Through the Wheat

by Thomas Boyd

  The sky was clear and the air was like a bell. It could have been fancied that any noise must be a tinkling one. The tree tops were tall Gothic spires that reached to the heavens. The man in the moon was distinct in the round, pale ball that threw silvery sheets into the forest.

  The platoon believed that it had embarked upon a night that at last was to be silent, harmless. They tried to stretch their muscles, which had been taut for days; their thoughts sought out other and more pleasant scenes of remembrance. The air was crisp and their bodies felt comfortable under their blankets. Their heads, pillowed on their gas-masks, were, for once, inert. Fear had flown.

  The first shell that whined its course from the German lines to the place where they were asleep passed unnoticed. It struck the ground with a “P-tt.” The next one did likewise, but some one awakened. He touched the man lying near to him. “What was that?” he asked fearfully, wanting to be assured. Another shell, sounding like a full bottle that is shaken, dropped several yards away.

  “Oh, hell,” said the aroused man. “The Squareheads are out of ammunition. They’re shootin’ beer-bottles over.” He fell asleep, unconcerned. The first man sniffed. “Beer-bottles! I guess not. GAS!” he screamed, in a panic. Grunting, swearing, frightened, the men got their masks over their faces in less time than they had been trained to. Now they sat around tense, their minds blank, the saliva running down their chins from the mouthpiece of the mask.

  Ahead of them, in the ravine, where they had been a few days ago, shells broke, reporting noisily. More shells were hurled over, to fall and explode, battering at the ravine. Meanwhile the barely discernible P-tt continued around them. The bombardment seemed to be everlasting. Under so heavy a bombardment the ravine must be levelled out. Bang, crash, bang, up in front at the ravine. P-tt, P-tt, P-tt, back where the platoon was lying. Out of the noise a voice was heard calling: “Hey, Third Platoon. We want volunteers for stretcher bearers!” Through the dimness made by the glass eyes of his mask, Hicks saw a man come stumbling through the trees.

  “Where are you, Third Platoon?” the form cried.

  Hicks drew off his mask, yelled “HERE!” and replaced it, then forcing the contaminated air out of the mask.

  “We want volunteers.” The form had a querulous voice.

  Hicks took off his mask again. “Put on your mask!” he shouted.

  “Damn the mask!” cursed the form. “We’ve got nothing but wounded men up at the front line and we want some help.”

  From somewhere among the still figures Lieutenant Bedford arose and walked to the form.

  “Hello, doc. You better put on your mask. The gas is damn heavy here.” He dove into his mask again.

  “Damn it, I came back here for volunteers, not to be told what to do. We got a lot of wounded men up there.”

  “All right; I’ll get you some men.” He summoned six men and ordered them to take litters up to the ravine.

  “Good God, Hicks, don’t go so fast. Wait a minute.”

  “All right; let your end down, then.”

  Hicks and Pietrzak had been assigned to the job of litter bearers. It was now the third time that they had carried a wounded man from the ravine to the first-aid station, almost two miles away. To do so they had to escape the shells that fell so numerously in the ravine, and, with their masks on, to carry their burden through the gulley filled with gas. On arriving at the first-aid station the first time they found their burden to be dead. His arm had been severed from his body. The second man was unconscious when he was lowered to the ground in front of the first-aid station. Now they were on the way from the ravine once more, carrying a man whose middle had been pierced by a fragment of shell casing. As they lowered the stretcher to rest, the man groaned and pleaded with them to go on. Hicks tried to reason: “We’ll never git there if we don’t take a little rest. We’ll be there soon, buddy. Do you want a drink?” He offered his canteen. “No, just take me away from here,” the man groaned piteously. They rested until they could endure the man’s groaning no longer; then they started off. They had no more than started when a shell struck directly in rear of them. They plodded on with their burden, stumbling over the boulders in the gulley. A little farther on and another shell exploded. On they went until the mustard-like odor of gas filled their nostrils. Then they stopped to put on their masks. Letting his end of the stretcher sink slowly to the ground, Hicks asked the wounded man: “Can you wear a mask, buddy?”

  “Yes, oh, yes, give it to me. I’ll die without it.” Fear in the man’s voice was stronger than pain. Hicks bent over the man’s chest for the familiar respirator. It was gone. “Where is your mask?” he asked. “I don’t know.” Very gently Hicks raised his head and placed his mask over the face of the wounded man. They started on again. Rapidly, successively, three shells struck close by. The rear end of the stretcher dropped to the ground.

  “Pete!” cried Hicks.

  Pietrzak did not answer, and Hicks, putting down his end of the stretcher, walked to the other end and felt along the ground. Pietrzak was lying on his side. His neck was wet with blood. A large piece of shell casing had struck him below the ear, and he was now quite dead. His mask was in shreds.

  The wounded man was unconscious. Until he was hoarse and the gas had burned his eyes so that they were coals of fire, Hicks called for help. But none came. His eyes smarting dreadfully, Hicks wrapped his coat around his head and took up his night’s vigil beside the wounded man. The bombardment continued most of the night.

  When the sun made its pilgrimage over the rim of the distant field and showered the scene with light, Hicks was still sitting on a small rock beside the stretcher, his chin supported by his knees, the coat over his head.

  For a distance of two miles, from the ravine to the village where the supply wagons were stationed, men lay dead and dying. In the woods and particularly in the gulley that ran through the woods to the village, the thick yellow gas clung to the ground. Wherever the gas had touched the skin of the men dark, flaming blisters appeared. Like acid, the yellow gas ate into the flesh and blinded the eyes. The ground was a dump-heap of bodies, limbs of trees, legs and arms independent of bodies, and pieces of equipment. Here was a combat pack forlorn, its bulge indicating such articles as a razor, an extra shirt, the last letter from home, a box of hard bread. Another place a heavy shoe, with a wad of spiral puttee near by. Where yesterday’s crosses had been erected, a shell had churned a body out of its shallow grave, separating from the torso the limbs. The crosses themselves had been blown flat, as if by a terrific wind.

  In the gray light of early morning Hicks felt the fury of impotence as he tried to rise. He unwound the coat that covered his head, forgetful, unmindful for the moment of the man whom he had guarded during the night. He seemed fastened to the surface of the stone. Dimly he knew that his legs burned with an awful pain. But the feeling of pain was lost in his marvelling at his inability to rise. Not far, distant voices sounded. Soon a detail of men filed along the gulley, commenting among themselves upon the havoc of the night. He called weakly to the men who were approaching. As their hands touched him he lost his senses and all went black.

  Chapter IX

  IT was the night for relief. Fourteen men, with the remainder of their equipment about them, huddled around in a group waiting for the new troops to appear and take over their sector. They were tired, hungry, and nerve-racked; the word “morale” could not conceivably be associated with them. Their three weeks’ experience in the woods had so bludgeoned their senses that they had been unresponsive when told that they were to be relieved. But after a while they partly recovered under the stimulation of the picture of warm food and a shelter of comparative safety. From a thick apathy they became clamorous, ill at ease, waiting for the new men to come. As the darkness grew their nerves twitched, and they peered often and again down the gulley from which the relief was to come into sight. At last a muffled clatter reached
their ears. It swelled and was accompanied by voices in a polyglot of tongues. Cigarette lights and the flare of matches were seen along the line of the incoming horde.

  Lieutenant Bedford had risen at their approach. Now he nervously shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “The drafted idiots,” he muttered, “do they want to kill all of us with these lights? Hey, you guys,” he called, “put out those damned matches.” A swell of jeers greeted him.

  “All right, Third Platoon, let’s go. If these damned fools want every German gun to start pounding at them, let them. Come on.”

  The platoon rose wearily and dragged through the woods in the direction of the village. Their spirits were so depressed, their bodies so fatigued, that, though the village was but two miles distant, an hour had elapsed before they marched through the cluttered streets between the rows of battered houses. But they did not stop. The outline of the village faded and on they tramped. Behind them shells rumbled over from the German lines, and, in answer, the crack and the sudden flare of a large gun being fired sounded to the right and left of them. At the noise the men’s muscles tightened, their nostrils narrowed and were bloodless. At the appearance of danger unheralded they were thorough automata; the explosions urged on their tired legs, whose muscles seemed tied in inextricable knots. Thick forests rose on each side of the tortuous white road, their dark-blue tops bewitchingly patterned against the sky. Where the woods were divided by a narrow path the platoon turned off, marching between the trees.

  Farther in the woods, where the path widened slightly, the men halted. In ten minutes they were curled up in their blankets, asleep.

  The platoon awoke in the heat of the day. In the woods the leaves of the trees were unruffled by a breeze. Glaring down from directly above, the sun was a monstrous incinerator. But for it all nature would have been inanimate. The men stretched experimentally. Their empty intestines made them aware of themselves. From among the trees floated a rich odor of frying food. “Steak,” some one guessed. The smell intensified their hunger, weakened them. King Cole, shading the sun from his owl-like eyes, sat up and sniffed.

  “Who said ‘steak’?” he observed. “Smells like good old Kentucky fried chicken to me.”

  “Chicken, hell,” said Hartman, the professional pessimist. “It’s probably fried Canned Bill.”

  “Oh, you make me sick,” Cole answered. “Can’t you let a man dream?”

  But it was steak. And dipped in flour before it was fried. It was not choice steak, but it was edible, very edible. And the quantity had been prepared for sixty men, while there were only fourteen men to dine.

  “Go easy,” cautioned Lieutenant Bedford, gnawing a huge steak which he held in his hand. “There’s plenty of chow, so you don’t need to be in a hurry to eat it all. You’ll do better if you eat slowly. Stomach’s not used to this sort of food.”

  “Je’s, this is jist like bein’ home,” King Cole informed the assembly.

  “Home? You never had a home. What are you talkin’ about?” jeered McCann, the New York roughneck who had been confined in the hospital twice with delirium tremens. “Ho there, you yellow greaseball, what do you want?” He hailed one of the mess helpers who was approaching.

  “I heard that R. E. McCann got scairt and shot himself when he got up to the front, and I come down to see if it was true.”

  The greaseball, whose name describes him well, looked inquiringly around. McCann failed to answer the badinage. The greaseball sat down among the men, who now had become filled and grew confidential. “You fellahs had a pretty tough time up there, didn’t you?”

  “I’ll say we did.”

  “You’d a thought so if you’d a been there, you lowlife.”

  “Yeh, pretty soft for you birds in the galley.”

  “But not as soft as it’s goin’ to be for you guys,” the greaseball was ingratiating.

  “Whaddya mean?” the platoon scoffed.

  “Ain’t you heard?” The greaseball looked surprised.

  “Heard nothin’,” Cole answered grumpily. “Where’ve we been to hear anything?”

  “Well,” hesitatingly, “maybe I hadn’t ought to tell.”

  “Go on and tell, greaseball.”

  “Yeh, what the hell else are you good for?”

  “Well . . . you guys ain’t goin’ back to the front no more.”

  “Hooray!” they sceptically shouted. “You damned liar.”

  “Fact. The brigade commander was down here yesterday, and I heard him tell Major Adams that the First Battalion was goin’ on board ship.”

  “Oh-o. That ain’t so good. I was sick all the way over on that damn transport,” Pugh remembered aloud.

  “Sure, you always do,” said Rousey, the old-timer. “But after the first cruise you’re all right. God, man, you don’t know how soft it is on board ship. A clean bunk and good chow. Shore leave whenever you go into port. Why, I remember——”

  “Maybe you’re right, but I’ll take my chances with my feet on the ground. There ain’t no damn whale gonna eat me, not if I know it.”

  “Well, it’s a blame sight better than lettin’ them Squareheads use you for a target. I’m glad we’re goin’.”

  While they talked the rumor that they had so sceptically regarded had become a fact. No one doubted that they were soon to be loaded into box cars and sent off to some seaport, where trim, clean ships would be waiting to take them aboard.

  Chapter X

  SNORTING gray camions drew up along the road by the path where the men were lying. At the driving-wheels the small Japanese, with their long, tired mustaches covered with fine dust, looked like pieces of graveyard sculpture. The dust was over their faces, over their light-blue uniforms. They sat immovable. The men took their seats upon the narrow benches and the camions chugged away.

  A river crawled along, its straight banks parallel with the road over which the camions were moving. In the crepuscular light it was a dark, straggly, insignificant stream, which, compared by the platoon with rivers that they had known, was only a creek. It was quite dark when the camions stopped at a town along the river, built in the valley between large hills. The men debarked and were assigned to their billets wherever empty rooms could be found in the houses.

  In Nanteuil, the name of the village where they had stopped, the ranks of the platoon were filled by men from one of the replacement battalions that recently had arrived in France from the United States. A daily routine was quickly established, and with but one day’s rest the platoon was kept at work from early morning until late afternoon. They drilled four hours a day, were inspected daily by the acting company commander, tried to rid themselves of lice by swimming in the Marne, made secret expeditions to neighboring villages, where they got drunk and made amorous eyes at sloppy French grandmothers, threw hand-grenades in the river and watched the dead fish rise to the surface, swore at the gendarmes when those persons remonstrated with them, shrank into basements whenever the long-distance German shells were aimed at the bridge that crossed the river at Nanteuil, cursed their officers, and tried to scare the new men by exaggerating the frightfulness of the front, gorged themselves on the plentiful rations, and played black jack, poker, or rolled dice out of sight of their officers. The officers smiled and told each other that they were not only recovering their morale, but were imbuing the new men with that spirit peculiar to the Marine Corps.

  The platoon had been in Nanteuil one week when Hicks returned, dusty, tired, and hungry. The older men crowded around him eagerly, while the more recent members stood off wonderingly.

  “Well, Hicksy, old boy, did you have a good rest?” Pugh asked.

  “Rest? Rest hell. The only way you can get a rest is to get killed. But don’t go to the hospital thinking you’ll get it.” Hicks paused, sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Remember that night they put over the gas attack?” He was assured by each of the old-
timers that he did.

  “Well, the next afternoon I woke up in an evacuation hospital. They carried me in on a stretcher, and when I opened my eyes there was a lousy doctor standing over me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Well, I could hardly talk, but I managed to whisper that I was gassed. He looked down at my card that the first-aid officer had pinned on me. ‘God damn it, get up, you coward,’ he said to me. ‘What the hell do you mean by taking a wounded man’s place?’ Of course, I was sore as hell, but what could I do? So I stuck around a while until an ambulance started for our battalion, and then I hid in it and came along.”

  The men cursed the medical officer effusively.

  “Saw Harriman back there,” Hicks continued. “He was lyin’ in bed with his foot in a sling. Said he got lost and some Squarehead shot him.” Hicks threw the butt of his cigarette. “But if you think the medical officers are bad, you ought to see the enlisted men. Don’t take any souvenirs back with you if you go. The damn orderlies’ll steal ’em. One guy had a Luger pistol and about four hundred francs when he got in the hospital, and they give him a bath, and when he come out he hadn’t a thing in his clothes. But I got a good hot bath, I’ll say that much. And I got some clean clothes. The damned clothes I had stunk so of gas that they had to bury them.”

  “How was the chow?”

  “Rotten. And you have to line up in the mud in your pajamas to get it if you’re a walking patient. They say the base hospitals are worse.”

  “Yeh, but you don’t have no shavetail raggin’ you around all the time, do you?”

  “The hell you don’t. Them damned orderlies who are supposed to do the work hand you a broom and tell you to clean up the deck, or wash up the toilets, or make up somebody’s bed.” Hicks got up and limped away. “Got to report to the company commander.”