Trechos de Through The Wheat (1923), de Thomas Boyd.
For nine interminable months William Hicks had been in France, shunted from one place to another, acting out the odious office of the military police, working as a stevedore beside evil-odored blacks, helping to build cantonments and reservoirs for new soldiers ever arriving from the United States.
And he was supposed to be a soldier. He had enlisted with at least the tacit understanding that he was some day to fight. At the recruiting office in Cincinnati the bespangled sergeant had told him: "Join the marines and see some real action." And the heart of William Hicks had fled to the rich brogue and campaign ribbons that the sergeant professionally wore.
But was this action? Was this war? Was this for what William Hicks had come to France? Well, he told himself, it was not. Soldiering with a shovel. A hell of a way to treat a white man.
- - -
In this sense of reconciliation John Pugh, the Mississippi gambler, forgot his everlasting dice-throwing, which every pay-day that the platoon had thus far known had won for him more money than his company commander received from the United States Government.
- - -
Sergeant Kerfoot Harriman, bearing with proud satisfaction the learning and culture he had acquired in the course of three years at a small Middle-Western university, walked down the Rue de Dieu in a manner which carried the suggestion that he had forgotten the belt of his breeches.
- - -
Stupid-looking old Frenchmen, a few thick-waisted women, and a scattering of ragged children dully watched the company march down the street.
- - -
Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the gray of the horizon.
[...] In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many parts of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the picture.
- - -
Then he became aware of himself. In place of the straw sailor there lay very heavily on his head a steel helmet that, though he had thought it chic for a while, was now no more distinguished-looking than the aluminum dish in which his food was rationed to him. He had worn his drab shirt for two weeks, and there were black rings around the collar and wrists. His gas-mask, girded over his chest, looked foul and unclean; he had used it for a pillow, for a dining-table, and often, he realized, it had been thrown in some muddy place when he had sickened of having it about him like an ever-present albatross. The knees of his breeches were as soiled and as uncomfortable as his shirt, and his puttees and shoes were crusted thickly with dried mud.
- - -
The shell hole was half filled with water and it was cold. After three or four hours the hip rubber boots made Hicks think that his feet were a pair of dead fish in a refrigerator.
- - -
Major Adams limped as he walked, from an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal as the fourth dimension.
- - -
Once or twice men were killed when the shells struck, and their bodies were hurried away to the dressing station; one morning the body of a red-haired German, an immense fellow with a broad forehead, large wide eyes, and a huge mouth, was found fastened to the strands of barbed wire in front of Hicks's post. There was a hole in his side made by the explosion of a small hand-bomb. Besides that, there was nothing of interest.
- - -
Wasn't there a general order recently made to the effect that no one in the American Expeditionary Forces could be executed without permission of President Wilson? Sure there was. Good of the old horse-face to think of that.
- - -
Puffing away at his cigarette, one of the men began: "If I ever get out of this man's war they'll have to hunt me with cannons to get me in another."
"You tell 'em. They sure will. When I git out of this outfit I'm goin' up into Montana and buy a ranch, and I'm goin' to dig trenches and put up barbed wire and git me some guns and spit at the whole bunch of 'em."
[...] "Well, there won't be any more wars after this one, anyway. This is the war to end war. After we lick these Boches everything will be all right."
- - -
From their sleepless nights on sentry duty, their lack of food, and the long, punishing march from the trenches, they were thoroughly exhausted. Many of the men were in such a state of fatigue that they dropped on the straw beds which had been provided for the French army in 1914, without stopping to take off their muddy shoes. And they slept dreamlessly, sodden beings with senses so dulled they could not think of food.
- - -
Sergeant Harriman rose grandly to the occasion. "Shut up, you bunch of agitators. I'll drill you till your shoes fall off."
"You wouldn't have to drill me much. Mine already have holes in them," some one remarked.
"Who said that?" Sergeant Harriman was furious.
- - -
The conversation turned upon decent prostitutes and honest gamblers, a discussion over which Paul Kruger alone had taken the affirmative every time.
- - -
No one seemed to have the least notion of the direction in which the camions were moving. Though some of the men who had been reading a recent copy of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune believed them to be headed for the Somme, where, it was said, there was heavy fighting; others believed that they were on their way to relieve the First American Division, which a few days earlier had attacked at Cantigny.
- - -
"All right. Form in a column of twos and follow me." Sergeant Harriman started off, and the men, who had risen, fell in behind him.
Until this time all had been quiet, but now the machine-guns, unmistakably Maxims, began an intermittent fire. It seemed to be a signal for the rifles, for now and again one of them would crack pungently somewhere in the dark.
- - -
Overhead the wings of an airplane whirred. Under its wings were painted large black crosses. It fired a signal, rose again in the air, wheeled, and flew back.
- - -
For perhaps a mile they had marched, and the platoon, like a sensitive instrument, was beginning to have an unaccountable perception of danger, when shoes were heard swishing through the heavy wheat.
- - -
Rat-t-t-t-tat.
A Maxim, but from an oblique direction, was firing, and Kahl sprawled on his face, his right arm falling over the shiny barrel of his rifle. Then other machine-guns rained their bullets into the clearing, and the men clawed at the ground in an effort to lower their bodies beneath the sweep of the lead.
- - -
Nine Germans stood together with their hands raised high above their heads. Their knees were shaking badly and they looked first to one side and then to the other. Docile sheep, he led them back to the village where he turned them over to a reserve regiment.
- - -
Then, for some reason, a salvo of shells were fired which struck with the wild shriek of some lost soul.
- - -
Occasionally, as the day advanced, a man would labor over the opening of a can of Argentina beef with the point of his bayonet. And then the contents would be exposed, green and sepulchrally white, the odor mingling and not quite immersed in the odor of decaying human flesh.
- - -
The morning sun sent wavering rays through the boughs of the trees, and exposed the white stumps whose tops had been blown to the earth by exploding shells. Tree limbs, with ghastly butts, lay dead-still on the thick, calm grass. Steel helmets, spattered with blood, were now and then encountered on the ground. On the space where the captain had been lying there was a blood-soaked shoe and a helmet, turned bottom up, and neatly holding a mess of brains. Near by lay a gas-mask which would never again be used. And near it the sleeve of a coat.
- - -
Had he possessed a widowed mother, or a wife and child, he would as gladly have fought the Hun from an office desk in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
- - -
Wherever the gas had touched the skin of the men, dark, flaming blisters appeared. Like acid, the yellow gas ate into the flesh and blinded the eyes.
- - -
Where yesterday's crosses had been erected, a shell had churned a body out of its shallow grave, separating from the torso the limbs. The crosses themselves had been blown flat, as if by a terrific wind.
- - -
"Smells like good old Kentucky fried chicken to me."
"Chicken, hell," said Hartman, the professional pessimist. "It's probably fried Canned Bill."
"Oh, you make me sick," Cole answered. "Can't you let a man dream?"
- - -
[The drivers of the camions were Japanese, which, as purveyors of information, made them as useful as do many "professional" silent men of the President's cabinet.]
Snorting gray camions drew up along the road by the path where the men were lying. At the driving-wheels the small Japanese, with their long, tired mustaches covered with fine dust, looked like pieces of graveyard sculpture. The dust was over their faces, over their light-blue uniforms. They sat immovable.
- - -
The platoon stopped for a moment as if stunned. Then they advanced without increasing their pace. In their faces a machine-gun spat angrily, the bullets flying past like peevish wasps. Automatic rifles were manipulated in the middles of the automatic rifle squad, and the loaders took their places at the sides of the men who were firing, jamming in one clip of cartridges after another. Rifle bullets fled past the advancing men with an infuriating zing.
- - -
The platoon had reached the first machine-gun nest, almost without knowing it. There were three Germans, their heavy helmets sunk over their heads, each performing a definite part in the firing. They, too, were surprised. Pugh, a little in the lead, drew a hand-grenade from his pocket, pulled out the pin, and threw it in their faces. It burst loudly and distinctly. One German fell flat, another grasped at his arm, his face taking on a blank expression as he did so, while the last man threw his hands above his head. Inattentive to his gesture of surrender, the line pushed on.
The fighting grew more furious. Germans, surprised, were hiding behind trees and firing their slow-working rifles. When the advancing line would reach them they would receive a charge of shot in their bodies, sometimes before they had fired at the swiftly moving line. Some member of the platoon offered his version of an Indian war whoop. It was successful in hastening the attack. Exhilarated, but sheerly impotent, one man ran forward blubbering, "You God-damn Germans," and pointing an empty rifle at the trees. Other men calmly and methodically worked the bolts of their rifles back and forth, refilling the chambers as they were emptied of each clip of five shots. From time to time a man dropped, thinning the ranks and spreading them out to such an extent that contact on the right side of the moving line was lost.
- - -
The bombardment of the night before had taken its toll of Germans. Bodies lay gawkily about on the grass. One body, headless, clutched a clay pipe between its fingers. Another lay flat on its back, a hole in its stomach as big as a hat.
- - -
In this multicolored canyon no words were exchanged. The Colonials looked sullen, the French beaten and spiritless, the Americans dogged and conscientious, the English expressionless; the Germans seemed the most human of them all. For them the fighting was finished.
- - -
From the road a small tank labored up the hill, puffing and creaking in every joint. Another tank, a miniature of the tanks pictured in the recruiting posters, wheezed along on its caterpillar tread. More tanks came. They were all small, ineffectual-looking little monsters, wearing a look of stubborn, gigantic babies. The arrival of the tanks was greeted by the firing of a salvo of shells from the German lines.
- - -
He remembered that the American army little knew the value of coffee to the man who is cold and tired and awake in the early dawn. But there would be, no doubt, French galleys, with black kettles in which they brewed strong black chicory.
- - -
Hanging in cowboy fashion, a forty-five calibre Colt flapped against his right hip. From his left side was a Luger pistol that he had taken from a dead German officer.
- - -
Possibly for an hour during his whole life he had hated the German army. Now he only disliked them. And for one reason: because they marched in a goose-step. He felt that for any people to march in that manner was embarrassing to the rest of humanity. Somehow it severed them from the rest of their kind.
- - -
Below, four waves of men with their bayoneted rifles held at high port, advanced along the flat field toward the hill. Hicks felt weak, as if he wanted to crumple up. Machine bullets clicked like keys on the typewriter of the devil's stenographer. Rifled bullets announced their swift, fatal flights by little "pings" that sounded like air escaping from a rubber tire. They seemed to follow each other closely enough to make a solid sheet of metal.
[...] To lie down in the face of the firing was more unendurable than moving toward it.
- - -
"This is an awful way to win a war. Are they tryin' to get us all killed?"
"Oh, one of these German spies is in command, that's all."
- - -
"Come back here, you damned fool. Do you want to get killed by your own barrage?"
The barrage was falling short of its mark. Shells struck the fringe of the woods toward which the men already had closely advanced.
- - -
He liked the feel of the pistol against his thigh. It made him feel equal to any danger. He was a Buffalo Bill, a Kit Carson, a d'Artagnan.
- - -
Bullets flew in every direction. Men toppled down from the windows of houses. Others raced up the steps of the dwellings. Men ran through the streets, wild and tumultuous.
- - -
"Let's sit here a while. That damned flare didn't seem to be more than a hundred yards from here."
"Yeah, le's. I don't want to git my head shot off this late in the game."
Mais:
Irving Berlin
John Philip Sousa
And he was supposed to be a soldier. He had enlisted with at least the tacit understanding that he was some day to fight. At the recruiting office in Cincinnati the bespangled sergeant had told him: "Join the marines and see some real action." And the heart of William Hicks had fled to the rich brogue and campaign ribbons that the sergeant professionally wore.
But was this action? Was this war? Was this for what William Hicks had come to France? Well, he told himself, it was not. Soldiering with a shovel. A hell of a way to treat a white man.
- - -
In this sense of reconciliation John Pugh, the Mississippi gambler, forgot his everlasting dice-throwing, which every pay-day that the platoon had thus far known had won for him more money than his company commander received from the United States Government.
- - -
Sergeant Kerfoot Harriman, bearing with proud satisfaction the learning and culture he had acquired in the course of three years at a small Middle-Western university, walked down the Rue de Dieu in a manner which carried the suggestion that he had forgotten the belt of his breeches.
- - -
Stupid-looking old Frenchmen, a few thick-waisted women, and a scattering of ragged children dully watched the company march down the street.
- - -
Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the gray of the horizon.
[...] In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many parts of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the picture.
- - -
Then he became aware of himself. In place of the straw sailor there lay very heavily on his head a steel helmet that, though he had thought it chic for a while, was now no more distinguished-looking than the aluminum dish in which his food was rationed to him. He had worn his drab shirt for two weeks, and there were black rings around the collar and wrists. His gas-mask, girded over his chest, looked foul and unclean; he had used it for a pillow, for a dining-table, and often, he realized, it had been thrown in some muddy place when he had sickened of having it about him like an ever-present albatross. The knees of his breeches were as soiled and as uncomfortable as his shirt, and his puttees and shoes were crusted thickly with dried mud.
- - -
The shell hole was half filled with water and it was cold. After three or four hours the hip rubber boots made Hicks think that his feet were a pair of dead fish in a refrigerator.
- - -
Major Adams limped as he walked, from an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal as the fourth dimension.
- - -
Once or twice men were killed when the shells struck, and their bodies were hurried away to the dressing station; one morning the body of a red-haired German, an immense fellow with a broad forehead, large wide eyes, and a huge mouth, was found fastened to the strands of barbed wire in front of Hicks's post. There was a hole in his side made by the explosion of a small hand-bomb. Besides that, there was nothing of interest.
- - -
Wasn't there a general order recently made to the effect that no one in the American Expeditionary Forces could be executed without permission of President Wilson? Sure there was. Good of the old horse-face to think of that.
- - -
Puffing away at his cigarette, one of the men began: "If I ever get out of this man's war they'll have to hunt me with cannons to get me in another."
"You tell 'em. They sure will. When I git out of this outfit I'm goin' up into Montana and buy a ranch, and I'm goin' to dig trenches and put up barbed wire and git me some guns and spit at the whole bunch of 'em."
[...] "Well, there won't be any more wars after this one, anyway. This is the war to end war. After we lick these Boches everything will be all right."
- - -
From their sleepless nights on sentry duty, their lack of food, and the long, punishing march from the trenches, they were thoroughly exhausted. Many of the men were in such a state of fatigue that they dropped on the straw beds which had been provided for the French army in 1914, without stopping to take off their muddy shoes. And they slept dreamlessly, sodden beings with senses so dulled they could not think of food.
- - -
Sergeant Harriman rose grandly to the occasion. "Shut up, you bunch of agitators. I'll drill you till your shoes fall off."
"You wouldn't have to drill me much. Mine already have holes in them," some one remarked.
"Who said that?" Sergeant Harriman was furious.
- - -
The conversation turned upon decent prostitutes and honest gamblers, a discussion over which Paul Kruger alone had taken the affirmative every time.
- - -
No one seemed to have the least notion of the direction in which the camions were moving. Though some of the men who had been reading a recent copy of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune believed them to be headed for the Somme, where, it was said, there was heavy fighting; others believed that they were on their way to relieve the First American Division, which a few days earlier had attacked at Cantigny.
- - -
"All right. Form in a column of twos and follow me." Sergeant Harriman started off, and the men, who had risen, fell in behind him.
Until this time all had been quiet, but now the machine-guns, unmistakably Maxims, began an intermittent fire. It seemed to be a signal for the rifles, for now and again one of them would crack pungently somewhere in the dark.
- - -
Overhead the wings of an airplane whirred. Under its wings were painted large black crosses. It fired a signal, rose again in the air, wheeled, and flew back.
- - -
For perhaps a mile they had marched, and the platoon, like a sensitive instrument, was beginning to have an unaccountable perception of danger, when shoes were heard swishing through the heavy wheat.
- - -
Rat-t-t-t-tat.
A Maxim, but from an oblique direction, was firing, and Kahl sprawled on his face, his right arm falling over the shiny barrel of his rifle. Then other machine-guns rained their bullets into the clearing, and the men clawed at the ground in an effort to lower their bodies beneath the sweep of the lead.
- - -
Nine Germans stood together with their hands raised high above their heads. Their knees were shaking badly and they looked first to one side and then to the other. Docile sheep, he led them back to the village where he turned them over to a reserve regiment.
- - -
Then, for some reason, a salvo of shells were fired which struck with the wild shriek of some lost soul.
- - -
Occasionally, as the day advanced, a man would labor over the opening of a can of Argentina beef with the point of his bayonet. And then the contents would be exposed, green and sepulchrally white, the odor mingling and not quite immersed in the odor of decaying human flesh.
- - -
The morning sun sent wavering rays through the boughs of the trees, and exposed the white stumps whose tops had been blown to the earth by exploding shells. Tree limbs, with ghastly butts, lay dead-still on the thick, calm grass. Steel helmets, spattered with blood, were now and then encountered on the ground. On the space where the captain had been lying there was a blood-soaked shoe and a helmet, turned bottom up, and neatly holding a mess of brains. Near by lay a gas-mask which would never again be used. And near it the sleeve of a coat.
- - -
Had he possessed a widowed mother, or a wife and child, he would as gladly have fought the Hun from an office desk in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
- - -
Wherever the gas had touched the skin of the men, dark, flaming blisters appeared. Like acid, the yellow gas ate into the flesh and blinded the eyes.
- - -
Where yesterday's crosses had been erected, a shell had churned a body out of its shallow grave, separating from the torso the limbs. The crosses themselves had been blown flat, as if by a terrific wind.
- - -
"Smells like good old Kentucky fried chicken to me."
"Chicken, hell," said Hartman, the professional pessimist. "It's probably fried Canned Bill."
"Oh, you make me sick," Cole answered. "Can't you let a man dream?"
- - -
[The drivers of the camions were Japanese, which, as purveyors of information, made them as useful as do many "professional" silent men of the President's cabinet.]
Snorting gray camions drew up along the road by the path where the men were lying. At the driving-wheels the small Japanese, with their long, tired mustaches covered with fine dust, looked like pieces of graveyard sculpture. The dust was over their faces, over their light-blue uniforms. They sat immovable.
- - -
The platoon stopped for a moment as if stunned. Then they advanced without increasing their pace. In their faces a machine-gun spat angrily, the bullets flying past like peevish wasps. Automatic rifles were manipulated in the middles of the automatic rifle squad, and the loaders took their places at the sides of the men who were firing, jamming in one clip of cartridges after another. Rifle bullets fled past the advancing men with an infuriating zing.
- - -
The platoon had reached the first machine-gun nest, almost without knowing it. There were three Germans, their heavy helmets sunk over their heads, each performing a definite part in the firing. They, too, were surprised. Pugh, a little in the lead, drew a hand-grenade from his pocket, pulled out the pin, and threw it in their faces. It burst loudly and distinctly. One German fell flat, another grasped at his arm, his face taking on a blank expression as he did so, while the last man threw his hands above his head. Inattentive to his gesture of surrender, the line pushed on.
The fighting grew more furious. Germans, surprised, were hiding behind trees and firing their slow-working rifles. When the advancing line would reach them they would receive a charge of shot in their bodies, sometimes before they had fired at the swiftly moving line. Some member of the platoon offered his version of an Indian war whoop. It was successful in hastening the attack. Exhilarated, but sheerly impotent, one man ran forward blubbering, "You God-damn Germans," and pointing an empty rifle at the trees. Other men calmly and methodically worked the bolts of their rifles back and forth, refilling the chambers as they were emptied of each clip of five shots. From time to time a man dropped, thinning the ranks and spreading them out to such an extent that contact on the right side of the moving line was lost.
- - -
The bombardment of the night before had taken its toll of Germans. Bodies lay gawkily about on the grass. One body, headless, clutched a clay pipe between its fingers. Another lay flat on its back, a hole in its stomach as big as a hat.
- - -
In this multicolored canyon no words were exchanged. The Colonials looked sullen, the French beaten and spiritless, the Americans dogged and conscientious, the English expressionless; the Germans seemed the most human of them all. For them the fighting was finished.
- - -
From the road a small tank labored up the hill, puffing and creaking in every joint. Another tank, a miniature of the tanks pictured in the recruiting posters, wheezed along on its caterpillar tread. More tanks came. They were all small, ineffectual-looking little monsters, wearing a look of stubborn, gigantic babies. The arrival of the tanks was greeted by the firing of a salvo of shells from the German lines.
- - -
He remembered that the American army little knew the value of coffee to the man who is cold and tired and awake in the early dawn. But there would be, no doubt, French galleys, with black kettles in which they brewed strong black chicory.
- - -
Hanging in cowboy fashion, a forty-five calibre Colt flapped against his right hip. From his left side was a Luger pistol that he had taken from a dead German officer.
- - -
Possibly for an hour during his whole life he had hated the German army. Now he only disliked them. And for one reason: because they marched in a goose-step. He felt that for any people to march in that manner was embarrassing to the rest of humanity. Somehow it severed them from the rest of their kind.
- - -
Below, four waves of men with their bayoneted rifles held at high port, advanced along the flat field toward the hill. Hicks felt weak, as if he wanted to crumple up. Machine bullets clicked like keys on the typewriter of the devil's stenographer. Rifled bullets announced their swift, fatal flights by little "pings" that sounded like air escaping from a rubber tire. They seemed to follow each other closely enough to make a solid sheet of metal.
[...] To lie down in the face of the firing was more unendurable than moving toward it.
- - -
"This is an awful way to win a war. Are they tryin' to get us all killed?"
"Oh, one of these German spies is in command, that's all."
- - -
"Come back here, you damned fool. Do you want to get killed by your own barrage?"
The barrage was falling short of its mark. Shells struck the fringe of the woods toward which the men already had closely advanced.
- - -
He liked the feel of the pistol against his thigh. It made him feel equal to any danger. He was a Buffalo Bill, a Kit Carson, a d'Artagnan.
- - -
Bullets flew in every direction. Men toppled down from the windows of houses. Others raced up the steps of the dwellings. Men ran through the streets, wild and tumultuous.
- - -
"Let's sit here a while. That damned flare didn't seem to be more than a hundred yards from here."
"Yeah, le's. I don't want to git my head shot off this late in the game."
Mais:
Irving Berlin
John Philip Sousa
