As we came closer to the Dragon a stretcher was borne down by two red cross men. A bullet had picked a private through a peephole. Just ahead of us two soldiers were walking, one with his full kit, rifle and shovel on his back, the other bareheaded and barebacked. Both wore on their sleeves the two yellow stripes of the distinguished soldier. The finger of the one who was to go was held by the hand of the one who was to stay. Neither spoke. They walked silently and slowly in the full sunlight. He of the full kit was ordered into the thirty-minute trench to take the place of the one who had passed out on the stretcher. He, too, is almost sure to pass, ere long, the same way. As the two comrades walked toward the place of death I saw how true Dickens is, for it was precisely thus—finger in palm—that he sent Sydney Carton and the seamstress to la guillotine in “The Tale of Two Cities”; the one who was to go clasping the finger of the one who was to stay, the one who was to stay looking with kind, brave strength calmly into the face of the one who was to go.
“Ah! Tragique!” cried D’Adda.
The officer said we might one at a time go into the front trench. I started. It was a short climb over shale and debris of sundered shells and of a sudden I hobbled into a hollow space, girt with bags and silent, silent as is the place of execution the morning of capital punishment. It was the redoubt, thrust into the air like the maw of a dragon. The sun beat in beautiful and sure. The rocks, with deadly glare, spat up their challenge. An occasional bullet sang as a ripsaw tears through a pine knot. Then a machine gun rattled and the shale beyond pattered. I was carried back to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is the most deadly; it has the ring of business.
Silence, blankness, death. At first I could see no life, but the officer spoke a low word—here all words are whispers as they are beside the couches of those about to leave this world—and four spots on the wall that had seemed monotonous and brown as the shale moved. Four simple, peasant faces with the star of Nippon above looked at me. Then one, attracted by something beyond, suddenly kneeled, seized the rifle beside him, leveled it through a chink and pulled the trigger. That deadly rip sawed its knot.
Boldened by the presence of soldiers kneeling as I was, I began to look around. A groan, first aspirate, then low, as of an asthmatic man snoring, brought my eyes across the bag-protected dragon’s mouth and I saw two figures kneeling above a third. Presently the two lifted the third into a stretcher and filed past me with it. I saw a face blood-dabbed, the lips piteously moving. A bandage across the eyes saved me the worst. The officer beckoned for me to peek through the farther hole. The incident was but a bit of the day’s work for him. I followed and saw a shattered field glass under the parapet. It told the story. He was—had been—a non-commissioned officer in charge of the sentry squad and was looking across at the Russians when a sharpshooter spotted the glass. I felt that I was hurt more than he, for I lay awake thinking of it much of that night, only to remember that the surgeon-general had told me that a man shot through the brain is instantly unconscious, though his lips move and he moans for minutes.
“Each day—how many?” I asked the officer.
“Twenty.”
“And how many days?”
“Fifty-nine.”
“How many to take the fort?”