swabbed his head and made him nearly scream. Then he unwound the bandage on his arm and swore and stood up and said: “Too late. Put on the tag, ‘Operate at once.’” It was cold between the two wheels under the open stars amid the cigarette smoke, but the ambulances in Bray made a powerful noise, and through the darkness a sergeant looked at him under a lantern and said impatiently: “Well, I don’t give a damn, there isn’t an inch of space left. Fire him along to Villers-Bretonneux with that convoy that’s starting.” The ambulance rocked and bounced over the roads, and it was twice as cold as before. He had not enough blankets. The ambulance smelled so he knew the man to his left must be dead; yes, the man to his left, not the man above, for the man above from time to time dripped hot blood upon him, now upon his neck, now upon his face. In the big shed at Villers-Bretonneux it was warm again, and he lay there upon the straw with the others while crowds of peasant people stared at them. One woman came up and offered him half an orange. He did not take it. Another woman said: “He’s out of his head, poor fellow.” He said: “No, I’m not.” After the man on the stretcher next him had told him he was wounded in the stomach, left shoulder, and both legs, the man on the stretcher next him asked him where he came from and how things were getting on there. He said: “All right.” Then the man on the stretcher next him said weakly: “Well, you seem to have picked up all the mud there is up there.” So he said: “Oh, there’s plenty left!” and a neat little man in black, with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, shook his head and said to a large man staring with a heavy scowl: “They’re all that way, you know; a joke on their lips up to the end.”
They carried him out through the crowd, and when he was opposite the bloody table under the great arc-light, the men carrying him had to stop a second and the doctor said to the man holding the end of the leg: “Bend down, idiot, haven’t you ever sawed wood?” And he saw that there were beads of perspiration upon the doctor’s forehead, and he wondered why. In the train it was very, very warm, only it smelled dreadfully—that same smell. He knew now it was the man in the bunk next to him that was dead, and he wanted to tell the attendant so, only the shadows on the wooden ceiling danced about as the train rushed along over bridges and through tunnels. The shadows danced about, and sometimes they were horsemen on chargers and sometimes they were just great clouds flying out across the ocean, and all the time that the shadows danced about and the train rushed on and on a man in the other end of the compartment yelled and swore. But although he called the attendants all the names a man has ever called another, the attendants did not move. One said:
“Well, if they do shunt us over on to that other service, that’ll mean we’ll get down to Paris now and then.”
And the first man answered:
“Oh, well, anything for a change—pass me the morphine again, will you, if you’re through with it.”
The train stopped, and every one wanted to know where they were. One of the attendants told them, “Amiens.” He was taken out slowly and carried before a man with a glossy, black beard, smoking a pipe, who read the tag on his buttonhole and wrote something on a sheet of paper. They took him out into the cold, biting wind of a railway yard and carried him across railway tracks and set the stretcher down in pools of black mud, and argued whose turn it was, while a long freight-train rolled slowly by and a man blew a whistle. The ambulance bobbed lightly over cobbles amid the clang of street-cars and the thousand noises of a city. This ambulance also smelled that same smell; but it could not be the man next him, for he was all alone. Then the ambulance ran along a smooth drive and stopped, and the flaps were opened and he was lifted out and carried into a long hallway, where a small man in red slippers scampered about and told others to come, and a white-hooded woman bent over him.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Operation.”
“Yes—his left arm—the smell is sufficient indication. George, tell the doctor not to go away.”
The white-hooded woman again leaned over him. Her face was wrinkled and tired, but her eyes were very beautiful—they were so gentle and so sad.
“How do you feel?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Poor boy! What’s your name?”
“Pierre De Barsac.”
She took his hand gently and held it.
“Well, Pierre, don’t worry. We are going to take care of you.”
A little later she said:
“Poor fellow! Are you suffering?”
Tears came into his eyes and he nodded his head.
They carried him up-stairs. They went up slowly, very carefully, and as they turned the corners of the staircase the eyes of the little man with the red slippers glittered and strained over the end of the stretcher. They undressed him. They washed him. They put him to bed. They unwound his arm. Then they stood away and stopped talking. They left him alone with a great wad of damp cotton upon his arm until the doctor came and said:
“My boy, we’ve got to amputate your left arm at the shoulder.”
“At the shoulder,” he repeated mechanically.
“Yes, it’s the only thing that will save you. What’s your profession?”
“Lawyer.”
The doctor smiled pleasantly.
“Oh, then you are all right! An arm the less will be a distinction.”
They went away. He turned over a little and looked at his arm. He realized that this was the dead thing he had so often smelled. The arm was all brown. It crackled under his finger; then came the large cotton wad where there were strips of black flesh. The hand was crumpled up like a fallen leaf. He saw the scar on his forefinger where, as a little boy, he had cut through the orange too swiftly. What a scene that was, and his mother was dead now, and his father was very old, and the hand now was going to be taken away from him! He turned his head back and cried weakly, not on account of his hand, but because he was in such pain, his arm, his leg, his head, everything. They rolled him into another room. They fussed about him. They hurt him dreadfully; but he said nothing, because he had nothing to say. Then he was back there again, beside the lieutenant, only the machine-gun jammed and he had to break the leg off and use it against the hordes of pig-eaters, and smoke, more smoke, down one’s nostrils, and then it was awful, awful, never like this, and he clutched the pig-eater by the throat and swore, swore, until now more smoke came rolling into his nostrils, and the white-hooded nurse was standing by his bed.
She went away; and when he woke up again, he was all alo
ne. There was a bandage upon his left arm; no, his left shoulder. His arm hurt much less; he felt much better. By and by he moved his right hand over. The sleeve of the nightgown was empty.
He lay there quietly a long time and looked up into the sky through some pine boughs swaying in the wind. They reminded him of other trees he knew of—trees way back there in Brittany by the seaside where he was born. They swayed beautifully to and fro, and every so often they bent over and swished against the window-pane.
Presently he smiled, smiled quietly, happily. Life, when one can live it, is such a really wonderful thing.
Chapter Ten
General Custer
By Francis Fuller Victor
It’s all here: The 7th Cavalry and its leader, General George Armstrong Custer, as they ride toward the Little Big Horn. Custer thought a glorious victory over the Indians would be his destiny. He was wrong.
—Lamar Underwood
General Terry left Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River, May 17th 1876, with his division, consisting of the 7th Cavalry under Lieut. Col. George A. Custer, three companies of infantry, a battery of Gatling guns, and 45 enlisted scouts. His whole force, exclusive of the wagon-train drivers, numbered about 1,000 men. His march was westerly, over the route taken by the Stanley expedition in 1873.
On the 11th of June, Terry reached the south bank of the Yellowstone at the mouth of Powder River, where by appointment he met steamboats, and established his supply camp. A scouting party of six companies of the 7th Cavalry under Major M. A. Reno was sent out June 10th, which ascended Powder River to its forks, crossed westerly to Tongue River and beyond, and discovered, near Rosebud River, a heavy Indian trail about ten days old leading westward toward Little Big Horn River. After following this trail a short distance Reno returned to the Yellowstone and rejoined his regiments, which then marched, accompanied by steamboats, to the mouth of Rosebud River where it encamped June 21st. Communication by steamboats and scouts had previously been opened with Col. John Gibbon, whose column was at this time encamped on the north side of the Yellowstone, near by.
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