“Two hundred and thirty-four men, sir, and seven officers, not counting the galley force and the office force that we’re leaving behind,” reported the second-in-command, falling in beside the captain as the company moved off with the rest of the battalion in the gathering darkness. They went in double file, dim shapes in the gloom, down the muddy, tortuous road.
“The company’s in better shape than it ever has been,” replied the captain thoughtfully. “St. Mihiel was a walk-over, but it was fine training for them, and even our greenest replacements had a chance to get over being gun-shy. And the non-coms are fine, too ... hope we don’t lose too many of them. You and I have come all the way from Belleau Wood together, John—I’m no calamity-howler—but there’s something about this dam’ Champagne country that gets you——”
“Too many men died here, I reckon,” said the lieutenant. “You feel ’em somehow, in the dark.... Something creepy about those flares, isn’t there?”
The road here was screened on the side toward the enemy by coarse mats of camouflage material erected on tall poles. Through this screen the German flares, ceaselessly ascending, shone with cold, greenish whiteness, so that men saw their comrades’ faces weirdly drawn and pale under their helmets. The files talked as they went——
“I’ve seen the time I’d have called those things pretty—but now—reckon hell’s lit with the same kind of glims!” ... “Remember the flare that went up in our faces the night we made the relief in Bellew Woods? Seemed to me like everybody in the world was lookin’ at me.” “Bois de Belleau! mighty few in the battalion now that remember them days, sonny....” “Listen to that dam’ Heine machine-gun over yonder ... like a typewriter, ain’t it?” “Useter run a typewriter myself, back befo’ Texas declared war on Germany—in a nice dry office it was, an’ this time o’ night I’d be down on the drug-store corner lookin’ ’em over.—” “Somebody shoot that bum, talkin’ about lookin’ ’em over!” “Hey! Th’ angels’ll be lookin’ him over, this time to-morrow night, they will!” “Yes, they will! I’ll live to spit on the grave of the man that said that!”—“My word! Don’t these 1917 model gyrines talk rough, Mac!” marvelled one old non-com to another.
Those sawed-off shotguns they gave us at St. Mihiel.
The road passed into the desolation and wound north, kilometre after kilometre. Presently the camouflage ended and the battalion felt exceedingly naked without its shelter. Then a slope to the left screened the way, the crest of it sharply outlined as the flares ascended. Beyond that crest the machine-guns sounded very near; now and again the air was filled with the whispering rush of their bullets, passing high toward some chance target in the rear. The upper air was populous with shells passing, and the sky flickered with gun-flashes, but the road along which the battalion went enjoyed for the time an uneasy immunity. The rests were all too short; the sweating files swore at their heavy packs; the going was very hard. Presently the road ceased to be a road—merely a broken way across an interminable waste of shell-holes, made passable after a fashion by the hasty work of French engineers, toiling behind the assault of the infantry.
The battalion skirted stupendous craters of exploded mines—“Good Gawd! you could lose my daddy’s house, an’ his barn, too, in that there hole! ’Taint no small barn, either!” The stars had come out, and shone very far off and strangely calm. The dark was foul with all the reek of an old battle-field. “After midnight,” conjectured the files. “Are we ever goin’ to get across this accursed place?”
The files plodded on each side of the tumbled track, and as they neared Somme-Py a pitiful stream of traffic grew and passed between them, the tide of French wounded ebbing to the rear. They were the débris of the attacks that had spent themselves through the day—walking wounded, drifting back like shadows in stained blue uniforms, men who staggered and leaned against each other and spoke in low, racked voices to the passing files; and broken men who were borne in stretchers, moaning—“Ah, Jesu!...” “Doucement, doucement!!...” Farther back the ambulances would be waiting for them.... The battalion went on in close-mouthed silence. Very little talking now, no laughing at all.... “El Capitan, regardez—we be sober-minded men approaching—what we approach—” said the second-in-command, hitching the sling of his musette bag well out of the way of his gas-mask. “I have always,” replied that stolid veteran, “held that war was a serious business.” ... “This is Somme-Py. Can’t those bums ahead set a better pace?”