“Right in their bloody backs,” said McDermott to himself.
And so it was. For the sixth advance of the German masses had carried them well into the Grande Place. McDermott, crouched at his window, cut loose with his gun at pointblank range as the first wave, five men deep, passed by him, splashing along the thick ranks from behind as one might sweep a garden hose down a row of vegetables. Taken thus in the rear, ambushed, with no knowledge of the strength of the attacking force behind them, the German shock troops swayed and staggered, faced about and fell and broke. For right into the milling herd of them, and into the second advancing wave, the British poured their bullets. The colonel, who had been about to order a retreat, ordered a charge, and before the stampeded remnant of the first two waves could recover themselves the British were on them with grenades and bayonets, flinging them back into the third wave, just advancing to their support, in a bleeding huddle of defeat.
McDermott saw the beginning of that charge, and with his bung starter in his hand he rushed from the door to join it. But he did not see the end of it, nor did he see the poilus, as they came slouching into the village five minutes later to give the repulse weight and confirmation, redolent of onions and strange stews, but with their bayonets—those bayonets that are part of the men who wield them, living things, instinct with the beautiful, straight, keen soul of France herself.
McDermott did not see them, for some more of the Hôtel Fauçon had fallen on him, crushing one of his ankles and giving him a clout on the head.
“Whoever it was turned loose that machine gun from the inn window, did the trick,” said the colonel, later. “It's hardly too much to say that he blocked the way to Hazebrouck—for the time, at least, if one man can be said to have done such a thing—what's that?”
“That” was McDermott, who was being carried forth, unconscious, to an ambulance. It was his blue overalls that had occasioned the colonel's surprise. He was neither French nor British nor German; palpably he was a civilian, and a civilian who had no business there. And in his hand he clasped a bung starter. His fingers were closed over it so tightly that in the base hospital later they found difficulty in taking it away from him.
Owing, no doubt, to the blow on his head, McDermott was unable to recall clearly anything that had taken place from the moment he had first fallen asleep under the influence of French brandy until he awakened in the hospital nearly four weeks later. During this period there had been several intervals of more open-eyed dreaming, succeeded by lapses into profound stupor; but even in these open-eyed intervals, McDermott had not been himself. It was during one of these intervals that a representative of the French Government bestowed the Croix de Guerre upon McDermott, for it had been learned that he was the man behind the machine gun that had turned the tide of combat.
McDermott, his eyes open, but his mind in too much of a daze even to wonder what the ceremony was about, sat in a wheel chair, and in company with half a dozen other men selected for decoration, listened to a brief oration in very good French, which he could not have understood had he been normal. In answer he muttered in a low tone, rubbing his broken and bandaged head: “I think maybe I will jine that war, afther all!”
The French officer assumed that McDermott had spoken some sort of compliment to France and kissed McDermott on both cheeks, in front of the hospital staff, several American reporters, and as much of the French army as qould be spared to do honor to the occasion. The Croix de Guerre made no impression upon McDermott, but the kiss briefly arrested his wandering consciousness, and he cried out, starting up in his chair and menacing the officer: “Where is me bung starter?” Then he fainted.
A good many thousands of people in France and England and America learned from the newspapers the story of the nondescript in the blue overalls, who had behaved so gallantly at the crucial moment of a crucial fight. But McDermott never did. He seldom read newspapers. No one had been able to learn his name, so the reporters had given him a name. They called him “Dennis.” And it was “Dennis” who got the fame and glory. McDermott would not have identified himself with Dennis had he seen the newspapers. When he awakened from his long, broken stupor, with its intervals of dazed halfconsciousness, the first thing he did was to steal away from that hospital; he left without having heard of Dennis or of the decoration of Dennis.