"Well," he called cheerily, "I'm the first victim."
Grafton wondered. Was it possible that men were going to behave on a battlefield just as they did anywhere else—just as naturally—taking wounds and death and horror as a matter of course? Beyond were more wounded—the wounded who were able to help themselves. Soon he saw them lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a battalion marching to storm a block-house. He got down, hitched his horse a few yards from the road and joined it. He was wondering how it would feel to be under fire, when just as they were crossing another road, with a whir and whistle and buzz, a cloud of swift insects buzzed over his head. Unconsciously imitating the soldiers near him, he bent low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low, horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him, nauseating him like a fetid odour—the crunching noise was the sound of a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward. One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an animal—he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, "Oh, God"—there was a moment of suffering consciousness for him; a third hopped aside into the bushes—cursing angrily. Still another, as he passed, looked up from the earth at him with a curious smile, as though he were half ashamed of something.
"I've got it, partner," he said, "I reckon I've got it, sure." And Grafton saw a drop of blood and the tiny mouth of a wound in his gullet, where the flaps of his collar fell apart. He couldn't realize how he felt—he was not interested any longer in how he felt. The instinct of life was at work, and the instinct of self-defence. When the others dropped, he dropped gladly; when they rose, he rose automatically. A piece of brush, a bush, the low branch of a tree, a weed seemed to him protection, and he saw others possessed with the same absurd idea. Once the unworthy thought crossed his mind, when he was lying behind a squad of soldiers and a little lower than they, that his chance was at least better than theirs. And once, and only once—with a bitter sting of shame—he caught himself dropping back a little, so that the same squad should be between him and the enemy: and forthwith he stepped out into the road, abreast with the foremost, cursing himself for a coward, and thereafter took a savage delight in reckless exposure whenever it was possible. And he soon saw that his position was a queer one, and an unenviable one, as far as a cool test of nerve was the point at issue. The officers, he saw, had their men to look after—orders to obey—their minds were occupied. The soldiers were busy getting a shot at the enemy—their minds, too, were occupied. It was his peculiar province to stand up and be shot at without the satisfaction of shooting back—studying his sensations, meanwhile, which were not particularly pleasant, and studying the grewsome horrors about him. And it struck him, too, that this was a ghastly business, and an unjustifiable, and that if it pleased God to see him through he would never go to another war except as a soldier. One consideration interested him and was satisfactory. Nobody was shooting at him—nobody was shooting at anybody in particular. If he were killed, or when anybody was killed, it was merely accident, and it was thus pleasant to reflect that he was in as much danger as anybody.
The firing was pretty hot now, and the wounded were too many to be handled. A hospital man called out sharply:
"Give a hand here." Grafton gave a hand to help a poor fellow back to the field hospital, in a little hollow, and when he reached the road again that black horse and his boy rider were coming back like shadows, through a rain of bullets, along the edge of the woods. Once the horse plunged sidewise and shook his head angrily—a Mauser had stung him in the neck—but the lad, pale and his eyes like stars, lifted him in a flying leap over a barbed-wire fence and swung him into the road again.
"Damn!" said Grafton, simply.
Then rose a loud cheer from the battery on the hill, and, looking west, he saw the war-balloon hung high above the trees and moving toward Santiago. The advance had begun over there; there was the main attack—the big battle. It was interesting and horrible enough where he was, but Caney was not Santiago; and Grafton, too, mounted his horse and galloped after Basil.
At head-quarters began the central lane of death that led toward San Juan, and Basil picked his way through it at a slow walk—his excitement gone for the moment and his heart breaking at the sight of the terrible procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach—each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some groaning and blood-stained, some conscious, some dying, some using a rifle for a support, or a stick thrust through the side of a tomato-can. Rolls, haversacks, blouses, hardtack, bibles, strewn by the wayside, where the soldiers had thrown them before they went into action. It was curious, but nearly all of the wounded were dazed and drunken in appearance, except at the brows, which were tightly drawn with pain. There was one man, with short, thick, upright red hair, stumbling from one side of the road to the other, with no wound apparent, and muttering:
"Oh, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what happened to me."