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Snorting gray camions drew up along the road by the path where the men were lying. At the driving-wheels the small Japanese, with their long, tired mustaches covered with fine dust, looked like pieces of graveyard sculpture. The dust was over their faces, over their light-blue uniforms. They sat immovable. The men took their seats upon the narrow benches and the camions chugged away.
A river crawled along, its straight banks parallel with the road over which the camions were moving. In the crepuscular light it was a dark, straggly, insignificant stream, which, compared by the platoon with rivers that they had known, was only a creek. It was quite dark when the camions stopped at a town along the river, built in the valley between large hills. The men debarked and were assigned to their billets wherever empty rooms could be found in the houses.
In Nanteuil, the name of the village where they had stopped, the ranks of the platoon were filled by men from one of the replacement battalions that recently had arrived in France from the United States. A daily routine was quickly established, and with but one day’s rest the platoon was kept at work from early morning until late afternoon. They drilled four hours a day, were inspected daily by the acting company commander, tried to rid themselves of lice by swimming in the Marne, made secret expeditions to neighboring villages, where they got drunk and made amorous eyes at sloppy French grandmothers, threw hand-grenades in the river and watched the dead fish rise to the surface, swore at the gendarmes when those persons remonstrated with them, shrank into basements whenever the long-distance German shells were aimed at the bridge that crossed the river at Nantueil, cursed their officers, and tried to scare the new men by exaggerating the frightfulness of the front, gorged themselves on the plentiful rations, and played black jack, poker, or rolled dice out of sight of their officers. The officers smiled and told each other that they were not only recovering their morale, but were imbuing the new men with that spirit peculiar to the Marine Corps.
The platoon had been in Nanteuil one week when Hicks returned, dusty, tired, and hungry. The older men crowded around him eagerly, while the more recent members stood off wonderingly.
“Well, Hicksy, old boy, did you have a good rest?” Pugh asked.
“Rest? Rest hell. The only way you can get a rest is to get killed. But don’t go to the hospital thinking you’ll get it.” Hicks paused, sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Remember that night they put over the gas attack?” He was assured by each of the old-timers that he did.
“Well, the next afternoon I woke up in an evacuation hospital. They carried me in on a stretcher, and when I opened my eyes there was a lousy doctor standing over me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Well, I could hardly talk, but I managed to whisper that I was gassed. He looked down at my card that the first-aid officer had pinned on me. ‘God damn it, get up, you coward,’ he said to me. ‘What the hell do you mean by taking a wounded man’s place?’ Of course, I was sore as hell, but what could I do? So I stuck around a while until an ambulance started for our battalion, and then I hid in it and came along.”
The men cursed the medical officer effusively.
“Saw Harriman back there,” Hicks continued. “He was lyin’ in bed with his foot in a sling. Said he got lost and some Squarehead shot him.” Hicks threw the butt of his cigarette. “But if you think the medical officers are bad, you ought to see the enlisted men. Don’t take any souvenirs back with you if you go. The damn orderlies’ll steal ’em. One guy had a Luger pistol and about four hundred francs when he got in the hospital, and they give him a bath, and when he come out he hadn’t a thing in his clothes. But I got a good hot bath, I’ll say that much. And I got some clean clothes. The damned clothes I had stunk so of gas that they had to bury them.”