From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

For the fiftieth time in half as many minutes, a captain—his name was Captain Griswold and he was the captain of B Company—consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch where he stooped behind shelter. He spoke then, and his voice was plainly to be heard under the whistle and whoop of the shells passing over his head from the supporting batteries behind with intent to fall in the supposed defences of the enemy in front. Great sounds would have been lost in that crashing tumult; by one of the paradoxes of battle lesser sounds were easily audible.

"All right," said Captain Griswold, "it's time! If some damn fool hasn't gummed things up the creeping barrage should be starting out yonder and everything is set. Come on, men—let's go!"

They went, each still behaving according to his own mode. The man with the gripes who retched was still retching as he heaved himself up over the parapet; the man who had laughed was still laughing; the man who had sworn was mechanically continuing to repeat that naughty pet name of his for the Fritzies. Nobody, though, called on anybody else to defend the glory of the flag; nobody invited anybody to remember the Lusitania; nobody spoke a single one of the fine speeches which the bushelmen of fiction at home were even then thinking up to put into the mouths of men moving into battle.

Indeed, not in any visible regard was the scene marked by drama. Merely some muddied men burdened with ironmongery and bumpy with gas masks and ammunition packs climbed laboriously out of a slit in the wet earth and in squads—single filing, one man behind the next as directly as might be—stepped along through a pale, sad, slightly misty light at rather a deliberate pace, to traverse a barb-wired meadowland which rose before them at a gentle incline. There was no firing of guns, no waving of swords. There were no swords to wave. There was no enemy in sight and no evidence as yet that they had been sighted by any enemy. As a matter of fact, none of them—neither those who fell nor those who lived—saw on that day a single living individual recognisable as a German.

A sense of enormous isolation encompassed them. They seemed to be all alone in a corner of the world that was peopled by diabolical sounds, but not by humans. They had a feeling that because of an error in the plans they had been sent forward without supports; that they—a puny handful—were to be sacrificed under the haunches of the Hindenburg line while all those thousands of others who should have been their companions upon this adventure bided safely behind, held back by the countermand which through some hideous blunder had failed to reach them in time. But they went on. Orders were to go on—and order, plus discipline, plus the individual's sense of responsibility, plus that fear of his that his mates may know how fearful of other things he is—make it possible for armies to be armies instead of mobs and for battles to be won.

They went on until they came to an invisible line drawn lengthwise across the broad way of the weed field, and here men began to drop down. Mainly those stricken slid gently forward to lie on their stomachs. Only here and there was there a man who spun about to fall face upward. Those who were wounded, but not overthrown, would generally sit down quite gently and quite deliberately, with puzzled looks in their eyes. Since still there was neither sign nor sight of the well-hidden enemy the thought took root in the minds of the men as yet unscathed that, advancing too fast, they had been caught in the drop curtain of their own barrage.

Sergeant Hyman Ginsburg, going along at the head of his squad, got this notion quite well fixed in his mind. Then, though, he saw smoke jets issuing from bushes and trees on ahead of him where the ridges of the slope sharpened up acutely into a sort of natural barrier like a wall; and likewise for the first time he now heard the tat-tat-tat of machine guns, sounding like the hammers of pneumatic riveters rapidly operated. To him it seemed a proper course that his squad should take such cover as the lay of the land afforded and fire back toward the machine guns. But since the instructions, so far as he knew them, called for a steady advance up to within a few rods of the enemy's supposed position and then a quick rush forward, he gave no such command to his squad.

Suddenly he became aware that off to the right the forward movement of the battalion was checking up. Then, all in an instant, men on both sides were falling back. He and his squad were enveloped in a reverse movement. It seemed too bad that the battalion should be driven in after suffering these casualties and without having dealt a blow in return for the punishment it had undergone. But what did it matter if, after all, they were being sacrificed vainly as the result of a hideous mistake at divisional headquarters? Better to save what was left.

So far as he could tell, nobody gave the word to retire. He found himself going back at the tail of his squad where before he had been its head. Subconsciously he was surprised to observe that the copse from which they had emerged but a minute or two earlier, as he had imagined, was a considerable distance away from them, now that they had set their faces toward it. It did not seem possible that they could have left it so far behind them. Yet returning to it the men did not perceptibly hurry their steps. They retreated without evidences of disorder—almost reluctantly—as though by this very slowness of movement to signify their disgust for the supposed fiasco that had enveloped them, causing them to waste lives in an ill-timed and futile endeavour.

Ginsburg reëntered the covert of birches with a sense of gratitude for its protection and let himself down into the trench. He faced about, peering over its rim, and saw that his captain—Captain Griswold—was just behind him, returning all alone and looking back over his shoulder constantly.