by Thomas Boyd
He paused, wondering irresistibly whether his impending rise to lieutenant-general would give his wife access into the more imposing homes of Washington.
“And so you are here, good soldiers who have done your duty and are willing to do it again.
“Many of you men came over to France with the belief that the war would soon be over and you would return home again to indulge in your inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (“Hooray!” shouted the men.) “You will return home soon, but not as soon as you expected. Not until we have pierced the enemy lines and brought them to our feet.” (“Take him out—to hell with you—how does he get that way”—the muttered comments rose indistinctly from the sea of mud.) “It depends upon you men right here as to how long you will stay in France. You can stay until hell freezes over or you can renew your good work and be home before you know it. Our commanding general has said: ‘Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas,’ and it is up to us to stand by him.” (“Oh, my God—let’s go home—we’re hungry—chow”—ending in a dull chanting, “When do we eat?”)
The general was going along famously. He felt his gift of rhetoric as he never before had felt it. His eyes dimmed and a lump rose in his throat at the frenzied cheering of the men.
“You men are assembled here to-day to be told of the great offensive in which you will soon take part. Many of you will not return from it, but that is war. Some of you will come off non-commissioned officers, and, as should be the case in a democratic army, others will have a chance to be officers, made so by an act of Congress.”
(“Pipe down—bunk.”)
He believed that he was being cheered again. He continued his address for fifteen minutes longer than he intended. When he stepped from the platform to the ground there were tears in his eyes.
In making the estimates of the divisions before him, the major-general had only spoken aloud what the men secretly believed—that they were the “finest flower of chivalry,” the epitome of all good soldierly qualities. But to hear themselves so praised sounded unethical, made them embarrassed. Had they been told that they were not shock troops, that they were not the best soldiers in the known world, they would have been indignant. Therefore they hid their gratitude and commendation under a torrent of mordant remarks. The long lines were formed into squads, demanding food, speculating upon the nearness of the attack, as they marched back to their respective towns where they were billeted.
Hicks had not recovered from his despondency. His stomach felt as if he had swallowed a stone every time reference was made to the attack. He had done about enough in this war, he thought, wondering vaguely whether there were no chance of escape. The thought of the sound of the guns depressed him, their monotonous tom-tom beating in memory on his skull like water dripping slowly on a stone. Disgusting! And no letters from home, no change of scene, no clean clothing, nothing but the hopelessness of routine, the bullying of petty officers, the prospect of the front.
He was still brooding when the platoon reached its billets in the town to which it had come from the last drive. Instead of the unsavory food steaming under a fire in the field kitchen, there was an issue of corned beef, and slabs of black bread to be eaten. The field kitchens were packed, the supply wagons were loaded. The persevering little mules that hauled the machine-gun carts stood waiting. Orders were passed for the men to pack up their equipment and be ready to fall into line on the company street in half an hour. “Shake it up, you men,” the officers called, walking back and forth past the buildings. “We haven’t got all night.” Somebody asked where the platoon was going. “To the front,” an officer answered. “Make it snappy.”
Chapter XIII
FOR two days now the bombardment had continued, heaving over the live, huge shells that broke in the distance with a dull, sullen fury. Lightly it had begun, and with an exchange of salutes from the six-inch rifles. Then a number of batteries in the centre of the sector started ferociously to bark. Along the left the heavy detonation of the exploding shells was taken up, later to be joined by the smaller pieces of artillery, which went off with mad, snapping sounds. The guns on the right brought the entire line into action.
Artillerymen, their blouses off, their sleeves rolled, sweated in torrents as they wrestled with shells, throwing them into the breeches of their guns. Each gun was fired, and as it recoiled from the charge another shell was waiting to be thrown into the breech. The officers of the gunners, their muscles tense, their lineaments screwed up so that their faces looked like white walnuts, made quick mathematical calculations, directing the shells unerringly to strike their targets. Orderlies hurried from gun-pit to gun-pit, carrying messages from a higher officer which, when delivered to the battery commanders and passed to the gunners, would strike or spare a hundred men, an old church, or a hospital.
Wagons and heavy motor-trucks rumbled over the roads leading to the forests where the long-range guns were hidden, bringing always more food for the black, extended throats of the guns. The batteries in the centre had been drawn up in a thick woods a few miles from the present front line. There, from the height of a steady swell in the earth, they were able better to watch the effects of their pounding.
Between the inky mass of forest which concealed the guns and the jagged front line were the crumbling ruins of a village of which not a building now stood. The ruins were at the edge of the front line, which zigzagged unendingly in either direction. Barbed wire, rusted and ragged, was strung from posts before the trench. Chevaux-de-frise, inspiring confidence in their ability to withstand penetration, were placed at intervals, wherever gaps had been blown in the barbed wire.
The space between the front line and the German listening posts was a yellowish gray. Its face was pockmarked and scabbed with tin cans, helmets, pieces of equipment. Bones, grayed in the sun and rain, were perceptible occasionally. A leather boot stuck grotesquely out of one of the unhealthy indentations in the lifeless ground. The flat chrome earth lay for several hundreds of yards and then was split by a strip of shadowy black woods.
Past the woods the barren earth continued, rising and disappearing at a distance, in a hill studded with trees.
Beyond lay mystery and a gargantuan demon who, taking whatever shape he chose, might descend with a huge funnelled bag from which he might extract any number of fascinatingly varied deaths.
The night before, out of a still, starlit sky, a sudden rain had fallen. It had drenched the trees and the grass and soaked the clothing of the troops who were lying in the woods awaiting the hour for the attack. The rain made a long, slimy, muddy snake out of the roads leading to the front line. Where the caisson tracks had bitten into the ground, hasty rivulets now ran. Water from the evenly plotted fields had drained into the ditch that ran alongside the road, overflowing.
Bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, their pockets stuffed with heavy corrugated hand-grenades, carrying shovels and picks, the platoon followed along the muddy road in rear of a machine-gun company. Rudely awakened from an irresistible sleep beneath the trees, they had been marshalled before supply wagons, had been given articles of extra equipment to use in the attack. Now, whenever the body of troops before them halted, the lids closed readily over their sleepy eyes and their bodies swayed with fatigue. The halts were frequent, for the machine-gunners carried their heavy rifles and tripods on their shoulders.
The road was slippery and the travel laborious, and after innumerable pauses whenever the advancing line became clogged, the men sat down, completely fatigued, in the mud and water. Uneasiness could be felt in the tightly packed mass that waddled along the road. It lay on the tongues of the platoon, preventing them from showing their exasperation at the long delay. Curses would rise to their lips and die unuttered. A word spoken aloud, the jangling of metal, would infuriate them. From fear and habit, the explosion of a gun near them would cause them to stop, standing without a tremor. A distance of
less than two miles, the platoon crawled along like an attenuated turtle. They felt that dawn would find them still on the road, their feet struggling with the clinging mud. The night was as thick and black as coal-tar. Progress through it seemed impossible.
Behind the barely moving lines the guns continued their boom, boom, like the sound of distant thunder. The shells whistled overhead, the report of their explosion only faintly to be heard. There was no retaliation. The enemy seemed willing to take the brunt without a murmur. But to the platoon their silence was suspicious. Accustomed to hearing the crashing reply to a bombardment, when the men did not hear it they grew fearful. They began to wonder if they were not being led into a trap. Fed too fully upon the German-spy propaganda issued by the Allied governments, they wondered whether the general directing the attack might not be a minion of the Kaiser, leading them to their deaths. Or else the Germans were planning some great strategic coup.
The failure of the enemy guns to reply was so annoying that it became the absorbing notion in the minds of the men. Their ears were strained, waiting to hear the familiar whine of a shell fired toward them. It made their nerves feel ragged and exposed. On the road sounded the decisive beat of horses’ hoofs. It was deeply perturbing. Stretching their necks, unmindful of the slippery road, the danger of sliding into the ditch, the men watched the horse and rider, believing it portentous. The horse was turned back to the woods.
Like a latrine built for a corps of monsters stretched the slippery trench. Approaching it through the narrow communication gully, the men slid and stumbled from the slatted-board bottom into the mire. They would withdraw their legs from the mud, the mud making a “pflung” as the foot rose above it.
The platoon filed into the trench, and crouched low against the firing bays their bayonets peeping over the top. After hours on the road the trench was warm to their bodies, despite its mud and slime. Their eyes staring into the black night, the men waited.
Hard, cold, and unfriendly dawn broke over the earth like a thin coating of ice shattering in a wash-basin. In the eerie light the tangled masses of wire, the weather-beaten posts from which the wire was strung, the articles of equipment and clothing once worn by men looked unreal. The woods ahead, a grayish black, lay against the sky like a spiked wall.
Hicks, his face pressed against the muddy side of the trench, felt sick. Along the road his body had been shaken with chills. Now the muscles of his stomach were contracting, forcing him to gag. He thought of poking his soiled finger down his throat, but the thought of it was so revolting that he only gagged more violently.
Crouching there, he had no desire to leave the trench. Why should he leave it, he asked himself, and could find no reason. Possibly for an hour during his whole life he had hated the German army. Now he only disliked them. And for one reason: because they marched in a goose-step. He felt that for any people to march in that manner was embarrassing to the rest of humanity. Somehow it severed them from the rest of their kind. But that was little reason, he realized, to drag his weary body over a repulsive ground. He was conscious of a sensation of numbness.
“Je’s, I’m sick,” he groaned to the man next to him. “I don’t know whether I can go over. I’m all in.”
“Why don’t you go back? Tell one of the officers. He’ll send you back.”
“Yeh. And have every one of you birds think I’m yellow? I will not. I’ll be all right,” he added.
The roar of the guns deepened. A heavy curtain of exploding shells lay between the platoon and the German lines. The barrage lifted and started to move.
Whistles were imperatively blown along the trench, commanding the men to rise and begin the advance. As if it were their last mortal act, the men clambered out of the trench and started to walk.
Bent over, like a feeble old man. Hicks walked abreast of the first wave. His respirator hung heavily from around his neck. He clutched at his collar, loosening it more freely to breathe. His legs were made of wood, they felt light, but hesitated to bend. His nostrils were being flattened against his face by huge, unseen thumbs. “Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas,” he thought, adding “Probably hell for all of us.”
The day brightened, and as he approached the trees they became separate identities. The trees stared at him menacingly. They embarrassed him by their scrutiny. He found himself making excuses for advancing toward them. It was exasperating that no bullets were fired from the trees. He wondered why it could be. And then he was at the woods, entering with the rest of the men, and the underbrush parted with a crackling sound. He drew back, frightened.
Because of the thickness of the underbrush and the irregularity of the setting of the trees, he veered off to a path that led through the woods. On it other men had made their way and were stealthily tramping through, their eyes darting from one side to the other.
At a place where another path crossed, an ammunition wagon stood. The bodies of four horses lay dead on the ground, their hides mutilated, pierced by pieces of flying shell. The dead horses were a squeamish sight, lying there with large reproachful eyes and slender necks that seemed to have been broken. Their stomachs were inflated as if they had eaten too much fresh clover. Hicks grew more depressed, his own stomach wanted to describe a parabola inside of him. Hicks gagged, engaged in a spasm of retching. The woods were covered with saffron, their trunks were gaunt, and yellow splotches stuck out from the branches. The grass wore a bilious complexion. He looked down at his shoes; they, too, were yellow, unfamiliar, indefinable from the color of his puttees or his mustard uniform.
He tramped on through the woods, hoping that his sickness would overpower him, cast him to the ground where he could rest.
“If only I’d get so sick I couldn’t walk,” he thought, “how nice it would be.”
He walked on, thinking of the spot in which he would like to lie, judging with a discerning eye the softness and safety of various spots of ground. The sight of a small hollow, with breastworks of fallen trees thrown up on the dangerous side, was attractive to him. He was about to succumb, but decided against it, thinking of the awkwardness of his position in case some one should pass. And they were sure to pass, some snooping lieutenant or orderly.
But he was supposed to be in an attack. Pugh and the rest were facing the enemy at this very moment. And here he was lagging behind! Choking with fright, he hurried out of the woods. The rest of the line had just broken through the trees and now he joined them as they marched steadily ahead.
The field over which they were advancing stretched like a gridiron for perhaps a mile, then it was lost in the thickly wooded hill that rose majestically and invincibly. “God,” Hicks thought, “do we have to take that hill?” It was inconceivable that it could be done, yet inconceivable that it would not be done. There it rose—a Gethsemane—towering in the air, austere and forbidding.
Below, four waves of men with their bayoneted rifles held at high port, advanced along the flat field toward the hill. Hicks felt weak, as if he wanted to crumple up. Machine bullets clicked like keys on the typewriter of the devil’s stenographer. Rifled bullets announced their swift, fatal flights by little “pings” that sounded like air escaping from a rubber tire. They seemed to follow each other closely enough to make a solid sheet of metal.
Slowly the men marched, trying to maintain an even line under the rapid firing. Silently and unexpectedly a whistle blew and the long lines dropped to the ground. For the distance they had advanced their losses were too great.
To lie down in the face of the firing was more unendurable than moving toward it. The bodies of the men felt to them more conspicuous than when they were on their feet. They tried to hug the ground, to expose as little of themselves as they could.
“What the hell are we going to do? Go to sleep here?”
“No, they’re lookin’ for the Angel of Mons to tell us when to advance.”
“This is an awful way to win a w
ar. Are they tryin’ to get us all killed?”
“Oh, one of these German spies is in command, that’s all.”
So ran the comment of the men, interspersed with cries of assistance from the wounded. At last the whistles blew again and the men rose to their feet, chafing, half-frightened, half-angry, under the restraint of the regulated advance. One man started ahead of the line and an officer, raising his voice above the frightful racket, yelled:
“Come back here, you damned fool. Do you want to get killed by your own barrage?”
The barrage was falling short of its mark. Shells struck the fringe of the woods toward which the men already had closely advanced.
An avion sailed over the field, a serene, self-satisfied dove of peace. The pilot fired a rocket when he was directly above the front line, and wheeled back. The barrage lengthened, the shells crashing into the trees. But if the barrage had delayed their progress on the field, it had hastened it in the woods. The coils of barbed wire which had been strung before the German front-line trench were blown to bits. Great gaps in the wire appeared all along the line. The men rushed through, fell into the trench, and scrambled out the other side. The German trench had been abandoned. The main body of their troops was withdrawn and the hill had been protected only by a heavy rear-guard.
Through the woods men were running like mad, beating small, inoffensive bushes with the butts of their rifles, and calling: “Come out of there, you damned Boche.” Wherever they saw a dugout they hurled a pocketful of hand-grenades down the entrance, following them with threatening exclamations. They were the new men who had joined the platoon at the last village at which it had been billeted.
