One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 7

they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty beasts."
"You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes."
"Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes." The
commandant rubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed.
"Hah! There's the next convoy. I must go."
"Good luck."
The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at
the garden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone.
Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb of
camions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting.
"Give us a drink, you."
"We're the train de luxe, we are."
"Down with the war!"
And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said:
"Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!"

Chapter IV
MARTIN, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft,
woke with a start.
"Say, Howe!" Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand.
"I think I heard a shell go over."
As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion that
shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face.
"Say, fellers, that was damn near," came a voice from the floor of the
barn.
"We'd better go over to the quarry."
"Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!"
A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.
"Gee, that was in the house behind us. . ."
"I smell gas.
"Ye damn fool, it's carbide."
"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas."
"All right, fellers, put on your masks."
Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely
with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the
stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in
a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched
the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up
a continuous hammering drum-beat. Over their head shells shrieked at
two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the
village on the other side of the valley.

"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern
voice. "Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to
sleep?... They must be tired like we are."
A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they
saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that followed,
the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.
Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of a
tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the
mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men
chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he
worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell
trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died
away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and
shuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far above
his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow
a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over
which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.
The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was
a small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the
horns of a long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and
peered about in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down
again and began talking briskly.
"We are exactly four hundred and five metres from the Boche.... Five
hundred metres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der
Kaiser.'"
"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la République,' I should say."
"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in
Paris."
"The sky is very beautiful to-night."
"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusqués;

it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."
Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred
and five metres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris
was the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a
nauseous stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand,
that had been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line
trenches that zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned
clay along the crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and
had clambered up the oily clay where