After a long wait the firing abated and the platoon started to creep forward. Instantly their movement was met with a hail of bullets. They lay quite still, their uniforms blending with the russet of the grass, on which the sun shone with intense vigor.
Hicks, lying at the extreme left of the platoon, was engaged in corralling those words which entered his mind and placing them into two classes—words with an even number of letters, words with an uneven number of letters. He had long held the view that the evenly lettered words were preponderant.
“P-l-a-t-o-o-n. Seven—that’s uneven. S-e-v-e-n—that’s uneven, too. U-n-e-v-e-n—six—even. Ha-a s-t-r-a-n-g-e—seven—again the mystic number. M-y-s-t-i-c—six—that’s even. And n-u-m-b-e-r—six, too. Let’s see, that’s five even and four—no, five”—he lost track of the number of unevenly lettered words he had thought of—his activity was interrupted by the ridiculous words—“oh, when I die—d-i-e—uneven—just bury me deep—d-e-e-p—even. Deeper, deeper, deeper where the croakers sleep. S-l-e-e-p—uneven, too, damn it. And tell all the boys that I died brave——”
He broke off. Behind a bush, a few hundred yards distant, an enormous olive that was supported by legs was hiding. Bellied to the ground, he started to crawl, his path describing a small arc. His automatic rifle, grasped in the middle by his right hand, interfered with his movements. His abstraction was so great that he bruised his knuckles between the rifle and the ground. The musette bag, filled with ammunition and suspended from his neck, was another annoyance. When he tried more quickly to move forward it got in his way.
The olive moved ever so slightly. It now seemed to be a combination of olive and turtle, with its queer hand rising above its body.
A jagged stone cut through Hicks’s trousers, bringing the blood. He crawled on, railing at the hot sun.
A shell hole yawned in front of him. Like an alligator slipping into the water, his body slid down to the bottom. He was almost directly across from the olive, and now he saw that it was neither olive nor turtle, but a German with a rifle pointing through the limbs of the bushes toward his platoon. He stuck the tripod in the bank a foot from the top of the hole. He adjusted the stock to his shoulder and fired.
The German scurried from his hiding-place out into the open. Hicks fired again. The German stopped, and, with a queer, hopeless gesture, his arms flung over his head, sprawled on the ground.
Hicks crawled out of the hole, moving forward. Nearly every one of the bushes concealed a German. Hicks anticipated a day’s occupation.