In a mangled place called the Wood Northwest of Lucy-le-Bocage two lieutenants of the Marine Brigade squatted by a hole the size of a coffin and regarded with attention certain cooking operations. The older, and perhaps the dirtier of the two, was intent upon a fire-blackened mess-kit, which was balanced on two stones and two German bayonets over a can of solidified alcohol. In the mess-kit was simmering a grayish and unattractive matter with doubtful yellowish lumps, into which the lieutenant fed, discriminatingly, bits of hard bread and frayed tomatoes from a can.
“Do what you will with it,” he observed, “monkey-meat is monkey-meat. It’s a great pity that damn Tompkins had to get himself bumped off last night when we came out. He had a way with monkey-meat, the kid did—hell! I never have any luck with orderlies!” He prodded the mess of Argentine beef—the French army’s canned meat ration—and stared sombrely. His eyes, a little bloodshot in his sunburnt, unshaven face, were sleepy.
The other waited on two canteen cups stilted precariously over a pale-lavender flame. The water in them began to boil, and he supplied coffee—the coarse-ground, pale coffee of the Frogs—with a spoon that shook a little. He considered: “S’pose I’d better boil the sugar in with it,” he decided. “There isn’t so much of it, you know. We’ll taste it more.” And he added the contents of a little muslin sack—heavy beet-sugar that looked like sand. His face was pale and somewhat troubled, and his week’s beard was straggling and unwholesome. He was not an out-of-doors man—and he was battalion scout officer. A gentleman over-sensitive for the rude business of war, he would continue to function until he broke—and one sensed that he would suffer while about it....
“I don’t like monkey-meat. Before this smell”—he waved his spoon petulantly—“got into my nose I never could eat it. But now you can’t smell but one thing, and, after all, you’ve got to eat.”
The smell he referred to lay through the wood like a tangible fog that one could feel against the cheek and see. It was the nub-end of June, and many battalions of fighting men had lain in the Wood Northwest of Lucy, going up to the front a little way forward or coming out to stand by in support. It was a lovely place for supports; you could gather here and debouch toward any part of the sector, from Hill 142, on the left, through the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches, to Vaux, where the infantry brigade took on. Many men had lain in the wood, and many men lay in it still. Some of these were buried very casually. Others, in hidden tangles of it, along its approaches, and in the trampled areas beyond it where attack and counter-attack had broken for nearly a month of days and nights, hadn’t been buried at all. And always there were more, and the June sun grew hotter as it made toward July.
“Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up!”
Troops lay in the wood now; a battalion of the 6th and two companies of the 5th Regiment outfit, half of which was still in line on the flank of the Bois de Belleau. These companies had come out at dawn, attended by shell-fire; they had plunged into the wood and slept where they halted, unawakened—except the wounded—by the methodical shelling to which the Boche treated the place every day. Now, in the evening, they were awake and hungry. They squatted, each man in his hole, and did what they could about it. A savage-looking lot, in battered helmets and dirty uniforms. But you saw them cleaning their rifles....
The scout officer, with his hand out to lift away the coffee, which was, in his judgment, boiled, heard: “Mr. Braxton? Yeh, he’s up thataway, with the lootenant.” “Hey, yuh dog-robbin’ battalion runner, you—what’s up? Hey?” “Scout officer? Over yonder, him wit’ the green blouse—” and a soiled battalion runner, identified by his red brassard and his air of one laden with vital information, clumped up and saluted sketchily.
“Sir, the major wants to see the battalion scout officer at battalion headquarters. The major said: Right away, sir.”