Again the long-suffering Mahan tried to set him right; this time as to the wide divergence between the gray-backed troops of Ludendorff and the Confederacy’s gallant soldiers. But Cash merely nodded cryptically, as always he did when he thought his foreigner fellow soldiers were trying to take advantage of his supposed ignorance. And he swung back to the theme nearest his heart.
“Now about that snipin’ business,” he pursued, “even if the Cap don’t want too many of ’em shot up, he sure won’t be so cantankerous as to keep me from tryin’ to git that thirteenth feller! I mean the one that kep’ blazin’ at me whiles I kep’ blazin’ at him; an’ the both of us too cute to show an inch of target to t’other or stay in the same patch of cover after we’d fired. That Dutchy sure c’n scout grand! He’s a born woodsman. An’ you-all don’t want it to be said the Germans has got a better sniper than what we’ve got, do you? Well, that’s jes’ what will be said by everyone in this yer county unless you let me down him. Come on, Sarge! Let me go back arter him! I been thinkin’ up a trick gran’ther got off’n th’ Injuns. It oughter land him sure. Let me go try! I b’lieve that feller can’t weigh an ounce less’n two-twenty. Leave me have one more go arter him; and I’ll bring him in to prove it!”
Top Sergeant Mahan’s patience stopped fraying, and ripped from end to end.
“You seem to think this war is a cross between a mountain feud and a deer hunt!” he growled. “Isn’t there any way of hammering through your ivory mine that we aren’t here to pick off unsuspecting Germans and make a tally of the kill? And we aren’t here to brag about the size of the men we shoot either. We’re here, you and I, to obey orders and do our work. You’ll get plenty of shooting before you go home again, don’t worry. Only you’ll do it the way you’re told to. After all the time you’ve spent in the hoosgow since you joined, I should think you’d know that.”
But Cash Wyble did not know it. He said so—loudly, offensively, blasphemously. He said many things—things that in any other army than his own would have landed him against a blank wall facing a firing squad. Then he slouched off by himself to grumble.
As far as Cash Wyble was concerned the war was a failure—a total failure. The one bright spot in its workaday monotony was blurred for him by the orders of his stupid superiors. In his vivid imagination that elusive German sniper gradually attained a weight not far from three hundred pounds.
In sour silence Cash sulked through the rest of the day’s routine. In his heart boiled black rebellion. He had learned his soldier trade, back at Camp Lee, because it had been very strongly impressed upon him that he would go to jail if he did not. For the same reason he had not tried to desert. He had all the true mountaineer horror for prison. He had toned down his native temper and stubbornness because failure to do so always landed him in the guardhouse—a place that, to his mind, was almost as terrible as jail.
But out here in the wilderness there were no jails. At least Cash had seen none. And he had it on the authority of Top Sergeant Mahan himself that this part of France was not within the legal jurisdiction of West Virginia—the only region, as far as Cash actually knew, where men are put in prison for their misdeeds. Hence the rules governing Camp Lee could not be supposed to obtain out here. All of which comforted Cash not a little.
To him “patriotism” was a word as meaningless as was “discipline.” The law of force he recognized—the law that had hog-tied him and flung him into the Army. But the higher law which makes men risk their all, right blithely, that their country and civilization may triumph—this was as much a mystery to Cash Wyble as to any army mule.
Just now he detested the country that had dragged him away from his lean shack and forbade him to disport himself as he chose in No Man’s Land. He hated his country; he hated his Army; he hated his regiment. Most of all he loathed his captain and Top Sergeant Mahan.