Now that the train had stopped he could hear the far-off growling of guns; deep-voiced monsters which his imagination pictured straining on their leashes while snarling at each other across the space of miles—truly dogs of war! He drew farther back in the seat, dreading to get out; but the moment had come, the fellows and nurses were moving to the door, the great task was at hand! He tried, while standing, to simulate indifference, but his legs were weak and his teeth chattered, just a little, in spite of his effort to control himself. It seemed as if he were forever wanting to yawn, conscious of the heaviness upon his chest.
With Dr. Barrow and a lieutenant on the first creaking wagon, the others followed, but there was no road. A morass was there, that formerly had been a road—a ditch sloshy with mud which, in some places, made it necessary for all hands to climb down and put their shoulders to the wheels.
"It is trying, this traveling in limbers," the lieutenant smiled apologetically. "The incessant hauling up of shells from our bases destroys the best of roads in a few days. But what would you?" he shrugged, smiling again. "If the ammunition dumps are constantly depleted, they must be fed!"
The far-off French artillery, in skillfully emplaced positions to right and left, seeming to enfilade on a point immediately ahead, was so vigorously directed that the German guns must have been dazed, since their counter-battery work sounded spasmodic and—so far as distance permitted Jeb to guess—never effective. Yet he was moving toward that tumult; as inexorably as death, he approached it. With eyes feeding upon this new world and ears startled by fierce rumblings, he felt as though he were living in a nightmare; and when the next minute threatened to snap his reason or strangle his frantically pounding heart, he turned to the driver, asking—but fearful of the answer:
"Who's winning this battle?"
It was spoken only in Hillsdale French, aided by a two months stop in Paris; but his poilu companion smiled brightly and replied in the average Paris English:
"Oh, Monsieur, there is now for three days what you call moment decalme. Tomorrow, if no rain, oui!—perhaps a ver' fine battle!"
Then this was a lull!—this cannonading, that to Jeb seemed reaching from skyline to skyline, was only a lull! Merciful God, he cried in his soul, what might a battle be like!
By midday, after hours of frightful tugging, they were halfway on their journey, being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field, but now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation. Shell craters, caused by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting, pockmarked the ground like a telescopic photograph of the moon. Fields, so lately rich with waving grain, were blasted into subsidences and cavities, bisected by crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements—a fortnight since forming barriers so impregnable as to resemble from a distance walls of red rust—lay snarled and tied into a million knots by the ruthless lyddite fingers.
It was a pastoral landscape distorted by the paralysis of suffering and death, and Jeb realized that not for many years would these tortured fields regain their tranquillity. Where were rises, now lay depressions; the loamy top soil was blown into dust and scattered to the winds, while sterile clay and pebbly strata had been boiled up from below to take its place. Mixed with this mass of unprofitable earth, strewn over its surface and buried for a depth of thirty feet, were thousands of tons of other wire, iron stakes, and wire stanchions; cartridge cases, rifles, and gas gongs; sand bags, iron scraps, and forge tools; steel helmets, spades, and telephones; pieces of uniforms, water pipes, pick axes, gas masks, binoculars, trench periscopes, blankets, surgical dressings, boots, aye, and human bones—all, all things which the plow shares of coming generations would be turning up to remind man (should man ever forget) that Humanity had once been outraged by a people who, although made in the imitation of Christ, preferred to assume the habits of beasts.