“H’lo, Kentuck ... you there?” came feebly back. With a wrench Kentucky was on his knees, staggered to his feet, and running to the voice. “Pug,” he said, stooping over the huddled figure. “You’re not hurt bad, are you, Pug, boy?” With clothing torn to rags, smeared and dripping with blood, with one leg twisted horribly under him, with a red cut gaping deep over one eye, Pug looked up and grinned weakly. “Orright,” he said; “I’m ... orright. But I tole you, Kentuck ... I tole you to touch wood.”
A couple of stretcher-bearers hurried along, and when the damages were assessed it was found that Pug was badly hurt, with one leg smashed, with a score of minor wounds, of which one in the side and one in the breast might be serious. Kentucky had a broken hand, torn arm, lacerated shoulder, and a heavily bruised set of ribs. So Pug was lifted on to a stretcher, and Kentucky, asserting stoutly that he could walk and that there was no need to waste a precious stretcher on carrying him, had his wounds bandaged and started out alongside the bearers who carried Pug. The going was bad, and the unavoidable jolting and jerking as the bearers stumbled over the rough ground must have been sheer agony to the man on the stretcher. But no groan or whimper came from Pug’s tight lips, that he opened only to encourage Kentucky to keep on, to tell him it wouldn’t be far now, to ask the bearers to go slow to give Kentucky a chance to keep up. But it was no time or place to go slow. The shells were still screaming and bursting over and about the ground they were crossing, gusts of rifle bullets or lonely whimpering ones still whistled and hummed past. A fold in the ground brought them cover presently from the bullets, but not from the shells, and the bearers pushed doggedly on. Kentucky kept up with difficulty, for he was feeling weak and spent, and it was with a sigh of relief that he saw the bearers halt and put the stretcher down. “How do you feel, Pug?” he asked. “Bit sore,” said Pug with sturdy cheerfulness. “But it’s nothin’ too bad. But I wish we was outer this. We both got Blighty ones, Kentuck, an’ we’ll go ’ome together. Now we’re on the way ’ome, I’d hate to have another of them shells drop on us, and put us out for good, mebbe.”
They pushed on again, for the light was failing, and although the moon was already up, the half-light made the broken ground more difficult than ever to traverse. Pug had fallen silent, and one of the bearers, noticing the gripped lips and pain-twisted face, called to the other man and put the stretcher down and fumbled out a pill. “Swallow that,” he said, and put it between Pug’s lips; “an’ that’s the last one I have.” He daubed a ghastly blue cross on Pug’s cheek to show he had been given an opiate, and then they went on again.
They crept slowly across the ground where the Germans had made one of their counter-attacks, and the price they had paid in it was plain to be seen in the piled heaps of dead that lay sprawled on the open and huddled anyhow in the holes and ditches. There were hundreds upon hundreds in that one patch of ground alone, and Kentucky wondered vaguely how many such patches there were throughout the battlefield. The stretcher-bearers were busy with the wounded, who in places still remained with the dead, and sound German prisoners under ridiculously slender guards were carrying in stretchers with badly wounded Germans or helping less severely wounded ones to walk back to the British rear. A little further on they crossed what had been a portion of trench held by the Germans and from which they appeared to have been driven by shell and mortar fire. Here there were no wounded, and of the many dead the most had been literally blown to pieces, or, flung bodily from their shelters, lay broken and buried under tumbled heaps of earth. Half a dozen Germans in long, flapping coats and heavy steel “coal-scuttle” helmets worked silently, searching the gruesome débris for any living wounded; and beyond them stood a solitary British soldier on guard over them, leaning on his bayoneted rifle and watching them. Far to the rear the flashes of the British guns lit the darkening sky with vivid, flickering gleams that came and went incessantly, like the play of summer lightning. It brought to Kentucky, trudging beside the stretcher, the swift memory of lines from a great poem that he had learned as a child and long since forgotten—the Battle Hymn of his own country. In his mind he quoted them now with sudden realization of the exactness of their fitting to the scene before him—“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.” Here surely in these broken dead, in the silent, dejected prisoners, in the very earth she had seized and that now had been wrested from her, was Germany’s vintage, the tramplings out of the grapes of a wrath long stored, the smitten of the swift sword that flashed unloosed at last in the gun-fire lightning at play across the sky.
For the rest of the way that he walked back to the First Aid Post the words of the verse kept running over in his pain-numbed and weary mind—”... where the grapes of wrath are stored; trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath ...” over and over again.
And when at last they came to the trench that led to the underground dressing-station just as the guns had waked again to a fresh spasm of fury that set the sky ablaze with their flashes and the air roaring to their deep, rolling thunders, Kentucky’s mind went back to where the great shells would be falling, pictured to him the flaming fires, the rending, shattering crashes, the tearing whirlwinds of destruction, that would be devastating the German lines. “Grapes of wrath,” he whispered. “God, yes—bitter grapes of wrath.” And in his fancy the guns caught up the word from his mouth, and tossed it shouting in long-drawn, shaking thunder: “Wrath—wrath—wrath!”