“We’re in a hell of a fix, though,” said Samson. “Can’t move another inch forward. There’s a plain twenty kilometers deep in front of us. The Boches have got high ground behind it and we couldn’t go across it without losing the whole division. Guess we’ll have to stand pat awhile. Ain’t that hell?”
His words panned out true. Before the guns of the Yankee division lay a great deep plain. To send men out into that plain meant to expose them to certain death with no possibility of a military advantage being obtained by so doing. Consequently, with the exception of a sacrifice attack planned against the enemy to divert his attention from the major operations being launched in the Argonne forest, the division remained in its victorious tracks for nearly six weeks. The sacrifice attack succeeded, but it cost the division almost the entire One Hundred and Second Infantry Regiment.
During this time O. D. drank to the dregs of the front. He became able to distinguish the difference between the whine of an ordinary shell and the whistle of a gas shell. Whizz-bangs got to be a part of his vocabulary, and he knew enough to duck toot sweet when he heard one coming. The mud stuck to him as Neil told him it would. He became friendly with cooties.
“Damn it all, Jimmy,” said O. D. five weeks after the St. Mihiel salient had been nipped off by the pinchers of the First American Army, “if they’d only lay off that ‘canned willy’ once in a while this guerre wouldn’t be half bad. Say, I lost my gas-mask two days ago, wonder if Joyce has got any in yet. The Boches are puttin’ gas over right along now.”
“Hope the hell we get up to a regular front again soon,” replied Jimmy, offering O. D. a cigarette. “Since Austria blew up we ought to get behind the Boches and push ’em right in the Rhine.”
CHAPTER XVI—BEYOND VERDUN
“Is this place hot enough to suit you, Jimmy?” asked O. D. as he and Jimmy huddled in a water-filled shell-hole while a drove of barrack bags went skimming over their heads.
“I’ll say, oui,” replied Jimmy. “Wish for a thing and you’ll sure get it. Remember my wishing that they’d send us to a real front. There ain’t no camouflage to this joint. Listen to that damn machine-gun music, will you?”
From the depths of the Haumont Bois issued the frenzied snapping and barking of machine-guns that contrasted strangely with the unending thunder-roll of the heavy guns.
Before Jimmy and his pal was the pivot upon which the German defenses in the Argonne depended. Upon that cemented pivot was hinged the hopes of the German High Command. If the pivot was forced the entire line of defenses that swung back and forth like a red, intangible thing in the depth of the Argonne woods would be swept away by the intrepid American troops. The Prussian militarists had rushed some of their finest divisions in front of Verdun to stay the advance of American soldiers who had been ordered to unhinge the pivotal defense at all costs.