Combat patrol.
Out over the woods a sound started, a new sound. It was a rumbling whine, it grew to a roar, and a 77 crashed down just beyond the crossroads. A cloud blacker than the night leaped up, shot with red fire—“Lie down, all hands!” Another landed at once; the air was full of singing particles. The men, flat on their faces, in the dark, waited numbly for the next order. There were a dozen or so shells all around the place. The last one hit between the two goods-boxes, where a man was lying. The boxes and the man vanished in a ruddy cloud—better than if he’d gotten it in the belly and rolled around screaming.... There were no more shells—“Say, you know, I saw a arm an’ a rifle goin’ up wit’ that burst—I—who was he, anyway?—” “Keep quiet, there! All right! on your feet—right down that road—” the officer ordered, and added to himself—“Dam’ it! Should have remembered they shell La Voie du Chatelle every night this time—but they acted fine....” A voice spoke up, excited, amused: “Say! Sergeant McGee—anything like that in Vera Cruz?” “Pipe down, you Boot.”
They went down a wood-road, black as a pocket, the files pressing close to keep the man ahead in sight. They went lightly, a weight off each man’s mind. They had been shelled, and nobody had run away, and only one man hurt! Most men are afraid when they go up to the front; and what they fear most is the fear of seeming afraid.... They were ordered to fix bayonets. The road began to have inequalities in it. There were noises, explosions, around in the dark. The machine-guns sounded nearer; the flares showed more starkly on the sky. A man fell into a hole, and there was an acrid smell that caught at your windpipe. Just ahead, down the road, came a bright flash and a roar, and fragments ripped through the woods, and they heard a lamentable crying, getting weaker: “First-aid! first-aid—” The column came to a dead mule and the wreck of a cart lying athwart the road, and a smoking hole, and a smell of high explosive, and the sharp reek of blood. There was a struggling group, somebody working swiftly in the dark, a whiteness of bandages, and the white blur of a man’s torso. “Lie still, damn you!”—“O, Jesus! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!—Ahhhhh! Go easy, you—” “Hell, I know it hurts, guy, but I got to get this bandage on, haven’t I? Come on—quit kickin’—” Passing around the mule, a man stepped on something neither hard nor soft—nothing else on earth feels that way—and he floundered to one side, cursing hysterically.—“Quiet, back there—pass the word, no talking!” The files obediently passed the word. The column groped on in the dark.
It came out of the woods into a pale stone town—Champillon. There were no lights in the houses; the place had an air of death about it. There was a well by Champillon, where the water-parties came back from the lines in the night for water.... One canteenful was a man’s allowance for each twenty-four hours. Men, after a time, made a shift to wash and shave and live not too thirsty out of one canteen a day. The replacements met two spectres who bore between them, on a long stick, twenty-odd canteens—the canteens of a platoon. “Hey! Guy!—” this in a hoarse whisper—“you comin’ up to relieve us?” “Hell, no!” a guide answered. “These is 1st Battalion replacements.” “I’ll be goddam’. Gonna leave us in forever—Ain’t we ever gonna be relieved?—” “Close up, there, and silence——”
A sprinkling of old-time Marines.
There was a Ph.D. from Harvard in that sweating file, a big, pale, unhandy private, hounded habitually by sergeants, and troubled with indigestion and patriotism. For all his training, a pack was not at home on his shoulders or a rifle easy in his hands. He was aware of his panoply of war—the full belt dragging at his loins, the straps that cut into his shoulders, the bulge of prunes in his blouse-pockets, and his Springfield, increasingly heavy. He reflected, feeling for the road with clumsy hobnails—for he was blind in the dark—“Now, those men are undoubtedly of the professional-soldier type. It is all a business with them. They are tired and they want to rest, and they say so frankly. No matter how tired I was, I’d never have the courage to say I wanted a relief. I’d want to awfully, but——”
He thought of the pleasant study back Cambridge way, of the gold-and-blue sergeant under the “First to Fight!” recruiting poster—“Your job, too, fella! Come on an’ help lick the Hun! You don’t wanta wait to be drafted, a big guy like you! We can use you in the Marines—” A hearty, red-necked ruffian—extremely competent in his vocation, no doubt. Good enough chaps. Yes ... but ... tea by a sea-coal fire in the New England twilight, and clever talk of art and philosophic anarchism—one wrote fastidious essays on such things for the more discriminating reviews ... scholarly abstractions.... Of all the stupid, ignorant, uncivilized things, a war! Who coined that phrase, civilized warfare? There was no such thing!... Here, in the most civilized country on earth.... The neighborhood of Château-Thierry ... Montaigne’s town, wasn’t it? The kings of France had a château near it, once. And yet it was always a cockpit ... since Ætius rolled back Attila in the battle of the nations, at Châlons—Napoleon fought Champ-Aubert and Montmirail around here—always war——
The column was through Champillon, dipping into a black hollow. More shell-holes in the road here.... All at once there was a new shell-hole, and the doctor of philosophy, sometime private of Marines, lay beside it, very neatly beheaded, with the rifle, that had been such a bore to keep clean, across his knees, and dried prunes spilling out of the pockets that he never had learned to button. The column went on. At dawn a naval medico attached to the Marine Brigade, with a staff officer, passed that way.