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blinding concussion.
"Look, Tom, this is foolish; the abri's right here."
"I haven't got it in my pocket, Howe. Damn those guns."
Again everything is crushed in the concussion of the guns.
They throw themselves on the ground as a shell shrieks and explodes.
There is a moment's pause, and gravel and bits of bark tumble about their
heads.
"We've got to find that abri. I wish I hadn't lost my flashlight."
"Here it is! No, that stinks too much. Must be the latrine."
"Say, Tom."
"Here."
"Damn, I ran into a tree. I found it."
"All right. Coming."
Martin held out his hand until Randolph bumped into it; then they
stumbled together down the rough wooden steps, pulled aside the blanket that
served to keep the light in, and found themselves blinking in the low tunnel
of the abri.
Brancardiers were asleep in the two tiers of bunks that filled up the
sides, and at the table at the end a lieutenant of the medical corps was
writing by the light of a smoky lamp.
"They are landing some round here to-night," he said, pointing out two
unoccupied bunks. "I'll call you when we need a car."
As he spoke, in succession the three big guns went off. The concussion
put the lamp out.
"Damn," said Tom Randolph.
The lieutenant swore and struck a match.
"The red light of the poste de secours is out, too," said Martin.
"No use lighting it again with those unholy mortars. It's idiotic to
put a poste de secours in the middle of a battery like this."
The Americans lay down to try to sleep. Shell after shell exploded
round the dugout, but regularly every few minutes came the hammer blows of
the mortars, half the time putting the light out.
A shell explosion seemed to split the dugout and a piece of clat
whizzed through the blanket that curtained off the door. Someone tried to
pick it up as it lay half-buried in the board floor, and pulled his fingers
away quickly, blowing on them. The men turned over in the bunks and laughed,
and a smile came over the drawn green face of a wounded man who sat very
quiet behind the lieutenant, staring at the smoky flame of the lamp.
The curtain was pulled aside and a man staggered in holding with the
other hand a limp arm twisted in a mud-covered sleeve, from which blood and
mud dripped on to the floor.
"Hello, old chap," said the doctor quietly. A smell of disinfectant
stole through the dugout.
Faint above the incessant throbbing of explosions the sound of a claxon
horn.
"Ha, gas," said the doctor. "Put on your masks, children." A man went
along the dugout waking those who were asleep and giving out fresh masks.
Someone stood in the doorway blowing a shrill whistle, then there was again
the clamour of a claxon near at hand.
The band of the gas-mask was tight about Martin's forehead, biting into
the skin.
He and Randolph sat side by side on the edge of the bunk, looking out
through the crinkled isinglass eye-pieces at the men in the dugout, most of
whom had gone to sleep again.
"God, I envy a man who can snore through a gas-mask," said Randolph.
Men's heads had a ghoulish look, strange large eyes and grey oilcloth
flaps instead of faces.
Outside the constant explosions had given place to a series of swishing
whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less
regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell,
and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the
dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, everyone was quiet.
Several stretchers with wounded men on them were brought in and laid in
the end of the dugout.
Gradually, as the bombardment continued, men began sliding into the
dugout, crowding together, touching each other for company, speaking in low
voices through their masks.
"A mask, in the name of God, a mask!" a voice shouted, breaking into a
squeal, and an unshaven man, with mud caked in his hair and beard, burst
through the curtain. His eyelids kept up a continual trembling and the water
streamed down both sides of his nose.
"O God," he kept talking in a rasping whisper, "O God, they're all
killed. There were six mules on my waggon and a shell killed them all and
threw me into the ditch. You can't find the road any more. They're all
killed."
An orderly was wiping his face as if it were a child's.
"They're all killed and I lost my mask. . . . O God, this gas . . ."
The doctor, a short man, looking like a gnome in his mask with its
wheezing rubber nosepiece, was walking up and down with short, slow steps.
Suddenly, as three soldiers came in drawing the curtain aside, he
shouted in a shrill, high-pitched voice:
"Keep the curtain closed! Do you want to asphyxiate us?"
He strode up to the newcomers, his voice strident like an angry
woman's. "What are you doing here? This is the poste de secours. Are you
wounded?"
"But, my lieutenant, we can't stay outside . . ." "Where's your own
cantonment? You can't stay here; you can't stay here," he shrieked.
"But, my lieutenant, our dugout's been hit."
"You can't stay here. You can't stay here. There's not enough room for
the wounded. Name of God!"
"But, my lieutenant."
"Get the hell out of here, d'you hear?"
The men began stumbling out into the darkness, tightening the
adjustments of their masks behind their heads.
The guns had stopped firing. There was nothing but the constant
swishing and whistling of gas-shells, like endless pails of dirty water
being thrown on gravel.
"We've been at it three hours," whispered Martin to Tom Randolph.
"God, suppose these masks need changing." The sweat from Martin's face
steamed in the eyepieces, blinding him.
"Any more masks?" he asked.
A brancardier handed him one. "There aren't any more in the abri."
"I have some more in the ear," said Martin.
"I'll get one," cried Randolph, getting to his feet. They started out
of the door together. In the light that streamed out as they drew the flap
aside they saw a tree opposite them. A shell exploded, it seemed, right on
top of them; the tree rose and bowed towards them and fell.
"Are you all there, Tom?" whispered Martin, his ears ringing.
"Bet your life."
Someone pulled them back into the abri. "Here; we've found another."
Martin lay down on the bunk again, drawing with difficulty each breath.
His lips had a wet, decomposed feeling.
At the wrist of the arm he rested his head on, the watch ticked
comfortably.
He began to think how ridiculous it would be if he, Martin Howe, should
be extinguished like this. The gas-mask might be defective.
God, it would be silly.
Outside the gas-shells were still coming in. The lamp showed through a
faint bluish haze. Everyone was still waiting.
Another hour.
Martin began to recite to himself the only thing he could remember,
over and over again in time to the ticking of his watch.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time.
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest . . ."
"One, two, three, four," he counted the shells outside exploding at
irregular intervals.
There were periods of absolute silence, when he could hear batteries
pong, pong, pong in the distance.
He began again.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun
In search of that far golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.
"Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go."
Whang, whang, whang; the battery alongside began again, sending out the
light. Someone pulled the blanket aside. A little leprous greyness filtered
into the dugout.
"Ah, it's getting light."
The doctor went out and they could hear his steps climbing up to the
level of the ground.
Howe saw a man take his mask off and spit.
"O God, a cigarette!" Tom Randolph cried, pulling his mask off. The air
of the woods was fresh and cool outside. Everything was lost in mist that
filled the shell--holes as with water and wreathed itself fantastically
about the shattered trunks of trees. Here and there was still a little
greenish haze of gas. It cut their throats and made their eyes run as they
breathed in the cool air of the dawn.
Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the
yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of
wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted
roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the
yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses of telephone wires.
Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against the ardent yellow sky, and
twining among the fantastic black leafless trees, the greenish wraiths of
gas. Along the roads camions overturned, dead mules tangled in their traces
beside shattered caissons, huddled bodies in long blue coats half buried in
the mud of the ditches.
"We've got to pass. . . . We've got five very bad cases."
"Impossible."
"We've got to pass. . . . Sacred name of God!"
"But it is impossible. Two camions are blocked across the road and
there are three batteries of seventy-fives waiting to get up the road."
Long lines of men on horseback with gas-masks on, a rearing of
frightened horses and jingle of harness.
"Talk to 'em, Howe, for God's sake; we've got to get past."
"I'm doing the best I can, Tom."
"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"
"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in this
hollow."
"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way."
"But they can't."
"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel."
"No, sit still and don't get excited."
"You're the one's getting excited."
"Damn this gas."
"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I
have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to get
by."
"God damn him, tell him to hurry."
"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake."
"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask."
"Hah, that did for the two back horses."
"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his
thigh ripped up."
"No room, no room."
"He'll have to go to a poste de secours."
The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener
on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the strands
of barbed wire and the rows of shells.
At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are
feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling of
blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.
Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars
spit yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations.
Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher,
while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except when
the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of the
man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit of
blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the stretcher
with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of the car, his
knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the stretcher, with his
chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm stretched down to keep the limp
bandaged leg still.
The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling
with an articulate groan.
"Softly. . . . Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"
"Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm in a
desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of blood and
filth is misery in his nostrils.
"Softly. . . . Softly. . .. Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid
the bubbling breath.
Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of
the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest,
trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from bouncing
in the broken stretcher.
"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly,
as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern.
"He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."
SO you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"
Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of grease
on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his knees.
"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."
They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred
everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road beneath
them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor trucks. The wind came
to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of motors.
"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one
morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we
talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was
silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"
"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."
He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.
"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.
Somebody ought to write a book called Heroisms of the Great War. . . ."
"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do it
yourself, Will. But go on."
The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hills
and the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flying low
passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out all other
sound.
"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and
a big 'V.' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time because
lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He tried giving
dinners to the General Staff and everything, but that didn't seem to work.
So there was nothing to it but to get wounded. So he took to going to the
front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of a quiet sector and no
shells ever came within a mile of it. At last somebody made a mistake and a
little Austrian eighty-eight came tumbling in and popped about fifty yards
from his staff car. He showed the most marvellous presence of mind, cause he
clapped his hand over his eye and sank back in the seat with a groan. The
doctor asked what was the matter, but old Duval just kept his hand tight
over his eye and said, 'Nothing, nothing; just a scratch,' and went off to
inspect the posts. Of course the posts didn't need inspecting. And he rode
round all day with a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the
other. But never would he let the doctor even peep at it. Next morning he
came out with a bandage round his head as big as a sheik's turban. He went
to see headquarters in that get-up and lunched with the staff-officers.
Well, he got his Croix de Guerre all right--cited for assuring the
evacuation of the wounded under fire and all the rest of it."
"Some bird. He'll probably get to be a general before the war's over."
Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottle
listlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case and
broke.
"But, Will, you can't like this," he said. "It's all so like an
ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment."
"I suppose it is . . ." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the
grease on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand.
"Damn those dirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is
that life was so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year
in an office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump."
"Look," said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring
straight up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting."
They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits
of mica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white and
others black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel from anti-aircraft
guns.
The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow
larger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished. The
falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, then stopped
suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the hills, leaving an
irregular trail of smoke.
"More garbage," said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet.
"Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!"
"They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie's
bringing in."
There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among
the trees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back.
Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree,
looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there was another
sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud that suddenly spread
and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took off his helmet and
examined it quizzically.
"Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet."
Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that had
rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet.
"God damn, it's hot," he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding's
keepings." He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter.
"That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom."
"You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?"
"Damn hog."
Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he heard
a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with the
crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brown face
with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches.
"A dirty business," he said. "It's idiotic. . . . Name of a dog!"
Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as a
shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road.
"Now look at that." The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've broken
the bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic."
"Been on permission?"
"Don't I look it?"
They sat at the top of the steps again; the man took out bits of wet
glass dripping red wine from his little bag, swearing all the while.
"I was bringing it to the little captain. He's a nice little old chap,
the little captain, and he loves good wine."
"Bordeaux?"
"Can't you smell it? It's Medoc, 1900, from my own vines. . . . Look,
taste it, there's still a little." He held up the neck of the bottle and
Martin took a sip.
The artilleryman drank the rest of it, twisted his long moustaches and
heaved a deep sigh.
"Go there, my poor good old wine." He threw the remnants of the bottle
into the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the road. "Oh, this is a
dirty business! I am a Gascon. . . . I like to live." He put a dirty brown
hand on Martin's arm.
"How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five."
"I am twenty-four. Look at the picture." From a tattered black
note-book held together by an elastic band he pulled a snapshot of a
jolly-looking young man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top
of a wide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tugging
at one of his long moustaches. "Then I was twenty. It's the war." He
shrugged his shoulders and put the picture carefully back into his inside
pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"
"You must have had a tough time."
"It's just that people aren't meant for this sort ofthing," said the
artilleryman quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see the worse
it is. Then you end by going crazy. Oh, it's idiotic!"
"How did you find things at home?"
"Oh, at home! Oh, what do I care about that now? They get on without
you. . . . But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hard on
the vines and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a horse and carriage. I had
the best-looking rig in the department. Sunday it was fun; we'd play bowls
and I'd ride about with my wife. Oh, she was nice in those days! She was
young and fat and laughed all the time. She was something a man could put
his arms around, she was. We'd go out in my rig. It was click-clack of the
whip in the air and off we were in the broad road. . . . Sacred name of a
pig, that one was close. . . . And the Marquis of Montmarieul had a rig,
too, but not so good as mine, and my horse would always pass his in the
road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour to have common people like us
pass him in the road. . . . Boom, there's another. . . . And the Marquis now
is nicely embusquй in the automobile service. He is stationed at Versailles.
. . . And look at me. . . . But what do I care about all that now?"
"But after the war . . ."
"After the war?" He spat savagely on the first step of the dugout.
"They learn to get on without you."
"But we'll be free to do as we please."
"We'll never forget."
"I shall go to Spain . . ." A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin's
ear, cutting off the sentence.
"Name of God! It's getting hot. . . . Spain: I know Spain." The
artilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping his
fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst down
the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of fragments.
"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la
la la-la-la-la, la-la la," he sang, snapping his fingers.
He stopped and spat again.
"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go. . . .
Say, let's change knives--a little souvenir."
"Great."
"Good luck."
The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.
Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees
stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled like
leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and there
guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green cheese-cloth,
and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The ambulance waits
by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans and brass shell-cases,
while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend over a man on a stretcher laid
among the underbrush. The man groans and there is a sound of ripping
bandages. On the other side of the road a fallen mule feebly wags its head
from side to side, a mass of purple froth hanging from its mouth and
wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.
There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the
smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe glances
round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of strange grey men
whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of men from the moon in
a fairy tale.
"Why, they're Germans," he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."
"Ah, they're prisoners." The doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.
The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road,
and piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.
"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and
eyes that burn out of black sockets.
"How should I know?"
"Many prisoners?"
"How should I know?"
The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting
on a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board
propped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri was
excavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station and
of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movable kitchen
not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapple speared with a
knife out of a can. In their manner there is something that makes Martin see
vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a table under the awning of a
cafй on the boulevards. It has a leisurely ceremoniousness, an ease that
could exist nowhere else.
"No, my friend," the doctor is saying, "I do not think that an
apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palaeolithic man."
"But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific people sometimes
lose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on their
scientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?"
"Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them."
"There are other ways," says the aumonier, smiling.
"One moment. . . ." From under the packing-box the captain produced a
small bottle of anisette. "You'll have a little glass, won't you?"
"With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette."
"But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example." . . .
A shell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind the
dugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few bits
of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "For example,
our life here, which is, as was the life of palaeolithic man, taken up only
with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. You know
yourself that it is not conducive to religion or any emotion except that of
preservation."
"I hardly admit that. . . . Ah, I saved it," the aumonier announces,
catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. An
exploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower of
earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.
"I must go and see if anyone was hurt," says the aumonier, clambering
up the clay bank to the level of the ground; "but you will admit, my
captain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to the
fundamental feelings of religion."
"My dear friend, I admit nothing. . . . Till this evening, good-bye."
He waves his hand and goes into the dugout.
Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of a
deserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a dripping camion
passed along the road, slithering through the mud.
"This is the last summer of the war. . . . It must be," said the little
man with large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat on
Martin's left.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Everyone feels like that."
"I don't see," said Martin, "why it shouldn't last for ten or twenty
years. Wars have before. . ."
"How long have you been at the front?"
"Six months, off and on."
"After another six months you'll know why it can't go on."
"I don't know; it suits me all right," said the man on the other side
of Martin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. "Of course, I don't
like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to it."
"But you are an Alsatian; you don't care."
"I was a baker. They're going to send me to Dijon soon to bake army
bread. It'll be a change. There'll be wine and lots of little girls. Good
God, how drunk I'll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with the women. . .
"
"I should just like to get home and not be ordered about," said the
first man. "I've been lucky, though," he went on; "I've been kept most of
the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once."
"When was that?" asked Martin.
"Near Mont Cornйlien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I was
running and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Mon ami,
mon ami,' in French. I ran on because I couldn't stop, and I heard my
bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over something and
fell down."
"You were scared," said the Alsatian.
"Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a
thunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouth open
and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know you have
to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet out."
"And if you're good at it," cried the Alsatian, "you ought to yank it
out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they gave me
the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at drill."
"Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him," went on the other Frenchman.
"When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I have
it." He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he took a
photograph and a bunch of pictures. "Look, this photograph was there, too.
It hurt my heart. You see, it s a woman and two little girls. They look so
nice. . . . It's strange, but I have two children, too, only one's a boy. I
lay down on the ground beside him--I was all in--and listened to the
machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wished I'd let
him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn't it?"
"It's idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them,
the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I've had since the war began, except
my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. I wonder where
he got it, the old corpse-stripper."
"Oh, it's shameful! I am ashamed of being a man. Oh, the shame, the
shame . . ." The other man buried his face in his hands.
"I wish they were serving out gniolle for an attack right now," said
the Alsatian, "or the gniolle without the attack'd be better yet."
"Wait here," said Martin, "I'll go round to the copй and get a bottle
of fizzy. We'll drink to peace or war, as you like. Damn this rain!"
"It's a shame to bury those boots," said the sergeant of the
stretcher-bearers.
From the long roll of blanket on the ground beside the hastily-dug
grave protruded a pair of high boots, new and well polished as if for
parade. All about the earth was scarred with turned clay like raw wounds,
and the tilting arms of little wooden crosses huddled together, with here
and there a bent wreath or a faded bunch of flowers.
Overhead in the stripped trees a bird was singing.
"Shall we take them off? It's a shame to bury a pair of boots like
that."
"So many poor devils need boots."
"Boots cost so dear."
Already two men were lowering the long bundle into the grave.
"Wait a minute; we've got a coffin for him."
A white board coffin was brought.
The boots thumped against the bottom as they put the big bundle in.
An officer strode into the enclosure of the graveyard, flicking his
knees with a twig.
"Is this Lieutenant Dupont?" he asked of the sergeant.
"Yes, my lieutenant."
"Can you see his face?" The officer stooped and pulled apart the
blanket where the head was.
"Poor Ren," he said. "Thank you. Good-bye," and strode out of the
graveyard.
The yellowish clay fell in clots on the boards of the coffin. The
sergeant bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening his book with a
vaguely professional air.
"It was a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays," said
the sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the little broad
shanty they used as a morgue.
Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shell
remained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches of
white and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass and the
intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was no longer
full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it. The place
smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down on the grass
where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain, you could see
nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin Howe and Tom Randolph
would spend there the quiet afternoons when they were off duty, sleeping in
the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily, pointing out to each other tiny
things, the pattern of snail-shells, the glitter of insects' wings, colours,
fragrances that made vivid for them suddenly beauty and life, all that the
shells that shrieked overhead, to explode on the road behind them,
threatened to wipe out.
One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face and
aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.
"Chef says we may go en repos in three days," he said, throwing himself
on the ground beside the other two.
"We've heard that before," said Tom Randolph.
"Division hasn't started out yet, ole boy; an' we're the last of the
division.
"God, I'll be glad to go. . . I'm dead," said Russell.
"I was up all last night with dysentery."
"So was I. . . . It was not funny; first it'd be vomiting, and then
diarrhoea, and then the shells'd start coming in. Gave me a merry time of
it."
"They say it's the gas," said Martin.
"God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it," said Russell, stroking
his forehead with his hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me the
night after the attack, up in the woods?"
"No."
"Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P.J. right and I'd
got just beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is--you know, where
they're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was so God-damned
black you couldn't see your hand in front of you. A camion'd gone off the
road and another had run into it, and everything was littered with boxes of
shells spilt about."
"Must have been real nice," said Randolph.
"The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sick
with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at the post, running out at
both ends like he'd die. Well . . . I yelled and shouted like hell in my bad
French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned wounded inside moaned
and groaned. And the shells were coming in so thick I thought my number'd
turn up any time. An' I couldn't get anybody. So I just climbed up in the
second camion and backed it off into the bushes. . . . God, I bet it'll take
a wrecking crew to get it out. .
"That was one good job.
"But there I was with another square in the road and no chance to pass
that I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to tell you about
happened. I saw a little bit of light in a ditch beside a big car that
seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and there was a bunch
of camion drivers, sitting round a lantern drinking.
"'Hello, have a drink!' they called out to me, and one of them got up,
waving his arms, ravin' drunk, and threw his arms around me and kissed me on
the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud. . . . Then he dragged me
into the crowd.
"'Ha, here's a copain come to die with us,' he cried.
"I gave him a shove and he fell down. But another one got up and handed
me a tin cup full of that God-damned gniolle, that I drank not to make 'em
sore. Then they all shouted, and stood about me, sayin', 'American's goin'
to die with us. He's goin' to drink with us. He's goin' to die with us.' And
the shells comin' in all the while. God, I was scared.
"'I want to get a camion moved to the side of the road. . . .
Good-bye,' I said. There didn't seem any use talkin' to them.
"'But you've come to stay with us,' they said, and made me drink some
more booze. 'You've come to die with us. Remember you said so.'
"The sweat was running into my eyes so's I could hardly see. I told 'em
I'd be right back and slipped away into the dark. Then I thought I'd never
get the second camion cranked. At last I managed it and put it so I could
squeeze past, but they saw me and jumped up on the running-board of the
ambulance, tried to stop the car, all yellin' at once, 'It's no use, the
road's blocked both ways. You can't pass. You'd better stay and die with us.
Caput.'
"Well, I put my foot on the accelerator and hit one of them so hard
with the mud-guard he fell into the lantern and put it out. Then I got away.
An' how I got past the stuff in that road afterwards was just luck. I
couldn't see a God-damn thing; it was so black and I was so nerved up. God,
I'll never forget these chaps' shoutin', 'Here's a feller come to die with
us.' "
"Whew! That's some story," said Randolph.
"That'll make a letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess
my girl'll think I'm heroic enough after that."
Martin's eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream
and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three boys
stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.
The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tell
if he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud about a
slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station for a gash in
his upper arm, and he was being used to help the stretcher-bearers. Martin
sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walked
down the rutted road under the torn shreds of camouflage that fluttered a
little in the wind. Martin wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all
this stench and filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order
of things? Or did he too burn with loathing and revolt?
And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they
thinking? But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep
them eternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think until
they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but for laughter
and misery and the smell of blood.
The rutted road was empty now. Most of the batteries were quiet.
Overhead in the brilliant sky aeroplanes snored monotonously.
The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged,
splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of
brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind
came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this was
what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this had
generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in
fields and work-shops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of
their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of their
intelligence. For this!
The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again,
carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous steps
of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of a whip
along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the dugout.
The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and
started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his shoulder.
Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the rutted road. He
wished he knew German so that he might call after the man and ask him what
manner of a man he was.
Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they
exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of the
prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay still.
Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child's voice the
prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled beside him and
tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the arms. He was very
hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their soaked trousers, where
the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy cloth, stickily. Sweat dripped
from Martin's face, on the man's face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the
ribs pressed against his body as he clutched the wounded man tightly to him
in the effort of carrying him towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a
strange contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of
this man's body. At last they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the
lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of
beings alike in every part, eternally alike.
Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the
man's body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.
As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily
rag, he could still feel the man's ribs and the muscles of the man's arm
against his side. It made him strangely happy.
At the end of the dugout a man was drawing short, hard breath as if
he'd been running. There was the accustomed smell of blood and chloride and
bandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a stretcher wrapped in his
blanket, with his coat over him, trying to sleep. There was very little
light from a smoky lamp down at the end where the wounded were. The French
batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells were combing through the
woods, coming in series of three and four, gradually nearing the dugout and
edging away again. Howe saw the woods as a gambling table on which, throw
after throw, scattered the random dice of death.
He pulled his blanket up round his head. He must sleep. How silly to
think about it. It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd be gone
before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he might be dead any
minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to go tearing through
his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?
Like the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious, a
shell-shriek shrilled to the crash.
Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away in
the woods the other side of the lines should be shoving a shell into the
breach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!
Like dice thrown on a table, shells burst about the dugout, now one
side, now the other.
"Seem to have taken a fancy to us this evenin'," Howe heard Tom
Randolph's voice from the bunk opposite.
"One," muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen with fear, flat on
his back, biting his trembling lips, "two. . . . God, that was near!"
A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing loud out of the
distance.
"This is us." He clutched the sides of the stretcher.
A snorting roar rocked the dugout. Dirt fell in his face. He looked
about, dazed. The lamp was still burning. One of the wounded men, with a
bandage like an Arab's turban about his head, sat up in his stretcher with
wide, terrified eyes.
"God watches over drunkards and the feeble-minded. Don't let's worry,
Howe," shouted Randolph from his bunk.
"That probably bitched car No. 4 for evermore," he answered, turning on
his stretcher, relieved for some reason from the icy suspense.
"We should worry! We'll foot it home, that's all." The casting of the
dice began again, farther away this time.
"We won that throw," thought Martin to himself.
DUCKS quacking woke Martin. For a moment he could not think where he
was; then he remembered. The rafters of the loft of the farmhouse over his
head were hung with bunches of herbs drying. He lay a long while on his back
looking at them, sniffing the sweetened air, while farmyard sounds occupied
his ears, hens cackling, the grunting of pigs, the rou-cou-cou cou,
rou-cou-coucou of pigeons under the eaves. He stretched himself and looked
about him. He was alone except for Tom Randolph, who slept in a pile of
blankets next to the wall, his head, with its close-cropped black hair,
pillowed on his bare arm. Martin slipped off the canvas cot he had slept on
and went to the window of the loft, a little square open at the level of the
floor, through which came a dazzle of blue and gold and green. He looked
out. Stables and hay-barns filled two sides of the farmyard below him.
Behind them was a mass of rustling oak-trees. On the lichen-greened tile
roofs pigeons strutted about, putting their coral feet daintily one before
"Look, Tom, this is foolish; the abri's right here."
"I haven't got it in my pocket, Howe. Damn those guns."
Again everything is crushed in the concussion of the guns.
They throw themselves on the ground as a shell shrieks and explodes.
There is a moment's pause, and gravel and bits of bark tumble about their
heads.
"We've got to find that abri. I wish I hadn't lost my flashlight."
"Here it is! No, that stinks too much. Must be the latrine."
"Say, Tom."
"Here."
"Damn, I ran into a tree. I found it."
"All right. Coming."
Martin held out his hand until Randolph bumped into it; then they
stumbled together down the rough wooden steps, pulled aside the blanket that
served to keep the light in, and found themselves blinking in the low tunnel
of the abri.
Brancardiers were asleep in the two tiers of bunks that filled up the
sides, and at the table at the end a lieutenant of the medical corps was
writing by the light of a smoky lamp.
"They are landing some round here to-night," he said, pointing out two
unoccupied bunks. "I'll call you when we need a car."
As he spoke, in succession the three big guns went off. The concussion
put the lamp out.
"Damn," said Tom Randolph.
The lieutenant swore and struck a match.
"The red light of the poste de secours is out, too," said Martin.
"No use lighting it again with those unholy mortars. It's idiotic to
put a poste de secours in the middle of a battery like this."
The Americans lay down to try to sleep. Shell after shell exploded
round the dugout, but regularly every few minutes came the hammer blows of
the mortars, half the time putting the light out.
A shell explosion seemed to split the dugout and a piece of clat
whizzed through the blanket that curtained off the door. Someone tried to
pick it up as it lay half-buried in the board floor, and pulled his fingers
away quickly, blowing on them. The men turned over in the bunks and laughed,
and a smile came over the drawn green face of a wounded man who sat very
quiet behind the lieutenant, staring at the smoky flame of the lamp.
The curtain was pulled aside and a man staggered in holding with the
other hand a limp arm twisted in a mud-covered sleeve, from which blood and
mud dripped on to the floor.
"Hello, old chap," said the doctor quietly. A smell of disinfectant
stole through the dugout.
Faint above the incessant throbbing of explosions the sound of a claxon
horn.
"Ha, gas," said the doctor. "Put on your masks, children." A man went
along the dugout waking those who were asleep and giving out fresh masks.
Someone stood in the doorway blowing a shrill whistle, then there was again
the clamour of a claxon near at hand.
The band of the gas-mask was tight about Martin's forehead, biting into
the skin.
He and Randolph sat side by side on the edge of the bunk, looking out
through the crinkled isinglass eye-pieces at the men in the dugout, most of
whom had gone to sleep again.
"God, I envy a man who can snore through a gas-mask," said Randolph.
Men's heads had a ghoulish look, strange large eyes and grey oilcloth
flaps instead of faces.
Outside the constant explosions had given place to a series of swishing
whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less
regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell,
and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the
dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, everyone was quiet.
Several stretchers with wounded men on them were brought in and laid in
the end of the dugout.
Gradually, as the bombardment continued, men began sliding into the
dugout, crowding together, touching each other for company, speaking in low
voices through their masks.
"A mask, in the name of God, a mask!" a voice shouted, breaking into a
squeal, and an unshaven man, with mud caked in his hair and beard, burst
through the curtain. His eyelids kept up a continual trembling and the water
streamed down both sides of his nose.
"O God," he kept talking in a rasping whisper, "O God, they're all
killed. There were six mules on my waggon and a shell killed them all and
threw me into the ditch. You can't find the road any more. They're all
killed."
An orderly was wiping his face as if it were a child's.
"They're all killed and I lost my mask. . . . O God, this gas . . ."
The doctor, a short man, looking like a gnome in his mask with its
wheezing rubber nosepiece, was walking up and down with short, slow steps.
Suddenly, as three soldiers came in drawing the curtain aside, he
shouted in a shrill, high-pitched voice:
"Keep the curtain closed! Do you want to asphyxiate us?"
He strode up to the newcomers, his voice strident like an angry
woman's. "What are you doing here? This is the poste de secours. Are you
wounded?"
"But, my lieutenant, we can't stay outside . . ." "Where's your own
cantonment? You can't stay here; you can't stay here," he shrieked.
"But, my lieutenant, our dugout's been hit."
"You can't stay here. You can't stay here. There's not enough room for
the wounded. Name of God!"
"But, my lieutenant."
"Get the hell out of here, d'you hear?"
The men began stumbling out into the darkness, tightening the
adjustments of their masks behind their heads.
The guns had stopped firing. There was nothing but the constant
swishing and whistling of gas-shells, like endless pails of dirty water
being thrown on gravel.
"We've been at it three hours," whispered Martin to Tom Randolph.
"God, suppose these masks need changing." The sweat from Martin's face
steamed in the eyepieces, blinding him.
"Any more masks?" he asked.
A brancardier handed him one. "There aren't any more in the abri."
"I have some more in the ear," said Martin.
"I'll get one," cried Randolph, getting to his feet. They started out
of the door together. In the light that streamed out as they drew the flap
aside they saw a tree opposite them. A shell exploded, it seemed, right on
top of them; the tree rose and bowed towards them and fell.
"Are you all there, Tom?" whispered Martin, his ears ringing.
"Bet your life."
Someone pulled them back into the abri. "Here; we've found another."
Martin lay down on the bunk again, drawing with difficulty each breath.
His lips had a wet, decomposed feeling.
At the wrist of the arm he rested his head on, the watch ticked
comfortably.
He began to think how ridiculous it would be if he, Martin Howe, should
be extinguished like this. The gas-mask might be defective.
God, it would be silly.
Outside the gas-shells were still coming in. The lamp showed through a
faint bluish haze. Everyone was still waiting.
Another hour.
Martin began to recite to himself the only thing he could remember,
over and over again in time to the ticking of his watch.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time.
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest . . ."
"One, two, three, four," he counted the shells outside exploding at
irregular intervals.
There were periods of absolute silence, when he could hear batteries
pong, pong, pong in the distance.
He began again.
"Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun
In search of that far golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.
"Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go."
Whang, whang, whang; the battery alongside began again, sending out the
light. Someone pulled the blanket aside. A little leprous greyness filtered
into the dugout.
"Ah, it's getting light."
The doctor went out and they could hear his steps climbing up to the
level of the ground.
Howe saw a man take his mask off and spit.
"O God, a cigarette!" Tom Randolph cried, pulling his mask off. The air
of the woods was fresh and cool outside. Everything was lost in mist that
filled the shell--holes as with water and wreathed itself fantastically
about the shattered trunks of trees. Here and there was still a little
greenish haze of gas. It cut their throats and made their eyes run as they
breathed in the cool air of the dawn.
Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the
yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of
wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted
roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the
yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses of telephone wires.
Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against the ardent yellow sky, and
twining among the fantastic black leafless trees, the greenish wraiths of
gas. Along the roads camions overturned, dead mules tangled in their traces
beside shattered caissons, huddled bodies in long blue coats half buried in
the mud of the ditches.
"We've got to pass. . . . We've got five very bad cases."
"Impossible."
"We've got to pass. . . . Sacred name of God!"
"But it is impossible. Two camions are blocked across the road and
there are three batteries of seventy-fives waiting to get up the road."
Long lines of men on horseback with gas-masks on, a rearing of
frightened horses and jingle of harness.
"Talk to 'em, Howe, for God's sake; we've got to get past."
"I'm doing the best I can, Tom."
"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"
"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in this
hollow."
"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way."
"But they can't."
"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel."
"No, sit still and don't get excited."
"You're the one's getting excited."
"Damn this gas."
"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I
have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to get
by."
"God damn him, tell him to hurry."
"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake."
"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask."
"Hah, that did for the two back horses."
"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his
thigh ripped up."
"No room, no room."
"He'll have to go to a poste de secours."
The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener
on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the strands
of barbed wire and the rows of shells.
At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are
feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling of
blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.
Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars
spit yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations.
Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher,
while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except when
the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of the
man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit of
blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the stretcher
with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of the car, his
knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the stretcher, with his
chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm stretched down to keep the limp
bandaged leg still.
The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling
with an articulate groan.
"Softly. . . . Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"
"Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm in a
desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of blood and
filth is misery in his nostrils.
"Softly. . . . Softly. . .. Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid
the bubbling breath.
Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of
the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest,
trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from bouncing
in the broken stretcher.
"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly,
as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern.
"He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."
SO you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"
Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of grease
on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his knees.
"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."
They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred
everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road beneath
them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor trucks. The wind came
to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of motors.
"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one
morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we
talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was
silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"
"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."
He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.
"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.
Somebody ought to write a book called Heroisms of the Great War. . . ."
"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do it
yourself, Will. But go on."
The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hills
and the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flying low
passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out all other
sound.
"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and
a big 'V.' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time because
lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He tried giving
dinners to the General Staff and everything, but that didn't seem to work.
So there was nothing to it but to get wounded. So he took to going to the
front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of a quiet sector and no
shells ever came within a mile of it. At last somebody made a mistake and a
little Austrian eighty-eight came tumbling in and popped about fifty yards
from his staff car. He showed the most marvellous presence of mind, cause he
clapped his hand over his eye and sank back in the seat with a groan. The
doctor asked what was the matter, but old Duval just kept his hand tight
over his eye and said, 'Nothing, nothing; just a scratch,' and went off to
inspect the posts. Of course the posts didn't need inspecting. And he rode
round all day with a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the
other. But never would he let the doctor even peep at it. Next morning he
came out with a bandage round his head as big as a sheik's turban. He went
to see headquarters in that get-up and lunched with the staff-officers.
Well, he got his Croix de Guerre all right--cited for assuring the
evacuation of the wounded under fire and all the rest of it."
"Some bird. He'll probably get to be a general before the war's over."
Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottle
listlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case and
broke.
"But, Will, you can't like this," he said. "It's all so like an
ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment."
"I suppose it is . . ." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the
grease on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand.
"Damn those dirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is
that life was so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year
in an office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump."
"Look," said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring
straight up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting."
They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits
of mica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white and
others black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel from anti-aircraft
guns.
The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow
larger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished. The
falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, then stopped
suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the hills, leaving an
irregular trail of smoke.
"More garbage," said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet.
"Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!"
"They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie's
bringing in."
There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among
the trees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back.
Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree,
looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there was another
sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud that suddenly spread
and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took off his helmet and
examined it quizzically.
"Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet."
Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that had
rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet.
"God damn, it's hot," he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding's
keepings." He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter.
"That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom."
"You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?"
"Damn hog."
Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he heard
a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with the
crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brown face
with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches.
"A dirty business," he said. "It's idiotic. . . . Name of a dog!"
Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as a
shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road.
"Now look at that." The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've broken
the bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic."
"Been on permission?"
"Don't I look it?"
They sat at the top of the steps again; the man took out bits of wet
glass dripping red wine from his little bag, swearing all the while.
"I was bringing it to the little captain. He's a nice little old chap,
the little captain, and he loves good wine."
"Bordeaux?"
"Can't you smell it? It's Medoc, 1900, from my own vines. . . . Look,
taste it, there's still a little." He held up the neck of the bottle and
Martin took a sip.
The artilleryman drank the rest of it, twisted his long moustaches and
heaved a deep sigh.
"Go there, my poor good old wine." He threw the remnants of the bottle
into the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the road. "Oh, this is a
dirty business! I am a Gascon. . . . I like to live." He put a dirty brown
hand on Martin's arm.
"How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five."
"I am twenty-four. Look at the picture." From a tattered black
note-book held together by an elastic band he pulled a snapshot of a
jolly-looking young man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top
of a wide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tugging
at one of his long moustaches. "Then I was twenty. It's the war." He
shrugged his shoulders and put the picture carefully back into his inside
pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"
"You must have had a tough time."
"It's just that people aren't meant for this sort ofthing," said the
artilleryman quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see the worse
it is. Then you end by going crazy. Oh, it's idiotic!"
"How did you find things at home?"
"Oh, at home! Oh, what do I care about that now? They get on without
you. . . . But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hard on
the vines and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a horse and carriage. I had
the best-looking rig in the department. Sunday it was fun; we'd play bowls
and I'd ride about with my wife. Oh, she was nice in those days! She was
young and fat and laughed all the time. She was something a man could put
his arms around, she was. We'd go out in my rig. It was click-clack of the
whip in the air and off we were in the broad road. . . . Sacred name of a
pig, that one was close. . . . And the Marquis of Montmarieul had a rig,
too, but not so good as mine, and my horse would always pass his in the
road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour to have common people like us
pass him in the road. . . . Boom, there's another. . . . And the Marquis now
is nicely embusquй in the automobile service. He is stationed at Versailles.
. . . And look at me. . . . But what do I care about all that now?"
"But after the war . . ."
"After the war?" He spat savagely on the first step of the dugout.
"They learn to get on without you."
"But we'll be free to do as we please."
"We'll never forget."
"I shall go to Spain . . ." A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin's
ear, cutting off the sentence.
"Name of God! It's getting hot. . . . Spain: I know Spain." The
artilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping his
fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst down
the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of fragments.
"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la
la la-la-la-la, la-la la," he sang, snapping his fingers.
He stopped and spat again.
"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go. . . .
Say, let's change knives--a little souvenir."
"Great."
"Good luck."
The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.
Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees
stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled like
leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and there
guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green cheese-cloth,
and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The ambulance waits
by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans and brass shell-cases,
while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend over a man on a stretcher laid
among the underbrush. The man groans and there is a sound of ripping
bandages. On the other side of the road a fallen mule feebly wags its head
from side to side, a mass of purple froth hanging from its mouth and
wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.
There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the
smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe glances
round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of strange grey men
whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of men from the moon in
a fairy tale.
"Why, they're Germans," he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."
"Ah, they're prisoners." The doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.
The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road,
and piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.
"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and
eyes that burn out of black sockets.
"How should I know?"
"Many prisoners?"
"How should I know?"
The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting
on a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board
propped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri was
excavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station and
of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movable kitchen
not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapple speared with a
knife out of a can. In their manner there is something that makes Martin see
vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a table under the awning of a
cafй on the boulevards. It has a leisurely ceremoniousness, an ease that
could exist nowhere else.
"No, my friend," the doctor is saying, "I do not think that an
apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palaeolithic man."
"But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific people sometimes
lose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on their
scientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?"
"Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them."
"There are other ways," says the aumonier, smiling.
"One moment. . . ." From under the packing-box the captain produced a
small bottle of anisette. "You'll have a little glass, won't you?"
"With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette."
"But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example." . . .
A shell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind the
dugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few bits
of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "For example,
our life here, which is, as was the life of palaeolithic man, taken up only
with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. You know
yourself that it is not conducive to religion or any emotion except that of
preservation."
"I hardly admit that. . . . Ah, I saved it," the aumonier announces,
catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. An
exploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower of
earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.
"I must go and see if anyone was hurt," says the aumonier, clambering
up the clay bank to the level of the ground; "but you will admit, my
captain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to the
fundamental feelings of religion."
"My dear friend, I admit nothing. . . . Till this evening, good-bye."
He waves his hand and goes into the dugout.
Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of a
deserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a dripping camion
passed along the road, slithering through the mud.
"This is the last summer of the war. . . . It must be," said the little
man with large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat on
Martin's left.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Everyone feels like that."
"I don't see," said Martin, "why it shouldn't last for ten or twenty
years. Wars have before. . ."
"How long have you been at the front?"
"Six months, off and on."
"After another six months you'll know why it can't go on."
"I don't know; it suits me all right," said the man on the other side
of Martin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. "Of course, I don't
like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to it."
"But you are an Alsatian; you don't care."
"I was a baker. They're going to send me to Dijon soon to bake army
bread. It'll be a change. There'll be wine and lots of little girls. Good
God, how drunk I'll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with the women. . .
"
"I should just like to get home and not be ordered about," said the
first man. "I've been lucky, though," he went on; "I've been kept most of
the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once."
"When was that?" asked Martin.
"Near Mont Cornйlien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I was
running and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Mon ami,
mon ami,' in French. I ran on because I couldn't stop, and I heard my
bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over something and
fell down."
"You were scared," said the Alsatian.
"Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a
thunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouth open
and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know you have
to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet out."
"And if you're good at it," cried the Alsatian, "you ought to yank it
out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they gave me
the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at drill."
"Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him," went on the other Frenchman.
"When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I have
it." He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he took a
photograph and a bunch of pictures. "Look, this photograph was there, too.
It hurt my heart. You see, it s a woman and two little girls. They look so
nice. . . . It's strange, but I have two children, too, only one's a boy. I
lay down on the ground beside him--I was all in--and listened to the
machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wished I'd let
him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn't it?"
"It's idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them,
the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I've had since the war began, except
my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. I wonder where
he got it, the old corpse-stripper."
"Oh, it's shameful! I am ashamed of being a man. Oh, the shame, the
shame . . ." The other man buried his face in his hands.
"I wish they were serving out gniolle for an attack right now," said
the Alsatian, "or the gniolle without the attack'd be better yet."
"Wait here," said Martin, "I'll go round to the copй and get a bottle
of fizzy. We'll drink to peace or war, as you like. Damn this rain!"
"It's a shame to bury those boots," said the sergeant of the
stretcher-bearers.
From the long roll of blanket on the ground beside the hastily-dug
grave protruded a pair of high boots, new and well polished as if for
parade. All about the earth was scarred with turned clay like raw wounds,
and the tilting arms of little wooden crosses huddled together, with here
and there a bent wreath or a faded bunch of flowers.
Overhead in the stripped trees a bird was singing.
"Shall we take them off? It's a shame to bury a pair of boots like
that."
"So many poor devils need boots."
"Boots cost so dear."
Already two men were lowering the long bundle into the grave.
"Wait a minute; we've got a coffin for him."
A white board coffin was brought.
The boots thumped against the bottom as they put the big bundle in.
An officer strode into the enclosure of the graveyard, flicking his
knees with a twig.
"Is this Lieutenant Dupont?" he asked of the sergeant.
"Yes, my lieutenant."
"Can you see his face?" The officer stooped and pulled apart the
blanket where the head was.
"Poor Ren," he said. "Thank you. Good-bye," and strode out of the
graveyard.
The yellowish clay fell in clots on the boards of the coffin. The
sergeant bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening his book with a
vaguely professional air.
"It was a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays," said
the sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the little broad
shanty they used as a morgue.
Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shell
remained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches of
white and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass and the
intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was no longer
full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it. The place
smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down on the grass
where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain, you could see
nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin Howe and Tom Randolph
would spend there the quiet afternoons when they were off duty, sleeping in
the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily, pointing out to each other tiny
things, the pattern of snail-shells, the glitter of insects' wings, colours,
fragrances that made vivid for them suddenly beauty and life, all that the
shells that shrieked overhead, to explode on the road behind them,
threatened to wipe out.
One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face and
aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.
"Chef says we may go en repos in three days," he said, throwing himself
on the ground beside the other two.
"We've heard that before," said Tom Randolph.
"Division hasn't started out yet, ole boy; an' we're the last of the
division.
"God, I'll be glad to go. . . I'm dead," said Russell.
"I was up all last night with dysentery."
"So was I. . . . It was not funny; first it'd be vomiting, and then
diarrhoea, and then the shells'd start coming in. Gave me a merry time of
it."
"They say it's the gas," said Martin.
"God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it," said Russell, stroking
his forehead with his hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me the
night after the attack, up in the woods?"
"No."
"Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P.J. right and I'd
got just beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is--you know, where
they're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was so God-damned
black you couldn't see your hand in front of you. A camion'd gone off the
road and another had run into it, and everything was littered with boxes of
shells spilt about."
"Must have been real nice," said Randolph.
"The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sick
with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at the post, running out at
both ends like he'd die. Well . . . I yelled and shouted like hell in my bad
French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned wounded inside moaned
and groaned. And the shells were coming in so thick I thought my number'd
turn up any time. An' I couldn't get anybody. So I just climbed up in the
second camion and backed it off into the bushes. . . . God, I bet it'll take
a wrecking crew to get it out. .
"That was one good job.
"But there I was with another square in the road and no chance to pass
that I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to tell you about
happened. I saw a little bit of light in a ditch beside a big car that
seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and there was a bunch
of camion drivers, sitting round a lantern drinking.
"'Hello, have a drink!' they called out to me, and one of them got up,
waving his arms, ravin' drunk, and threw his arms around me and kissed me on
the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud. . . . Then he dragged me
into the crowd.
"'Ha, here's a copain come to die with us,' he cried.
"I gave him a shove and he fell down. But another one got up and handed
me a tin cup full of that God-damned gniolle, that I drank not to make 'em
sore. Then they all shouted, and stood about me, sayin', 'American's goin'
to die with us. He's goin' to drink with us. He's goin' to die with us.' And
the shells comin' in all the while. God, I was scared.
"'I want to get a camion moved to the side of the road. . . .
Good-bye,' I said. There didn't seem any use talkin' to them.
"'But you've come to stay with us,' they said, and made me drink some
more booze. 'You've come to die with us. Remember you said so.'
"The sweat was running into my eyes so's I could hardly see. I told 'em
I'd be right back and slipped away into the dark. Then I thought I'd never
get the second camion cranked. At last I managed it and put it so I could
squeeze past, but they saw me and jumped up on the running-board of the
ambulance, tried to stop the car, all yellin' at once, 'It's no use, the
road's blocked both ways. You can't pass. You'd better stay and die with us.
Caput.'
"Well, I put my foot on the accelerator and hit one of them so hard
with the mud-guard he fell into the lantern and put it out. Then I got away.
An' how I got past the stuff in that road afterwards was just luck. I
couldn't see a God-damn thing; it was so black and I was so nerved up. God,
I'll never forget these chaps' shoutin', 'Here's a feller come to die with
us.' "
"Whew! That's some story," said Randolph.
"That'll make a letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess
my girl'll think I'm heroic enough after that."
Martin's eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream
and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three boys
stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.
The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tell
if he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud about a
slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station for a gash in
his upper arm, and he was being used to help the stretcher-bearers. Martin
sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walked
down the rutted road under the torn shreds of camouflage that fluttered a
little in the wind. Martin wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all
this stench and filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order
of things? Or did he too burn with loathing and revolt?
And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they
thinking? But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep
them eternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think until
they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but for laughter
and misery and the smell of blood.
The rutted road was empty now. Most of the batteries were quiet.
Overhead in the brilliant sky aeroplanes snored monotonously.
The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged,
splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of
brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind
came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this was
what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this had
generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in
fields and work-shops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of
their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of their
intelligence. For this!
The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again,
carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous steps
of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of a whip
along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the dugout.
The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and
started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his shoulder.
Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the rutted road. He
wished he knew German so that he might call after the man and ask him what
manner of a man he was.
Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they
exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of the
prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay still.
Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child's voice the
prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled beside him and
tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the arms. He was very
hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their soaked trousers, where
the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy cloth, stickily. Sweat dripped
from Martin's face, on the man's face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the
ribs pressed against his body as he clutched the wounded man tightly to him
in the effort of carrying him towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a
strange contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of
this man's body. At last they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the
lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of
beings alike in every part, eternally alike.
Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the
man's body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.
As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily
rag, he could still feel the man's ribs and the muscles of the man's arm
against his side. It made him strangely happy.
At the end of the dugout a man was drawing short, hard breath as if
he'd been running. There was the accustomed smell of blood and chloride and
bandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a stretcher wrapped in his
blanket, with his coat over him, trying to sleep. There was very little
light from a smoky lamp down at the end where the wounded were. The French
batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells were combing through the
woods, coming in series of three and four, gradually nearing the dugout and
edging away again. Howe saw the woods as a gambling table on which, throw
after throw, scattered the random dice of death.
He pulled his blanket up round his head. He must sleep. How silly to
think about it. It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd be gone
before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he might be dead any
minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to go tearing through
his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?
Like the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious, a
shell-shriek shrilled to the crash.
Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away in
the woods the other side of the lines should be shoving a shell into the
breach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!
Like dice thrown on a table, shells burst about the dugout, now one
side, now the other.
"Seem to have taken a fancy to us this evenin'," Howe heard Tom
Randolph's voice from the bunk opposite.
"One," muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen with fear, flat on
his back, biting his trembling lips, "two. . . . God, that was near!"
A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing loud out of the
distance.
"This is us." He clutched the sides of the stretcher.
A snorting roar rocked the dugout. Dirt fell in his face. He looked
about, dazed. The lamp was still burning. One of the wounded men, with a
bandage like an Arab's turban about his head, sat up in his stretcher with
wide, terrified eyes.
"God watches over drunkards and the feeble-minded. Don't let's worry,
Howe," shouted Randolph from his bunk.
"That probably bitched car No. 4 for evermore," he answered, turning on
his stretcher, relieved for some reason from the icy suspense.
"We should worry! We'll foot it home, that's all." The casting of the
dice began again, farther away this time.
"We won that throw," thought Martin to himself.
DUCKS quacking woke Martin. For a moment he could not think where he
was; then he remembered. The rafters of the loft of the farmhouse over his
head were hung with bunches of herbs drying. He lay a long while on his back
looking at them, sniffing the sweetened air, while farmyard sounds occupied
his ears, hens cackling, the grunting of pigs, the rou-cou-cou cou,
rou-cou-coucou of pigeons under the eaves. He stretched himself and looked
about him. He was alone except for Tom Randolph, who slept in a pile of
blankets next to the wall, his head, with its close-cropped black hair,
pillowed on his bare arm. Martin slipped off the canvas cot he had slept on
and went to the window of the loft, a little square open at the level of the
floor, through which came a dazzle of blue and gold and green. He looked
out. Stables and hay-barns filled two sides of the farmyard below him.
Behind them was a mass of rustling oak-trees. On the lichen-greened tile
roofs pigeons strutted about, putting their coral feet daintily one before