Once an Eagle (34 page)

Why was it so quiet? For the tenth part of an instant he thought of Malsainterre Farm, the silence and then the empty trenches, and his heart flowered with a sickly, frantic hope—then he struck the thought down. The Germans had no intention of pulling out of a ridge line that anchored the entire position: they would stay, and stay … He felt no fear, only a seeping, oppressive dread that chilled him more than the fine end-of-October rain. It didn't get easier: it got harder and harder with each immersion, each trial, until—

Wheeeee
eeeeet
—

That thin, demonic rending of earth and heaven, a mounting scream—and then a hideous yellow ball exploded over their heads, followed by the deep snarl of steel; all around him heads ducked in unison. Shrapnel. Morehouse was staring up at it, transfixed.

“All right, come
on,
now!—” he shouted. Another blossomed to their right, and he heard the bright cry of pain. He had time to think, This is going to be pretty bad—and then the whiplash cracks came in furious succession, a celestial rafale that glowed an evil orange against the dirty roof of the sky, and showered down death and mutilation. A storm of iron; it spattered around them, moaning. A line of soot-black geysers rose up ahead, a putteed leg came sailing at him, struck and rolled beneath his feet. All he could hear now were cries.

—They were down, half the first wave, in a shell hole. He could see the helmets. Lieutenant Zimmerman was kneeling at the edge of the hole, screaming at them, gesticulating. No good. They could not stay there. He ran forward easily, his feet seemed to bounce over the soft, wet earth. He grabbed Zimmerman's shoulder and shouted, “No! Not that way. You must lead!”

“They won't follow me—!”

“Easy, now. Easy. Yes, they will. You must be—” A giant fingernail raced down the blackboard of the heavens and snapped off above them. Zimmerman was staring at him eagerly. He was all right. He'd be all right. “The new men need some visible symbol of authority,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “You must provide it.”

“But if they won't even—”

“They will. They must! I'll show you.” He walked quickly around to the front of the hole and waggled the snout of his Chauchat in long, looping gestures; their eyes followed him. “Hobbs! Welcker! Get up—come on, now. You can't stay there. Up you go, now. Just up to that row of pines, that's all.” There was another burst overhead and iron spattered on the ground around the shell hole. “Boyce, you can get hit down there just as easy as up here—now God dammit let's
go,
we're holding up the whole crowd. Hobbs, come on now, just up to that line of pine trees—just up there, that's all I'm asking …”

Hobbs drew his feet up under him all at once and got up, scrambling; Boyce followed him, then the rest. “That's it,” he shouted, “now we're rolling …” Down the line to his right he saw Tsonka routing out some others. He walked on, watching Zimmerman out of the tail of his eye. Beside him a man went down screaming shrilly, clutching at his leg, ahead of him someone else—was it Miller?—faltered, hung poised in the air like a man tumbling backward off a roof, and then fell, his throat and chest a bloody, crawling mass. Now he could hear the machine guns, the death drone of bullets. It was like a sleet storm, a sleet storm engineered by the devil. A Chauchat team went past him, the rifle racketing away—and then a terrible orange sun burst full in their faces and they were there no longer, only a wormlike disheveled pile of rags and viscera and blood from which one naked arm jerked violently, back and forth. They were falling all around him, falling like leaves, like blocks, like worn-out sacking. Oh, the bastards! The old rage seized him; he saw ahead now the harsh, webbed gloom of the pines, the fresh dirt of the pits. Too late. The Boche had waited too late to open fire—they were going to get in there, they were going to take them, he knew it absolutely.

“Come on,
come on,
” he roared. Dead ahead he saw the deep round helmets with their flaring rims, the gray-green uniforms, the flash-flash-flash of a gun muzzle. Walking forward he fired, watched as if in a murky dream the gunner sink away, another swing into place, fired again and again, aware that he was now shouting something indecipherable at the top of his lungs, over and over—

Something struck him a violent blow on the thigh. He was down. He was lying on his side, his left leg numb and burning. He got to his feet and fell down again. His leg. His leg wouldn't hold him. He was hit. At long last. After the. After all the.

He felt his thigh gingerly—then savagely. Yes, he was hit. Blood—his own blood this time—smeared his fingers in thick, warm skeins.

This wouldn't do. This simply would not do, he had to
get up and get in there.
So near! He gritted his teeth, drove all the grim determination of a lifetime into the command
You will
and rose to his feet—groaned aloud at the sickly hollow grating, a great pulsing globe of pain that swallowed up everything but its own fiery presence.
You will.
He lurched forward for several agonizing strides. Ahead of him the earth heaved and tilted giddily, in a goblin's carnival of bayonets and clubbed rifles, men grappling with one another like clumsy shaggy animals, a final babble of shrieks and hoarse cries—and the guns were silent.

They had got in. They'd done it. Now the—now the company was to wheel left, pivoting on the ridge line. A halt of. Halt of forty minutes, and then drive north-northwest through the woods—

Someone was tugging at his shoulder. Why were they always yanking at him? He was down again, on his knees, propping himself erect with the rifle. Raebyrne was crouched beside him. Old Reb, his face white and masklike against the bright orange stubble of beard, his eyes wild.

“Skipper! Skipper—you're hit …”

“—Go on,” he cried, a garbled croak he could hardly hear in the racket and crash of gunfire and grenades. He gestured. “Go on, now …”

“I won't leave you, Cap—I won't leave you now!—”

“Get on in, Reb. That's an order. An order. Deploy your people—get into those pits before their batteries start working us over …” But Raebyrne was paying no attention. What was the matter with him? Didn't he know what to do by now, for God's sake? Raebyrne, the fresh wet dirt of the emplacements, the feathery black somnolence of the pines glowed and faded like a forge fanned by bellows. He'd better say it again. If they didn't find some cover—

He looked up. He was lying on his side now and Raebyrne was trying to bandage him, fumbling absurdly with a packet of white gauze. “Reb, you clumsy Tarheel,” he said, or thought he said. “Can't you do any better than that?” Then he caught sight of the blood moving in a silken scarlet sheen over Raebyrne's hand and forearm, and grunted. Well. They'd all had it. They'd all had it, then. “Help me up,” he demanded.

“Skipper, you can't—your leg's shot half off …”

“The hell it is,” he muttered, but fright gripped him. He tried to get up: the hollow grating soared into a terrific electric bolt of pure pain that made him cry out. He subsided, then. Nothing. There was nothing left.

“—get you back, I
swear
I'll get you back, Skipper, take it easy, now …”

“Sure.—Bandage yourself,” he said. His head had cleared again, but there was still this unpleasant glowing and fading sensation.

“Captain, the position is secured.”

He looked up in surprise. Zimmerman. Breathing hard, and without his helmet, but his voice perfectly steady. The pistol in his hand was smoking gently at the barrel. Like me, he thought. Like me, after Brigny Farm. “I've organized the company sector to repel counterattack. Our strength is forty-seven.”

“Forty-seven?” he murmured. “Forty-seven?”

“That's it.”

“Where's Lieutenant Shaw?”

“Badly wounded, sir. He's not conscious.”

“How are they doing over on the left? You'd better get in touch with Ballard.”

“Captain Ballard's dead, sir.”

“Well, Russo then, Russo's got the—”

“I don't know where Russo is, Captain. Nobody knows. We seem to be pretty much on our own up here.”

He nodded dumbly. Forty-seven. He felt all at once very infirm and fragile. Monteleone and another medic had come up, and Raebyrne was talking to them; figures moved here and there around him in mysterious patterns. Why didn't they keep still! He had to find out whether Weyburn still wanted them to jump off for Second Objective as planned, if Ballard and Russo were held up. But Ballard was dead—

“Help me up,” he said to Zimmerman. “You'd better go back, Captain. That's a pretty bad wound.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “I'm staying. Where's Guillette?”

“He's dead, sir.”

“Jesus. Genthner, then. I want to get word back to Battalion as soon as possible. And let's try to make contact with Able right away.”

“Captain—”

“I tell you, I'm staying. As long as there's one God damn one of us left, I'm—”

But the world had betrayed him now: the world was a disc that began to swim in violent circular oscillations, spinning faster and faster, faded and brightened, faded again. He was lying on his back now, feeling quite cold. Zimmerman was crouched over talking to him but he understood not a word. He smiled and nodded and patted the boy on the shoulder. “You're all right, Harry,” he said. “You're going to be a good officer, the best. The company's yours now. Take good care of it, there was never one better. You just make contact with the boys in Able. The Old Man will get support up to you in no time, you can bet on it …” Had he said all that? But Caldwell was gone now, Caldwell was a general back at Division, far away … Zimmerman's face looked oddly worn—thousands of little lines stroked in with some ingenious engraving tool around his eyes. Well. He'd be a lot more weary than this, he'd find. But the company was in good hands, and that was something.

The sky was heavy with rain clouds and the air was suddenly, unbearably cold. People were still moving around above him: they seemed as powerful, as graceful as gods, free to live and move and have their being far beyond his chilled infirmity. The swirling circle of the disc increased. He knew he could not get up now under any circumstances whatever. He was through, finally; and that was all there was to it. Anyway, the company was in good hands, he would bet his last franc on it: his lucky one-franc piece. If Harry would just hurry up and tie in with Able now, they'd—

 

It was shining.
Shining on his face, a curious silver flickering. He was looking straight above him, but oddly all he could see were billowing, sweeping shoulders, silver and black like burnished armor. Then it broke, and there was sky of the purest, rarest blue. He gazed at it, absorbed. It had a clarity, an
importance
it was quite necessary to decipher—or perhaps not decipher but merely accept, open one's heart to, allow to reveal itself in all its truth and clarity. To acquiesce to that, yield to it! In all the world there was nothing so profound, so blessed and remote as this sweep of azure sky beyond the ragged bits of cloud. Late afternoon sunlight fell on his face again, the slant October sun that pressed pale orange against his eyelids; then that too yielded, became part of this discreet and glorious serenity …

Behind him Raebyrne's voice said tersely: “All right, Nugent. Git a holt, now.”

He closed his eyes. He was swinging, swinging basket-free, a weightless suspended jolting. Pain soared in a high red cone into his brain and burst there, like a rocket, in stabbing wire tendrils. Jesus. Ah, Jesus. He knew he was groaning out loud, and tried to choke it back. An interminable jolting slithering journey. How far? How many burning everlasting hours before they would set him down?

“It's all right, Skipper …” Reb's voice above him, panting, thin with urgency. “Just a mite further. Just a mite further on, now …”

 

A cobbled yard.
A worn ocher wall over which the gnarled branches of an apple tree reached torturously. It was so
cold.
He had never been so cold in all his life. Someone was bent over him asking him something but he couldn't catch it, started to ask the man to repeat his question. But the man was gone. Slowly he turned his head to the right. A broad, tough face was squinting upward fiercely—an expression so ecstatic it was fearful to watch. Great, trembling groans issued from the parted lips. But now there was no sun, no truth-sustaining arch of sky.

They had picked him up again. Pain leaped up into his groin, his guts, drove down into his feet and lay burning in the very marrow of his bones: it blurred and darkened everything around him queerly. He bit his lip. Farmhouse, a long white wall seamed with a million cracks, and a harsh, clinging odor like raw gas and alcohol and burned iodine and lime. The smell of pain. Faces peered down at him. One of them, very lined, very tired, broke into a frosty grin:

“Bless my soul. Sam Damon. Don't tell me they finally put
you
down.”

Gimlet Gardinier. Crusty old Yankee sawbones, with a white stubble of beard and puffy, narrowed eyes.

“Not for long,” he answered; but he knew that wasn't true. His voice sounded tremulous and furry, and it distressed him.

“Well, let's have us a look-see.”

There was a flowering throb of pure agony that ran its roots into his brain, his heart, his vitals. Oh Christ! He cried out again, he couldn't help it, gnawed at the back of his hand until he tasted salt. Then it receded to dark, slow pain, waiting.

“Doc …” He tried to raise himself on one elbow. Hands restrained him. “Is it—bad?” he gasped.

The Gimlet's face shot back into view. “Well. Needs work, I'll say that. You won't be doing the Turkey Trot for a while.”