The cooks issued corn-bill hash and dared any man to growl.
The road led eastward through a country of low hills, sodden in the rain. Untidy clouds sprawled on the crests and spilled wet filaments into the valleys. The land was all in cultivation, laid off in precise squares and oblongs; some newly ploughed, some sparsely green with turnips and rape. It looked ugly and ordered and sullenly prosperous. There was slow conversation in the column.
A nice day for a hike.
“—Anybody know where we goin’ to-day?” “Damfino—naw—I did hear the skipper’s orderly say we’d make the Rhine, some time—” “How far—” “Some guy was lookin’ at a map at battalion. Said it was about thirty kilomets.” “Jesus on his golden throne!—It’s always ’bout thirty kilomets in this dam’ country—” “Yeh! But I remember one time it was twelve kilomets. The night we hiked up to Verdun, back last March. Had a Frawg guide—little shrimp wit’ a forked beard. Ask him how far, all he’d say was: ‘Dooz kilomets—dooz kilomets—’ Hiked all night in the rain, like this, an’ at daylight we come to a sign, wit’ the name of the place we’re goin’ to, an’ it said ‘Dooz kilomets’—that guide, he let on that he was right su’prised—” But there were very few men in the column who remembered the hike to Verdun, in the early spring of 1918; in one company eight, in another eleven; in the whole battalion the barest handful. It had been a long road. The first way-station was the Bois de Belleau; a lot of people stopped there, and were there yet. And there were more, comfortably rotting in the Forêt de Retz, south of Soissons. And more yet, well dead around Blanc Mont. And a vast drift of them back in hospitals. Men walked silent, remembering the old dead.... Twelve hundred men hiking to the Rhine, and how many ghosts.... The mist rolled around the column.
“—You replacements never knew Corp’ral Snair, that got bumped off at Soissons, dallyin’ with a Maxim gun. He was a musical cuss, an’ he uster sing a song to the tune of the ‘Old Gray Mare—She Ain’t What She Uster Be’—somethin’ like
‘The U. S. flag will fly over Germany
Less than a year from now——’
