Hicks sat down across from the two bodies. His elbows on his knees, his arms folded, he lowered his head and was soon asleep. He was awakened by voices crying:
“Hicks! What’s wrong?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Tryin’ to git a cru de geer by stayin’ out alone all night?”
He looked up and through the early dawn saw the faces of his own platoon. Without answering he picked up his automatic rifle which lay beside him, and joined them.
The ground over which they were advancing was flat for a long distance, then it rose in a steep hill that stood majestically in the dawn. Upon the ground many people had left their marks: a group of bones, a piece of equipment, a helmet, a rifle barrel from which the stock had rotted.
There was no hindrance to the advance of the platoon. From that point in the line which for miles was being attacked that morning, even the rear-guard had withdrawn. But the withdrawal had been made to the top of the hill, whose crest was a large plateau. Perhaps a thousand yards from the brink, where a ridge cut the flatness of the ground, the German lines had intrenched and lay waiting to be attacked.
As the platoon climbed up the hill they could hear the friendly explosion of their own barrage. It gave them strength to thread their way among the bushes on the hill, ever nearing the summit, and not knowing the sort of reception that was waiting for them.
A portly captain, puffing like a porpoise, clambered up with them. From time to time he would stop and take from his hip pocket a brightly colored paper sack of scrap tobacco. Then, with a generous amount in the side of his mouth, he would begin again the ascent. He offered the paper bag to some of the men nearer to him, and they accepted it gratefully, but not cramming their mouths so full as he. The portly captain also invented the fiction that he was a former brewery-wagon driver in St. Louis and that, “By God, he wished he was back on a brewery wagon again.”
The men laughed obligingly but hollowly.