Part 16

“Looks as if the boche really meant business,” commented the major. “Do you care to watch the evacuation? If so I recommend the rear steps of the château as a good reviewing stand.”

I took my place as directed, well removed from the traffic. Upon the road beneath just in front of the hospital tents were lined up a long string of ambulances. A sergeant was in charge of the affair. Inside the tents, orderlies and nurses had their hands full preparing the men for transportation. Some of the patients were up, superintending their own moving; some, in vivid pink-striped Red Cross pajamas--the gift of some gay soul--were sitting on their cots, swinging bare legs and shouting for footgear; some, disdaining such effete trappings of civilization, had wrapped the drapery of their couches about them, squaw-wise, and were standing barefoot on the grass outside enjoying the festal scene. It was like a great gipsy encampment.

Still farther down the road one man had boldly snatched another’s sole garment of attire, a dressing robe, and the owner, reduced to his birthday suit, started a chase. Ensued a picturesque race. This, however, was but a brief kaleidoscopic film, which danced across the road for a minute like a Greek frieze, and was abruptly censored by the sergeant. A nurse appeared at the flap of the tent, an anxious look in her eye. She caught sight of the tall statuesque Indian who, with his blanket hunched well round his head and his pyjamas swelling gently in the evening breeze, stood rubbing one big bare foot luxuriously over the other big bare foot and discoursing to another young Indian buck thus:

“Yes, sir, I’m telling you, friend, I sure thought the end had come. There I was, sitting under a little short tree by the road writing home to my mother. I’d just finished writing ‘Well, mamma, I’ve come through lucky so far,’ and looked up. There was a whole wagonload of grenades passing, and at that minute a shell burst in the road right ahead. And I’m telling you, friend, suddenly it seemed like all the world rose up in the air but me----”

“You, Fred Murphy,” interrupted the nurse severely. “Where are those slippers I gave you? Don’t you know you can’t travel in bare feet? It isn’t done in France!”

“Miles too small for my trilbies,” explained Murphy succinctly. He turned his face toward her a brief instant and then, turning it back, continued without a halt: “----but me, and I went down. And when the lieutenant helped me to my feet he said that nobody but a damn fool or a Marine could sit under a little short tree like that writing letters while a whole wagonload of grenades exploded, and get away with it. And he showed me the tree top blowed clear down the valley and sitting up there like an open umbrella.”

A medical officer came hurrying over to the nurse.

“The orderly said you wanted me. What is it?”

“It’s that chest case. He can’t go. He’s on the list, but there must be some mistake. Oh, I think it’s terrible to send a man on the road like that!”

They passed into the deeper gloom of the tent. I followed. Near the door on a cot sat a doughboy, a shoulder case, garbed as per army regulation as far as his waist, and from thence upward his fine torso naked save for strappings and splints which held his arm in an immobile apparatus.

With his free hand he was pawing wildly among the effects of his kit, while he exclaimed in loud excited tones, “I can’t find it! I never got it. If I had it I’d remember it, wouldn’t I? Say, wouldn’t a guy remember a thing like that? I guess yes! You never gave it to me--see?”

The orderly--later killed when the hospital was bombed by boche planes--was down on his haunches lacing up the patient’s boots. He looked up with a grin.

“What’s biting you, buddy? The last thing I gave you was slum, and I notice you wolfed that down like one o’clock.”

“It’s my shrapnel. The piece the doctor took outa me. He promised before he put me to sleep on the operating table to pin it onto my shirt. Say, look in my pocket, will you?”

The orderly obliged. But the shrapnel was not there. Just then the doctor passed. “Say, captain, did you operate on this guy? He says you promised to save his shrapnel.”

The doctor squinted uncertainly through the gloom.

“Yes, sir, you did!” affirmed the private with confidence. “And you promised, sir, to pin the shrapnel onto my shirt.”

“That’s right. I remember now, old man.” A look passed between the young surgeon and the orderly. Was it a wink that caused the orderly’s left eyelid to droop so flat upon his cheek?

“Sir, shall I go get his shrapnel? I think I know where it’s at.”

“Good!” said the surgeon, laughter in his voice. “You’ll find it wrapped in a piece of gauze.”

“Yes, sir.”

The orderly departed. But just outside the tent he paused, dived down into his pocket, brought up several objects, examined them attentively, and then hurried back to the rear entrance, where by the light of an electric torch the nurse was making up her list.

“S-s-t! Gimme a gauze compress, sister!” said a husky voice in her ear. Absently she pointed to a parcel on the table. The orderly helped himself. The next moment he was back in the front tent.

“Here you are, buddy! That’ll hold you for a while!” And he deposited an object twisted up in a bit of gauze in the soldier’s eager palm. It was a copper bullet the size of a marble.

“Oh, boy!” ejaculated the private in deep ecstatic joy. “She’s a whale! A regular Big Bertha! No wonder she stopped me. Say, captain,” he hailed the surgeon who was passing, “can’t I go back to my outfit? I don’t want to lose that gang. And I feel fine.”

The orderly chuckled as he warped his man’s free arm into the flannel shirt. “Feel so darned nifty you’d like to go out and chop down a couple or three trees just for sport--hey?”

Outside, upon the road, the ambulances were loading rapidly and rumbling off into the gloom. The sergeant, the man of the hour, oversaw all.

“Gently there!” This to the brancardiers as they lifted a litter with a recumbent figure swathed in blankets and shot it into the ambulance. “You have three in there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, beat it! Now how many more are there left?”

From the steps of the château Major M----, in white cap and operating apron, surveyed the scene. The procession passed briskly.

Ambulances rolled up, loaded and disappeared. Not a light showed. The men were mere dusky patches of gloom moving through denser gloom. Overhead the sky was equally dark, fitting the earth close, like the stopper of a bottle.

“I wonder how it feels,” I said, “to be lying in the little black interior of those ambulances and rumbling off to God knows where.”

“Sometimes very dramatic things happen in those same little black interiors,” observed the major grimly.

An orderly approached, saluted the major.

“Sir, there’s a light shining out of one of the upper windows. It makes quite a projection. One of the drivers marked it far down the road.”

“Go up and tell the nurse to close the shutter,” commanded the major tersely. “Tell her to go all over the house. We don’t want a bomb dropped in the midst of this party.”

“Have you ever had any disagreeable experiences with wounded German prisoners?” I inquired.

“We’ve not had many of their wounded, but one night we got in a Prussian lieutenant. I put him in a tent with a bunch of Germans, all in pretty bad shape. He shouted and swore like a trooper for being subjected to the hideous ignominy of having to breathe the same polluted air as his men. ’Twas an American atrocity! He said he was a Prussian officer, and he haughtily demanded to be changed to an officers’ ward.”

“And what did you do? Assign him to a private room with a special nurse and send up iced champagne?”

“Something like that! I ordered his cot changed, and I placed him between two poor German devils who were dying of gas gangrene. They smelled to heaven! I thought if our own nurses could tend to those fellows it might do his lord-highmightiness good to lie between ’em for a while! In contrast to his conduct I had a young American lieutenant out in one of the tents, Ward B, and it was not until he was evacuated that I learned he was an officer.

“‘Why, lieutenant,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I’d have placed you in the officers’ ward.’

“‘Oh, that’s all right, sir,’ he laughed. ‘What’s good enough for my men is good enough for me.’ And that is the difference in a nutshell between autocracy and democracy.”

One of the medical staff approached hurriedly. “Sir, I’d like to keep some few of these cases. They’re in bad shape. I hate to start them on the road. It--it’s against my conscience.”

“All right. Use your own discretion. You heard the orders, though--to make a clean sweep. It may seem hard, but the men will receive better attention than we’ll be able to give them once the rush begins. But keep them if you feel you should.”

With a breath of relief the officer turned away to countermand his order.

“Sergeant!” called the major.

“Here, sir!” came a steady reliable voice from the dark.

“Put all the wounded that are left into one tent--Ward A. How many have you?”

“About twenty-five, sir.”

“Good. Tell your men to clean up all the rest of the wards and get them into condition. And, sergeant----”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are those tent bags--the ones in which we pack the tents?”

“Upstairs in the storeroom, sir.”

“Get them down. Place one outside each tent and instruct your men in their use. Maybe you’d better assign a patrol on this road to-night.”

“Yes, sir. The officer of the day has already spoken to me about it, sir.”

“All right, sergeant. Then I guess we’re about ready for whatever may turn up. You’d better try to snatch some sleep.”

“I think I’d rather stay up, sir, if you don’t mind.”

The sergeant saluted. We went inside. Already the surgeons and the nurses had sought their respective quarters to summon what sleep they might before the storm broke. I said good night also, and was conveyed to my billet in the village, the major promising to have me roused if anything occurred. By now the sky was clear, a deep soft firmament of gleaming stars which blinked friendly reassurance to the troubled earth atom below.

“It’s all right!” they seemed mutely to say. “See, we’re still here! It’s all right!”

The wind was toward the Germans. Therefore, though already the big guns had waked to their nightly orchestra, and vivid lightninglike flashes from their flaming throats played constantly across the low horizon, yet not a single sound could be heard. All through the night, when at intervals I rose to watch, that leaping devil’s dance played noiselessly across the rosy sky. It was uncanny--lightning without thunder. Where was the sound? In the upper air reaches?

The next morning I woke to discover I had not been called. The drive, then, had not materialized. At the hospital I found that such was even the case. There was a smile in the air, and a whisper that the Americans, the previous night, had dumped twelve thousand gas shells down upon the Hun just as he was clambering over the top. The push for the moment was averted. Nevertheless a few wounded were trickling in, and upstairs in the officers’ ward I found two bedfast lieutenants. One, by his soft velvety drawl, was a Southerner. Later I learned his exact habitat was Memphis, Tennessee. The other young officer apparently had been recounting some knavery of the boche, for with my hand on the open door I heard the Tennesseean respond fervidly: “Yes, suh. They’re dirty snakes. You can’t have no commerce with them. Yuh just got to kill their souls!”

I drew back and listened, for the Tennesseean was beginning a tale.

“Yes, suh,” his cool, placid voice flowed on, “they was murderin’ us in that woods. They’d got us in a pocket and from nests of machine guns they was shellin’ us three ways. We’d had no meat for over two days. It was tough, I’m tellin’ yuh, suh. So that night I took my sergeant and went foraging in the village. It was deserted and the shells was falling right lively. Presently I shoved open the door of a barn, and there was a fine fat hawg rooting away inside.

“‘Sergeant,’ I says, ‘that hawg in there tried to bite me.’

“‘Well, suh,’ says the sergeant, ‘there ain’t no French hawg born that can bite my lieutenant and get away with it. We-all ain’t going to stand that from no hawg. No, suh!’ And so that night we had a fine mess of po’k chops. Yes, suh, those po’k chops certainly tasted grand.”

I slipped inside to have a look at the _raconteur_. He was a tall, lean, lank, freckled, solemn-looking young gentleman, with a broken ankle and a quizzical brown eye. Somehow he reminded me of Lincoln.

“Yes, suh,” he was remarking, “this sure is one damn funny man’s wah.” After I had established myself I demanded what led him to such a cynical conclusion. But he refused to be drawn, and asked instead the condition of a patient in the adjoining shock ward. I told him the man was dead.

“I’m sure sorry to heah that,” he said simply. “That man was in my outfit and a bettah boy never spit. He got his after I came in. I left a squad of five in a dugout on the side of a knoll and I told them not to stir until the shelling let up. Well, this boy says it got pretty hot and crowded inside and he stepped out a minute to breathe. And that very minute a shell dropped. He might have saved his life if he’d bandaged his leg right off; but no, suh, he told me he couldn’t think of nothing but hauling those poor fellows from that caved-in wreck--and him with one leg blowed off. That boy deserves a Croix de Guerre. I’m goin’ to write to his mothah.”

I was called away for a few minutes, and when I returned the lieutenant was embarked upon another tale:

“Yes, suh, I just couldn’t bear to see that boy’s body lyin’ out in the blisterin’ sun. By the clothes he was a Marine, and I expect he’d been hangin’ up against that bob-wire some time. I didn’t care if it was No Man’s Land. It wasn’t no fit land for an American’s body to be lyin’ out in the sun, and so I started out to fetch it in.

“‘Lemme go, lieutenant!’ one of my outfit says. I’ve got the finest outfit of boys, miss, you ever laid eyes on.”

“Maybe that’s because they’ve got such a fine lieutenant!” I said slyly.

“No, suh, that isn’t it at all!” he retorted earnestly. “Well, I says to him: ‘Man, I can’t ask for volunteers for this. It’s too danged dangerous.’ And that boy, he says to me: ‘Shucks, lieutenant! I’ll die for yuh any day with pleasure. But for God’s sake, don’t leave me lie out there like a dawg.’ So I promised, and he went out and fetched the Marine in. Two hours later that boy was shot straight between the eyes by a sniper’s bullet. I remembered what he’d said: ‘For God’s sake, lieutenant, don’t leave my body lie out like that’--and it kind of hurt my soul. So I sent him back to the rear. And we buried that boy with honahs. Yes, suh, this sure is one damn funny man’s wah!”

Downstairs the hospital seemed drowned in a drowsy Sabbath calm. Not a breath stirred. Roses drooped in the hot stillness. High overhead in a light azure sky Allied planes swam like gnats across a sun-lit stretch of water. To complete the note of peace two stray hounds dreamed on the steps or snapped languidly at blue-bottle flies. Who said there was a world war on hand? And yet, late the night before, still another warning had come over the wires, and the remaining twenty-five patients had been hurriedly transported to safer climes.

Down the road thousands of camions were passing, a steady sluggish stream. The level, poplar-bordered highway was alive with them as far as the eye could see. Camions filled with French troops; camions filled with artillery, guns, guns, guns; camions filled with horses, two to a vehicle. And after that stream of blue casques had flowed by, with scarcely a minute’s interval, came another stream--United States khaki, going up on the line. The heavy American lorries thundered by in a cloud of dust, their wheels tearing the gravel out of the roads. The men were covered with a coating of dust, thick as if they had come through a desert sandstorm. Their eye-lashes were powdered gray; their eyebrows were bleached white; their fresh skins were burned brick red; and their eyes, unprotected by that abominable visorless overseas cap, were inflamed with dust and fatigue and lack of sleep. And yet how they hurrahed, leaning far out to yell as they flashed by! They were going into hell, and they knew it.

They had no illusions about war. But the sight of those dirty, sweaty, confident men thrilled us.

At five, in front of the château, the chaplain read the burial service over the hero who had given his life to save his comrades in the dugout. Over the pine box lay the folds of the flag, a mantle of glory. Upon the rude casket some friend had placed a cross of crimson ramblers, the rich splendor of their hue and their fragrance symbolizing mutely the beauty of soul of him who lay underneath. Red roses for those who die in youth for their country! They seemed to burn in the quiet air. Their fragrance mounted like rare incense. The chaplain read the immortal words of hope: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live....” High overhead the faint reassuring drone of Allied planes mingled with the murmur of the detachment of soldiers, who with bared heads repeated softly “Our Father who art in Heaven ...” while off on the side lines stood a group of French children, awed, curious, respectful, with bunches of field daisies clutched tightly in their hands, with which, after the _Americains_ had departed, they proposed to decorate the strange soldier’s grave.

Later, in search of consolation, I wandered back to the Tennesseean’s ward. I was not disappointed. That liquid drawl flowed on, soft as the Mississippi at twilight.

“Yes, suh, we called that outfit the Midnight Regiment. I reckon yuh-all heard of them; they was stationed a while at B----. They was officered with white folks, and a friend of mine was major. Well, suh, they put that regiment alongside some French niggers from Upper Africa. Yuh’d think those two sets would amalgamate, coming from the same family tree. But no, suh! There was just one perpetual uproar. They was a-hackin’ and a-choppin’ each up with knives from mawning until night! Yuh nevah heard such takin’s-on. And the officers couldn’t find what was the row nohow. So one night the major, he says to his sergeant, a big negro:

“‘Sergeant,’ says he, ‘I want yuh to go out and make a private investigation of just what’s the trouble between yuh Americans and those French niggers, and hand in a confidential report.’

“‘I don’t need to go out and make no ’vestigation, major,’ says that sergeant. ‘I can report to yuh whut-all’s the trouble right now. Yes, suh!’

“‘All right, sergeant. What is it?’

“‘Well, suh, it’s like this: Evah since this heah Midnight Regiment come over to France and been a-takin’ part in this man’s wah, us-all’s been hearin’ the white folks talkin’ French. All the white folks gettin’ to talkin’ French. Yes, suh. And now we come up alongside these strange nigger folks and find them gabblin’ French too! And when niggers goes to gittin’ stuck up like that and puttin’ on proud white folks’ airs they’s jest naturally boun’ to be trouble! Yes, suh, that’s whut it is!’”

The afternoon shaded gently into night; the night’s dark hours slipped by, silent as bats’ wings; morning came again, calm, sunshiny--and still no threat of attack. It was ominous, menacing. The hospital staff rested with taut nerves, like a football team ready at a given signal to spring into intense action. But the signal was withheld.

Then suddenly one July morning about two o’clock the storm burst. The atmosphere trembled and shook to the clamor of mighty guns. Even in Paris, fifty-one miles away, their deep-throated orchestra could be heard. Pluff! Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Distant, yet clear, unmistakable, sounded those soft and sinister volleys through the night. Not since the Battle of the Marne in 1914 had Parisians heard such a violent bombardment. Some flew to the telephone. Was it a Gotha raid? Was that the outer antiaircraft barrage? No. It was the long-delayed July offensive.

THE SPITE ATTACK

The third phase of the great German offensive of 1918 began with the first light of dawn on July the fifteenth. In Paris, fifty-one miles behind Château-Thierry, that distant bombardment, violent beyond all precedent, could be distinctly heard. It could be heard, but the explosions were not like real explosions. They were like tiny, far-away echoes, ghosts of explosions--as if baseballs were being hurled with extreme force against a wall heavily padded with cotton wool. Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Pluff! Distinct, yet muted, they came, those distant thuds; denatured, so to speak, with all the sound violence extracted.

Parisians rose from their beds, stepped to the windows and leaned from their casements to listen. But immediately the nearer night noises of the city eclipsed those distant ghost roars of battle. The whir of a belated taxi through the deserted streets, the hollow ring of footsteps on the pavement, even the blinking of an eyelid--and those soft sinister booms were completely blotted out. But back in bed once more, with the windows shutting out the city sounds, the dull pounding commenced again, steady, persistent as the beat of the blood in the arteries: Pluff! Pluff-pluff! Pluff!

Thus at Paris, the heart of the world. But up at Château-Thierry, the seat of alarms, it was a vastly different affair. There was nothing dim, distant, dissolved, denatured or cotton-woolly about the cannonading in that sector. It was the storm center of the tornado. The air was thick with clamor. The heavy guns bellowed incessantly. In order to hear each other men had to lean close and shout, and then it was only by the lip movement that they could be understood. It was like trying to speak during the rushing thunder of an express train. The Prussian storm troops were attacking formidably, with all their immense prestige, and the Americans were responding coolly, methodically as the Concord minutemen, with machine gun and rifle.