The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

It was only by a certain tingling of the nerves that he, a tenderfoot in this business, sensed the presence of war; that war was here about him, within reach of his arm. Those seventy-fives which spoke with such a vicious, through-the-teeth bark were sending lethal shells across the sunlit landscape, causing death and wounds. Possibly that very shell which he could hear as it sped on its way might kill an enemy.... And these boys killed with an air of detachment and ennui....

And the infantrymen! Scattered through the woods about their rabbit-warren of dugouts, they looked and acted like boys on holiday, on some camping excursion. They chatted and frolicked, and grumbled about the food, and because they were not relieved and sent to rest billets, and because the enemy did not try to advance, and because they themselves were not sent against the enemy. Kendall absorbed a feeling that they rather liked the whole thing, that it was just the life they were born to and were fitted to live—and that they knew it.

It was a picture, there in the bois, a picture that touched the imagination of that young man from the peaceful Middle West and would not soon be erased from his memory. The trees grew closely, admitting only patches of sunlight here and there, with an effect of peaceful, lazy, restful shade. One saw dimly. The scene was soothing to the eyes, alive as it was with movement. The brown of uniforms blended with the yellow-green of the foliage and with the red-yellow of the upturned soil where it had been broken by hundreds of shovels in the fashioning of shelters.... Kendall stood and watched and knew that he was beholding a sight which, in the years of his age, he would see again and describe again, and live again in the telling.... It excited him, yet he wondered why it should excite him more than it had done when he had seen other khaki-clad boys in camps in America.... It was because these boys slept with death for a blanket-mate. It was because no man of them knew what minute might call him with awful suddenness over the threshold of life and into the mysteries of death....

There had been no fire from the enemy. Since the dawn their guns had been silent, but now, without warning, the air was filled with a threat, with a sound which Kendall had never heard before, but which he recognized by the instinct of self-preservation which resided in him. It was the rushing, shrieking, rending, express-train rush of a big shell—not of a shell going, but of one coming. It startled Kendall. For an instant he was blind and deaf to everything in the universe but the approach of that shell, and it seemed to him to be directing itself exactly at the small of his back. He wanted to dodge, to run, to obliterate himself from that portion of the earth, but there was no place to betake himself. It was a matter of seconds, of parts of a second. The shell screeched over their heads and detonated over toward the farm-house.... And Ken became fully conscious again, a bit surprised that he was still in the same spot and that he had not made himself ridiculous.

And now pictures came to him that he had seen in that interval, pictures seen but registering now for the first time. He laughed.... The woods had resolved itself into a prairie-dog village at the first instant of alarm. The air had been full of diving legs as soldiers plunged headlong into the earth. Everywhere Ken’s eyes had looked they had seen an American soldier disappearing with comical haste into the bowels of the earth.

“It was about time for them to start,” said Martin. “We’d better get back to headquarters. I may be wanted.”

They walked back hurriedly while shell after shell screamed down at them as it rushed over their heads. Ken was silent. He was thinking: “I’m under fire. I’m really under fire. The enemy is shooting at me.... They are trying to kill me.” It was not easy to convince his mind.

As they entered the farm-house the shells were coming in rapid succession and exploding in the vicinity with tremendous detonations. Young Martin cocked his ear and hazarded an opinion as to their caliber.... A jagged fragment, hurtled from an explosion a hundred feet away, crashed through the roof and came to rest on the second floor. Young Martin was delighted; he rushed up-stairs after the bit, carrying it down gingerly wrapped in a cloth, for it was still hot, and then with joy applied gauges and calipers to it so that he might identify it exactly.... He was happy. The gauge was as he had named it.

“Say,” he said over his shoulder to several officers who were gathered in the room, “listen here: now comes this man with orders for us to report on the crops of the neighborhood. Kind of crops. Quantity. Quality. How many kernels of wheat to the head.... My business is collecting information about the Germans....”

“Huh!” grunted the lieutenant-colonel, who evidently in civilian life had been acquainted with market reports, “snails weak to medium. Frogs strong. Give it to ’em, boy. Full particulars.”