A Rifleman Went to War

of the shelling: “Oh, oh! What the hell’s he after? We must have a battery stuck in the side of that pile of plaster over there.”

The pile of plaster is the remains of the familiar quadrangle which was once a French farm-house. It is about the level of a man’s waist, with a timber sticking up here and there. It is a singular fact that almost no one ever voices any wonder as to where the owners are, or how they live. They do not even think of it as a home, or as having been a home. This illustrates better, than anything I know, the strange impersonality of war, its complete severance from everyday experience, a severance so subtly made that no one knows how or when it was made. In the most advanced “borderland” villages, the strange thing is not that there are soldiers here, in this town which doesn’t belong to them, but that there are a few civilians poking about. A woman or an old man has opened a little shop in the comer of a ruined building. A soldier goes in for a bar of black chocolate or a few candles for use in the trenches; and it is much as if an explorer had come upon a tiny trading-post far beyond the Arctic Circle in a land where nobody, except explorers, belongs. No; this is a land of men in uniform, and guns and rifles, shells and bullets; there is nothing puzzling about it; but there is something puzzling about coming upon an old woman prodding with a stick among the shell-holes, just beyond a little grayish patch sprinkled with a few red tiles. (This was her vegetable garden, and she has come up to see if she can find a bit of garlic or a bunch of leeks.) There is something funny, incongruous, about this apparition who presently hobbles on to the road and takes her way back to the nearest village still whole enough to shelter her from the rain.

But there is nothing incongruous about the scene a short time later, when the battalion has ceased to move as a battalion; — headquarters has gone to its position and the various companies or platoons are on their several ways to theirs, led by guides, and under conditions and over distances that vary a great deal. The area may be perfectly quiet, or mildly shelled and swept by bullets, much of which they time and localize without difficulty and almost without thinking. But presently there comes an unlucky shell, or, in an overland stretch, someone stops a machine-gun bullet. There is no confusion, no excitement. War is the business here, and death as familiar as it can ever be for the living. It is dark. The few words are spoken quietly, merely for guidance: “This way, stretcher- bearers.” “Oh, you’re all right. I won’t dress it; wait till you get back where they have a light. Tell them to send for him; there is no hurry; half his head is gone.” “Who is it?” “Johnson.” “Give me those candles out of his haversack.”

“Anybody else hurt? All right men, close up. Keep in touch here.”

So they go: Step down. Step up. Hole. Wire here; easy in front; all right, go ahead. Dash across here, forty feet, watch out for little holes. Everybody over? Keep in touch.

There is a spurt of orange flame in the darkness at a height of a hundred feet some yards ahead. A leisurely sort of a hiss mounts rapidly and ends abruptly in an explosion: Shrapnel. But they go on, waiting for the next to see whether it is worth while to take cover.

After a while they arrive at their position; which is neither in Berlin nor St. Petersburg, as has been suggested — for the ears of the guide — several times en route; it is the front-line trench.

A comparatively quiet sector affords the best opportunity for observing the soldier and noting the little incidents and scraps of conversation which indicate something of his attitude. If these seem quite undramatic, free of excitement, horror and ghastly unreality, you are on the right track. They are concerned with such things as the posthumous career of Adolph. Adolph was once a Bavarian Lieutenant. When I first saw him the insignia of his rank had been stripped off. I was told that he had been cashiered. But that same day there was another court sitting on the case. He was being tried for having been a good soldier. I am sorry that I haven’t a complete record of the evidence introduced and of the findings, not only of this but of dozens of other trials which he had undergone — and still continued to undergo, for there was hardly enough of him left now to bury. He had been buried, originally, I understand, shining helmet and all. No one knew when this had taken place. His first appearance, so far as our history went, was on a fine morning in the midst of breakfast, when a minnie, evidently intended for the dugout, unearthed him. He was pretty badly scattered about; but when breakfast was over, he was raked together and buried again, the helmet, bearing a suitable inscription and identification as to rank and regiment, being affixed to the top of the grave.

Within a few days he was out again. It seemed hardly worth while to attempt to keep him down. There was not much of him now; a half-dozen bones, a skull, a portion of one leg of his trousers and a fragment of coat with some bits of piping in red. Someone had made him look as tidy as possible, supporting him on a strand of old wire and placing his battered helmet in position. The shells had quite destroyed the parados immediately beside the entrance to the dugout, and it had never been rebuilt; so that he was in plain view — only a few feet away — to all who passed along the trench or paused for a breath of fresh air, or to finish their tea, at the entrance. Most of the men were on familiar terms with him, but with each new trip in the line there were some new men, and these were curious. Their questions resulted, in the end, in quite a long and somewhat contradictory history. He was treated very kindly, and sometimes so brilliantly that he ceased to be a ragged old coat, relict of the comedy of war, and became a splendid young Bavarian with flashing eyes and a quick smile, wearing his nice new uniform with a manner, saying good-bye with a pleasant jest and promising to return soon.

Somebody, seeing his utter defenselessness, had in time supplied him with an old bayonet. In the mornings after stand-to, while waiting for breakfast, they would stop to exchange greetings with him or to congratulate him on being damned well out of it, or to inquire as to what he knew about the plans of the High Command. But there was nothing strange about his fate, and he was not a constant reminder that at any minute a similar fate might overtake one of them. They didn’t need such reminders; death was their business; they treated it familiarly because they were familiar with it. They forgot all about it, and waited impatiently the return of the ration party with their oatmeal, bacon and tea.

“Ah here we are fellows; Fritz is sending us a few pineapples for breakfast.” The sound was like that of a rifle firing defective ammunition. When the grenade had exploded, near the trench apparently, but thirty yards to the right, there were other reports, and for perhaps five minutes the miniature bombardment continued. Then it tapered off, with one now and then, at long irregular intervals, at the whim, possibly, of some German soldier who had nothing else to do.

“Hey, two of you fellows come along here and help with the rations.” Two men set off without question, first calling down the dugout: “All right down there; you can eat your jam and bread and dig up a can of bully. There’s brains in the tea this morning.”

But the tea was all right. So was the oatmeal and bacon; though there was a big dent in the side of the dixie: “Who was it?” “Smith and McGregor. Mac is done for. Smith got a knee-cap torn off.” “Dammit; why in the hell don’t they keep their eyes open!” “All right, fellows, I’m not going to be here all day dishing this out.”

Such incidents were not frequent in the quiet sectors after things had settled down into the long siege of trench warfare. During my last few weeks in France it was not unusual for a battalion to make its tour of front-line duty with so few casualties that they went almost unnoticed. But no matter how frequently they occurred, they did not, as a rule, bring death any closer to the survivors. Each one went on with his business in hand as if he were quite certain he would live to see the end of it and return to peace-time pursuits. It was not a matter of believing this or knowing it. It may better be called hope; but it was hope without its opposite of doubt or fear. A man might in an odd moment think about it and face quite frankly the possibility that before another day had passed he would be pushing up daisies, but meanwhile he carried on on the very definite assumption that he would not. This was an imperatively necessary attitude. Without it a man could not face a hail of machine-gun bullets and showers of whining shrapnel. With it, he faced them without thinking of the danger. He ducked only to rise again and carry on. But he did not need to remember the casualty list — or look at the men falling on each side of him — to know that it was only an attitude. So in the instant while he waited he faced the possibility of never rising again. This instant might be filled with a thousand reactions, all so brief that perhaps two of them were clear; and these might be, first, a momentary shrinking wonder as to where the damned thing would hit and, second, a dim bitter reflection that this is a goddamned fine end for a man. It was only an instant; the ground shook, the fuse assembly of a shell whirred and buried itself in the mud under his nose, and he was up and away, with a queer, excited, short laugh or a shout to his comrades. Maybe, in the next shell-hole, he would say to one of them: “That damned Boche thought he had my number that time.”

This came to be a very common expression of that attitude. Sometimes it took a hold so deep that it amounted almost to a superstition; and I can readily imagine how this might come about from watching high-angle shells, at times when a man had nothing to do but watch them, as on an idle afternoon when Heinie decided to