One Man's Initiation-1917 Part 4

"We'd better go over to the quarry."

"Oh, h.e.l.l, I was sound asleep!"

A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.

"Gee, that was in the house behind us...."

"I smell gas."

"Ye d.a.m.n fool, it's carbide."

"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas."

"All right, fellers, put on your masks."

Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads sh.e.l.ls shrieked at two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the village on the other side of the valley.

"d.a.m.n foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice.

"Why don't those d.a.m.n gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?...

They must be tired like we are."

A sh.e.l.l burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.

Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre sh.e.l.l trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k, these huge ma.s.ses whirling through the evening far above his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.

The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was a small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of a long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and began talking briskly.

"We are exactly four hundred and five metres from the Boche.... Five hundred metres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der Kaiser.'"

"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la Republique', I should say."

"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in Paris."

"The sky is very beautiful to-night."

"They say they're sh.e.l.ling the Etat-Major to-day. d.a.m.ned embusques; it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."

Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and five metres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the sh.e.l.l-holes.

"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a serious case all day."

"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb....

You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."

"It was the Boche who did that.... We took that slope from them two months ago.... How does it grow?"

"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.

He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept asking himself, that the sky was a beneficent G.o.ddess who would stoop gently out of the infinite s.p.a.ces and lift him to her breast, where he could lie amid the amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously down at the spinning ball of the earth? It might have beauty if he were far enough away to clear his nostrils of the stench of pain.

"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much nearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to anyone else."

"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."

The little doctor nodded.

"G.o.d, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? n.o.body's fighting about anything.... G.o.d, it's so hideously stupid!" cried Martin, suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his pa.s.sionate revolt.

"Life is stupid," said the little doctor sententiously.

Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns.

"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'd better get your car ready, my friend."

The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that led to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of blood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle of the man had been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals, where the thighs had joined with a strong swerving of muscles to the trunk, was a depression, a hollow pool of blood, that glinted a little in the cold diffusion of grey light from the west.

The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green smoke. At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and Tom Randolph, Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nails spread flat and his head resting on the table between them, so that Martin could see the stiff black hair on top of his head and the dark nape of his neck going into shadow under the collar of the flannel shirt.

"Oh, G.o.d, it's too d.a.m.ned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide and no d.a.m.ned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.

"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were G.o.d and could look at it like that ... Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred so?"

"A question of taste ... as the lady said when she kissed the cow."

"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid d.a.m.n-fool people, like Higgins, who believes that the Bible was written in G.o.d's own handwriting and that the newspapers tell the truth."

"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."

"It is a stupid affair, _la vie_, as the doctor at P.1. said yesterday...."

"h.e.l.l, yes...."

They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in sparkling finger-like streams.

"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back his head and laughed. "They're so b.l.o.o.d.y frank. Did I tell you about what happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"

"No."

"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plum-tree, a wonderfully nice place near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane ... You know the one that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at the corner of the road.... Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look in her eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' match gettin' away from her."

"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman."

"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why down where I come from a drunken mulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of not wantin' your attentions." His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed his deep ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set an omelette before them.

"Voila, messieurs," she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar's head that she was serving.