One of Ours
Book V: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On"
Chapter XVI
The Battalion had twenty-four hours' rest at Rupprecht trench, and then
pushed on for four days and nights, stealing trenches, capturing patrols, with
only a few hours' sleep,—snatched by the roadside while their food was being
prepared. They pushed hard after a retiring foe, and almost outran themselves.
They did outrun their provisions; on the fourth night, when they fell upon a
farm that had been a German Headquarters, the supplies that were to meet them
there had not come up, and they went to bed supperless.
This farmhouse, for some reason called by the prisoners Frau Hulda farm, was
a nest of telephone wires; hundreds of them ran out through the walls, in all
directions. The Colonel cut those he could find, and then put a guard over the
old peasant who had been left in charge of the house, suspecting that he was in
the pay of the enemy.
At last Colonel Scott got into the Headquarters bed, large and lumpy,—the
first one he had seen since he left Arras. He had not been asleep more than two
hours, when a runner arrived with orders from the Regimental Colonel. Claude was
in a bed in the loft, between Gerhardt and Bruger. He felt somebody shaking him,
but resolved that he wouldn't be disturbed and went on placidly sleeping. Then
somebody pulled his hair,—so hard that he sat up. Captain Maxey was standing
over the bed.
"Come along, boys. Orders from Regimental Headquarters. The Battalion is to
split here. Our Company is to go on four kilometers tonight, and take the town
of Beaufort."
Claude rose. "The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey, and they had
no supper."
"That can't be helped. Tell them we are to be in Beaufort for breakfast."
Claude and Gerhardt went out to the barn and roused Hicks and his pal, Dell
Able. The men were asleep in dry straw, for the first time in ten days. They
were completely worn out, lost to time and place. Many of them were already four
thousand miles away, scattered among little towns and farms on the prairie. They
were a miserable looking lot as they got together, stumbling about in the dark.
After the Colonel had gone over the map with Captain Maxey, he came out and
saw the Company assembled. He wasn't going with them, he told them, but he
expected them to give a good account of themselves. Once in Beaufort, they would
have a week's rest; sleep under cover, and live among people for awhile.
The men took the road, some with their eyes shut, trying to make believe they
were still asleep, trying to have their agreeable dreams over again, as they
marched. They did not really waken up until the advance challenged a Hun patrol,
and sent it back to the Colonel under a one-man guard. When they had advanced
two kilometers, they found the bridge blown up. Claude and Hicks went in one
direction to look for a ford, Bruger and Dell Able in the other, and the men lay
down by the roadside and slept heavily. Just at dawn they reached the outskirts
of the village, silent and still.
Captain Maxey had no information as to how many Germans might be left in the
town. They had occupied it ever since the beginning of the war, and had used it
as a rest camp. There had never been any fighting there.
At the first house on the road, the Captain stopped and pounded. No answer.
"We are Americans, and must see the people of the house. If you don't open,
we must break the door."
A woman's voice called; "There is nobody here. Go away, please, and take your
men away. I am sick."
The Captain called Gerhardt, who began to explain and reassure through the
door. It opened a little way, and an old woman in a nightcap peeped out. An old
man hovered behind her. She gazed in astonishment at the officers, not
understanding. These were the first soldiers of the Allies she had ever seen.
She had heard the Germans talk about Americans, but thought it was one of their
lies, she said. Once convinced, she let the officers come in and replied to
their questions.
No, there were no Boches left in her house. They had got orders to leave day
before yesterday, and had blown up the bridge. They were concentrating somewhere
to the east. She didn't know how many were still in the village, nor where they
were, but she could tell the Captain where they had been. Triumphantly she
brought out a map of the town—lost, she said with a meaning smile, by a German
officer—on which the billets were marked.
With this to guide them, Captain Maxey and his men went on up the street.
They took eight prisoners in one cellar, seventeen in another. When the
villagers saw the prisoners bunched together in the square, they came out of
their houses and gave information. This cleaning up, Bert Fuller remarked, was
like taking fish from the Platte River when the water was low, simply pailing
them out! There was no sport in it.
At nine o'clock the officers were standing together in the square before the
church, checking off on the map the houses that had been searched. The men were
drinking coffee, and eating fresh bread from a baker's shop. The square was full
of people who had come out to see for themselves. Some believed that deliverance
had come, and others shook their heads and held back, suspecting another trick.
A crowd of children were running about, making friends with the soldiers. One
little girl with yellow curls and a clean white dress had attached herself to
Hicks, and was eating chocolate out of his pocket. Gerhardt was bargaining with
the baker for another baking of bread. The sun was shining, for a
change,—everything was looking cheerful. This village seemed to be swarming
with girls; some of them were pretty, and all were friendly. The men who had
looked so haggard and forlorn when dawn overtook them at the edge of the town,
began squaring their shoulders and throwing out their chests. They were dirty
and mud-plastered, but as Claude remarked to the Captain, they actually looked
like fresh men.
Suddenly a shot rang out above the chatter, and an old woman in a white cap
screamed and tumbled over on the pavement,—rolled about, kicking indecorously
with both hands and feet. A second crack,—the little girl who stood beside
Hicks, eating chocolate, threw out her hands, ran a few steps, and fell, blood
and brains oozing out in her yellow hair. The people began screaming and
running. The Americans looked this way and that; ready to dash, but not knowing
where to go. Another shot, and Captain Maxey fell on one knee, blushed furiously
and sprang up, only to fall again,—ashy white, with the leg of his trousers
going red.
"There it is, to the left!" Hicks shouted, pointing. They saw now. From a
closed house, some distance down a street off the square, smoke was coming. It
hung before one of the upstairs windows. The Captain's orderly dragged him into
a wineshop. Claude and David, followed by the men, ran down the street and broke
in the door. The two officers went through the rooms on the first floor, while
Hicks and his lot made straight for an enclosed stairway at the back of the
house. As they reached the foot of the stairs, they were met by a volley of
rifle shots, and two of the men tumbled over. Four Germans were stationed at the
head of the steps.
The Americans scarcely knew whether their bullets or their bayonets got to
the Huns first; they were not conscious of going up, till they were there. When
Claude and David reached the landing, the squad were wiping their bayonets, and
four grey bodies were piled in the corner.
Bert Fuller and Dell Able ran down the narrow hallway and threw open the door
into the room on the street. Two shots, and Dell came back with his jaw
shattered and the blood spouting from the left side of his neck. Gerhardt caught
him, and tried to close the artery with his fingers.
"How many are in there, Bert?" Claude called.
"I couldn't see. Look out, sir! You can't get through that door more than two
at a time!"
The door still stood open, at the end of the corridor. Claude went down the
steps until he could sight along the floor of the passage, into the front room.
The shutters were closed in there, and the sunlight came through the slats. In
the middle of the floor, between the door and the windows, stood a tall chest of
drawers, with a mirror attached to the top. In the narrow space between the
bottom of this piece of furniture and the floor, he could see a pair of boots.
It was possible there was but one man in the room, shooting from behind his
movable fort,—though there might be others hidden in the corners.
"There's only one fellow in there, I guess. He's shooting from behind a big
dresser in the middle of the room. Come on, one of you, we'll have to go in and
get him."
Willy Katz, the Austrian boy from the Omaha packing house, stepped up and
stood beside him.
"Now, Willy, we'll both go in at once; you jump to the right, and I to the
left,—and one of us will jab him. He can't shoot both ways at once. Are you
ready? All right—Now!"
Claude thought he was taking the more dangerous position himself, but the
German probably reasoned that the important man would be on the right. As the
two Americans dashed through the door, he fired. Claude caught him in the back
with his bayonet, under the shoulder blade, but Willy Katz had got the bullet in
his brain, through one of his blue eyes. He fell, and never stirred. The German
officer fired his revolver again as he went down, shouting in English, English
with no foreign accent,
"You swine, go back to Chicago!" Then he began choking with blood.
Sergeant Hicks ran in and shot the dying man through the temples. Nobody
stopped him.
The officer was a tall man, covered with medals and orders; must have been
very handsome. His linen and his hands were as white as if he were going to a
ball. On the dresser were the files and paste and buffers with which he had kept
his nails so pink and smooth. A ring with a ruby, beautifully cut, was on his
little finger. Bert Fuller screwed it off and offered it to Claude. He shook his
head. That English sentence had unnerved him. Bert held the ring out to Hicks,
but the Sergeant threw down his revolver and broke out:
"Think I'd touch anything of his? That beautiful little girl, and my
buddy—He's worse than dead, Dell is, worse!" He turned his back on his comrades
so that they wouldn't see him cry.
"Can I keep it myself, sir?" Bert asked.
Claude nodded. David had come in, and was opening the shutters. This officer,
Claude was thinking, was a very different sort of being from the poor prisoners
they had been scooping up like tadpoles from the cellars. One of the men picked
up a gorgeous silk dressing gown from the bed, another pointed to a
dressing-case full of hammered silver. Gerhardt said it was Russian silver; this
man must have come from the Eastern front. Bert Fuller and Nifty Jones were
going through the officer's pockets. Claude watched them, and thought they did
about right. They didn't touch his medals; but his gold cigarette case, and the
platinum watch still ticking on his wrist,—he wouldn't have further need for
them. Around his neck, hung by a delicate chain, was a miniature case, and in it
was a painting,—not, as Bert romantically hoped when he opened it, of a
beautiful woman, but of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not
eyes.
Claude studied it, wondering. "It looks like a poet, or something. Probably a
kid brother, killed at the beginning of the war."
Gerhardt took it and glanced at it with a disdainful expression. "Probably.
There, let him keep it, Bert." He touched Claude on the shoulder to call his
attention to the inlay work on the handle of the officer's revolver.
Claude noticed that David looked at him as if he were very much pleased with
him,—looked, indeed, as if something pleasant had happened in this room; where,
God knew, nothing had; where, when they turned round, a swarm of black flies was
quivering with greed and delight over the smears Willy Katz' body had left on
the floor. Claude had often observed that when David had an interesting idea, or
a strong twinge of recollection, it made him, for the moment, rather heartless.
Just now he felt that Gerhardt's flash of high spirits was in some way connected
with him. Was it because he had gone in with Willy? Had David doubted his nerve?