Huts in Hell

by Daniel A. Poling

As the major spoke, he turned to a lieutenant, and said, "Get those carriers, and send them back." Pest and I followed the lieutenant into the open. The lieutenant inquired of Pest the location of the prisoner; and the man from Newark replied, "I'll show you." It was at this point that the writer made a speech. The speech was brief, but logical and unanswerable. I told Mr. Pest that he had no business to go back. True, the barrage had lifted, but the Germans had another one where the first one came from, and they might decide to spare it! Then, too, he—Pest—had done not only his full duty, but more. To go back would be to expose himself needlessly and also to run the risk of having the trenches closed to the Y. M. C. A. "What will the army over here say if it gets the idea that you Y. M. C. A. fellows are sticking your heads above parapets and rambling around in open fields? How long will it stand for the Y. M. C. A. man's assuming a rôle that does not belong to him? Granted that you did the only thing you could do by helping with that prisoner when you ran into the immediate need, this return trip is another proposition."

I laid hands on my friend; but he started up the road for the open field, showing the way to the lieutenant, and with a heavy heart I followed another officer to indicate the carriers who must go out to help bring in the wounded man. Pest had made no reply to my speech, and I knew that my logic was sound; but that didn't satisfy my heart, with Pest out there. And Pest's heart would not have been satisfied, had he allowed me to win the debate.

I came back and stood at the head of the road leading through the tumbled walls, out by some abandoned trenches with tangles of rusted wires above them, and on into that open field where so many brave men had fought and died since the first rush came down from Metz. "Poor place to spend a vacation," said the sentinel, who stood post there, and scarcely had the last word left his lips when that field again became an inferno. I could not see my friend and those who had gone to join him, a slight rise in the ground and an old cut-to-pieces orchard obscured the view; but the air was full of earth and rocks, and I was sure that I saw fragments of bodies in the vortex. Surely men could not come again unscathed through such a horror.

And now I was forced into the sickening acknowledgment that, while my logic had been sound when I sought to dissuade Pest from returning to the prisoner, my nerve had not been. I knew that my feverish urgency was not unmixed with personal fear. Never did a more sick and anguished heart cry out to God than the one that supplicated for that stretcher party. But it did not appear! When the suspense became unbearable, I hurried to the major; and, when I told him the situation, he became very grave. He had been trying for some minutes to silence our own batteries, fearing that the enemy would continue to concentrate their fire on objectives near our battalion headquarters if our firing continued to stir them up. And our fire was stirring them up! Our shelling was deadly and unrelenting. The major wanted to give that party in the field a chance to get back. But his communications were down. Already two runners had been despatched, and the signal-corps men were working frantically.

I asked for permission to go down the road a little way to see whether there might be a sign of the men. I could not face my own soul without knowing for myself what Pest's end was. The major understood, and down the road I went. A great fear possessed me, but it was a new kind of fear. I reached the edge of the open place; there was no sign of life anywhere. The snow was falling again, and I hurried on. I met a runner; he had not seen the party. Three minutes more, and I was on the spot where the first barrage broke; and still there was no sign.

Suddenly the tightening about my heart loosened, and I fairly shouted, "There would be something left, if they were dead." A second runner was skirting the woods we had passed through earlier in the day. I ran to meet him, and fairly choked him to get the information that I was desperately searching for. "Yes," he had seen them. They had waited till the shelling stopped, and then from the cover of the woods he had watched them rush the stretcher back to the trench. They had followed close against the lower side of the trench, the longer way into the village. This brought them into the lower end of the town, and gave them a slight cover for the entire distance. It was the way we should have taken in the beginning.

"And now," the runner said, "this is our 'busy' afternoon,"—I had heard the word so often that day,—"and we must get to headquarters 'toot sweet'!" The youthful veteran instructed me to follow him at a distance of twenty paces, and he led the way down the road which skirted the edge of the field farthest from the German lines. The snow was falling more rapidly now, and we were practically safe from observation. We walked in the shallow ditch by the roadside, so that in case shelling was resumed we could avail ourselves of its protection. By lying flat we should be on a level with the surface of the ground.

The road was deep in mud, and I saw the prints of French boots! Then I remembered what the lieutenant had said in the morning of the gallant French reserves, and realized that I was on the exact spot where they had waited in the open behind our trenches. A rush of emotion overwhelmed me, and I wept. Suddenly in front of me I saw a mask, a blue gas-mask, half buried in the mud, lying where the brave Poilu had dropped it only a few hours before. When I showed it to the major a little later, soaked with water and with blood, ruined and useless, he said, "Take it home to your children; you are a millionaire." Yes, a millionaire in the treasure of sentiment, by the wealth of the vision the blue mask brings to me of the comradeship of democracy in suffering and in sacrifice.

Before we reached the edge of the village the batteries became busy again, but at first their objectives seemed to be well beyond the town. Then without warning the fire assumed the intensity of a barrage, and the range was shortened so that the projectiles fell all over "headquarters." Such a spectacle I had never seen before. It was as though the heavens had opened and precipitated an ocean of soil, bowlders, and trees upon the earth. No, rather the earth itself seemed to open as the result of some great sickness and vomit this terrifying spectacle upon us. The ground trembled, and the noise became literally deafening. I stood transfixed behind the runner. I was conscious of no other emotion than one of complete amazement. I had been in the midst of the former barrage, and had not seen it! We were perhaps one hundred and fifty yards away from this one, and so soon does one become accustomed to the eccentricities of shell-fire that we felt ourselves in no danger. We listened to the shells as they described their low arc above us, and knew instinctively whether they would land to the right or to the left, near us or relatively far away. One's judgment in these matters is much akin to his judgment of a batted ball; only he judges the shell altogether by its sound.