Twenty-five men were making a road out of a path up the hillside.
The light batteries in the rear were impatient to advance, but
first must be done all that digging and smoothing which gains no
encrusted medals from war. The men worked like gardeners, and a
road was growing from the old pack-animal trail.
Trees arched from a field of guinea-grass which resembled young
wild corn. The day was still and dry. The men working were dressed
in the consistent blue of United States regulars. They looked
indifferent, almost stolid, despite the heat and the labour. There
was little talking. From time to time a Government pack-train, led
by a sleek-sided tender bell-mare, came from one way or the other
way, and the men stood aside as the strong, hard, black-and-tan
animals crowded eagerly after their curious little feminine
leader.
A volunteer staff-officer appeared, and, sitting on his horse in
the middle of the work, asked the sergeant in command some
questions which were apparently not relevant to any military
business. Men straggling along on various duties almost invariably
spun some kind of a joke as they passed.
A corporal and four men were guarding boxes of spare ammunition at
the top of the hill, and one of the number often went to the foot
of the hill swinging canteens.
The day wore down to the Cuban dusk, in which the shadows are all
grim and of ghostly shape. The men began to lift their eyes from
the shovels and picks, and glance in the direction of their camp.
The sun threw his last lance through the foliage. The steep
mountain-range on the right turned blue and as without detail as a
curtain. The tiny ruby of light ahead meant that the
ammunition-guard were cooking their supper. From somewhere in the
world came a single rifle-shot.
Figures appeared, dim in the shadow of the trees. A murmur, a sigh
of quiet relief, arose from the working party. Later, they swung up
the hill in an unformed formation, being always like soldiers, and
unable even to carry a spade save like United States regular
soldiers. As they passed through some fields, the bland white light
of the end of the day feebly touched each hard bronze
profile.
"Wonder if we'll git anythin' to eat," said Watkins, in a low
voice.
"Should think so," said Nolan, in the same tone. They betrayed no
impatience; they seemed to feel a kind of awe of the
situation.
The sergeant turned. One could see the cool grey eye flashing under
the brim of the campaign hat. "What in hell you fellers kickin'
about?" he asked. They made no reply, understanding that they were
being suppressed.
As they moved on, a murmur arose from the tall grass on either
hand. It was the noise from the bivouac of ten thousand men,
although one saw practically nothing from the low-cart roadway. The
sergeant led his party up a wet clay bank and into a trampled
field. Here were scattered tiny white shelter tents, and in the
darkness they were luminous like the rearing stones in a graveyard.
A few fires burned blood-red, and the shadowy figures of men moved
with no more expression of detail than there is in the swaying of
foliage on a windy night.
The working party felt their way to where their tents were pitched.
A man suddenly cursed; he had mislaid something, and he knew he was
not going to find it that night. Watkins spoke again with the
monotony of a clock, "Wonder if we'll git anythin' to eat."
Martin, with eyes turned pensively to the stars, began a treatise.
"Them Spaniards—"
"Oh, quit it," cried Nolan. "What th' piper do you know about th'
Spaniards, you fat-headed Dutchman? Better think of your belly, you
blunderin' swine, an' what you're goin' to put in it, grass or
dirt."
A laugh, a sort of a deep growl, arose from the prostrate men. In
the meantime the sergeant had reappeared and was standing over
them. "No rations to-night," he said gruffly, and turning on his
heel, walked away.
This announcement was received in silence. But Watkins had flung
himself face downward, and putting his lips close to a tuft of
grass, he formulated oaths. Martin arose and, going to his shelter,
crawled in sulkily. After a long interval Nolan said aloud, "Hell!"
Grierson, enlisted for the war, raised a querulous voice. "Well, I
wonder when we will git fed?"
From the ground about him came a low chuckle, full of ironical
comment upon Grierson's lack of certain qualities which the other
men felt themselves to possess.
II
In the cold light of dawn the men were on their knees, packing,
strapping, and buckling. The comic toy hamlet of shelter-tents had
been wiped out as if by a cyclone. Through the trees could be seen
the crimson of a light battery's blankets, and the wheels creaked
like the sound of a musketry fight. Nolan, well gripped by his
shelter tent, his blanket, and his cartridge-belt, and bearing his
rifle, advanced upon a small group of men who were hastily
finishing a can of coffee.
"Say, give us a drink, will yeh?" he asked, wistfully. He was as
sad-eyed as an orphan beggar.
Every man in the group turned to look him straight in the face. He
had asked for the principal ruby out of each one's crown. There was
a grim silence. Then one said, "What fer?" Nolan cast his glance to
the ground, and went away abashed.
But he espied Watkins and Martin surrounding Grierson, who had
gained three pieces of hard-tack by mere force of his audacious
inexperience. Grierson was fending his comrades off
tearfully.
"Now, don't be damn pigs," he cried. "Hold on a minute." Here Nolan
asserted a claim. Grierson groaned. Kneeling piously, he divided
the hard-tack with minute care into four portions. The men, who had
had their heads together like players watching a wheel of fortune,
arose suddenly, each chewing. Nolan interpolated a drink of water,
and sighed contentedly.
The whole forest seemed to be moving. From the field on the other
side of the road a column of men in blue was slowly pouring; the
battery had creaked on ahead; from the rear came a hum of advancing
regiments. Then from a mile away rang the noise of a shot; then
another shot; in a moment the rifles there were drumming, drumming,
drumming. The artillery boomed out suddenly. A day of battle was
begun.
The men made no exclamations. They rolled their eyes in the
direction of the sound, and then swept with a calm glance the
forests and the hills which surrounded them, implacably mysterious
forests and hills which lent to every rifle-shot the ominous
quality which belongs to secret assassination. The whole scene
would have spoken to the private soldiers of ambushes, sudden flank
attacks, terrible disasters, if it were not for those cool
gentlemen with shoulder-straps and swords who, the private soldiers
knew, were of another world and omnipotent for the business.
The battalions moved out into the mud and began a leisurely march
in the damp shade of the trees. The advance of two batteries had
churned the black soil into a formidable paste. The brown leggings
of the men, stained with the mud of other days, took on a deeper
colour. Perspiration broke gently out on the reddish faces. With
his heavy roll of blanket and the half of a shelter-tent crossing
his right shoulder and under his left arm, each man presented the
appearance of being clasped from behind, wrestler fashion, by a
pair of thick white arms.
There was something distinctive in the way they carried their
rifles. There was the grace of an old hunter somewhere in it, the
grace of a man whose rifle has become absolutely a part of himself.
Furthermore, almost every blue shirt sleeve was rolled to the
elbow, disclosing fore-arms of almost incredible brawn. The rifles
seemed light, almost fragile, in the hands that were at the end of
these arms, never fat but always with rolling muscles and veins
that seemed on the point of bursting. And another thing was the
silence and the marvellous impassivity of the faces as the column
made its slow way toward where the whole forest spluttered and
fluttered with battle.
Opportunely, the battalion was halted a-straddle of a stream, and
before it again moved, most of the men had filled their canteens.
The firing increased. Ahead and to the left a battery was booming
at methodical intervals, while the infantry racket was that
continual drumming which, after all, often sounds like rain on a
roof. Directly ahead one could hear the deep voices of
field-pieces.
Some wounded Cubans were carried by in litters improvised from
hammocks swung on poles. One had a ghastly cut in the throat,
probably from a fragment of shell, and his head was turned as if
Providence particularly wished to display this wide and lapping
gash to the long column that was winding toward the front. And
another Cuban, shot through the groin, kept up a continual wail as
he swung from the tread of his bearers. "Ay—ee! Ay—ee! Madre mia!
Madre mia!" He sang this bitter ballad into the ears of at least
three thousand men as they slowly made way for his bearers on the
narrow wood-path. These wounded insurgents were, then, to a large
part of the advancing army, the visible messengers of bloodshed and
death, and the men regarded them with thoughtful awe. This doleful
sobbing cry—"Madre mia"—was a tangible consequent misery of all
that firing on in front into which the men knew they were soon to
be plunged. Some of them wished to inquire of the bearers the
details of what had happened; but they could not speak Spanish, and
so it was as if fate had intentionally sealed the lips of all in
order that even meagre information might not leak out concerning
this mystery—battle. On the other hand, many unversed private
soldiers looked upon the unfortunate as men who had seen thousands
maimed and bleeding, and absolutely could not conjure any further
interest in such scenes.
A young staff-officer passed on horseback. The vocal Cuban was
always wailing, but the officer wheeled past the bearers without
heeding anything. And yet he never before had seen such a sight.
His case was different from that of the private soldiers. He heeded
nothing because he was busy—immensely busy and hurried with a
multitude of reasons and desires for doing his duty perfectly. His
whole life had been a mere period of preliminary reflection for
this situation, and he had no clear idea of anything save his
obligation as an officer. A man of this kind might be stupid; it is
conceivable that in remote cases certain bumps on his head might be
composed entirely of wood; but those traditions of fidelity and
courage which have been handed to him from generation to
generation, and which he has tenaciously preserved despite the
persecution of legislators and the indifference of his country,
make it incredible that in battle he should ever fail to give his
best blood and his best thought for his general, for his men, and
for himself. And so this young officer in the shapeless hat and the
torn and dirty shirt failed to heed the wails of the wounded man,
even as the pilgrim fails to heed the world as he raises his
illumined face toward his purpose—rightly or wrongly, his
purpose—his sky of the ideal of duty; and the wonderful part of it
is, that he is guided by an ideal which he has himself created, and
has alone protected from attack. The young man was merely an
officer in the United States regular army.
The column swung across a shallow ford and took a road which passed
the right flank of one of the American batteries. On a hill it was
booming and belching great clouds of white smoke. The infantry
looked up with interest. Arrayed below the hill and behind the
battery were the horses and limbers, the riders checking their
pawing mounts, and behind each rider a red blanket flamed against
the fervent green of the bushes. As the infantry moved along the
road, some of the battery horses turned at the noise of the
trampling feet and surveyed the men with eyes as deep as wells,
serene, mournful, generous eyes, lit heart-breakingly with
something that was akin to a philosophy, a religion of
self-sacrifice—oh, gallant, gallant horses!
"I know a feller in that battery," said Nolan, musingly. "A
driver."
"Dam sight rather be a gunner," said Martin.
"Why would ye?" said Nolan, opposingly.
"Well, I'd take my chances as a gunner b'fore I'd sit way up in th'
air on a raw-boned plug an' git shot at."
"Aw—" began Nolan.
"They've had some losses t'-day all right," interrupted
Grierson.
"Horses?" asked Watkins.
"Horses and men too," said Grierson.
"How d'yeh know?"
"A feller told me there by the ford."
They kept only a part of their minds bearing on this discussion
because they could already hear high in the air the wire-string
note of the enemy's bullets.
III
The road taken by this battalion as it followed other battalions is
something less than a mile long in its journey across a
heavily-wooded plain. It is greatly changed now,—in fact it was
metamorphosed in two days; but at that time it was a mere track
through dense shrubbery, from which rose great dignified arching
trees. It was, in fact, a path through a jungle.
The battalion had no sooner left the battery in rear when bullets
began to drive overhead. They made several different sounds, but as
these were mainly high shots it was usual for them to make the
faint note of a vibrant string, touched elusively,
half-dreamily.
The military balloon, a fat, wavering, yellow thing, was leading
the advance like some new conception of war-god. Its bloated mass
shone above the trees, and served incidentally to indicate to the
men at the rear that comrades were in advance. The track itself
exhibited for all its visible length a closely-knit procession of
soldiers in blue with breasts crossed with white shelter-tents. The
first ominous order of battle came down the line. "Use the cut-off.
Don't use the magazine until you're ordered." Non-commissioned
officers repeated the command gruffly. A sound of clicking locks
rattled along the columns. All men knew that the time had
come.
The front had burst out with a roar like a brush-fire. The balloon
was dying, dying a gigantic and public death before the eyes of two
armies. It quivered, sank, faded into the trees amid the flurry of
a battle that was suddenly and tremendously like a storm.
The American battery thundered behind the men with a shock that
seemed likely to tear the backs of their heads off. The Spanish
shrapnel fled on a line to their left, swirling and swishing in
supernatural velocity. The noise of the rifle bullets broke in
their faces like the noise of so many lamp-chimneys or sped
overhead in swift cruel spitting. And at the front the
battle-sound, as if it were simply music, was beginning to swell
and swell until the volleys rolled like a surf.
The officers shouted hoarsely, "Come on, men! Hurry up, boys! Come
on now! Hurry up!" The soldiers, running heavily in their
accoutrements, dashed forward. A baggage guard was swiftly
detailed; the men tore their rolls from their shoulders as if the
things were afire. The battalion, stripped for action, again dashed
forward.
"Come on, men! Come on!" To them the battle was as yet merely a
road through the woods crowded with troops, who lowered their heads
anxiously as the bullets fled high. But a moment later the column
wheeled abruptly to the left and entered a field of tall green
grass. The line scattered to a skirmish formation. In front was a
series of knolls treed sparsely like orchards; and although no
enemy was visible, these knolls were all popping and spitting with
rifle-fire. In some places there were to be seen long grey lines of
dirt, intrenchments. The American shells were kicking up reddish
clouds of dust from the brow of one of the knolls, where stood a
pagoda-like house. It was not much like a battle with men; it was a
battle with a bit of charming scenery, enigmatically potent for
death.
Nolan knew that Martin had suddenly fallen. "What—" he began.
"They've hit me," said Martin.
"Jesus!" said Nolan.
Martin lay on the ground, clutching his left forearm just below the
elbow with all the strength of his right hand. His lips were pursed
ruefully. He did not seem to know what to do. He continued to stare
at his arm.
Then suddenly the bullets drove at them low and hard. The men flung
themselves face downward in the grass. Nolan lost all thought of
his friend. Oddly enough, he felt somewhat like a man hiding under
a bed, and he was just as sure that he could not raise his head
high without being shot as a man hiding under a bed is sure that he
cannot raise his head without bumping it.
A lieutenant was seated in the grass just behind him. He was in the
careless and yet rigid pose of a man balancing a loaded plate on
his knee at a picnic. He was talking in soothing paternal
tones.
"Now, don't get rattled. We're all right here. Just as safe as
being in church...They're all going high. Don't mind them...Don't
mind them...They're all going high. We've got them rattled and they
can't shoot straight. Don't mind them."
The sun burned down steadily from a pale blue sky upon the
crackling woods and knolls and fields. From the roar of musketry it
might have been that the celestial heat was frying this part of the
world.
Nolan snuggled close to the grass. He watched a grey line of
intrenchments, above which floated the veriest gossamer of smoke. A
flag lolled on a staff behind it. The men in the trench volleyed
whenever an American shell exploded near them. It was some kind of
infantile defiance. Frequently a bullet came from the woods
directly behind Nolan and his comrades. They thought at the time
that these bullets were from the rifle of some incompetent soldier
of their own side.
There was no cheering. The men would have looked about them,
wondering where was the army, if it were not that the crash of the
fighting for the distance of a mile denoted plainly enough where
was the army.
Officially, the battalion had not yet fired a shot; there had been
merely some irresponsible popping by men on the extreme left flank.
But it was known that the lieutenant-colonel who had been in
command was dead—shot through the heart—and that the captains were
thinned down to two. At the rear went on a long tragedy, in which
men, bent and hasty, hurried to shelter with other men, helpless,
dazed, and bloody. Nolan knew of it all from the hoarse and
affrighted voices which he heard as he lay flattened in the grass.
There came to him a sense of exultation. Here, then, was one of
those dread and lurid situations, which in a nation's history stand
out in crimson letters, becoming a tale of blood to stir generation
after generation. And he was in it, and unharmed. If he lived
through the battle, he would be a hero of the desperate fight at—;
and here he wondered for a second what fate would be pleased to
bestow as a name for this battle.
But it is quite sure that hardly another man in the battalion was
engaged in any thoughts concerning the historic. On the contrary,
they deemed it ill that they were being badly cut up on a most
unimportant occasion. It would have benefited the conduct of
whoever were weak if they had known that they were engaged in a
battle that would be famous for ever.
IV
Martin had picked himself up from where the bullet had knocked him
and addressed the lieutenant. "I'm hit, sir," he said.
The lieutenant was very busy. "All right, all right," he said, just
heeding the man enough to learn where he was wounded. "Go over that
way. You ought to see a dressing-station under those trees."
Martin found himself dizzy and sick. The sensation in his arm was
distinctly galvanic. The feeling was so strange that he could
wonder at times if a wound was really what ailed him. Once, in this
dazed way, he examined his arm; he saw the hole. Yes, he was shot;
that was it. And more than in any other way it affected him with a
profound sadness.
As directed by the lieutenant, he went to the clump of trees, but
he found no dressing-station there. He found only a dead soldier
lying with his face buried in his arms and with his shoulders
humped high as if he were convulsively sobbing. Martin decided to
make his way to the road, deeming that he thus would better his
chances of getting to a surgeon. But he suddenly found his way
blocked by a fence of barbed wire. Such was his mental condition
that he brought up at a rigid halt before this fence, and stared
stupidly at it. It did not seem to him possible that this obstacle
could be defeated by any means. The fence was there, and it stopped
his progress. He could not go in that direction.
But as he turned he espied that procession of wounded men, strange
pilgrims, that had already worn a path in the tall grass. They were
passing through a gap in the fence. Martin joined them. The bullets
were flying over them in sheets, but many of them bore themselves
as men who had now exacted from fate a singular immunity. Generally
there were no outcries, no kicking, no talk at all. They too, like
Martin, seemed buried in a vague but profound melancholy.
But there was one who cried out loudly. A man shot in the head was
being carried arduously by four comrades, and he continually yelled
one word that was terrible in its primitive strength,—"Bread!
Bread! Bread!" Following him and his bearers were a limping crowd
of men less cruelly wounded, who kept their eyes always fixed on
him, as if they gained from his extreme agony some balm for their
own sufferings.
"Bread! Give me bread!"
Martin plucked a man by the sleeve. The man had been shot in the
foot, and was making his way with the help of a curved, incompetent
stick. It is an axiom of war that wounded men can never find
straight sticks.
"What's the matter with that feller?" asked Martin.
"Nutty," said the man.
"Why is he?"
"Shot in th' head," answered the other, impatiently.
The wail of the sufferer arose in the field amid the swift rasp of
bullets and the boom and shatter of shrapnel. "Bread! Bread! Oh,
God, can't you give me bread? Bread!" The bearers of him were
suffering exquisite agony, and often they exchanged glances which
exhibited their despair of ever getting free of this tragedy. It
seemed endless.
"Bread! Bread! Bread!"
But despite the fact that there was always in the way of this crowd
a wistful melancholy, one must know that there were plenty of men
who laughed, laughed at their wounds whimsically, quaintly
inventing odd humours concerning bicycles and cabs, extracting from
this shedding of their blood a wonderful amount of material for
cheerful badinage, and, with their faces twisted from pain as they
stepped, they often joked like music-hall stars. And perhaps this
was the most tearful part of all.
They trudged along a road until they reached a ford. Here under the
eave of the bank lay a dismal company. In the mud and in the damp
shade of some bushes were a half-hundred pale-faced men prostrate.
Two or three surgeons were working there. Also, there was a
chaplain, grim-mouthed, resolute, his surtout discarded. Overhead
always was that incessant maddening wail of bullets.
Martin was standing gazing drowsily at the scene when a surgeon
grabbed him. "Here, what's the matter with you?" Martin was
daunted. He wondered what he had done that the surgeon should be so
angry with him.
"In the arm," he muttered, half-shamefacedly.
After the surgeon had hastily and irritably bandaged the injured
member he glared at Martin and said, "You can walk all right, can't
you?"
"Yes, sir," said Martin.
"Well, now, you just make tracks down that road."
"Yes, sir." Martin went meekly off. The doctor had seemed
exasperated almost to the point of madness.
The road was at this time swept with the fire of a body of Spanish
sharpshooters who had come cunningly around the flanks of the
American army, and were now hidden in the dense foliage that lined
both sides of the road. They were shooting at everything. The road
was as crowded as a street in a city, and at an absurdly short
range they emptied their rifles at the passing people. They were
aided always by the over-sweep from the regular Spanish line of
battle.
Martin was sleepy from his wound. He saw tragedy follow tragedy,
but they created in him no feeling of horror.
A man with a red cross on his arm was leaning against a great tree.
Suddenly he tumbled to the ground, and writhed for a moment in the
way of a child oppressed with colic. A comrade immediately began to
bustle importantly. "Here," he called to Martin, "help me carry
this man, will you?"
Martin looked at him with dull scorn. "I'll be damned if I do," he
said. "Can't carry myself, let alone somebody else."
This answer, which rings now so inhuman, pitiless, did not affect
the other man. "Well, all right," he said. "Here comes some other
fellers." The wounded man had now turned blue-grey; his eyes were
closed; his body shook in a gentle, persistent chill.
Occasionally Martin came upon dead horses, their limbs sticking out
and up like stakes. One beast mortally shot, was besieged by three
or four men who were trying to push it into the bushes, where it
could live its brief time of anguish without thrashing to death any
of the wounded men in the gloomy procession.
The mule train, with extra ammunition, charged toward the front,
still led by the tinkling bell-mare.
An ambulance was stuck momentarily in the mud, and above the crack
of battle one could hear the familiar objurgations of the driver as
he whirled his lash.
Two privates were having a hard time with a wounded captain, whom
they were supporting to the rear, He was half cursing, half wailing
out the information that he not only would not go another step
toward the rear, but that he was certainly going to return at once
to the front. They begged, pleaded at great length as they
continually headed him off. They were not unlike two nurses with an
exceptionally bad and headstrong little duke.
The wounded soldiers paused to look impassively upon this struggle.
They were always like men who could not be aroused by anything
further.
The visible hospital was mainly straggling thickets intersected
with narrow paths, the ground being covered with men. Martin saw a
busy person with a book and a pencil, but he did not approach him
to become officially a member of the hospital. All he desired was
rest and immunity from nagging. He took seat painfully under a bush
and leaned his back upon the trunk. There he remained thinking, his
face wooden.
V
"My Gawd," said Nolan, squirming on his belly in the grass, "I
can't stand this much longer."
Then suddenly every rifle in the firing line seemed to go off of
its own accord. It was the result of an order, but few men heard
the order; in the main they had fired because they heard others
fire, and their sense was so quick that the volley did not sound
too ragged. These marksmen had been lying for nearly an hour in
stony silence, their sights adjusted, their fingers fondling their
rifles, their eyes staring at the intrenchments of the enemy. The
battalion had suffered heavy losses, and these losses had been hard
to bear, for a soldier always reasons that men lost during a period
of inaction are men badly lost.
The line now sounded like a great machine set to running
frantically in the open air, the bright sunshine of a green field.
To the prut of the magazine rifles was added the under-chorus of
the clicking mechanism, steady and swift, as if the hand of one
operator was controlling it all. It reminds one always of a loom, a
great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to
weave a woof of thin red threads, the cloth of death. By the men's
shoulders under their eager hands dropped continually the yellow
empty shells, spinning into the crushed grass blades to remain
there and mark for the belated eye the line of a battalion's
fight.
All impatience, all rebellious feeling, had passed out of the men
as soon as they had been allowed to use their weapons against the
enemy. They now were absorbed in this business of hitting
something, and all the long training at the rifle ranges, all the
pride of the marksman which had been so long alive in them, made
them forget for the time everything but shooting. They were as
deliberate and exact as so many watchmakers.
A new sense of safety was rightfully upon them. They knew that
those mysterious men in the high far trenches in front were having
the bullets sping in their faces with relentless and remarkable
precision; they knew, in fact, that they were now doing the thing
which they had been trained endlessly to do, and they knew they
were doing it well. Nolan, for instance, was overjoyed. "Plug 'em,"
he said: "Plug 'em." He laid his face to his rifle as if it were
his mistress. He was aiming under the shadow of a certain portico
of a fortified house: there he could faintly see a long black line
which he knew to be a loop-hole cut for riflemen, and he knew that
every shot of his was going there under the portico, mayhap through
the loop-hole to the brain of another man like himself. He loaded
the awkward magazine of his rifle again and again. He was so intent
that he did not know of new orders until he saw the men about him
scrambling to their feet and running forward, crouching low as they
ran.
He heard a shout. "Come on, boys! We can't be last! We're going up!
We're going up." He sprang to his feet and, stooping, ran with the
others. Something fine, soft, gentle, touched his heart as he ran.
He had loved the regiment, the army, because the regiment, the
army, was his life,—he had no other outlook; and now these men, his
comrades, were performing his dream-scenes for him; they were doing
as he had ordained in his visions. It is curious that in this
charge he considered himself as rather unworthy. Although he
himself was in the assault with the rest of them, it seemed to him
that his comrades were dazzlingly courageous. His part, to his
mind, was merely that of a man who was going along with the
crowd.
He saw Grierson biting madly with his pincers at a barbed-wire
fence. They were half-way up the beautiful sylvan slope; there was
no enemy to be seen, and yet the landscape rained bullets. Somebody
punched him violently in the stomach. He thought dully to lie down
and rest, but instead he fell with a crash.
The sparse line of men in blue shirts and dirty slouch hats swept
on up the hill. He decided to shut his eyes for a moment because he
felt very dreamy and peaceful. It seemed only a minute before he
heard a voice say, "There he is." Grierson and Watkins had come to
look for him. He searched their faces at once and keenly, for he
had a thought that the line might be driven down the hill and leave
him in Spanish hands. But he saw that everything was secure, and he
prepared no questions.
"Nolan," said Grierson clumsily, "do you know me?"
The man on the ground smiled softly. "Of course I know you, you
chowder-faced monkey. Why wouldn't I know you?"
Watkins knelt beside him. "Where did they plug you, old boy?"
Nolan was somewhat dubious. "It ain't much. I don't think but it's
somewheres there." He laid a finger on the pit of his stomach. They
lifted his shirt, and then privately they exchanged a glance of
horror.
"Does it hurt, Jimmie?" said Grierson, hoarsely.
"No," said Nolan, "it don't hurt any, but I feel sort of
dead-to-the-world and numb all over. I don't think it's very
bad."
"Oh, it's all right," said Watkins.
"What I need is a drink," said Nolan, grinning at them. "I'm
chilly—lying on this damp ground."
"It ain't very damp, Jimmie," said Grierson.
"Well, it is damp," said Nolan, with sudden irritability. "I can
feel it. I'm wet, I tell you—wet through—just from lying
here."
They answered hastily. "Yes, that's so, Jimmie. It is damp. That's
so."
"Just put your hand under my back and see how wet the ground is,"
he said.
"No," they answered. "That's all right, Jimmie. We know it's
wet."
"Well, put your hand under and see," he cried, stubbornly.
"Oh, never mind, Jimmie."
"No," he said, in a temper. "See for yourself." Grierson seemed to
be afraid of Nolan's agitation, and so he slipped a hand under the
prostrate man, and presently withdrew it covered with blood. "Yes,"
he said, hiding his hand carefully from Nolan's eyes, "you were
right, Jimmie."
"Of course I was," said Nolan, contentedly closing his eyes. "This
hillside holds water like a swamp." After a moment he said, "Guess
I ought to know. I'm flat here on it, and you fellers are standing
up."
He did not know he was dying. He thought he was holding an argument
on the condition of the turf.
VI
"Cover his face," said Grierson, in a low and husky voice
afterwards.
"What'll I cover it with?" said Watkins.
They looked at themselves. They stood in their shirts, trousers,
leggings, shoes; they had nothing.
"Oh," said Grierson, "here's his hat." He brought it and laid it on
the face of the dead man. They stood for a time. It was apparent
that they thought it essential and decent to say or do something.
Finally Watkins said in a broken voice, "Aw, it's a dam shame."
They moved slowly off toward the firing line.
* * *
In the blue gloom of evening, in one of the fever-tents, the two
rows of still figures became hideous, charnel. The languid movement
of a hand was surrounded with spectral mystery, and the occasional
painful twisting of a body under a blanket was terrifying, as if
dead men were moving in their graves under the sod. A heavy odour
of sickness and medicine hung in the air.
"What regiment are you in?" said a feeble voice.
"Twenty-ninth Infantry," answered another voice.
"Twenty-ninth! Why, the man on the other side of me is in the
Twenty-ninth."
"He is?...Hey, there, partner, are you in the Twenty-ninth?"
A third voice merely answered wearily. "Martin of C Company."
"What? Jack, is that you?"
"It's part of me...Who are you?"
"Grierson, you fat-head. I thought you were wounded."
There was the noise of a man gulping a great drink of water, and at
its conclusion Martin said, "I am."
"Well, what you doin' in the fever-place, then?"
Martin replied with drowsy impatience. "Got the fever too."
"Gee!" said Grierson.
Thereafter there was silence in the fever-tent, save for the noise
made by a man over in a corner—a kind of man always found in an
American crowd—a heroic, implacable comedian and patriot, of a
humour that has bitterness and ferocity and love in it, and he was
wringing from the situation a grim meaning by singing the
"Star-Spangled Banner" with all the ardour which could be procured
from his fever-stricken body.
"Billie," called Martin in a low voice, "where's Jimmy
Nolan?"
"He's dead," said Grierson.
A triangle of raw gold light shone on a side of the tent. Somewhere
in the valley an engine's bell was ringing, and it sounded of peace
and home as if it hung on a cow's neck.
"And where's Ike Watkins?"
"Well, he ain't dead, but he got shot through the lungs. They say
he ain't got much show."
Through the clouded odours of sickness and medicine rang the
dauntless voice of the man in the corner.