“Go if you want to. Ryan and I can take care of things all right.”
The ration party tracked through the thick woods, purpled with late evening. Trees stretched gaunt arms in awkward gestures toward the sombre-colored sky, through which lights gaily winked and danced. Under foot were objects over which they tried to step without touching. Now and then a foot would strike a dead man’s pack or his body, and some one would draw back, mutter “Damn,” feeling as if he had committed sacrilege. Branches of trees, half torn from the trunk by shell explosion, barred their way. On they walked, their hands flung out in front of them, and walking as closely to each other as was possible. Passing one place in the woods Harriman thought:
“Here’s where Halvorsen got killed.”
They went on farther. An open space in the woods reminded him that it was there that Kahl received three machine-gun bullets through his head. “He’s probably rotten by this time.” Harriman shivered to his marrow. It seemed hours before they got out of the woods and into the field through which a small dusty road ran toward the village where they had first gone into action.
In outline the buildings, worn down by heavy shell fire, clung to each other for moral encouragement. They looked so tightly clustered in their common misery suffered by devastation.
A shell, like the flash of lightning, hurtled over and resounded as does that kind of lightning after which one says: “That struck somewhere, all right.”
The village was being used as the supply station for the regiment. Inside the shattered houses and barns the field kitchens had been drawn; in the dim light made by candles the mess sergeant was the centre of a group of unwashed louts dressed in greasy blue denim.
“Say, Weaver, where’s our chow?”
“Been sellin’ another quarter of beef to the Frogs again?”
“Don’t you let us catch you at any o’ them fancy tricks.”