Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 459
Huon talked on and on, with the eloquence of a Frenchman who relieves himself of a burden. He told of trenches dug in a swamp, lived in and fought in, and then used for the graves of the dead, trenches that had to be lived in again months afterward. The rotting dead were everywhere. When they were covered the rain would come to wash away the earth, exposing them again. That was the strange refrain of this soldier’s moody lament — the rain that fell, the mud that forever held him rooted fast in the tracks of his despair. He told of night and storm, of a weary squad of men, lying flat, trying to dig in under cover of rain and darkness, of the hell of cannonade over and around them. He told of hours that blasted men’s souls, of death that was a blessing, of escape that was torture beyond the endurance of humans. Crowning that night of horrors piled on horrors, when he had seen a dozen men buried alive in mud lifted by a monster shell, when he had seen a refuge deep underground opened and devastated by a like projectile, came a cloud-burst that flooded the trenches and the fields, drowning soldiers whose injuries and mud-laden garments impeded their movements, and rendering escape for the others an infernal labor and a hideous wretchedness, unutterable and insupportable.
Round the camp-fires the Blue Devils stood or lay, trying to rest. But the habit of the trenches was upon them. Dorn gazed at each and every soldier, so like in strange resemblance, so different in physical characteristics; and the sad, profound, and terrifying knowledge came to him of what they must have in their minds. He realized that all he needed was to suffer and fight and live through some little part of the war they had endured and then some truth would burst upon him. It was there in the restless steps, in the prone forms, in the sunken, glaring eyes. What soldiers, what men, what giants! Three and a half years of unnamable and indescribable fury of action and strife of thought! Not dead, nor stolid like oxen, were these soldiers of France. They had a simplicity that seemed appalling. We have given all; we have stood in the way, borne the brunt, saved you — this was flung at Dorn, not out of their thought, but from their presence. The fact that they were there was enough. He needed only to find these bravest of brave warriors real, alive, throbbing men.
Dorn lingered there, loath to leave. The great lesson of his life held vague connection in some way with this squad of French privates. But he could not pierce the veil. This meeting came as a climax to four months of momentous meetings with the best and the riffraff of many nations. Dorn had studied, talked, listened, and learned. He who had as yet given nothing, fought no enemy, saved no comrade or refugee or child in all this whirlpool of battling millions, felt a profound sense of his littleness, his ignorance. He who had imagined himself unfortunate had been blind, sick, self-centered. Here were soldiers to whom comfort and rest were the sweetest blessings upon the earth, and they could not grasp them. No more could they grasp them than could the gaping civilians and the distinguished travelers grasp what these grand hulks of veteran soldiers had done. Once a group of civilians halted near the soldiers. An officer was their escort. He tried to hurry them on, but failed. Delorme edged away into the gloomy, damp barn rather than meet such visitors. Some of his comrades followed suit. Ferier, the incomparable of the Blue Devils, the wearer of all the French medals and the bearer of twenty-five wounds received in battle — he sneaked away, afraid and humble and sullen, to hide himself from the curious. That action of Ferier’s was a revelation to Dorn. He felt a sting of shame. There were two classes of people in relation to this war — those who went to fight and those who stayed behind. What had Delorme or Mathie or Ferier to do with the world of selfish, comfortable, well-fed men? Dorn heard a million voices of France crying out the bitter truth — that if these war-bowed veterans ever returned alive to their homes it would be with hopes and hearts and faiths burned out, with hands forever lost to their old use, with bodies that the war had robbed.
Dorn bade his new-made friends adieu, and in the darkening twilight he hurried toward his own camp.
“If I could go back home now, honorably and well, I would never do it,” he muttered. “I couldn’t bear to live knowing what I know now — unless I had laughed at this death, and risked it — and dealt it!”
He was full of gladness, of exultation, in contemplation of the wonderful gift the hours had brought him. More than any men of history or present, he honored these soldiers the Germans feared. Like an Indian, Dorn respected brawn, courage, fortitude, silence, aloofness.
“There was a divinity in those soldiers,” he soliloquized. “I felt it in their complete ignorance of their greatness. Yet they had pride, jealousy. Oh, the mystery of it all!… When my day comes I’ll last one short and terrible hour. I would never make a soldier like one of them. No American could. They are Frenchmen whose homes have been despoiled.”
In the tent of his comrades that night Dorn reverted from old habit, and with a passionate eloquence he told all he had seen and heard, and much that he had felt. His influence on these young men, long established, but subtle and unconscious, became in that hour a tangible fact. He stirred them. He felt them thoughtful and sad, and yet more unflinching, stronger and keener for the inevitable day.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE MONSTROUS POSSIBILITY that had consumed Kurt Dorn for many months at last became an event — he had arrived on the battle-front in France.
All afternoon the company of United States troops had marched from far back of the line, resting, as darkness came on, at a camp of reserves, and then going on. Artillery fire had been desultory during this march; the big guns that had rolled their thunder miles and miles were now silent. But an immense activity and a horde of soldiers back of the lines brought strange leaden oppression to Kurt Dorn’s heart.
The last slow travel of his squad over dark, barren space and through deep, narrow, winding lanes in the ground had been a nightmare ending to the long journey. France had not yet become clear to him; he was a stranger in a strange land; in spite of his tremendous interest and excitement, all seemed abstract matters of his feeling, the plague of himself made actuality the substance of dreams. That last day, the cumulation of months of training and travel, had been one in which he had observed, heard, talked and felt in a nervous and fevered excitement. But now he imagined he could not remember any of it. His poignant experience with the Blue Devils had been a reality he could never forget, but now this blackness of subterranean cavern, this damp, sickening odor of earth, this presence of men, the strange, muffled sounds — all these were unreal. How had he come here? His mind labored with a burden strangely like that on his chest. A different, utterly unfamiliar emotion seemed rising over him. Maybe that was because he was very tired and very sleepy. Sometime that night he must go on duty. He ought to sleep. It was impossible. He could not close his eyes. An effort to attend to what he was actually doing disclosed the fact that he was listening with all his strength. For what? He could not answer then. He heard the distant, muffled sounds, and low voices nearer, and thuds and footfalls. His comrades were near him; he heard their breathing; he felt their presence. They were strained and intense; like him, they were locked up in their own prison of emotions.
Always heretofore, on nights that he lay sleepless, Dorn had thought of the two things dearest on earth to him — Lenore Anderson and the golden wheat-hills of his home. This night he called up Lenore’s image. It hung there in the blackness, a dim, pale phantom of her sweet face, her beautiful eyes, her sad lips, and then it vanished. Not at all could he call up a vision of his beloved wheat-fields. So the suspicion that something was wrong with his mind became a certainty. It angered him, quickened his sensitiveness, even while he despaired. He ground his teeth and clenched his fists and swore to realize his presence there, and to rise to the occasion as had been his vaunted ambition.
Suddenly he felt something slimy and hairy against his wrist — then a stinging bite. A rat! A trench rat that lived on flesh! He flung his arm violently and beat upon the soft earth. The incident of surprise and disgust helped Dorn at least in one way. His mind had been set upon a strange and supreme condition of his being there, of an emotion about to overcome him. The bite of a rat, drawing blood, made a literal fact of his being a soldier, in a dugout at the front waiting in the blackness for his call to go on guard. This incident proved to Dorn his limitations, and that he was too terribly concerned with his feelings ever to last long as a soldier. But he could not help himself. His pulse, his heart, his brain, all seemed to beat, beat, beat with a nameless passion.
Was he losing his nerve — was he afraid? His denial did not reassure him. He understood that patriotism and passion were emotions, and that the realities of a soldier’s life were not.
Dorn forced himself to think of realities, hoping thus to get a grasp upon his vanishing courage. And memory helped him. Not so many days, weeks, months back he had been a different man. At Bordeaux, when his squad first set foot upon French soil! That was a splendid reality. How he had thrilled at the welcome of the French sailors!
Then he thought of the strenuous round of army duties, of training tasks, of traveling in cold box-cars, of endless marches, of camps and villages, of drills and billets. Never to be forgotten was that morning, now seemingly long ago, when an officer had ordered the battalion to pack. “We are going to the front!” he announced. Magic words! What excitement, what whooping, what bragging and joy among the boys, what hurry and bustle and remarkable efficiency! That had been a reality of actual experience, but the meaning of it, the terrible significance, had been beyond the mind of any American.
“I’m here — at the front — now,” whispered Dorn to himself. “A few rods away are Germans!” … Inconceivable — no reality at all! He went on with his swift account of things, with his mind ever sharpening, with that strange, mounting emotion flooding to the full, ready to burst its barriers. When he and his comrades had watched their transport trains move away — when they had stood waiting for their own trains — had the idea of actual conflict yet dawned upon them? Dorn had to answer No. He remembered that he had made few friends among the inhabitants of towns and villages where he had stayed. What leisure time he got had been given to a seeking out of sailors, soldiers, and men of all races, with whom he found himself in remarkable contact. The ends of the world brought together by one war! How could his memory ever hold all that had come to him? But it did. Passion liberated it. He saw now that his eye was a lens, his mind a sponge, his heart a gulf.
Out of the hundreds of thousands of American troops in France, what honor it was to be in the chosen battalion to go to the front! Dorn lived only with his squad, but he felt the envy of the whole army. What luck! To be chosen from so many — to go out and see the game through quickly! He began to consider that differently now. The luck might be with the soldiers left behind. Always, underneath Dorn’s perplexity and pondering, under his intelligence and spirit at their best, had been a something deeply personal, something of the internal of him, a selfish instinct. It was the nature of man — self-preservation.
Like a tempest swept over Dorn the most significant ordeal and lesson of his experience in France — that wonderful reality when he met the Blue Devils and they took him in. However long he lived, his life must necessarily be transformed from contact with those great men.
The night march over the unending roads, through the gloom and the spectral starlight, with the dull rumblings of cannon shocking his heart — that Dorn lived over, finding strangely a minutest detail of observation and a singular veracity of feeling fixed in his memory.
Afternoon of that very day, at the reserve camp somewhere back there, had brought an officer’s address to the soldiers, a strong and emphatic appeal as well as order — to obey, to do one’s duty, to take no chances, to be eternally vigilant, to believe that every man had advantage on his side, even in war, if he were not a fool or a daredevil. Dorn had absorbed the speech, remembered every word, but it all seemed futile now. Then had come the impressive inspection of equipment, a careful examination of gas-masks, rifles, knapsacks. After that the order to march!
Dorn imagined that he had remembered little, but he had remembered all. Perhaps the sense of strange unreality was only the twist in his mind. Yet he did not know where he was — what part of France — how far north or south on the front line — in what sector. Could not that account for the sense of feeling lost?
Nevertheless, he was there at the end of all this incomprehensible journey. He became possessed by an irresistible desire to hurry. Once more Dorn attempted to control the far-flinging of his thoughts — to come down to earth. The earth was there under his hand, soft, sticky, moldy, smelling vilely. He dug his fingers into it, until the feel of something like a bone made him jerk them out. Perhaps he had felt a stone. A tiny, creeping, chilly shudder went up his back. Then he remembered, he felt, he saw his little attic room, in the old home back among the wheat-hills of the Northwest. Six thousand miles away! He would never see that room again. What unaccountable vagary of memory had ever recalled it to him? It faded out of his mind.
Some of his comrades whispered; now and then one rolled over; none snored, for none of them slept. Dorn felt more aloof from them than ever. How isolated each one was, locked in his own trouble! Every one of them, like himself, had a lonely soul. Perhaps they were facing it. He could not conceive of a careless, thoughtless, emotionless attitude toward this first night in the front-line trench.
Dorn gradually grew more acutely sensitive to the many faint, rustling, whispering sounds in and near the dugout.
A soldier came stooping into the opaque square of the dugout door. His rifle, striking the framework, gave out a metallic clink. This fellow expelled a sudden heavy breath as if throwing off an oppression.
“Is that you, Sanborn?” This whisper Dorn recognized as Dixon’s. It was full of suppressed excitement.
“Yes.”
“Guess it’s my turn next. How — how does it go?”
Sanborn’s laugh had an odd little quaver. “Why, so far as I know, I guess it’s all right. Damn queer, though. I wish we’d got here in daytime.… But maybe that wouldn’t help.”
“Humph!… Pretty quiet out there?”
“So Bob says, but what’s he know — more than us? I heard guns up the line, and rifle-fire not so far off.”
“Can you see any—”
“Not a damn thing — yet everything,” interrupted Sanborn, enigmatically.
“Dixon!” called Owens, low and quickly, from the darkness.
Dixon did not reply. His sudden hard breathing, the brushing of his garments against the door, then swift, soft steps dying away attested to the fact of his going.
Dorn tried to compose himself to rest, if not to sleep. He heard Sanborn sit down, and then apparently stay very still for some time. All of a sudden he whispered to himself. Dorn distinguished the word “hell.”
“What’s ailin’ you, pard?” drawled Brewer.
Sanborn growled under his breath, and when some one else in the dugout quizzed him curiously he burst out: “I’ll bet you galoots the state of California against a dill pickle that when your turn comes you’ll be sick in your gizzards!”
“We’ll take our medicine,” came in the soft, quiet voice of Purcell.
No more was said. The men all pretended to fall asleep, each ashamed to let his comrade think he was concerned.
A short, dull, heavy rumble seemed to burst the outer stillness. For a moment the dugout was silent as a tomb. No one breathed. Then came a jar of the earth, a creaking of shaken timbers. Some one gasped involuntarily. Another whispered:
“By God! the real thing!”
Dorn wondered how far away that jarring shell had alighted. Not so far! It was the first he had ever heard explode near him. Roaring of cannon, exploding of shell — this had been a source of every-day talk among his comrades. But the jar, the tremble of the earth, had a dreadful significance. Another rumble, another jar, not so heavy or so near this time, and then a few sharply connected reports, clamped Dorn as in a cold vise. Machine-gun shots! Many thousand machine-gun shots had he heard, but none with the life and the spite and the spang of these. Did he imagine the difference? Cold as he felt, he began to sweat, and continually, as he wiped the palms of his hands, they grew wet again. A queer sensation of light-headedness and weakness seemed to possess him. The roots of his will-power seemed numb. Nevertheless, all the more revolving and all-embracing seemed his mind.
The officer in his speech a few hours back had said the sector to which the battalion had been assigned was alive. By this he meant that active bombardment, machine-gun fire, hand-grenade throwing, and gas-shelling, or attack in force might come any time, and certainly must come as soon as the Germans suspected the presence of an American force opposite them.
That was the stunning reality to Dorn — the actual existence of the Huns a few rods distant. But realization of them had not brought him to the verge of panic. He would not flinch at confronting the whole German army. Nor did he imagine he put a great price upon his life. Nor did he have any abnormal dread of pain. Nor had the well-remembered teachings of the Bible troubled his spirit. Was he going to be a coward because of some incalculable thing in him or force operating against him? Already he sat there, shivering and sweating, with the load on his breast growing laborsome, with all his sensorial being absolutely at keenest edge.
