Once an Eagle (14 page)

“Qu'est-ce qui se passe?” Devlin called. The men struggling with the Hotchkiss gun glanced in his direction, said nothing. Several more Frenchmen streamed by, and now Damon could see that their uniforms were filthy and torn to ribbons; some had abandoned or lost most of their equipment. “Les Boches sont là-bas?” Devlin called again, pointing over the hill, the bristling palisade of woods to their right.

A tall man, helmetless, with a dark-stained bandage around his head, swung toward them and said: “Oui, Boches, Boches, bien sûr—qu'est-ce que tu pense? des Esquimaux?”

“Then what you Froggies cutting and running for?” Raebyrne asked him.

The wounded Frenchman stopped momentarily, arrested by the tone rather than the words; his teeth flashed once in a savage grin. “Aaah—attendez un peu, hein? A vous le dé … ” He nodded fiercely, glaring at them. “On verra, alors—vous sautillerez comme des lapins, vous! Petites soeurs … ”

Devlin started to climb out of his hole. Damon, guessing at the epithet, said sharply: “Dev! Stay where you are. Reb, you button up your lip. They've had a hard time of it … ”

Another clump of French straggled by, gasping and muttering, and vanished in the darkness. The place seemed infinitely lonely, bound in the thunder and crash of guns. Damon thought of the tough veterans facing them across the Court of Honor of the Invalides that hot, still morning almost a year ago, their faintly amused contempt, and thought: It must be bad, up there. Very bad. To make them come all apart like this—

He heard the taut sigh of approaching shells, a leisured trajectory that all at once began to accelerate, grew deeper in tone, hoarser, thicker, bending down—struck with a violent flash of orange light full in their midst. The ground under them lifted and shook, a quick, murderous jarring, and bits of steel spattered in the wheat.

Damon jumped to his feet and called, “Anybody hit?”

“Stretcher-bearer,” a voice on his left cried tensely. “Stretcher-bearer …!”

He moved quickly along the line of foxholes. More shells swept overhead and crashed thunderously in the rear of the woods. He heard voices, came upon two figures fussing with a third, which was inert. “Who is it?” he said crisply.

“It's Van Gelder,” came a voice which Damon recognized as Brewster's. “He's been hurt …”

Van Gelder, a stout, pleasant boy from Michigan, was lying perfectly still, breathing in short, swift pants. Damon put his hands on him.

“It's his back,” Brewster said.

“How do you know?” This was Poletti.

“I heard it. It hit him in the back. It sounded as if someone had slapped him. I could hear it.”

“All right,” Damon said. He passed his hands down Van Gelder's back—his fingers plunged all at once into a deep, slick groove in the boy's shirt. There was an instant's hot repugnance, then an icy calm flooded with the need for action.

“One minute he was all right,” Brewster was going on rapidly, “he was just starting to say something to me—and the next there was this slap and he let out a cry—”

“All right,” Damon cut him off. “Take it easy, now.” He faced rear and shouted, “Stretcher-bearer!”—his voice nearly drowned in the roar of shelling. Several shadows rose out of the gloom. “Over here,” Damon called.

The medics gathered around Van Gelder. “He hurt bad?” one of them asked.

“No,” Damon said, although he wasn't at all sure of this; he knew Brewster and Poletti were listening intently, and he felt that Van Gelder was still conscious, in spite of his silence. “But he'd better go back, all right.”

They lifted Van Gelder on to the stretcher, which went taut with his weight. He gave a sharp cry, and then the thick panting began again.

“It's all right,” Damon said, bending down. “They'll take care of you. Just relax, now.”

“—I was looking right at him,” Brewster was saying hurriedly. “He was just starting to dig his hole a little deeper, he was bent over—”

Damon looked up. Several of them were milling around, talking, listening to Brewster, asking questions. “Get back in your holes,” he said roughly. “What's the matter with you people—you want to get peppered? Get back in your holes and check your weapons …”

He watched the medics move off toward the black screen of the woods. First casualty, he thought; first man down. Who'll be the last?

 

His watch said
11:42; the hands, the numerals, looked green and ghostly. Twelve o'clock, midnight—the barrage would open at midnight, and the attack would follow at 12:30 or so. It would be just like the Germans to open up on the dot of twelve. He crept from hole to hole, checking his squads. Ferguson, rat-faced and debonaire; Poletti, nervous and very silent; little Turner, irate with impatience.

“Well, are the bastards coming or aren't they?”

“They're coming all right. Hold your water.”

Krazewski, his big face flat and solid, fixing a clip to that ugly, long-snouted beast of a Chauchat. “Keep that thing firing, now,” Sam said.

“Damon.”

“Yes?”

Krazewski snorted wetly through his nose. Since that afternoon behind the latrines he had consistently displayed the cleanest weapon and become a marvel at field-stripping. Damon had praised him twice, briefly, but the big man had made no response. Now he was grinning, his face like a flat, sweaty moon. “I—just wanted to tell you. You're all right.”

Damon slapped the gunner on the shoulder for answer, crept on to Tsonka, who had the stump of an unlighted cigar sticking straight out between his teeth. He would gradually chew it up entire; he was rarely known to spit. “Stick with him now, Tsonka. If Kraz is hit, it's your gun.”

“Right, Sarge.”

Raebyrne's skinny profile, the broad grin. “Sarge!” This uttered in a heavy stage whisper. “What am I going to do with these?” He held up what looked like a cloth sack.

“What's that?”

“Four honest-to-God hen's eggs, Sarge. Scrowged them out of that farm down the road a piece. I got time to cook 'em up a little?”

“
Cook
'em! I
told
you no fires—” Damon had an urge to roar with laughter. “What the hell do you think this is, a church supper?”

“Jesus, Sarge, I can't eat 'em
raw!
…”

“Well, you can't eat them any
other
way, I'll tell you that. Knock the tops off with your knife and suck 'em clean. That's what the rich do,” he added.

“The rich?”

“Sure—rich folks in town houses in Chicago. Boat-club swells.” He had a swift vision of his Uncle Bill sitting by the table on the screen porch, his face flushed with beer, one arm gesticulating. “It's all the rage.” He moved along to Brewster and said: “All set?”

The boy nodded, then shook his head. “Cold,” he murmured.

“Cold!”
Damon exclaimed. His own face and neck were slick with sweat.

Brewster nodded rapidly; he made a sharp little sound low in his throat, and licked his lips.

The Sergeant reached out and gripped Brewster's arm. “You'll do all right … Don't
think
so much! Just do what you have to do …” And with a final shake: “Be hard!”

And then Devlin, looking Irish and tough, his chin jutting out against the helmet's tight leather strap. “All set, Dev?”

“All set, Sam.”

“Keep your eye on the Chauchat teams, won't you.”

“Right you are.”

He paused; Devlin was still watching him, he knew. “Good luck, Dev.”

“Good luck, Sam.”

 

The night was
terrible. There were these tremulous sighs that mounted to a shriek, swooped in awful descent like some enormous blade scoring the vast black vault of the sky, and struck in mountainous crashes that lifted Brewster in all his frailty and flung him to and fro in his hole. At first he had wanted to get up and run, to flee into the woods from this place of darkness and terrors—once he'd started to climb out of his hole and Devlin had roared at him: “Get—down!” and he'd obeyed. Now the very thought of leaving this little place of safety was as unendurable as staying in it had been before. Shriek mounted upon arching shriek—and then vast jarring concussions that battered and buffeted him, turned him into a gasping, cringing rag doll. Where was he? Where was anybody? at all? A huge weight drove straight down upon him, smashed all his senses awry and fluttering. There, he thought,
there,
all right—but there was no end to the squeals and hammer blows. He could hear nothing, see nothing. He crouched lower and lower, clawing at the damp earth with his fingers in an agony of need, while the old soft world spat and heaved in an orgy of shattering, and trainloads of iron were hurled into factories of glass. No more, he thought, please no more, now—finally became aware that he was screaming the words like a child:
“No—more—please please—no more!”

There was a little lull then; and his ears ringing, his sight marred by brilliant, darting rings and blotches, he remembered a football game back at St. Andrew's, a scrimmage with the varsity—he had been too small even to dream of playing on the varsity—a moment of feverish apprehension and then bodies far bigger and harder than his had come at him weaving and diving, had struck him down and rolled over him, leaving him trampled, ignominious, and thundered on; the torn earth of the football field had smelled and tasted like this earth. His nose had bled. Now they were doing it again. All over again. He discovered he was biting hard on the back of his hand. Never should have got into this, he moaned, or thought he moaned. Never should have come here. To this place …

There was a flat crash near him, another. He looked up, and around him the world burst into light—but light like some kingdom of the mad: an eerie, blue-white field struck with dark shadow, day without depth. An evil dream of light in which nothing looked the way it should, nothing at all. There was the embankment, the screen of trees to the left, but smashed and stripped now like mammoth cornstalks rent and dangling … He was facing backward. Was he? Jesus! He turned and saw in the crazy, subterranean shimmer a low black lump like an animal crawling, or rolling—a furry mass that split apart in clumps and piles, in figures swelling, jostling up and down. He saw the swept-down helmets glinting under the flare's evil glow, and was filled with dread so great it choked him. Those were—those were Germans. And they were coming to kill him. Thousands of them. To kill him—

The flare went out and darkness swooped in over him and blinded him. He heard firing close by, a Chauchat's dry, hiccuping rhythm, and someone was shouting in a clear, hard voice; but he could not understand one word. The tone reached him though, its threatful urgency, and he pushed his rifle out ahead of him and began to fire into the sparks and chains of light that hurt his eyes—kept firing, flinching with the recoil each time, heard nothing, realized his rifle was empty. He gazed around him in a panic, could make out nothing in the awful, flashshot din. Someone was screaming in a high, shrill voice, like a dog yelping. In pain. Someone in terrible pain. He clawed a clip out of his cartridge belt, a reflex action, hearing the thump and clatter of running men, their onrushing proximity; dropped the clip and ducked down and scrabbled for it in the dark, could not find it anywhere, conscious now of screams and hoarse cries, the dense roar of explosions all around him. Something slammed against the top of his helmet and his face struck the earth with an impact that momentarily stunned him. I'm dying, he thought with quaking awful protest, oh dear God, I'm dying now, God help me, it's all over, all the things I—

Something drove down on his back, dirt showered over his neck and arms. A boot, a man's boot. He cried out in pain. It was gone. Explosions swept him, drove him lower.
Stop this,
he was crying frankly now,
oh stop this awful, awful thing!
He had no sight, no sense, no functions—lay crushed like a potato sack and wanted only for it all to be over, just be over, forever and for good …

 

When he stirred
again he was amazed at the stillness. He was here. In this hole. He was alive. He started to move, felt the pain in his back, stopped and reached around gingerly; there was nothing. His other hand encountered an object, a hard, round object. He pushed at it, picked it up and hefted it curiously. It was a German grenade. Potato masher. He let it drop in a slow wave of fear. That had been lying there. Beside him. For how long? With tremendous revulsion he reached out and picked it up again and tossed it out of his hole, heard it hit with a soft thud a few feet away. Then he felt consternation: suppose it should still go off—it could hurt someone else nearby. He raised his head. Far behind him he could hear the snare drum rattle of small-arms fire.

“Starkie?” he called softly. “Starkie? Corporal Devlin?” There was no answer. He was alone. He was here all alone, they had all run off and left him here in the open, to face everything all by himself. He felt a longing for the close presence of someone, anyone, so great he could have wept. He glared about wildly, but could see nothing but blobs and chains of gray streaming on blackness. This was terrible: if he could only
see
—!

He rose to his feet. Over to his left he heard voices. He had opened his mouth to call when one of them said: “Nein, nein, ist nicht schwer. Fleischwunde …”

Brewster sank back into his hole. All the fear he'd felt before was nothing to the boundless dread that gripped him now. Surrounded. He was alone, and surrounded by the enemy. In the dark.

“Wo ist Schroeder?” the wounded man asked. Firing to the south swelled up again, and Brewster couldn't hear the answer. The two men talked in low voices for a moment.

“Dieser Stacheldraht—er ist bösartig …”