“Odd, the wounds you see,” observed the naval man, professionally interested. He looked curiously. “I couldn’t have done a neater decapitation than that myself. Wonder who—took his identification tags with it. I see. Replacement, by his uniform—” (For the 5th and 6th Regiments had long since worn out their forester-green Marine uniforms, and were wearing army khaki, while the replacements came in new green clothing.) The staff officer picked up the rifle, snapped back the bolt, and squinted expertly down the bore. “Disgustin’,” he said. “Sure he was a replacement. You never catch an old-timer with a bore like that—filthy! Bet there hasn’t been a rag through it in a week. You know, surgeon, I was looking at some of the rifles of that bunch of machine-gunners lying in the brush just across from Battalion; they were beautiful. Never saw better kept pieces. Fine soldiers in a lot of ways, these Boche!...”
Meantime the column had passed into heavier woods, and halted where the rifles ahead sounded very near. They saw dugouts, betrayed by the thread of candle-light around the edges of the blankets that cloaked their entrances. One was a dressing-station, by the sound and the smell of it. The officer named Henry ducked into the other. There a stocky major sat up on the floor and rolled a cigarette, which he lighted at a guttering candle. “Replacements in? Well, what do they look like?—”
“Same men I saw in the training area last month, sir. A sprinkling of old-time Marines—Sergeant McGee, that we broke for something or other in Panama, is with ’em—and the rest of them are young college lads and boys off the farm—fine material, sir. Not much drill, but they probably know how to shoot, they take orders, and they don’t scare worth a cent! Shelled coming in, at Voie du Chatelle, and some more this side of Champillon—several casualties. No confusion—nothing like a panic—laid down and waited for orders—did exactly as they were told—fine men, sir!”
“All right! All right! Rush ’em right up to the companies. Guides are waiting around outside—company commanders have their orders about distribution. Start with the 49th and drop ’em off as you go along. They’ll do—they’ll have to!...”
III
THE BOIS DE BELLEAU
They tried new tactics to get the bayonets into the Bois de Belleau. Platoons—very lean platoons now—formed in small combat groups, deployed in the wheat, and set out toward the gloomy wood. Fifty batteries were working on it, all the field pieces of the 2d Division, and what the French would lend. The shells ripped overhead, and the wood was full of leaping flame, and the smoke of H. E. and shrapnel. The fire from its edge died down. It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low enough to shine under the edge of your helmet. The men went forward at a walk, their shoulders hunched over, their bodies inclined, their eyes on the edge of the wood, where shrapnel was raising a hell of a dust. Some of them had been this way before; their faces were set bleakly. Others were replacements, a month or so from Quantico; they were terribly anxious to do the right thing, and they watched zealously the sergeants and the corporals and the lieutenants who led the way with canes.
Some of them had been this way before.
One such group, over to the left, followed a big young officer, a replacement, too, but a man who had spent a week in Bouresches and was to be considered a veteran, as such things went in those days, when so many chaps were not with the brigade very long. He had not liked Bouresches, which he entered at night, and where he lived obscenely in cellars with the dead, and saw men die in the orange flash of minenwerfer shells, terribly and without the consolation of glory. Here, at last, was attack.... He thought, absently watching his flank to see that it guided true—guide centre was the word—of the old men who had brought him up to tales of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the War of the Southern Confederacy. Great battles, glamorous attacks, full of the color and the high-hearted élan of chivalry. Jackson at Chancellorsville; Pickett at Gettysburg—that was a charge for you—the red Southern battle-flags, leading like fierce bright-winged birds the locked ranks of fifteen gray brigades, and the screeching Rebel yell, and the field-music, fife and drum, rattling out “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:
“Oh, if ever I get through this war,