The other struck him familiarly across the shoulder. “And that ain’t all. Say, fellow, there’s a band concert tonight right here in this little old square. I’m goin’ and I’m goin’ to take a lady.”
“Lady! Where’d you get her?”
“Right here. These girls are all right. Not afraid of a dark skin. ‘How should we have fear, m’soo,’ one of them says to me, ‘when you fight for our patrie and when you are so beau?’ ‘Beau’ that’s handsome, ain’t it? Say this is some country to fight for; got some sense of appreciation. Better come along, old scout. There’s a pile of loots getting ready to come, each with a French dame in tow.”
“I’ll be there,” Peter told him, laughing. “But count me out with the ladies. I can’t get along with the domestic brand and I know I’ll be out of luck with the foreign ones.”
Some passing thought wiped the joy of anticipation from Harley’s face. “My experience is that these foreign ones are a damn sight less foolish than some domestic ones I’ve met. Well, me for the concert.”
But that band concert never came off. At sunset a company of white American Southerners marched into Lathus down the main street, past the little place. There was a sudden uproar.
“Look! Darkies and white women! Come on, fellows, kill the damned niggers!”
There was a hasty onslaught in which the colored soldiers even taken by surprise gave as good as they took. Between these two groups from the same soil there was grimmer, more determined fighting than was seen at Verdun. The French civil population stood on the church-steps opposite the square and watched with amazement.
“Nom de dieu! Are they crazy, then, these Americans, that they kill each other!”
The next day saw Peter’s company on its way to La Courtine, a training center, where there were no women. Thence they moved presently to the front in the Metz Sector.
The injustice and indignity rendered the colored troups at Lathus, plus the momentary glimpses which he caught of Meriwether and his exaltation, plunged Peter into a morass of melancholy and bitter self-communing which shut him off as effectually as a smokescreen from any real appreciation of the dangers which surrounded him on the front.
In the midst of all that ineffable danger, that hellish noise, he was harassed by the inextricable confusion, the untidiness of his own life. God, to get rid of it all! Once he spent forty-eight hours with nine other men on the ridge of a hill under fire. The other fellows told stories and swapped confidences. But he stayed unmoved through it all, impervious alike to the danger and the good man-talk going on about him.
When the call came for a reconnoitering party, he was one of the first to step forward. He went out that night into the blackness, the hellishness of No Man’s Land. He saw a dark figure rise in front of him, heard a guttural sound and the next moment his left arm, drenched with blood, hung useless at his side. Raising himself he shot at the legs which showed a solid blackness against the thinner surrounding darkness. Wriggling on his belly, he pushed forward to where he thought he heard sounds, a struggle. “Something doing,” he told himself, “might as well get in on that.”
But when he drew near the darkness was so intense that he did not dare interfere. Two men, at least, were struggling terribly but he could not tell which was which. They were breathing in terrific grunts, so heavily that they had not noticed the approach of his smoothly sliding body. Suddenly what he had hoped for, happened. A rocket shot up in the air flared briefly and showed him the two men. One was Meriwether Bye, the other was a German, his hand in the act of throwing a hand grenade.
Peter lurched forward and at that ghastly short range shot the German through the stomach. But he was too late, the grenade had left the man’s hand. The earth rocked about him, he could see Meriwether fall, a toppling darkness in the darkness. He started toward him but his foot caught in a depression and he himself fell sideways on his wounded arm. There was a moment of exquisite pain and then the darkness grew even more dark about him, the silent night more silent.
When he came to, it was still dark, though the day, he felt, rather than saw, was approaching. His arm hurt unmercifully. He had never known such pain. He raised himself on his one arm, and felt around with his foot. Yes, there was a body, he prayed it might not be the German. Crawling forward he plunged his hand into blood, a depthless pool of sticky blood. Sickened, he drew back and dried it, wiping it on his coat. More cautiously, then, he reached out again, searching for the face, yes, that was Meriwether’s nose. Those canny fingertips of his recognized the facial structure. His hand came back to Meriwether’s chest. The heart was beating faintly and just above it was a hole, with the blood gushing, spurting, hot and thick.
He sat upright and wrenching open his tunic tore at his shirt. The stuff was hard to tear but it finally gave way under the onslaught of teeth and fingers. Faint with the pain of his left arm and the loss of his own blood, he set his lips hard, concentrating with all his strength on the determination not to lose consciousness again. Finally grunting, swearing, almost crying, he got Meriwether’s head against his knee, then against his shoulder, and staunched the wound with the harsh, unyielding khaki. His canteen was full and he drenched the chilly, helpless face with its contents. All this time he was sitting with no support for his back and the strain was telling on him.
Against the surrounding gray of the coming morning, southward toward
