The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

The effect of his shot gave Wardwell a thorough surprise. Not only did the man with the branches tied about him disappear, but what had seemed to be an almost solid hedge of green shrubs across the mouth of the ravine fell away instantly, revealing some bare rocks and two guns. Wardwell mentally rubbed his eyes and stared. There must, before, have been at least three or four men standing about the guns and all draped in heavy bushes.

As he watched, one of the guns began to fire again, though he could not see the hands that managed it, and a sudden flutter of twigs and leaves came pattering down upon his head. They had guessed him out in his tree.

He shifted his position to get the full protection of the body of the tree, and gave his attention to the lone gun out on the hill. He would like to put that gun out of working, not because it was doing any harm just now, but because of what might have to be done later. He watched patiently for several minutes, while the gun in the ravine continued to trim the little branches from his tree, but it did not seem that he would get a chance. The fellow in the ditch was keeping entirely under cover and working his gun with a stubborn fixity of idea against the line of the bridge wall.

The sputtering explosion of a soft shell on the bridge startled Wardwell. Now if the Germans had found the creek bed with gas—and, of course, they had every range studied down to a matter of feet—then there was a bad time ahead. He waited while another shell fell into the creek bed below the bridge and another dropped down in front of him right near where the two wounded men had been placed. The foul poison was practically colorless, but, immediately, he could see the little green tufts of grass in the creek bed withering to death.

He slid to the ground and made a low running dive down the bank of the creek. The lieutenant was already giving orders to get the two men up from the bed of the creek and to make holes for them in the top of the bank on the north side. Wardwell saw that the lieutenant had taken his decision. They could not stay here. The creek bed would soon fill with gas. If they were to go back, they must go at once, across the half mile of open field between them and the river. They must carry at least one wounded man, and, from the elevation, those machine guns could follow them every inch of the way. What was worse, the gas would soon fill the creek bed and then the wind coming down from the hill would carry it back so that it would follow them to the river.

Well, they were not going back. Or at least, Wardwell judged from the lieutenant's dispositions, they were not going back until they had made a try for those machine guns.

Three minutes later they were all strung out just on the edge of the upper bank, with intervals of about fifty feet between them, their bodies curled up tight for a spring, their eyes fixed on the spitting guns up the hill before them. The two hundred and fifty yards of sloping hillside looked as smooth and bare as the top of a slightly tilted table. There did not seem to be a hollow anywhere in it, not as much as the suggestion of a furrow, into which a man might drop for breath and an instant's respite in his rush up toward those guns.

They were stripped of everything except their rifles and the one or two bombs that each man could carry in his rush. They had not needed details of instruction. They had done this thing before.

A man rose silently from the edge of the bank. It was the young lieutenant himself. He did not stand poised, or look at his men. He came up running, and shot forward with that peculiar, side-wheeling motion that many men acquire from running with a foot ball under one arm while warding off tacklers with the other arm stiff. He ran with his pistol clutched stiffly in his right hand, his other arm curled in against his side. Fifty, sixty, seventy feet he drove on, running low and pigeon-toed, always with that wheeling motion, while the machine guns dropped their other marks and turned their blazing eyes on him.

Before the lieutenant had dropped safe into a little depression of the slope, another man was shooting forward away out on the right. Then another, below the bridge, scooted ahead, dodging along in a way that was his own. Man after man rose running, dove forward for about the length of five seconds—a hundred feet maybe—then dropped flat into anything that looked like a slight protection.