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_ Four o'clock . . . a summer dawn . . . his first morning in the
trenches.
Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams
were in position. This hour, when the light was changing, was a
favourite time for attack. He had come in late last night, and
had everything to learn. Mounting the firestep, he peeped over
the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist.
Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with
birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they
did on the wire fences at home. Clear and flute-like they sounded
in the heavy air,--and they were the only sounds. A little breeze
came up, slowly clearing the mist away. Streaks of green showed
through the moving banks of vapour. The birds became more
agitated. That dull stretch of grey and green was No Man's Land.
Those low, zigzag mounds, like giant molehills protected by wire
hurdles, were the Hun trenches; five or six lines of them. He
could easily follow the communication trenches without a glass.
At one point their front line could not be more than eighty yards
away, at another it must be all of three hundred. Here and there
thin columns of smoke began to rise; the Hun was getting
breakfast; everything was comfortable and natural. Behind the
enemy's position the country rose gradually for several miles,
with ravines and little woods, where, according to his map, they
had masked artillery. Back on the hills were ruined farmhouses
and broken trees, but nowhere a living creature in sight. It was
a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection. Yet
everywhere the ground was full of men. Their own trenches, from
the other side, must look quite as dead. Life was a secret, these
days.
It was amazing how simply things could be done. His battalion had
marched in quietly at midnight, and the line they came to relieve
had set out as silently for the rear. It all took place in utter
darkness. Just as B Company slid down an incline into the shallow
rear trenches, the country was lit for a moment by two star
shells, there was a rattling of machine guns, German Maxims,--a
sporadic crackle that was not followed up. Filing along the
communication trenches, they listened anxiously; artillery fire
would have made it bad for the other men who were marching to the
rear. But nothing happened. They had a quiet night, and this
morning, here they were!
The sky flamed up saffron and silver. Claude looked at his watch,
but he could not bear to go just yet. How long it took a Wheeler
to get round to anything! Four years on the way; now that he was
here, he would enjoy the scenery a bit, he guessed. He wished his
mother could know how he felt this morning. But perhaps she did
know. At any rate, she would not have him anywhere else. Five
years ago, when he was sitting on the steps of the Denver State
House and knew that nothing unexpected could ever happen to him .
. suppose he could have seen, in a flash, where he would be
today? He cast a long look at the reddening, lengthening
landscape, and dropped down on the duckboard.
Claude made his way back to the dugout into which he and Gerhardt
had thrown their effects last night. The former occupants had
left it clean. There were two bunks nailed against the side
walls,--wooden frames with wire netting over them, covered with
dry sandbags. Between the two bunks was a soap-box table, with a
candle stuck in a green bottle, an alcohol stove, a bainmarie,
and two tin cups. On the wall were coloured pictures from Jugend,
taken out of some Hun trench.
He found Gerhardt still asleep on his bed, and shook him until he
sat up.
"How long have you been out, Claude? Didn't you sleep?"
"A little. I wasn't very tired. I suppose we could heat shaving
water on this stove; they've left us half a bottle of alcohol.
It's quite a comfortable little hole, isn't it?"
"It will doubtless serve its purpose," David remarked dryly. "So
sensitive to any criticism of this war! Why, it's not your
affair; you've only just arrived."
"I know," Claude replied meekly, as he began to fold his
blankets. "But it's likely the only one I'll ever be in, so I may
as well take an interest."
The next afternoon four young men, all more or less naked, were
busy about a shellhole full of opaque brown water. Sergeant Hicks
and his chum, Dell Able, had hunted through half the blazing hot
morning to find a hole not too scummy, conveniently, and even
picturesquely situated, and had reported it to the Lieutenants.
Captain Maxey, Hicks said, could send his own orderly to find his
own shellhole, and could take his bath in private. "He'd never
wash himself with anybody else," the Sergeant added. "Afraid of
exposing his dignity!"
Bruger and Hammond, the two second Lieutenants, were already out
of their bath, and reclined on what might almost be termed a
grassy slope, examining various portions of their body with
interest. They hadn't had all their clothes off for some time,
and four days of marching in hot weather made a man anxious to
look at himself.
"You wait till winter," Gerhardt told them. He was still
splashing in the hole, up to his armpits in muddy water. "You
won't get a wash once in three months then. Some of the Tommies
told me that when they got their first bath after Vimy, their
skins peeled off like a snake's. What are you doing with my
trousers, Bruger?"
"Hunting for your knife. I dropped mine yesterday, when that
shell exploded in the cut-off. I darned near dropped my old nut!"
"Shucks, that wasn't anything. Don't keep blowing about it--shows
you're a greenhorn."
Claude stripped off his shirt and slid into the pool beside
Gerhardt. "Gee, I hit something sharp down there! Why didn't you
fellows pull out the splinters?"
He shut his eyes, disappeared for a moment, and came up
sputtering, throwing on the ground a round metal object, coated
with rust and full of slime. "German helmet, isn't it? Phew!" He
wiped his face and looked about suspiciously.
"Phew is right!" Bruger turned the object over with a stick. "Why
in hell didn't you bring up the rest of him? You've spoiled my
bath. I hope you enjoy it."
Gerhardt scrambled up the side. "Get out, Wheeler! Look at that,"
he pointed to big sleepy bubbles, bursting up through the thick
water. "You've stirred up trouble, all right! Something's going
very bad down there."
Claude got out after him, looking back at the activity in the
water. "I don't see how pulling out one helmet could stir the
bottom up so. I should think the water would keep the smell
down."
"Ever study chemistry?" Bruger asked scornfully. "You just opened
up a graveyard, and now we get the exhaust. If you swallowed any
of that German cologne--Oh, you should worry!"
Lieutenant Hammond, still barelegged, with his shirt tied over
his shoulders, was scratching in his notebook. Before they left
he put up a placard on a split stick.
No Public Bathing! ! Private Beach
C. Wheeler, Co. B. 2-th Inf'ty.
. . . . . . . . . .
The first letters from home! The supply wagons brought them up,
and every man in the Company got something except Ed Drier, a
farm-hand from the Nebraska sand hills, and Willy Katz, the
tow-headed Austrian boy from the South Omaha packing-houses.
Their comrades were sorry for them. Ed didn't have any "folks" of
his own, but he had expected letters all the same. Willy was sure
his mother must have written. When the last ragged envelope was
given out and he turned away empty-handed, he murmured, "She's
Bohunk, and she don't write so good. I guess the address wasn't
plain, and some fellow in another comp'ny has got my letter."
No second class matter was sent up,--the boys had hoped for
newspapers from home to give them a little war news, since they
never got any here. Dell Able's sister, however, had enclosed a
clipping from the Kansas City Star; a long account by one of the
British war correspondents in Mesopotamia, describing the
hardships the soldiers suffered there; dysentery, flies,
mosquitoes, unimaginable heat. He read this article aloud to a
group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where
they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story
of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where
the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,--a desolate
spot full of stinging insects--when Oscar Petersen, a very
religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together,
opened his mouth and said scornfully,
"That's a lie!"
Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. "How do you
know it is?"
"Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the
Garden, and there ain't no man going to find it. It ain't
intended they should. The Bible says so."
Hicks began to laugh. "Why, that was about six thousand years
ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?"
"'Course they are. What's a thousand years to a cherubim?
Nothin'!"
The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.
Dell Able looked at his chum. "Ain't he the complete bonehead?
Solid ivory!"
Oscar wouldn't listen further to a "pack of lies" and walked off
with his washing.
. . . . . . . . . .
Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front
line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The
Colonel's office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the
place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One
night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the
gun teams. The young officers were sitting about on soap boxes,
smoking and eating sweet crackers out of tin cases. Gerhardt was
working at a plank table with paper and crayons, making a clean
copy of a rough map they had drawn up together that morning,
showing the limits of fire. Noise didn't fluster him; he could
sit among a lot of men and write as calmly as if he were alone.
There was one officer who could talk all the others down,
wherever he was; Captain Barclay Owens, attached from the
Engineers. He was a little stumpy thumb of a man, only five feet
four, and very broad,--a dynamo of energy. Before the war he was
building a dam in Spain, "the largest dam in the world," and in
his excavations he had discovered the ruins of one of Julius
Caesar's fortified camps. This had been too much for his
easily-inflamed imagination. He photographed and measured and
brooded upon these ancient remains. He was an engineer by day and
an archaeologist by night. He had crates of books sent down from
Paris,--everything that had been written on Caesar, in French and
German; he engaged a young priest to translate them aloud to him
in the evening. The priest believed the American was mad.
When Owens was in college he had never shown the least interest
in classical studies, but now it was as if he were giving birth
to Caesar. The war came along, and stopped the work on his dam.
It also drove other ideas into his exclusively engineering
brains. He rushed home to Kansas to explain the war to his
countrymen.. He travelled about the West, demonstrating exactly
what had happened at the first battle of the Marne, until he had
a chance to enlist.
In the Battalion, Owens was called "Julius Caesar," and the men
never knew whether he was explaining the Roman general's
operations in Spain, or Joffre's at the Marne, he jumped so from
one to the other. Everything was in the foreground with him;
centuries made no difference. Nothing existed until Barclay Owens
found out about it. The men liked to hear him talk. Tonight he
was walking up and down, his yellow eyes rolling, a big black
cigar in his hand, lecturing the young officers upon French
characteristics, coaching and preparing them. It was his legs
that made him so funny; his trunk was that of a big man, set on
two short stumps.
"Now you fellows don't want to forget that the night-life of
Paris is not a typical thing at all; that's a show got up for
foreigners . . . . The French peasant, he's a thrifty fellow . .
. . This red wine's all right if you don't abuse it; take it
two-thirds water and it keeps off dysentery . . . . You don't
have to be rough with them, simply firm. Whenever one of them
accosts me, I follow a regular plan; first, I give her
twenty-five francs; then I look her in the eye and say, 'My girl,
I've got three children, three boys.' She gets the point at once;
never fails. She goes away ashamed of herself."
"But that's so expensive! It must keep you poor, Captain Owens,"
said young Lieutenant Hammond innocently. The others roared.
Claude knew that David particularly detested Captain Owens of the
Engineers, and wondered that he could go on working with such
concentration, when snatches of the Captain's lecture kept
breaking through the confusion of casual talk and the noise of
the phonograph. Owens, as he walked up and down, cast furtive
glances at Gerhardt. He had got wind of the fact that there was
something out of the ordinary about him.
The men kept the phonograph going; as soon as one record buzzed
out, somebody put in another. Once, when a new tune began, Claude
saw David look up from his paper with a curious expression. He
listened for a moment with a half-contemptuous smile, then
frowned and began sketching in his map again. Something about his
momentary glance of recognition made Claude wonder whether he had
particular associations with the air,--melancholy, but beautiful,
Claude thought. He got up and went over to change the record
himself this time. He took out the disk, and holding it up to the
light, read the inscription
"Meditation from Thais--Violin solo--David Gerhardt."
When they were going back along the communication trench in the
rain, wading single file, Claude broke the silence abruptly.
"That was one of your records they played tonight, that violin
solo, wasn't it?"
"Sounded like it. Now we go to the right. I always get lost
here."
"Are there many of your records?"
"Quite a number. Why do you ask?"
"I'd like to write my mother. She's fond of good music. She'll
get your records, and it will sort of bring the whole thing
closer to her, don't you see?"
"All right, Claude," said David good-naturedly. "She will find
them in the catalogue, with my picture in uniform alongside. I
had a lot made before I went out to Camp Dix. My own mother gets
a little income from them. Here we are, at home." As he struck a
match two black shadows jumped from the table and disappeared
behind the blankets. "Plenty of them around, these wet nights.
Get one? Don't squash him in there. Here's the sack."
Gerhardt held open the mouth of a gunny sack, and Claude thrust
the squirming corner of his blanket into it and vigorously
trampled whatever fell to the bottom. "Where do you suppose the
other is?" "He'll join us later. I don't mind the rats half so
much as I do Barclay Owens. What a sight he would be with his
clothes off! Turn in; I'll go the rounds." Gerhardt splashed out
along the submerged duckboard. Claude took off his shoes and
cooled his feet in the muddy water. He wished he could ever get
David to talk about his profession, and wondered what he looked
like on a concert platform, playing his violin. _
Read next: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 9
Read previous: Book Five: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On": Chapter 7
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