“Oh, the jumped-up holy ghost!” Bill drew the weak muscles of his face down until his upper lip lay across his lower teeth. He smiled with mirthless cunning and looked at John with gentle pitying amazement. “Buddy, you wanta know how to be a hero again? I’ll tell you. You say war’s a swell thing if you’re on the right side—and you was on the right side, buddy—” Bill’s grin was chilling. “You tell how you rammed them Huns in their guts and piled them up in the Rhine until it run backwards. And if you could tell how you saved a virtuous woman—say, for the love of virgins, couldn’t you tell a story like that? Buddy, that would put you right on top of the popcorn pile with a cigar in your face a yard long. Well,” he said, and spit straight down between his knees, “you get the idea.”
But it was a difficult idea for John Benton to grasp. He walked around like a tall pale ghost of a man, with spiritual anguish in his thin, sensitive face. He wanted persons to like him. He wanted persons to remember Jesus, as he had remembered Him for two years in France, and to look far into the ways of kindliness and mercy. But Bill, meeting him now, gave him a cynical yellow smile and a jab in his ribs. “Be fierce,” he said, smirking wisely, “and blow your horn.” And again: “Buddy, stop lookun like one of the twelve apostles, huntun around for the coast of Galilee. Sail out and tell them-there big stomachs what they wanta hear.” And John, after days of wretched indecision, resolved to try.
He approached the matter gently, experimentally, at first, telling only the less horrifying details of war; and in the men here who had remained at home he found an eager response. They gathered round him in the pool hall, and when his tale faltered, or when he broke off, feeling sick and traitorous, they urged him to resume. “Hey, John, tell us how you captured that there machine-gun nest.” And simply, without exaggeration, John told of the lone exploit for which he had been decorated by three nations. He said he crept out at daybreak and came to the nest and surprised the gunners and marched them back to the American line. Such a bald narrative, he learned after a while, would not do at all. His listeners wanted heroics and a breath-taking clash and a picture of a lone American fighting hand to hand with a dozen of the enemy and licking the whole lot of them. It took John a long time and many tellings to learn what was wanted. The questions helped. “And didn’t them cowards put up no fight at all?” “Hey, John, you don’t mean they just laid down like a bunch of sheep!” No, John perceived, he could not afford to mean anything like that. “You’re too modest,” they said, never doubting that he had more amazing things to tell; and with increasing recklessness John became less modest. He elaborated the tale, adding to it in every recital some breathless episode, some additional moment in which he missed death by a hair, some new cunning ferocity in the foe. And he was a strange person, this tall, grave man, telling his legends and feeling sickened by the telling.
After a while his tale was a gorgeous thing and not like the real experience at all. But that, he began to understand, did not matter. Now he crawled forth under a red sheet of artillery fire with shells bursting like automobile motors all around him and with the sky above him like a rolling mountain of flame. He crawled inch by inch through great shell-holes, and the lead falling around him threw earth into his eyes and stung his flesh like hornets and dug graves across his path. He crept past dead bodies—American bodies, the slain and mangled of his own company, all of them gutted in the gray wet dawn; went slowly, patiently, toward that one infernal nest that was raining death on the American line; dragged himself foot by foot, seeing that one gun belching its flame and hearing above and around him the mad thundering nightmare and smelling dead flesh. Inch by inch he crawled toward that nest, his hair matted with earth, his paralyzed hands grasping his pistols, his ears running blood—inch by inch, until at last he was under the red fire of it; and for a moment he rested, with his senses reeling and his heart in his throat....
“And—and then?” gasped one.
Then he crept slowly around the bushes of the nest and forward in the darkness of underbrush until he could almost touch the five men there, every one of them like a blackened sweating devil, pouring lead at the American flag. And here in his narrative John paused, having learned much of the proper telling of a story; looked at the choked, almost anguished, suspense in the faces around him. “Then what?” asked one in a whisper. Then, John said, carefully building his legend, he examined his pistols and cocked them; and when all five men were busy, working like fiends out of hell, he sprang to his feet and covered the distance in one bound; brought his guns crashing upon the skulls of two of them; kicked a third in his belly and sent him over the machine-gun; and jammed the pistol barrels into the bellies of the fourth and fifth. The third, knocked into the line of fire, was slain by his own gun, and the first and second rose, with blood gushing from their skulls, and reached for the sky. He marched the four of them, gory with wounds, out across the surging hell of no-man’s-land, and that was the end of a nest that had taken thousands of American lives. It was the end, John learned to understand, of the most villainous bandits on the whole western front....
The news of John spread, and three months after his return the local paper announced:
JOHN BENTON TO SPEAK
John Benton, one of the greatest heroes in the World War, and Idaho’s native son and our own fellow-townsman, will address a mammoth meeting tonight in the Paramount Theater and relate some of his most dramatic experiences. He will tell of his capture, alone and unaided and in a veritable deluge of bursting shellfire, of the most murderous and treacherous machine-gun nest on the whole German front.
And John did. The audience went wild with applause and he was again a hero. On the following Sunday he had dinner at the mayor’s home and repeated his story to nine distinguished guests; and when one of them, Harry Cuthwright, a banker, declared that Germany was a degenerate nation and that America had entered the war with the noblest of motives, John hastily agreed. Within a month he was the most respected person in his home city. The girls looked at him with coy admiration and the men deferred to him when he spoke. Though happy and proud, he was troubled, too: he no longer knew what the truth was or was not, and with obstinate ardor he strove not to care. And he blundered again.