And the Lincoln boys don’t find me,
I’m goin’ to go right back again
To the girl I left behind me——”
No music here, no flags, no bright swords, no lines of battle charging with a yell. Combat groups of weary men, in drab and dirty uniforms, dressed approximately on a line, spaced “so that one shrapnel-burst cannot include more than one group,” laden like mules with gas-masks, bandoleers, grenades, chaut-chaut clips, trudging forward without haste and without excitement, they moved on an untidy wood where shells were breaking, a wood that did not answer back, or show an enemy. In its silence and anonymity it was far more sinister than any flag-crowned rampart, or stone walls topped with crashing volleys from honest old black-powder muskets—he considered these things and noted that the wood was very near, and that the German shells were passing high and breaking in the rear, where the support companies were waiting. His own artillery appeared to have lifted its range; you heard the shells farther in, in the depths of the wood.
Boche grenadier.
So many chaps were not with the brigade very long.
The air snapped and crackled all around. The sergeant beside the lieutenant stopped, looked at him with a frozen, foolish smile, and crumpled into a heap of old clothes. Something took the kneecap off the lieutenant’s right knee and his leg buckled under him. He noticed, as he fell sideways, that all his men were tumbling over like duck-pins; there was one fellow that spun around twice, and went over backward with his arms up. Then the wheat shut him in, and he heard cries and a moaning. He observed curiously that he was making some of the noise himself. How could anything hurt so? He sat up to look at his knee—it was bleeding like the deuce!—and as he felt for his first-aid packet, a bullet seared his shoulder, knocking him on his back again. For a while he lay quiet and listened to odd, thrashing noises around him, and off to the left a man began to call, very pitifully. At once he heard more machine-gun fire—he hadn’t seemed to hear it before—and now the bullets were striking the ground and ricocheting with peculiar whines in every direction. One ripped into the dirt by his cheek and filled his eyes and his mouth with dust. The lamentable crying stopped; most of the crawling, thrashing noises stopped. He himself was hit again and again, up and down his legs, and he lay very still.
Where he lay he could just see a tree-top—he was that near the wood. A few leaves clung to it; he tried to calculate, from the light on them, how low the sun was, and how long it would be until dark. Stretcher-bearers would be along at dark, surely. He heard voices, so close that he could distinguish words: