Once an Eagle (13 page)

“Now what kind of a trick is that?” he demanded, but his voice had no force. “Kind of way to wake up a fellow … ?”

Damon jabbed his collarbone with a rigid finger. “You know what you've done, don't you? You've fallen asleep on watch, on the line. You know what that means?”

“Sarge, the hours are too long …”

“Is that a fact. We'll have to adjust them for you.”

“It's all the
water.
When my feet get cold—” Raebyrne broke off; he was seized with an almost irrepressible surge of laughter—succeeded in less than a second by abject dread. Asleep on outpost duty. Asleep on—

“You know what you could get. Don't you.”

“I—guess so, Sarge.”

“You guess so. Jesus, they're just dying to make an example of somebody like you, back there. They'll burn you at the stake.”

“Yes, Sarge.” He felt contrite, assailed by vague fears of courts-martial, banks of scowling, implacable faces behind a battery of desks, the sweating gray walls of prisons, even the black stake before the firing squad. But nothing stayed in his head for very long; his thoughts rolled around like marbles loose in a can. The swollen terror of that instant of waking still held him with his teeth chattering, half-dizzy, sick at his stomach.

“You God damned fool … What am I going to
do
with you?” Damon struck his thigh, waved one arm—the arm that had held the trench knife—wildly north and east. “They want to
kill
you, over there! Cut your throat and leave you for the rats. Kill.
You.
Can't you get that through your stupid Tarheel head?”

Raebyrne nodded, miserable. He had gone to sleep on watch. When his buddies depended on him for their safety. Their lives. Even now he could hardly comprehend what had happened. He could go to prison for years. Years and years behind stone walls, in the dark.

“Sarge,” he mumbled. “It won't happen again …”

“No. It won't. It sure as hell won't.” There was a thick sucking sound as Damon pulled his boots out of the water. He was staring at no man's land. His face was visible now; for a fleeting instant the Sergeant's expression was troubled and uncertain, almost fearful—as though he could see out in that swollen desert of muck and débris something infinitely destructive and menacing to them all. Watching him Raebyrne was filled with a nameless, all-pervasive affection for the Nebraskan—and an urgent concern he could not possibly have explained. Old Sarge, he thought awkwardly.

But when Damon looked at him again the Sergeant's face might have been carved from flint. In a very quiet voice he said: “All right. I'm going to give you one more chance, Raebyrne. I'm going to let you off.”

“Sarge, I—”

“Shut up. I'll do the talking. You're out and away the best marksman among the rookies, and I think you've got the makings of a halfway decent soldier. Maybe I'm wrong.” He paused. “No man deserves another chance after an exhibition as disgraceful as this. But I'm going to give you one. I'm going to leave this between you and me and God Almighty …” All at once his hand shot out and gripped the private between neck and shoulder, so hard he winced. “But if I ever catch you on watch with one eye closed again, Raebyrne—if I ever see you even
blink!
—I'm going to personally run your sorry ass all the way up to Black Jack Pershing and see to it they give you the Bastille for the remainder of your unnatural life. Now have you got that?”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Now get back to your post, Soldier. You
will
stay alert and observant until relieved.”

“Right, Sarge.”

“Right.” Damon moved away in a sliding, slithering crouch, his hobnailed boots sucking and gurgling in the mud.

“… The Bass Steel,” Raebyrne mumbled. His mind was whirling in a disordered skein of images and sensations. His chest still hurt where Damon had struck him and he rubbed it tenderly, imagining instead of the Sergeant's fist a knife, the blade going down through his ribs into his vitals, his liver and lights. A rocket went up, far to his left, and he followed its tremulous course like a mole. “The Bass Steel.” He was shaken all at once with a fit of laughter and doubled over helplessly against the mud, giggling and shaking.

“Old Reb,” he murmured. “You almost packed it in. You almost left this kindly old world, without a flask for the journey … ” The sweat was clammy on his forehead, his whole body was sweat-drenched now, clutched in one mountainous, trembling chill. For several moments he could not tell whether he was laughing, crying or hiccuping, or caught by all three.

“—Rugged old Sarge,” he gasped finally, squinting at the charred and terrible landscape, no longer lighted by flares. The tomnoddy sailor had finally turned in. “Damn. Old Sarge really clapperclawed me, didn't he now? Treated me like something out of the midden. Now, I mean.” Sniffling and hawking, watching the darkness gently lift, he felt his face slip once more into its easy grin. “Old Reb. Bouncing in the catbird seat. Let a smile be your umbrella …”

3

The road was
jammed with refugees. Away to the north, artillery rumbled and shuddered, and the crowds surged toward the column as though blown ahead of the gusty mutter of the guns. The platoon peered at them as they streamed past—gnarled old men in berets and baggy trousers, women hooded in black shawls, bony horses pulling wagons that held chests and quilts and iron kettles and the dark, carved posts of bedsteads. All were walking except the sick and the very old. There were carriages Damon would never have imagined still existed: stylish cabriolets with cracked leather calash hoods, ancient tumbrils with massive iron-bound wheels that could have borne nobles to the guillotine, sulky-bodied phaëtons from the days of the Second Empire, from whose windows elderly faces wreathed in black lace gazed fearfully. There were painted carts pulled by dogs, and wheelbarrows pushed by little boys in sabots with grimy, tear-stained faces; there was even a post coach listing drunkenly on a broken spring. They were all piled high with the treasures of ten thousand abandoned homes: Limoges pitchers and rosewood clocks and chased hourglass cages where parakeets clung and screamed. Women and children and old men, coming like the ocher froth on the leading edge of a flood tide, well-to-do and poor commingled, indistinguishable in the endless, pitiful processional. A world is on the edge of falling, Damon thought, and his belly felt hot with anger. But it will not fall, because we are here.

Now and then a farmer would wave to the column—a brief, half-hearted gesture abandoned almost as soon as begun; occasionally a woman would try to smile, but this was rare. The horde of faces were gray with terror and fatigue. They had been turned out of their homes the day before, and now the Germans were in them, looting and smashing. They knew. After four years the war had reached out without warning and caught them in its iron fist, and nothing would ever be the same for them. Walking in laced leather shoes or wooden sabots or barefoot they came on, clutching to their bosoms rabbits or pullets or shiny copper pots. Now and then a mirror piled high in a carriage among feather mattresses and armoires would flash like a shield in the hot sun, dazzling the eyes of the platoon marching along the right-hand side of the road.

“Look at 'em all—”

“Hightailing it ahead of the God dayamn Pee-roossians.”

“Yes, and so would you, Reb. My God, half the country must be running away …”

Farther on, in a little village square, hundreds of people were lying on the dirty cobbles. They stared at the column dully, too weary now for hope or wonder. A little girl in a pink pinafore dress was standing in her grandfather's arms and wailing softly, her mouth drawn down in the age-old expression of a child's anguish, deep and boundless. Turner muttered something wrathfully, and Raebyrne called: “Don't you fret none, honey girl, we'll get you back home. Those Fritzies ain't seen
us
in action yet …”

“All right,” Damon said. “Dress it up, now.”

Yet it was sobering. Earlier in the day the platoon had been in high spirits, calling out greetings and encouragement; but the steady onrush of these frightened, despairing multitudes, coupled with thirst and heat and the strain of the forced march from Drouamont, had begun to tell on them. Gradually they became irritable, then sullen and unsure. There was no end to this hot, dusty, undulating country, these powdery roads lined with the gaunt black silhouettes of poplars.

“What kind of trees are those?” Tsonka wanted to know.

“Well, they're skirmisher trees,” Raebyrne answered.

“Why skirmisher trees?”

“Because they keep advancing by line of skirmishers no matter where you find them. They never bunch up and they never go to prone position. They're just good, steady skirmishers.”

“Well, they're not very damn much for shade …”

The guns were louder now, a steady, billowing rumble; drums beaten by malicious children. To their right were little rolling hills, and sloping fields furry with grain, and patches of dense woodland. They swung along, thirty-two inches to the stride, rolling their shoulders and flexing their arms against the numbing grip of the packs. They passed a farmhouse, barren and ghostly in the late afternoon light. In the next field a French battery was firing, the gunners pulling the lanyards as fast as the loaders could slam the breeches: a mesmeric frenzy. Damon watched them as they moved past; they were tired, unshaven, they stumbled when they tried to avoid each other, passing shells. Beyond those hills, then, were the Germans, divisions and divisions of them, coming like doom under a gray helmet. They had broken through at Cambrai, they had broken through at St. Quentin and the Chemin des Dames, they had all at once taken more ground than either side in four terrible years. They were going to try to wind it up now, cross the Marne, swing west and envelop Paris, but from the south this time … He felt it in his very bones: this was the moment, there would be no other.

“What I'd like to know is, where are we?” Brewster said.

“What difference does it make?” Devlin answered him. “You go where they point you.”

“Yes, but I'd still like to know. It gives me a sense of—it gives me a sense of orientation.”

“I saw a sign that said Poux,” Turner volunteered.

“Poo yourself. I didn't see any sign that said Poo …”

“We're heading for Briny Deep,” Raebyrne proclaimed. “Spotted it on that red-capped gravestone down the road a piece.”

“Who in hell ever heard of a town called Briny Deep?”

Raebyrne thrust out his lower lip and spat. “That's where we're heading, all the same.”

 

The room was
narrow and had no ceiling. Most of the officers and sergeants of the battalion were packed into it; huddled around Major Caldwell, who was talking clearly and rapidly. A French one-to-twenty-thousand map—the only map of the area the battalion had—was resting on a shattered armoire; the Major's shoulder now and then moved as his finger traveled over its surface.

“… and B Company will deploy along the high ground about a hundred yards beyond the railroad embankment—here. The French Two fifty-ninth is already dug in in the woods to the east of Brigny-le-Thiep, here. It will be B Company's responsibility to maintain contact with the French. It is expected that the main weight of the enemy attack will come from Cherseulles, with Brigny as its main objective …”

By rising on his toes and peering down between two heads Damon could see most of the map. There was what looked like a very broad meadow curving southwest toward Nantseche, where they now were. To the east were dense woods in a long, scarflike crescent, to the west patches of woodland surrounding a cluster of buildings—Raebyrne's Briny Deep. South and east of the town, beyond the railroad and nearly centered between the wooded areas were what looked like two isolated buildings, probably a farm.

“General Benoît-Guesclin has issued express orders that our positions are to be held at all costs. If dislodged from our original positions, unit commanders will counterattack vigorously to recover them.” The Major paused. “Are there any questions?”

Captain Hillebrand of C Company said: “Is the enemy strength at Cherseulles known, sir?”

“No. It is not even certain that the Germans hold it. All we know is that the French have taken a terrible pounding and are falling back rapidly. Elements of the Fifth Prussian Guards Division and the Fifteenth Grenadiers have been definitely identified.”

“Sir,” Captain Crowder said, “my company still hasn't any grenades.”

Major Caldwell looked back at him impassively. “There are no grenades. They haven't come up and they probably won't.”

There was a silence in the room. The booming of the guns was heavier now. Lieutenant Jamison, the Yale boy, said: “Artillery is in a bad way, Major—Captain Henchey says the one fifty-fives are certain to be delayed for several hours. What are we to do if we don't receive any counterbattery support?”

Caldwell raised his head. “We must go it without them.” There was another pause. A flock of shells shrilled overhead, a high whistling sibilance, and crashed a hundred yards away, and the room's occupants gave a little restless stir. Damon, his eyes on Caldwell, noticed that the Major had not moved a muscle.

“I'm sure I don't have to remind you gentlemen that the situation is grave, to put it mildly. We are entering the line at a crucial moment, a desperate moment. A great deal—a very great deal—will hinge on the quality of our efforts here.” His gaze passed over the massed faces in front of him. “All eyes are upon us. We are a part of the first participation of American arms in this long and cruel war. There are those who are convinced that we Americans are lacking in audacity, in élan, in fortitude. That we will not and cannot fight. There are even those—and they are not simply the Germans”—his eyes flashed in the dim light—“who will rejoice if we should fail. I am counting on each and every one of you to give the lie to those foolish conjectures …” Another flight of shells arched overhead and exploded close by; the Major put his hands on the map. “There is no time to lose. Make your troop dispositions as rapidly as possible. Make your orders brief ones, and above all encourage the greatest possible use of individual initiative by the men of your commands.” He gave a brief, mournful smile. “Good luck to all of you. Dismiss.”

 

The platoon was
sprawled in the courtyard of a house, slumped against the stone, when Damon and Lieutenant Harris came up. As the men fell in, two others came straggling across the street—Ferguson carrying an iron pot, Raebyrne with a bottle of wine and what looked like a great pink corset adorned with ribbons and bows.

“Where the hell have you two been?” Damon demanded.

“Just a little happy foraging, Sarge.”

Damon suppressed a smile. “You damn fools. All right, fall in …”

They stepped off in two files, moving gently uphill; and darkness came like a breath of wind. There was a heavy low mass on the right, woods, and later a row of poplars on the skyline. The pace was rapid; hills and valleys came and went, their feet began to hurt, the pack straps cut more deeply into their shoulders. They entered a patch of woods, a pathway gray and ghostly in the dark, came out at the edge of a vast wheatfield damp with dew. Shells came over again with their high, taut sigh, and burst deep in the woods they had left. Walking on, they came over the crest of a hill, and suddenly they heard it: the sound of a machine gun. Dod dod dod. Dod dod dod dod dod. Then another—a lighter, flatter sound, and after that the whine and crack of rifle fire. Damon could feel the column tremble like an animal.

“Close it up,” he said, his voice lower. “Close it up, now.”

“Going to be rougher than a cob trying to get a little shut-eye around here,” Raebyrne observed genially. “That's the trouble with war, you—”

Out ahead of them there rose the swift rush of vertical light, and Damon called out:
“Stand fast!”
The column went rigid. There was a flat crack and the flare started its slow descent, drifting softly, swaying in the summer night like an indescribably beautiful, lustrous flower sinking through water, and around them hills and woods and walled ruins leaped into view starkly, without depth: a fairy stage set. The column was still as death, their faces white and childlike under the dish rim of their helmets, and to Damon it was as if he were seeing them all for the first time: brash, uncertain, voluble, happy-go-lucky, resentful—and as vulnerable as flesh alone can be. Going toward battle. The men he'd trained and threatened and cajoled, who were now standing fast, as he'd bidden them, without a ripple or a flutter. For the briefest of instants, gazing at their bright, eager faces he was swept with the most fierce and exultant pride—and then with the deepest, darkest sadness he had ever felt in all his life.

Then the flare went out, and darkness rushed back over them all like a cool hand. “All right,” Damon called flatly. “Move out, now …”

 

“You'd think they
could have got us grenades,” Lieutenant Harris said. “My God, when you think of all the dumps cram-jam full of ammunition we passed coming from Charmevillers … What time is it?”

“Quarter to eleven,” Damon answered.

“Quarter to eleven. Do you think we'll get a counterbarrage?”

“Yes, sir. I do.” Actually he wasn't at all sure. There had been a haste about the whole two days, an atmosphere of confusion and improvisation that disturbed him; but it seemed better to show confidence now.

“I wish we knew where the front line was,” Harris went on. He was a volunteer officer from Plattsburg and he was trying very hard not to show his fear, which was making him garrulous. “I'd feel a lot better if we knew for certain whether the Germans were in Cherseulles …”

Damon made no reply. He knew that what Harris meant was that he was unhappy about their position; he was himself. Why were they placed here out in front of the railroad embankment, facing rising ground? It felt all wrong; they ought to be dug in on the leading edge of the embankment itself, and at the edge of the woods … But you obeyed orders; and the orders of the French command had been to dig in here.

“What's that—over there?” Harris muttered. “If you could only
see
…”

There was movement on their right. Men were coming out of the woods, hurrying through the wheat, and in the dim light Damon made out the curved and crested helmets, heard the liquid patter of their talk.

“French,” he said.

“What are they doing?” Harris asked.

“Dev,” Damon said, raising his voice, “ask them what's up, will you?”

The group came through them, hurrying. One man was limping, giving a quick, tight groan every time his wounded foot touched the earth. Two others were lugging an assembled Hotchkiss gun, stumbling and panting over the uneven ground.