CHAPTER XVIII
The Worst Ordeal
I am convinced that these two Germans I came upon were as greatly surprised as I was. I do not think I had been observed and they sent out after me. In that event, indeed, they would not have traveled together nor directly along the trench path, but would have stalked me and tried to meet me, one on either side. This is a natural plan in such hunts, for when the pursued turns to meet the attack of one man, the other has him at his mercy. But these Huns were together. And we faced one another not ten feet apart.
It certainly looked bad for me. They were both huge, robust fellows and just about then in the glare of the night lights appeared like devils—their pale eyes gleaming through trench grime, their clothing all wrinkled and bunched about their big bodies, their mouths gone open in astonishment and showing tobacco-blackened teeth. Not that I could have looked a beauty myself though I have to be thankful in view of what happened later that I had that morning given myself a clean shave. This fact was to save me in all probability from dreadful infection later.
Well, there must have been fully two seconds’ pause, I think, in which we stood and faced each other. As I look back on it, it was a most foolish pause on my part and the same is to be said for the pause on theirs.
With a gulp in my throat I noticed that both carried bombs—and in the very same instant I wondered why the devil I was standing there with a bomb in my own hand and not throwing it.
I let go at them—seeking to dash the bomb directly at their feet that there should be no failure of its instant explosion.
I honestly can’t tell you if that bomb of mine went off. For in the very lift of my arm, both Germans swung their arms into the air and hurled their bombs at me. One bomb went over my head. I am quite sure that my bomb was faulty and did not explode. The other fell directly at my feet.
I had been too long trained in that game not to know what I had to do and what I had to do in a hurry. I pounced on that bomb and without loss of movement—without trying to stand erect and aim it, I shunted the bomb back at them with an upward toss of both hands.
And then the big thing happened—a big thing to me but infinitely bigger to them. For that toss of the bomb cost them both their lives. I don’t like to recall what I afterward saw—when smashed, bleeding and reeling, I looked to see what had become of my two enemies. The truth is they were blown to pieces. One man’s severed head was nearly at my feet. The star-shell showed it to me. It was staring up at me with a frightful grimace. Their bodies were scattered in that pathway as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax—worse than that—as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax with a roughened, dull edge.
In the first of the explosion, of course, I knew nothing of this. I was receiving my own crippling from the back blast of the German bomb I had hurled at them. There was a glare and a sudden shock in my face as though I had been struck on the mouth with a sledgehammer. Of course, I went down. But as far as my own recollection goes I was not knocked unconscious and I was immediately afterward sitting up in the pathway while I coughed and sputtered blood from a mouth in which all the upper teeth had been cracked or blown out and the upper jaw itself broken. Then, as the earth stopped swaying, I knew my right arm was numb and stared at it. My hand was a red mangle. At the same time there came a realization of hellish paroxysms of pain on the left side of my face and biting savagely at my left arm. I touched my face with my left hand and instinctively drew the fingers away in horror. The flesh of my face was raw.