Once an Eagle (24 page)

“Over that way,” Devlin heard him tell Sam. The Colonel's eyes were swollen, his face was white with fatigue. “By the edge of those woods, see? Keep on to the right until you see the Moroccans. Keep going forward, and hug that barrage. Hug it! And good luck to you, all of you.”

There was a murmured, indecipherable reply. They swung out in line of skirmishers, in good order. Devlin looked at his watch. 4:23. He turned and gazed at the platoon. They were wobbling and wavering as they walked. Their faces were ash gray and wan; they looked like sickly older brothers of the men he had trained.

“All right,” Damon said. He had turned to face them, holding his Springfield across his thighs. His voice sounded harsh in the silence. “I'm not a great hand at speeches. You new men, remember your three-yard interval. If anybody gets hit, let him lie. You automatic riflemen, keep wide on the flanks wherever you can; and pour it on. That's what you're there for, to let us get in close. Dev, I'm counting on you to make contact with the Senegalese as early as possible.”

“Right, Sam,” he answered. His voice felt metallic, with none of the edges filed off. Sweat was working down through his eyebrows into his eyes.

“Now, we're going to go through,” Sam went on; his face looked hard, almost angry. “Don't any of you make any mistake about that. What we go after, we get. Any man doesn't do his duty here today has got a hell of a lot more than me to answer to. But I know you'll do your duty, all of you. Because you're good men. The best.”

The ranks stood there doggedly, watching him. The silence was like great plates of glass bending.

“Fix bayonets,” he ordered sharply. Their hands went smartly to their left thighs, the blades flashed in the light; and the click of the studs on the locking ring rippled along the line, dry and deadly in the stillness.

“All right, let's go,” Damon said, and swung on his heel.

4:33. They were moving forward through the shattered wood. Turner seemed to jerk up and down with every step, as though his shoes had little wire coils. Ferguson was bent almost double and holding his rifle absurdly high, as if he were wading through a stream. Krazewski's face was contorted in a snarl, his huge white teeth bared. No one spoke. This was going to take hours. Hours and hours, walking in this crazy silence. Devlin was conscious of the pressure of the helmet strap against his chin, the sweat stinging his eyes, and the stark, solid quaking of blood in his temples. His mind, a captive bird, shot away from the moment, saw Michele standing on the little balcony, her hands on the iron grillwork; she was laughing, her head back, her dark eyes dancing with delight. “Ah, to think I'd stopped believing in anyone like you. Wasn't that foolish of me?” That quick, roguish look, her lovely lips quivering with mirth. “To turn so cynical? When there on the river bank, lying in all your naked glory, like a wild Irish king—”

It came: a crash like the collision of a thousand locomotives, and the high-vaulted whisper and shriek of their arching—and then ahead of them, near, very near, the ragged, monstrous detonations of their fall. Smoke boiled upward and more and more shells passed over, the air above their heads singing with their terrible passage, and geysers of fiery red danced and darted through the screen of trees. He kept waiting for the answering barrage, but none came.

Sam was shouting at them, his mouth wide, inaudible; his arm was pumping up and down, and making long, sweeping motions. He ran obediently, inclining toward his right. The earth lurched and tilted, flames flared, smoke rose in foul, belching towers. He could make out nothing ahead of him. There was wire now, everywhere, in sprawling, spidery strands and tangles. He vaulted over some, tripped, righted himself, climbed over a log—checked at a narrow little pit and a man in a horizon-blue helmet. French. Spotter, or advance post. He crouched, panting, the point of his bayonet a few inches from the face of the man, who eyed it wildly.

“Combien?” he screamed. “Combien de kilomètres aux Boches?”

The Frenchman's narrow, leathery face cracked in amazement. “
Kilomètres
—! Je m'en fou, cinquante mètres,
mètres!
…”

He raced on through the boiling, hellish roar, conscious of only one purpose; waves of concussion smote him in the face, dragged at him, bent him double. Bits of trees, leafy branches floated gently by.

Two helmets. Round and deep. He was on them before either they or he could react; he leaped the pit and dashed on. There came a descending, deepening shriek, like a giant knife blade drawn down an endless metal plate, and then the explosion. He was knocked off his feet; his head was ringing, his eyes hurt. All right. He was all right. He was up like a cat, mindful of nothing but Sam's stern injunction, bending still farther to the right. He glanced back furtively once, saw no one, fell sprawling into a rusty tangle of wire that slashed at him like an animate thing. God damn filthy stuff! He wrenched upward in a staggering, capering hop and got clear again.

He could hear the machine guns now, their flat, metallic, shuttling
pang-pang-pang,
in series, in chorus. He thought with a throb of dread of the embankment at Brigny, and gritted his teeth. There was a fearful slapping sound in a tree trunk near his head and he plunged out and down into a tangle of branches and torn green leaves, his head hammering; his sight turned blue, then red, then bright green—cleared at last. Someone sprawled down beside him, looked up. Turner, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

He nodded, as though Turner's gawping, strained face were exactly what he had expected all along, and started crawling off toward the right of the gun, which hadn't once stopped. Its hail swept over him, and bits of bark and leaves sifted down around his head. He waited: it swung off to the left and he snaked his way forward in a rush, across an open patch and into a slight depression, lay cringing again while bullets spanked into the earth a foot beyond his head and dirt stung his face and neck.

“—Jesus,” he gasped. “No room. No
room
…”

Behind him now he heard the coughing, hiccuping burst of a Chauchat: a short sequence, then a longer one. The Maxim stopped, started again, and another Chauchat, back and to the left, began firing. Lying in against the damp earth, his mouth dry, he nodded tensely: they were moving right now, automatic fire working scissors from the flanks, just as he and Sam had taught them. The Maxim stopped again. He leaped to his feet, saw the German bent over, struggling frantically to get the dead gunner off the weapon. He fired: the man threw both arms to the sky and fell backward out of sight. He shouted something, he did not know what, conscious of people running on his left now; he crashed through a network of brush—and all at once saw through the trees a clump of lean men in mustard uniforms and blue casques, running hard, their bayonets flickering like needles, uttering high, yapping cries. Senegalese. He crouched at the base of a tree, faced left again, raised his right arm and clenched his fist. Then he dropped to the ground.

The machine guns were everywhere—a snarling chatter that seemed to press against the inside of his skull. He saw Turner behind a log, firing, ran forward and sprawled beside him. Someone was shouting from a thicket on their left. He looked around him, watched Ferguson coming up in an ungainly, shambling rush, holding his rifle tight against his chest. There was the whine of a ricochet and Ferguson was gone. No, he had stepped behind a tree and now was peering out; his narrow, heavy-jawed face looked curiously guilty. He had started forward again when Devlin saw the grenade—a fat, round billy club spinning in the air. “Ferg-get-
down!
” he screamed. Ferguson turned toward his voice, his face pinched with perplexity. Devlin buried his head in his arm. There was a deafening, shocking crash, and things of terrible menace whined and sizzled and showered around him. He looked up to see Ferguson clutching at his face, soundlessly screaming; blood rushed forward over his eyes and mouth. Like paint, a huge bucket of scarlet paint thrown.
Ferg.
He was filled with rage—a black, seething fury that had no thought but vengeance. He felt nothing, no fear or weariness, no sensation in his arms and feet. He rose up cold as a shaft of marble, already aiming. The grenadier too came up with his arm back to throw again, and he shot him cleanly, effortlessly, fired again. The grenade went off in the thicket with a muffled boom.

“Come on!” he roared, and started forward, aware of Turner and several others moving with him. A gang of kids in a playground mob game, yelling and screeching. He leaped over a dense mat of twigs and branches and there they were. He was conscious of a flurry of field-gray figures fearfully close, whirling, reaching—then the place dissolved in a feria of violence. A man pointed a rifle at his chest. He bayoneted him once, withdrew. There was another, a huge man with a trench knife, an amazingly broad blade like a trowel. He swung around with the butt and the man went down in a sitting position. He pivoted to use the bayonet—and felt a tremendous blow on his helmet and shoulder that drove him to his knees. He clutched at his rifle, could not raise it; his arm was numb to the shoulder. He gazed upward to see the German raise the clubbed rifle again. All his soul protested, Oh no! Not again—not to me! He drove forward into the man's legs, felt him give—and then something hit him in the small of the back and he was flung to one side. In an evil dream of confusion he got to his knees and drew his pistol fumblingly with both hands, heard a thick, choking cry, and saw his tormentor lurch backward against the emplacement, blood pouring from his neck.

It was all over. All at once. Raebyrne, his face tense and white, was cleaning his bayonet blade methodically on the uniform of a dead German. Sam was standing behind him wiping sweat from his face with a shaking hand. Little Turner was shouting, “Sons of bitches, sons of bitches—!” and kicking in a frenzy at a body in the corner of the pit. Devlin got to his feet, rubbing his shoulder, and the two Mexican veterans looked at each other, panting.

“You all right, Dev?”

He nodded. His rifle was buried under a body; he rolled the man away and picked it up. His arm was still numb and he flexed the fingers slowly.

“Yes,” he said, for no reason he could see. “I made contact. With the Moroccans.”

“I saw you. Good going.”

There seemed nothing on earth to say. Blood was dripping from Sam's left wrist. “You—you're hit, Sam …”

Damon shook his head. “Wire.”

“Oh,” he answered numbly. It was like a kind of drunken brawl, endless and benumbing. What was next? What were they—

“All right, come on out of there, you bastards, come out—!”

He turned in mild surprise to see four or five Germans hurry out of a connecting pit, their hands high over their heads. Turner was pointing his rifle at them. The last man had a heavy mustache with upturned points, and was smiling apprehensively. Two of them began to gibber in German.

“Shut up!” Turner screamed. “You no-good murdering bastards—shut your faces!” The Germans gazed at him in alarm; the one with the mustache shuffled backward, crying something. Turner watched them coldly, his eyes slitted. “Yes, now crawl! Oh Jesus, yes …” and Devlin watched in dulled amazement as he very deliberately raised his rifle to his cheek.

“None of that!” Sam had stepped past him and pushed Turner's weapon up and away. “Take them back …”

“Shit to that! They let Ferg go back, I suppose—!”

“Terry,
take them on back.
That's an order!”

Turner gave Sam a surly, savage glance, then turned and kicked the nearest German, who almost fell. They went back through the trees, their hands stiff above their heads, the prisoner with the mustache still babbling in a high, strained voice.

“Come on, now. Let's go, let's go,” Sam was saying to them tersely.

There was no rhythm, no ordered movement; there was no sense to anything. It was a treadmill—a jittering, bedlam treadmill of shattered trees and mangled corpses, of heaps of discarded equipment that kept flowing by like some foul river, laced by the spanking hammer of machine guns. There was a woodman's hut, which apparently had been used as a dressing station and was now abandoned, where there were stretchers and several medical chests and an improvised table covered with blood-soaked blankets, and a man whose head and chest were swathed in crimson rags held one hand to his eyes and kept reaching out to everyone with his free arm, moaning something in German over and over. There was a massive beech-tree at whose base two Americans lay side by side, their hands almost touching, like lost children asleep in a wood—except that one of them was half-naked, with his back laid open from neck to thigh, and the other, shot through the head, was Captain Crowder. Somewhere there was a Senegalese platoon sergeant who grinned at him, a vile and merry grin, and tapped at a curious collection of leaves, or mushrooms, or apple slices strung on a piece of wire around his neck—only they were not leaves or mushrooms or apple slices but human ears. “Cochon,” Devlin heard himself say, his gorge rising, “sale bête d'un boucher. Crapule …” But the Senegalese had vanished. Farther on, a beautiful black-and-brown German shepherd dog yanked in terrible silent fury at the rope tying him to a tree, its eyes rolling; and still farther on, a machine gun cleverly hidden behind a log cribbing got Mecklar through the throat before they even knew it was there. The Chauchats tied it down, and led by Sam they went in and killed the crew, and swept on. And after that, some strange time after that, he had paused, his hand to his head, sick with raging, weak with slaughter. A wounded man was watching him, a wounded man sitting propped against a root bole behind an emplacement; his eyes still on Devlin he reached stealthily inside his tunic. Devlin fired from the hip; the German shook with the impact, struggled to withdraw his hand, then fell over weakly. The blood in his lungs and throat made a rattling, gurgling sound. His eye still followed Devlin, who started on by—on an impulse stepped back and reached down and lifted the man's hand out of his tunic. A stiff, small piece of paper fell to the ground. The Sergeant picked it up. A snapshot, a young girl with fine chestnut hair holding a baby in her hands and smiling, squinting a little in the sunlight. Behind her was a bridge with bronze horses prancing.