Georges’s story is almost told, now; there remains only the end of his soldiering, which was to be eventful to the last. After following the fighting body for three days, the Twentieth Regiment was ordered into the first line.
The Germans, having now retreated to the Aisne, and eastward to the strategic positions long since prepared and mapped by German spies, had made a stand. So on toward Ville-sur-Tourbes Georges marched, the firing every moment getting hotter. They were evidently advancing against a very strong position, so that when they swung westward to the little village of Le Mesnil they began to be subjected to continuous shelling and to rifle fire that grew worse and worse. But still no enemy was in sight.
Again the Twentieth had to wait for the French artillery to arrive in front of a black wood that poured out destruction. Lying in the brush, Georges wondered whether it would all end as before. As before, each man waited for his time to come; but now, seasoned, hopeful, he could joke at death.
“There’s a marmite for you!” a corporal would sing out, as a German shell came screaming to the right; and, as the shrapnel exploded, “Look out for the prunes!” a man would yell, “they’re coming your way!” Georges was taking it all coolly enough, thinking, he told me, how much those hurtling shells sounded like a subway train rolling into a station—rather more like an express traveling past without stopping. And so, when a sergeant near him yelled, “Look out—here comes our portion!” he only laughed and ducked under the little shelter of brush and earth he had been building.
XXII
But Georges laughed too soon, he ducked just too late! There was a terrific explosion, and suddenly he felt paralyzed all over—as if by an electric shock. No pain anywhere at first; only a fearful feeling that something dire had happened to him. He was stunned; “sort of upside-down, all over,” he said. Dragging himself out of the shower of dirt, dazed and frightened, he saw that his left foot was covered with blood. Then, a sudden leap of pain! He had a savage burst of anger that he should have been so treated. The pain every moment grew more excruciating....
Just how he got to the rear he didn’t know, but after crawling and limping somehow, with his rifle as a crutch, he found himself at last by the wall of a house outside the village, and there he lay down to rest.
But there was to be little rest for Georges Cucurou. From that moment, for a whole week, he lived in a sort of waking nightmare. One foot bare, hopping along, hugging the walls of the village, savagely bombarded by German batteries—lying under big trees, watching his retreating regiment leaving him to almost certain capture—limping away on the arm of a stray wounded soldier in desperate haste before the “Bosches” came that ride in a galloping ammunition wagon, bounced and jolted, bouncing into ditches, bumping over stones—and then, after a hurried first-aid dressing, that fearful journey to Ville-sur-Tourbes!
That journey—more than three miles—Georges made along the hard macadam road, crawling on his hands and knees. He had thrown away his knapsack, he had thrown away his rifle. “But,” said Georges, “there was one thing I’d have died before I’d have thrown away—and that was that Prussian helmet!” The last half mile he was carried on horseback, half fainting, behind a friendly chasseur.