Past the woods the barren earth continued, rising and disappearing at a distance, in a hill studded with trees.
Beyond lay mystery and a gargantuan demon who, taking whatever shape he chose, might descend with a huge funnelled bag from which he might extract any number of fascinatingly varied deaths.
The night before, out of a still, starlit sky, a sudden rain had fallen. It had drenched the trees and the grass and soaked the clothing of the troops who were lying in the woods awaiting the hour for the attack. The rain made a long, slimy, muddy snake out of the roads leading to the front line. Where the caisson tracks had bitten into the ground, hasty rivulets now ran. Water from the evenly plotted fields had drained into the ditch that ran alongside the road, overflowing.
Bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, their pockets stuffed with heavy corrugated hand-grenades, carrying shovels and picks, the platoon followed along the muddy road in rear of a machine-gun company. Rudely awakened from an irresistible sleep beneath the trees, they had been marshalled before supply wagons, had been given articles of extra equipment to use in the attack. Now, whenever the body of troops before them halted, the lids closed readily over their sleepy eyes and their bodies swayed with fatigue. The halts were frequent, for the machine-gunners carried their heavy rifles and tripods on their shoulders.
The road was slippery and the travel laborious, and after innumerable pauses whenever the advancing line became clogged, the men sat down, completely fatigued, in the mud and water. Uneasiness could be felt in the tightly packed mass that waddled along the road. It lay on the tongues of the platoon, preventing them from showing their exasperation at the long delay. Curses would rise to their lips and die unuttered. A word spoken aloud, the jangling of metal, would infuriate them. From fear and habit, the explosion of a gun near them would cause them to stop, standing without a tremor. A distance of less than two miles, the platoon crawled along like an attenuated turtle. They felt that dawn would find them still on the road, their feet struggling with the clinging mud. The night was as thick and black as coal-tar. Progress through it seemed impossible.
Behind the barely moving lines the guns continued their boom, boom, like the sound of distant thunder. The shells whistled overhead, the report of their explosion only faintly to be heard. There was no retaliation. The enemy seemed willing to take the brunt without a murmur. But to the platoon their silence was suspicious. Accustomed to hearing the crashing reply to a bombardment, when the men did not hear it they grew fearful. They began to wonder if they were not being led into a trap. Fed too fully upon the German-spy propaganda issued by the Allied governments, they wondered whether the general directing the attack might not be a minion of the Kaiser, leading them to their deaths. Or else the Germans were planning some great strategic coup.
The failure of the enemy guns to reply was so annoying that it became the absorbing notion in the minds of the men. Their ears were strained, waiting to hear the familiar whine of a shell fired toward them. It made their nerves feel ragged and exposed. On the road sounded the decisive beat of horses’ hoofs. It was deeply perturbing. Stretching their necks, unmindful of the slippery road, the danger of sliding into the ditch, the men watched the horse and rider, believing it portentous. The horse was turned back to the woods.
Like a latrine built for a corps of monsters stretched the slippery trench. Approaching it through the narrow communication gully, the men slid and stumbled from the slatted-board bottom into the mire. They would withdraw their legs from the mud, the mud making a “pflung” as the foot rose above it.
The platoon filed into the trench, and crouched low against the firing bays their bayonets peeping over the top. After hours on the road the trench was warm to their bodies, despite its mud and slime. Their eyes staring into the black night, the men waited.