Golden Lads Part 6

The sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones, a crisp crackle as they strike and bounce. We ran and picked them up. They were blunted by smiting on the paving. Any one of them would have plowed into soft flesh and found the bone and shattered it. They seem harmless because they make so little noise. They don't scream and wail and thunder. Our guns, back on the hillocks of the Ghent road, grew louder and more frequent. Each minute now was cut into by a roar, or a fainter rumble.

The battle was on. Our barricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like the center of a typhoon.

Yonder we could see the ca.n.a.l, fifty feet away, at the foot of our street. On the farther side behind the river front houses lay the Germans, ready to sally out and charge. It would be all right if they came quickly. But a few hours of waiting for them on an empty stomach, and having them disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they would hurry and have it over with, or else go away for good. Civilians stumbling and bleeding went past us.

And that was how the morning went by, heavy footed, unrelieved, with a sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us was puffing away, and deciding there was nothing to this German attack, after all. A smoke makes just the difference between sticking it out or acting the coward's part.

Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days, when external event is lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps always feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster.

The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.

We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a little way out. In the road ahead of us, a sh.e.l.l had just splashed an artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splintered wood of the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine masonry dust blowing into the eyes. Houses around us crumpled up at one blast, and then shot a thick brown cloud of dust, and out of the cloud a high central flame that leaped and spread. With the wailing of sh.e.l.ls in the air, every few seconds, the thud and thunder of their impact, the scattering of the shattered metal, it was one of the hot, thorough bombardments of the war. It cleared the town of troops, after tearing their ranks. But it left wounded men in the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. The Grand Place and the Hotel were the center of the fire. Here we had to wait fifteen minutes, while the wounded were made ready for our two cars. It was then we turned to tobacco as to a friend. I remember the eas.e.m.e.nt that came when I found I had cigars in my waistcoat pocket. The act of lighting a cigar, and pulling at it briskly, was a relief.

There was a second of time when we could hear a sh.e.l.l, about to burst close, before it struck. It came, sharpening its nose on the air, making a shrill whistle with a moan in it, that gathered volume as it neared.

There was a menace in the sound. It seemed to approach in a vast enveloping ma.s.s that can't be escaped, filling all out-doors, and sure to find you. It was as if the all-including sound were the missile itself, with no hiding place offered. And yet the sh.e.l.l is generally a little three-or-four inch thing, like a flower-pot, hurtling through the scenery. But bruised nerves refuse to listen to reason, and again and again I ducked as I heard that high wail, believing I was about to be struck.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOOR CHALKED BY THE GERMANS.

One of the 100 houses in Termonde with the direction "Do not Burn"

written in German. One thousand one hundred houses were burned, house by house. Photograph by Radclyffe Dugmore.]

In that second of tension, it was a pleasant thing to draw in on a b.u.t.t--to discharge the smoke, a second later, carelessly, as who should say, "It is nothing." The little cylinder was a lightning conductor to lead away the danger from a vital part. It let the nervousness leak off into biting and puffing, and making a play of fingering the stub, instead of striking into the stomach and the courage. It gave the troubled face something to do, and let the writhing hand busy itself. It saved me from knowing just how frightened I was.

But what of the wounded themselves? They have to endure all that dreariness of long waiting, and the pressure of danger, and then, for good measure, a burden of pain. So I come to the men who are revealing human nature at a higher pitch than any others in the war. The trench-digging, elderly chaps are patient and long-enduring, and the fighting men are as gallant as any the ballad-mongers used to rime about.

But it is of the wounded that one would like to speak in a way to win respect for them rather than pity. I think some American observers have missed the truth about the wounded. They have told of the groaning and screaming, the heavy smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of vivid horror. But the final impression left on me by caring for many hundred wounded men is that of their patience and cheeriness. I think they would resent having a sordid pen picture made of their suffering and letting it go at that. After all, it is their wound: they suffered it for a purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by will power and the Gallic touch of humor. Suffering borne n.o.bly merits something more than an emphasis on the blood and the moan. To speak of these wounded men as of a heap of futile misery is like missing the worthiness of motherhood in the details of obstetrics.

It was thought we moderns had gone soft, but it seems we were storing up reserves of stoic strength and courage. This war has drawn on them more heavily than any former test, and they have met all its demands.

Sometimes, being tired, I would drop my corner of the stretcher, a few inches suddenly. This would draw a quick intake of the breath from the hurt man and an "aahh"--but not once a word of blame. I should want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium whom I carried had pa.s.sed beyond littleness.

Once we had a French Zouave officer on the stretcher. He was wounded in the right arm and the stomach. Every careen of the ambulance over cobble and into sh.e.l.l-hole was a thrust into his hurt. We had to carry him all the way from the Nieuport cellar to Zuydcoote Hospital, ten miles. The driver was one more of the American young men who have gone over into France to pay back a little of what we owe her. I want to give his name, Robert Cardell Toms, because it is good for us to know that we have brave and tender gentlemen. On this long haul, as always, he drove with extreme care, changing his speed without the staccato jerk, avoiding b.u.mps and holes of the trying road. When we reached the hospital, he ran ahead into the ward to prepare the bed. The officer beckoned me to him. He spoke with some difficulty, as the effort caught him in the wound of his stomach.

"Please be good enough," he said, "to give my thanks to the chauffeur.

He has driven me down with much consideration. He cares for wounded men."

Where other races are grateful and inarticulate, the French are able to put into speech the last fine touch of feeling.

My friend kept a supply of cigarettes for his ambulance cases, and as soon as the hour-long drive began we dealt them out to the bandaged men.

How often we have started with a groaning man for the ride to Zuydcoote, and how well the trip went, when we had lighted his cigarette for him.

It brought back a little of the conversation and the merriment which it had called out in better days. It is such a relief to be wounded. You have done your duty, and now you are to have a little rest. With a clear conscience, you can sink back into laziness, far away from noise and filth. Luck has come along and pulled the pack off your back, and the responsibility from your sick mind. No weary city clerk ever went to his seash.o.r.e holiday with more blitheness than some of our wounded showed as they came riding in from the Nieuport trenches at full length on the stretcher, and singing all the way. What is a splintered forehead or a damaged leg compared to the happiness of an honorable discharge? Nothing to do for a month but lie quietly, and watch the wholesome, clean-clad nurse. I am not forgetting the sadness of many men, nor the men hurt to death, who lay motionless and did not sing, and some of whom died while we were on the road to help. I am only trying to tell of the one man in every four who was glad of his enforced rest, and who didn't let a little thing like agony conquer his gaiety. Those men were the Joyous Wounded. I have seldom seen men more light hearted.

Word came to my wife one day that several hundred wounded were side-tracked at Furnes railway station. With two nurses she hurried to them, carrying hot soup. The women went through the train, feeding the soldiers, giving them a drink of cold water, and bringing some of them hot water for washing. Then, being fed, they were ready for a smoke, and my wife began walking down the foul-smelling ambulance car with boxes of supplies, letting each man take out a cigarette and a match. The car was slung with double layers of stretcher bunks. Some men were freshly wounded, others were convalescent. A few lay in a stupor. She provided ten or a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they lighted up and were well under way. She had so many patients that day that she was not watching the individual man in her general distribution. She came half way down the car, and held out her store to a soldier without looking at him. He glanced up and grinned. The men in the bunks around him laughed heartily. Then she looked down at him. He was flapping the two stumps of his arms and was smiling. His hands had been blown off. She put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone.

Comradeship was left for him, and here was the lighted cigarette expressing that comradeship.

WAS IT REAL?

The man was an old-time friend. In the days of our youth, we had often worked together. He was small and nervous, with a quick eye. He always wore me down after a few hours, because he was restless and untiring. He was named Romeyn Rossiter--one of those well-born names. We had met in times before the advent of the telescopic lens, and he used a box camera, tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we snapped polo ponies, coming at full tilt after the ball, riding each other off, while he would stand between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on him. I had to shove him out of the way, at the last tick, when the hoofs were loud. I often wondered if those ponies didn't look suddenly large and imminent on the little gla.s.s rectangle into which he was peering. That was the kind of person he was. He was glued to his work. He was a curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is well developed in most of us, was left out of his make-up. No credit to him. It merely wasn't there. He was color-blind to danger. He had spent his life everywhere by bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality.

I used to write the text around his pictures, captions underneath them, and then words spilled out over the white paper between his six by tens.

We published in the country life magazines. They gave generous big display pages. In those days people used to read what I wrote, because they wanted to find out about the pictures, and the pictures were fine.

You must have seen Rossiter's work--caribou, beavers, Walter Travis coming through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward giving a twist delivery.

We had the field to ourselves for two or three years, before the other fellows caught the idea, and broke our partnership. I turned to literature, and he began drifting around the world for long shots. He'd be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of Africa--a lion drinking under a tropical moon. Two more years, and I had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those chaps that, once in your life, is like the _motif_ in an opera, or like the high-cla.s.s story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on a coping and ends with that brick smiting the hero's head.

It was London where I ran into him at last.

"Happy days?" I said, with a rising inflection.

"So, so," he answered.

He was doing the free-lance game. He had drifted over to England with his $750 moving-picture machine to see what he could harvest with a quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him. He wasn't going to be happy till he could get the boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with him? I would.

Next day, we took the Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend, went by train to Ghent, and trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.

Those were the early days of the war when you could go anywhere, if you did it nicely. The Belgians are a friendly people. They can't bear to say No, and if they saw a hard-working man come along with his eye on his job, they didn't like to turn him back, even if he was mussing up an infantry formation or exposing a trench. They'd rather share the risk, as long as it brought him in returns.

When we footed it out that morning, we didn't know we were in for one of the Famous Days of history. You never can tell in this war. Sometimes you'll trot out to the front, all keyed up, and then sit around among the "Set-Sanks" for a month playing pinochle, and watching the flies chase each other across the marmalade. And then a sultry dull day will suddenly show you things....

Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate narrow little streets that run down to the ca.n.a.l, like spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its earthworks and group of defenders. Out over the ca.n.a.l stretched footbridges, and these were thickly sown with barbed wire.

"Great luck," said Rossiter. "They're making an old-time barricade. It's as good as the days of the Commune. Do you remember your street-fighting in Les Miserables?"

"I surely do," I replied. "Breast high earthworks, and the 'citizens'

crouched behind under the rattle of bullets."

"This is going to be good," he went on in high enthusiasm. The soldiers were rolling heavy barrels to the gutter, and knocking off the heads.

The barrels were packed with fish, about six inches long, with scales that went blue and white in the fresh morning light. The fish slithered over the cobbles, and the soldiers stumbled on their slippery bodies.

They set the barrels on end, side by side, and heaped the cracks between and the face with sods of earth, thick-packed clods, with gra.s.s growing.

The gra.s.s was bright green, unwilted. A couple of peasant hand-carts were tilted on end, and the flooring sodded like the barrels.

"Look who's coming," pointed Rossiter, swiveling his lens sharply around.

Steaming gently into our narrow street from the Grand Place came a great Sava mitrailleuse--big steel turret, painted lead blue, three men sitting behind the swinging turret. One of the men, taller by a head than his fellows, had a white rag bound round his head, where a bullet had clipped off a piece of his forehead the week before. His face was set and pale. Sitting on high, in the grim machine, with his bandage worn as a plume, he looked like the presiding spirit of the fracas.

"It's worth the trip," muttered Romeyn, grinding away on his crank.

There was something silent and efficient in the look of the big man and the big car, with its slim-waisted, bright bra.s.s gun shoving through.

"Here, have a cigarette," said Rossiter, as the powerful thing glided by.

He pa.s.sed up a box to the three gunners.

"_Bonne chance_," said the big man, as he puffed out rings and fondled the trim bronze body of his Lady of Death. They let the car slide down the street to the left end of the barricade, where it came to rest.

Over the ca.n.a.l, out from the smoke-misted houses, came a peasant running. In his arms he carried a little girl. Her hair was light as flax, and crested with a knot of very bright red ribbon. Hair and gay ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed houses. The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces, and there, thirty feet under the crossfire, this man and his child squirmed their way through the barrier. They won through, and were lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She nestled contentedly.

"Did you get it, man? Did you get it?" I asked Rossiter.