Читать книгу Through the Wheat - Thomas Parker Boyd - Страница 5

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Three days were spent by the platoon at the little village. On the evening of the third day, just as the men had formed in a long, impatient line before the field kitchen, with their aluminum food receptacles held out to catch the thin, reddish stew surlily thrown at them, the company commander walked among them bearing words of dour import. Captain Powers talked softly and gently, wringing the words from his heart, burnishing them with a note of sadness:

“Stay close to your billets to-night after chow, men. We’re moving up to the front some time to-night.”

He passed by them, and those whom he passed shuffled their feet, looking furtively at the ground. There was very little comment. The shuffling line was funereal. Men smiled at Captain Powers, but their smiles lacked certitude.

When they had packed their belongings in the stipulated military manner the pall remained, vaguely hanging over them, drawing them together in their common aversion from the future. In the rooms they sat on their packs, nervously waiting to move.

The moonlight streamed in through the window and showed the gray whitewashed walls of the deserted room. The fireplace was a black maw.

Night fell in mysterious folds, giving the appearance of unfamiliarity to the squat French houses, the spired Gothic church, the trees which drooped their boughs in a stately canopy over the smooth gray road. The men, their feet striking against the cobblestones, clumped through the village streets and along the road.

The sector toward which the platoon was moving had once been the scene of violent conflict, but of late, with the more important military manœuvres taking place farther west, it had dropped into a peaceful desuetude. It lay a few miles from Verdun, among the green-covered concealed fortresses, from which the noses of mammoth artillery unexpectedly rose. Tops of thickly wooded hills reared evenly in an unbroken line. Between the crests the shadow-hidden valleys rested serene, content with their secrets of the dead. Along the base of the mauve chain of hills wound a trench from which French soldiers, most of whom were on the farther side of fifty, sat around in dugouts and drank their ration of Pinard or squatted, their shirts off, hunting lice in the seams.

The platoon marched up in the pitch-black night, slipping, from time to time, off the slimy duck boards which had been placed in the bottom of the trench to prevent traffic from being buried in the mud. Their packs, with hip rubber boots, bandoliers of ammunition, bombs, and shovels, bowed them over as they cautiously and cursingly made their way through the communication trench.

Somewhere ahead a white light flared with a sputtering noise.

“Stand fast!” Lieutenant Bedford called out peremptorily.

The men stood as rocks, their arms crooked, covering their faces. The light dropped slowly and unemotionally to the ground, dying out. Again all was blackness.

Sergeant Harriman, who had gone ahead as billeting officer, now joined the platoon and piloted the men into the trench. The main trench was much wider than the communication trench, but passage along it was difficult because of the half-checkered manner in which it had been laid out.

Not waiting to be relieved, the French soldiers one by one had disappeared into the night. Now the platoon stood silent and ill at ease. No one knew where to go, and so the entire body was ordered to remain standing in the firing bays until morning.

Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the gray of the horizon.

He experienced a strange feeling of awe, as if he were looking upon another world. The early sun threw the trees and barbed wire into a queer perspective and gave them a harsh, unreal aspect.

In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many parts of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the picture. Ordinarily he would have been contemplating such a pastoral scene from the window of a railway train or from a northern Michigan farmhouse, where he would have been spending his summer vacation. He would have been dressed in a blue flannel suit, with a sailor hat, a white shirt of some soft summery material and a rather striking tie. His hose would have been of silk and his cool white underclothes would have been of the “athletic” type, Hicks mused.

Then he became aware of himself. In place of the straw sailor there lay very heavily on his head a steel helmet that, though he had thought it chic for a while, was now no more distinguished-looking than the aluminum dish in which his food was rationed to him. He had worn his drab shirt for two weeks, and there were black rings around the collar and wrists. His gas-mask, girded over his chest, looked foul and unclean; he had used it for a pillow, for a dining-table, and often, he realized, it had been thrown in some muddy place when he had sickened of having it about him like an ever-present albatross. The knees of his breeches were as soiled and as uncomfortable as his shirt, and his puttees and shoes were crusted thickly with dried mud.

His stock-taking of his dress was interrupted by the knowledge that a persistent vermin was exploring the vicinity of his breast. He could not apprehend it because of his gas-mask, which, suspended from his neck, was strapped to his chest.

After the first few days life in the trenches became inordinately dull, so dull that an occasional shell fired from the artillery of either side was a signal for the members of the platoon to step into the trench and speculate where it struck.

Every night two squads of the platoon stood watch while the others slept. Hicks, with Bullis, was stationed in a shell hole a few yards ahead of the front line. The shell hole was half filled with water and it was cold. After three or four hours the hip rubber boots made Hicks think that his feet were a pair of dead fish in a refrigerator.

It was customary for the corporal of the guard and the lieutenant each night to inspect the outposts, but because the ground was wet and because of the strands of unmanageable barbed wire the lieutenant had stayed in his dugout, permitting the corporal of the guard to have the honor of inspecting.

One night, when the dampness seemed like a heavily draped ghost that wanted to kiss Hicks’s entire body, and when his eyes had completely tired from the strain of imagining that the stumps and posts in the field were moving, Hicks fell asleep. In his cramped position, sitting on a board over a shell hole, with his feet in the icy water, Hicks’s sleep was full of fantastic dreams. He might have slept until the noonday sun awakened him, had he not slipped from his seat and sprawled into the water. This awakened Bullis, who invariably went to sleep, remaining so until the watch was over.

“What the hell’s coming off?” Hicks awakened with a jerk. “Christ, it’s time to go in.”

They observed the sun, which was slowly climbing over the horizon and shedding the earth with a silvery light. The sky was almost smoked-pearl colored, and before it the trees and barbed wire made sharp sentinels.

Silently they picked up their rifles and slunk into the trench. Answering the guard’s challenging “Halt, who’s there?” with an “Oh, shut up,” they stepped on the slippery duck board.

“Say, Hicksy, you’d better look out. What the hell were you guys up to last night?” the guard asked.

“What do you mean? We weren’t up to anything.”

“Well, old Hepburn came back here after being out to your hole, a-cussin’ like hell. He said you guys couldn’t take advantage of your friendship with him like that and get away with it.”

“I don’t know what he meant. Let’s beat it, Bullis.”

They went to their dugout, where they slept with their shoes beneath their heads, to keep, as Hicks almost truthfully remarked, the rats from carrying them away.

The major’s orderly, his dignity wrestling with the slippery footing of the duck boards, marched down the trench from battalion headquarters. Stopping in front of the dugout which Hicks and Bullis had entered, he removed his helmet, patted his hair, and called:

“Is Private Hicks in there? Tell Private Hicks Major Adams wants to see him.”

His hair a rat’s nest, and a heavy beard on his muddy-looking face, Hicks looked out of the entrance of the dugout.

“What’s the matter?”

The orderly turned about and marched back toward battalion headquarters with Hicks following him.

Major Adams belonged to that type of officer each of which you meet with the feeling that he is the sole survivor of the school of regular soldiers. He was a tall, slim, very erect person. His face was ascetic, though gossip about his personal affairs proclaimed him to be fiercely lustful. He wore his campaign hat adeptly. He limped as he walked, from an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal as the fourth dimension. He was adored and held in awe by half of the battalion.

Private Hicks stepped inside the major’s dugout and saluted.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Hicks, you were reported this morning to have gone to sleep while on outpost duty.”

Hicks started visibly. “That’s true, sir.”

“Well, what the hell kind of a soldier are you, anyway?” Major Adams fairly bit his words loose.

“I don’t know, sir. I mean, I guess I’ve been a pretty good soldier.”

“You have like hell, Hicks, and you know it. Now, why did you go to sleep on watch?”

Hicks knew that if he were court-martialled his sentence might be life imprisonment. It might be anything, he reflected, that the group of morons sitting in solemn judgment might decide to give him.

Major Adams also knew it.

“Sir, the hours are too long. Nobody can stay awake when he goes on watch eight hours every night.”

“Yes?” Major Adams raised an eyebrow forbiddingly.

“Well, sir, there’s two feet of water in the shell hole where my post is, and I guess I got so numb with cold that I went to sleep.”

“And you never thought to bail it out? I knew that officers were so damned dumb that they needed dog-robbers, but I didn’t know that enlisted men were. Now, Hicks, you haven’t a case at all. But”—he was silent a moment—“some day you might make a good soldier. You wouldn’t have a chance if you were to get a general court martial, because the judges would have you hung as an example. Hicks,” he said, “I’m going to let this drop. You may go.”

Mumbling a “thank you, sir,” Hicks very properly about-faced and left the dugout.