More days and nights, slipping, characterless, into each other. Being less than a company in strength, the 1st Battalion of the 5th was not called on to attack again. They lay in their holes and endured. “Until the division has accomplished its mission,” said the second-in-command, rubbing his dirt-encrusted and unshaven chin. “That means, until the rest of the outfit is killed down as close as we are. Then we’ll be relieved, an’ get a week’s rest and a gang of bloodthirsty replacements, an’ then we can do it all over again.” “Yes,” replied the captain, turning uneasily in the cramped, coffin-shaped hole in which they lay. He scratched himself. “I have cooties, I think. In plural quantities.” “Well, you would have that orderly strip the overcoats off a covey of dead Boches to furnish this château of ours. The Boche is such an uncleanly beast.... I have cooties, too, my capitan. Hell ... ain’t war wonderful!”
And after certain days the division was relieved. The battalion marched out at night. The drumming thunder of the guns fell behind them and no man turned his face to look again on the baleful lights of the front. On the road they passed a regiment of the relieving division—full, strong companies of National Guardsmen. They went up one side of the road; and in ragged column of twos, unsightly even in the dim and fitful light, the Marines plodded down the other side. They were utterly weary, with shuffling feet and hanging heads. The division had just done something that those old masters in the art of war, the French, and the world after them, including Ludendorff, were to acknowledge remarkable. They had hurled the Boche from Blanc Mont and freed the sacred city of Rheims. They had paid a price hideous even for this war. And they were spent. If there was any idea in those hanging heads it was food and rest.
The Guard companies gibed at the shrunken battalion as they passed. Singing and joking they went. High words of courage were on their lips and nervous laughter. Save for a weary random curse here and there, the battalion did not answer.... “Hell, them birds don’t know no better....” “Yeh, we went up singin’ too, once—good Lord, how long ago!... They won’t sing when they come out ... or any time after ... in this war.”... “Damn you, can’t you march on your own side the road? How much room you need?”
SONGS
THREE
“MADEMOISELLE FROM ARMENTIÈRES”
It was nice, back in billets, resting between battles, to sit on a bench in the sun and watch the world go by. Odette, the strapping and genteel daughter of the baker of Croutte-sur-Marne, here herds the duck Anatole into the courtyard of her mother’s bakery. (M. Boulanger was last heard from on the Chemin des Dames; Mme. Boulangère keeps the establishment going.) The duck Anatole has been ordered for dinner by two lieutenants of the 1st Battalion, the consideration being 37 francs 80 centimes. Two privates of the 49th Company are choiring softly “Mademoiselle from Armentières” as she passes. It is just as well that neither Odette nor Anatole comprend l’anglais.
IV
At various times and places in 1918 the 2d Marine Division was subsisted on the French ration, a component part of which was preserved Argentine beef with carrots in it. This was called monkey-meat by the Marines of the 4th Brigade. Men ate it when they were very hungry.