“Four thousand six hundred and fifty-three.”
“With each night a battle to resist a sortie?”
“Yes. Each night a sortie, each night a battle.”
“Thus—by night—how many to hold this awful place?”
“Since the beginning? Perhaps a regiment, perhaps a few more.”
He motioned me to the corner hole—the hole through which a minute before the bullet had sped into the officer’s eye. I emulated neither bullet nor officer, but at a respectful two feet glimpsed a ridge ghastly and glimmering in the sun like any other ridge in this hell hole. Quite near enough to reach in a short dash—200 yards, the officer said—a row of sandbags were backed business-like toward me. Between us were five heaps of blue clothes, four in a huddle and one a bit off—Russian dead killed in the battle of Hatchimakiyama four days ago in the zone where nothing lives. Grass withers there. Vermin alone germinate.
Behind those sandbags and behind these men crouch and have crouched every minute for two months hunting game the most lordly and the most cunning, the most deceitful and the most contemptible, the boldest and the fiercest, the most inspired and the most depraved this earth can boast.
The Russians on three sides held us in a vise. The bottom of the crater was paved with empty cartridge shells and bullets flattened on the rocks. Constantly more knots were being ripped by the saw above. Except for that rasp—a rasp that bore in with crescendic violence on the nerves—the silence was profound. Life was everywhere—intelligence at the keenest pitch, ingenuity the most diabolical, agility the most intense, sacrifice heroic, daring, sublime—but not a sound, not a motion. Everywhere the silence kept—the unendurable silence of the Eternal Dragon. Its insatiable maw thrust up there in the ghastly sunlight, drenched in blood, yet cried for more.
