Three airplanes, white stars in a field of red on their wings, flew gaily over the field and toward the German lines. They floated gracefully and haughtily out of sight. Not much later on they precipitately returned with three Fokkers after them like angry hornets. Shriven of their grandeur, they flocked in disorder back to their hangars, the machine-guns of the German planes spitting bullets after them. The aerial entertainment was changed: Four large German bombing planes, pursuing a businesslike course, arrived above the advancing men and began to drop bombs and fire machine-gun bullets at them. The bombs reported as noisily as the seventy-seven-millimetre guns, but they made only a shallow hole in the ground. More devastating were the machine-gun bullets which zinged off the steel helmets of the men or bored their way through to the skull. Under the combination of direct artillery fire, enfilade machine-gun, rifle sniping, bombs dropped from airplanes, the ranks of the advancing men had become so sparse that the attack was brought to a temporary halt.
It was now afternoon and the heat of the sun was unendurable. It burned upon the helmets and through the clothing and caused sweat to trickle down the skin, irritating the scratches, bruises, and burns with which the bodies of the men were covered. The four bombing planes continued lazily to circle overhead, “kicking out their tail-gates,” as the men graphically phrased it. Hicks and Pugh, with four of the new men, were at the farthest point of advance. Lying flat, they tried with their bayonets, their mess knives, to throw up a protection of ground in front of them. Thoroughly tired, they worked slowly, in spite of the danger. They were half-way finished when a bullet zipped through the wheat and penetrated the bone of the crooked elbow with which the man next Hicks was supporting himself.
“Here it is,” said Hicks, picking up a small steel-jacketed bullet.
“By God, that hurts. Help me get my shirt off.”
“Je’s, you’re lucky,” Hicks murmured enviously. “You’ll never come back to the front any more. And what a fancy place to get hit!” The shirt off, the bullet was seen to have gone through the forearm just above the elbow, coming out on the other side.
“Don’t you think so?” eagerly. “It don’t hurt so much.”
“No, but you better hurry up and git outa here or you’ll have somep’n more than a busted arm,” one of the new men advised.
The arrival of a salvo of shells decided the new man upon an immediate departure. Throwing away all of his equipment, he hurried away, his elbow pressed closely to his side.
Behind Hicks, a few yards, some one began to whimper.