Where the Souls of Men are Calling

by Credo Fitch Harris

"At dawn this curtain of shells will be lifted and dropped on the Boche second line. That instant our boys go over the top, across No Man's Land. But Germans burrow under ground in a barrage, or run out forward and lie down to escape it; so there will still be many with machine-guns left to rake the open stretch, and not all of our brave fellows will get across. It is those," he added, in a voice of thunder, "whom the good God expects us to bring in!"

There was no disobeying this man. Jeb felt sick through and through, but as the others filed out, every second one with a folded stretcher, he, also, followed. Yet he wanted to hold back; he wanted to dash into the darkest niche of the dug-out, bury his face there and—well, die! To die at once, outright, was preferable to the mental torture of expected laceration and suffering; nor could even the great Bonsecours have convinced him that these two monsters were not crouching, waiting especially for the moment when he should step forth.

While the dressing-station shelters opened into a roomy quadrangle, that in turn connected with trenches, there had also been cut narrow roadways up past the side of each dug-out, ascending sharply toward the front. By this rough and gravelly, though more direct, means, stretcher-bearers could be upon the crest in a twinkling, thence forward and downward over narrow bridges spanning the first line trench to No Man's Land itself.

As the stretcher-bearers of Barrow's unit poured out beneath the sky—or what would have been a sky had not incarnate fiends usurped it—Jeb found himself moving next to Bonsecours. Even in this strain, when men were thinking in terms of armies, the famous surgeon with infinite tact went about supporting the props of one human atom. After all, he had been trained to mend one man at a time! He spoke no word until they had climbed the sloping roadway and laid flat, peeping over; then, with his lips close to Jeb's ear, he shouted:

"Have no fear! When man calls on the highest expression of his will, he becomes indomitable; he succeeds in the highest terms of success—and thus will you succeed, mon pauvre enfant! Look!"

He sprang up, pointing where the fringe of that French fire curtain touched this great stage. The blinding lights flickered over his face and made him supreme at that moment. In the continuous, head-splitting noises of three thousand shells per minute, bursting on an eight-mile segment, he looked more like a war god than an agent of mercy.

The German position was crumbling—rather, it was being blasted out of existence. To Jeb it might have marked the very brink of hell. The flashes were almost as a steady white and greenish-orange blaze, and showed the earth spurting in great bunches upward; stiff winds that had sent clouds scurrying the day before now caught the ground smoke and drew it, as a sweeping prairie fire, back upon the enemy. This was a propitious wind, and on its wings the death gas sped.

Between the armies lay No Man's Land in utter desolation, but each little detail, each inconspicuous bit of wreckage left from earlier struggles, stood boldly outlined in the calcium glare. This was the stretch of ground he would be searching when the curtain lifted—except that its surface would then be strewn with men; some drawn up in pain, some moaning, some whimpering, some cursing, some terribly still. Had ever a curtain lifted on more poignant tragedy! Was there a parallel in crime to this wholesale slaughter which a treacherous nation thrust upon a peaceful world! Jeb tried to wonder how many dead might be there, but found that his mind would not leave the point of destruction; it had become riveted, as a bird is said to be mesmerized by a slowly approaching snake.

Lying just behind the ridge, feeling the earth tremble beneath his body, waiting for Bonsecours' command to dash into that cockpit of suffering and there mingle with the torn, the dying and the dead, he repeated over and over the great surgeon's words which bit into him like acid: "It is those whom the good God expects us to bring in!"

The dawn was coming! No sun appeared, but the flashes grew less blinding; the ground close to his face began to show natural browns where formerly had been flickering greens, and his hands looked more alive than dead. Also did the whole scene change as sky and earth increased their fury in this blending of the real and unreal; for, now added to the noises and fitful lights, were huge balls of white smoke, and brown, springing into quick existence; some expanded to balloon size and swept majestically onward, upward; some, caught in a vortex of madness,—swirling, writhing, darting,—formed devilishly gruesome arabesques that yet were formless; some burst like pon-pons; some released long streamers and darted earthward. Jeb's eyes were held by this appalling grandeur; his soul was chained, numbed, by its unlicensed braggadocio.