The Flag

by Homer Greene

Then the order came to advance. In a storm of shrapnel, bullets and flame, the British host swept down again upon the foe. The Germans gave desperate and deadly resistance. They fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed muskets and grenades. It was a death grapple, with decisive victory on neither side. In the wild onrush and terrific clash, Pen lost touch with his comrade. Only once he saw him after the charge was launched. Aleck waved to him and smiled and plunged into the thick of the carnage. Two hours later, staggering with shock and heat and superficial wounds, and choking with thirst and the smoke and dust of conflict, Pen made his way with the survivors of his section back over the ground that had been traversed, to find rest and refreshment at the rear. They had been relieved by fresh troops sent in to hold the narrow strip of territory that had been gained. Stumbling along over the torn soil, through wreckage indescribable, among dead bodies lying singly and in heaps, stopping now and then to aid a dying man, or give such comfort as he could to a wounded and helpless comrade, Pen struggled slowly and painfully toward a resting spot.

At one place, through eyes half blinded by sweat and smoke and trickling blood, he saw a man partially reclining against a post to which a tangled and broken mass of barbed wire was still clinging. The man was evidently making weak and ineffectual attempts to care for his own wounds. Pen stopped to assist him if he could. Looking down into his face he saw that it was Aleck. He was not shocked, nor did he manifest any surprise. He had seen too much of the actuality of war to be startled now by any sight or sound however terrible. He simply said:

"Well, old man, I see they got you. Here, let me help."

He knelt down by the side of his wounded comrade, and, with shaking hands, endeavored to staunch the flow of blood and to bind up two dreadful wounds, a gaping, jagged hole in the breast beneath the shoulder, made by the thrust and twist of a Boche bayonet, and a torn and shattered knee.

Aleck did not at first recognize him, but a moment later, seeing who it was that had stopped to help him, he reached up a trembling hand and laid it on his friend's face. Something in his mouth or throat had gone wrong and he could not speak.

After exhausting his comrade's emergency kit and his own in first aid treatment of the wounds, Pen called for assistance to a soldier who was staggering by, and between them, across the torn field with its crimson and ghastly fruitage, with fragments of shrapnel hurtling above them, and with bodies of soldiers, dead and living, tossed into the murky air by constantly exploding shells, they half carried, half dragged the wounded man across the ravine and up the hill to a captured German trench, and turned him over to the stretcher-bearers to be taken to the ambulances.

It was after this day's fighting that Pen, "for conspicuous bravery in action," was promoted to the rank of sergeant. He wore his honor modestly. It gave him, perhaps, a better opportunity to do good work for Britain and for France, and to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his own countrymen; otherwise it did not matter.

So the fighting on the Somme went on day after day, week after week, persistent, desperate, bloody. It was early in August, after the terrific battle by which the whole of Delville Wood passed into British control, that Pen's battalion was relieved and sent far to the rear for a long rest. Even unwounded men cannot stand the strain of continuous battle for many weeks at a stretch. The nervous system, delicate and complicated, must have relief, or the physical organization will collapse, or the mind give way, or both.

At the end of the first night's march from the front the battalion camped in the streets of a little, half-wrecked village on the banks of the Avre. Up on the hillside was a long, rambling building which had once been a convent but was now a hospital. Pen knew that somewhere in a hospital back of the Somme Aleck was still lying, too ill to be moved farther to the rear. It occurred to him that he might find him here. So, in the hazy moonlight of the August evening, having obtained the necessary leave, he set out to make inquiry. He passed up the winding walk, under a canopy of fine old trees, and reached the entrance to the building. From the porch, looking to the north, toward the valley of the Somme, he could see on the horizon the dull gleam of red that marked the battle line, and he could hear the faint reverberations of the big guns that told of the fighting still in progress. But here it was very quiet, very peaceful, very beautiful. For the first time since his entrance into the great struggle he longed for an end of the strife, and a return to the calm, sweet, lovely things of life. But he did not permit this mood to remain long with him. He knew that the war must go on until the spirit that launched it was subdued and crushed, and that he must go with it to whatever end God might will.

He found Aleck there. He had felt that he would, and while he was delighted he was not greatly surprised. There was little emotion manifested at the meeting of the two boys. The horrors of war were too close and too vivid yet for that. But the fact that they were glad to look again into one another's eyes admitted of no doubt. Aleck had recovered the use of his voice, but he was still too weak to talk at any length. The bayonet wound in his shoulder had healed nicely, but his shattered knee had come terribly near to costing him his life. There had been infection. Amputation of the leg had been imminent. The surgeons and the nurses had struggled with the case for weeks and had finally conquered.