A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to meet her and took her into the house. Claude sat down again, almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely understood, of being no longer a stranger. In the far distance the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden Louis was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis’ songs. The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very cheerfully. There was something open and warm about the boy’s voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too. It was distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.

  When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the creeping sunlight. “I didn’t know there were any French girls like you,” he said simply, as she sat down.

  She smiled. “I do not think there are any French girls left. There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came, and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different with us.” She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men would be left to see the day of victory.

  She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay. Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave; but an hour more or less wouldn’t matter. Two people could hardly give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.

  “Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get through this war?” he asked as he rose.

  He wrote it down in his notebook.

  “I shall look for you,” she said, giving him her hand.

  There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop which he would never find again.

  The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front. They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.

  When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn’t happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious. This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees. More because he admired the looks of the man than because he needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt nodded.

  “About how far back would you say it was?”

  “I wouldn’t say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,” he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a washtub.

  “Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?”

  “That I couldn’t say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour.”

  “I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can’t be?”

  Hicks asked jovially.

  “That I couldn’t say. You’ve been four years gettin’ this far, I know verra well.”

  Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. “Oh, if that’s the way you talk—”

  “That’s the way I do,” said the other sourly.

  Claude put out a warning hand. “Come on, Hicks. You’ll get nothing by it.” They went up the road very much disconcerted. Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was angry, the Sergeant’s forehead puffed up and became dark red, like a young baby’s. “What did you call me off for?” he sputtered.

  “I don’t see where you’d have come out in an argument, and you certainly couldn’t have licked him.”

  They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves, with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the soldier’s photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.

  The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped. Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie. They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.

  A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them, — what they were and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France. How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one’s mind, where one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never blush.

  Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the silence. “Somehow, Lieutenant, ‘mort’ seems deader than ‘dead.’ It has a coffinish sound. And over there they’re all ‘tod,’ and it’s all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here, black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who put ’em here, and what’s the good of it?”

  “Search me,” the other murmured absently.

  Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. “Well,” he brought out at last, “we’d better hike. This afterglow will hang on for an hour, — always does, over here.”

  “I suppose we had.” They rose to go. The white crosses were now violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow. Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep thunder. “Somebody’s getting peppered up there. Do owls always hoot in graveyards?”

  “Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It’s a peaceful spot, otherwise. Good-night, boys,” said Hicks kindly, as they left the graves behind them.

  They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting back to their chums and their own little group. Hicks broke out and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business together when they got home; were going to open a garage and automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both, that lonely spot lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.

  XI

  AFTER FOUR DAYS’ rest in the rear, the Battalion went to the front again in new country, about ten kilometers east of the trench they had relieved before. One morning Colonel Scott sent for Claude and Gerhardt and spread his maps out on the table.

  “We are going to clean them out there in F 6 tonight, and straighten our line. The thing that bothers us is that little village stuck up on the hill, where the enemy machine guns have a strong position. I want to get them out of there before the Battalion goes over. We can’t spare too many men, and I don’t like to send out more officers than I can help; it won’t do to reduce the Battalion for the major operation. Do you think you two boys could manage it with a hundred men? The point is, you will have to be out and back before our artillery begins at three o’clock.”

  Under the hill where the village stood, ran a deep ravine, and from this ravine a twisting water course wound up the hillside. By climbing this gully, the raiders should be able to fall on the machine gunners from the rear and surprise them. But first they must get across the open stretch, nearly one and a half kilometers wide, between the American line and the ravine, without attracting attention. It was raining now, and they could safely count on a dark night.

  The night came on black enough. The Company crossed the open stretch without provoking fire, and slipped into the ravine to wait for the hour of attack, A young doctor, a Pennsylvanian, lately attached to the staff, had volunteered to come with them, and he arranged a dressing station at the bottom of the ravine, where the stretchers were left. They were to pick up their wounded on the way back. Anything left in that area would be exposed to the artillery fire later on.

  At ten o’clock the men began to ascend the water-course, creeping through pools and little waterfalls, making a continuous spludgy sound, like pigs rubbing against the sty. Claude, with the head of the column, was just pulling out of the gully on the hillside above the village, when a flare went up, and a volley of fire broke from the brush on the up-hill side of the water-course; machine guns, opening on the exposed line crawling below. The Hun had been warned that the Americans were crossing the plain and had anticipated their way of approach. The men in the gully were trapped; they could not retaliate with effect, and the bullets from the Maxims bounded on the rocks about them like hail. Gerhardt ran along the edge of the line, urging the men not to fall back and double on themselves, but to break out of the gully on the downhill side and scatter.

  Claude, with his group, started back. “Go into the brush and get ’em! Our fellows have got no chance down there. Grenades while they last, then bayonets. Pull your plugs and don’t hold on too long.”

  They were already on the run, charging the brush. The Hun gunners knew the hill like a book, and when the bombs began bursting among them, they took to trails and burrows. “Don’t follow them off into the rocks,” Claude kept calling. “Straight ahead! Clear everything to the ravine.”

  As the German gunners made for cover, the firing into the gully stopped, and the arrested column poured up the steep defile after Gerhardt.

  Claude and his party found themselves back at the foot of the hill, at the edge of the ravine from which they had started. Heavy firing on the hill above told them the rest of the men had got through. The quickest way back to the scene of action was by the same water-course they had climbed before. They dropped into it and started up. Claude, at the rear, felt the ground rise under him, and he was swept with a mountain of earth and rock down into the ravine.

  He never knew whether he lost consciousness or not. It seemed to him that he went on having continuous sensations. The first, was that of being blown to pieces; of swelling to an enormous size under intolerable pressure, and then bursting. Next he felt himself shrink and tingle, like a frost-bitten body thawing out. Then he swelled again, and burst. This was repeated, he didn’t know how often. He soon realized that he was lying under a great weight of earth; his body, not his head. He felt rain falling on his face. His left hand was free, and still attached to his arm. He moved it cautiously to his face. He seemed to be bleeding from the nose and ears. Now he began to wonder where he was hurt; he felt as if he were full of shell splinters. Everything was buried but his head and left shoulder. A voice was calling from somewhere below.

  “Are any of you fellows alive?”

  Claude closed his eyes against the rain beating in his face. The same voice came again, with a note of patient despair.

  “If there’s anybody left alive in this hole, won’t he speak up?

  I’m badly hurt myself.”

  That must be the new doctor; wasn’t his dressing station somewhere down here? Hurt, he said. Claude tried to move his legs a little. Perhaps, if he could get out from under the dirt, he might hold together long enough to reach the doctor. He began to wriggle and pull. The wet earth sucked at him; it was painful business. He braced himself with his elbows, but kept slipping back.

  “I’m the only one left, then?” said the mournful voice below.

  At last Claude worked himself out of his burrow, but he was unable to stand. Every time he tried to stand, he got faint and seemed to burst again. Something was the matter with his right ankle, too — he couldn’t bear his weight on it. Perhaps he had been too near the shell to be hit; he had heard the boys tell of such cases. It had exploded under his feet and swept him down into the ravine, but hadn’t left any metal in his body. If it had put anything into him, it would have put so much that he wouldn’t be sitting here speculating. He began to crawl down the slope on all fours. “Is that the Doctor? Where are you?”

  “Here, on a stretcher. They shelled us. Who are you? Our fellows got up, didn’t they?”

  “I guess most of them did. What happened back here?”

  “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” the voice said sadly. “I used my flash light, and that must have given them the range. They put three or four shells right on top of us. The fellows that got hurt in the gully kept stringing back here, and I couldn’t do anything in the dark. I had to have a light to do anything. I just finished putting on a Johnson splint when the first shell came. I guess they’re all done for now.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Fourteen, I think. Some of them weren’t much hurt. They’d all be alive, if I hadn’t come out with you.”

  “Who were they? But you don’t know our names yet, do you? You didn’t see Lieutenant Gerhardt among them?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Nor Sergeant Hicks, the fat fellow?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Where are you hurt?”

  “Abdominal. I can’t tell anything without a light. I lost my flash light. It never occurred to me that it could make trouble; it’s one I use at home, when the babies are sick,” the doctor murmured.

  Claude tried to strike a match, with no success. “Wait a minute, where’s your helmet?” He took off his metal hat, held it over the doctor, and managed to strike a light underneath it. The wounded man had already loosened his trousers, and now he pulled up his bloody shirt. His groin and abdomen were torn on the left side. The wound, and the stretcher on which he lay, supported a mass of dark, coagulated blood that looked like a great cow’s liver.

  “I guess I’ve got mine,” the Doctor murmured as the match went out.

  Claude struck another. “Oh, that can’t be! Our fellows will be back pretty soon, and we can do something for you.”

  “No use, Lieutenant. Do you suppose you could strip a coat off one of those poor fellows? I feel the cold terribly in my intestines. I had a bottle of French brandy, but I suppose it’s buried.”

  Claude stripped off his own coat, which was warm on the inside, and began feeling about in the mud for the brandy. He wondered why the poor man wasn’t screaming with pain. The firing on the hill had ceased, except for the occasional click of a Maxim, off in the rocks somewhere. His watch said 12:10; could anything have miscarried up there?

  Suddenly, voices above, a clatter of boots on the shale. He began shouting to them.

  “Coming, coming!” He knew the voice. Gerhardt and his rifles ran down into the ravine with a bunch of prisoners. Claude called to them to be careful. “Don’t strike a light! They’ve been shelling down here.”

  “All right are you, Wheeler? Where are the wounded?”

  “There aren’t any but the Doctor and me. Get us out of here quick. I’m all right, but I can’t walk.”

  They put Claude on a stretcher and sent him ahead. Four big Germans carried him, and they were prodded to a lope by Hicks and Dell Able. Four of their own men took up the doctor, and Gerhardt walked beside him. In spite of their care, the motion started the blood again and tore away the clots that had formed over his wounds. He began to vomit blood and to strangle. The men put the stretcher down. Gerhardt lifted the Doctor’s head. “It’s over,” he said presently. “Better make the best time you can.”

  They picked up their load again. “Them that are carrying him now won’t jolt him,” said Oscar, the pious Swede.

  B Company lost nineteen men in the raid. Two days later the Company went off on a ten-day leave. Claude’s sprained ankle was twice its natural size, but to avoid being sent to the hospital he had to march to the railhead. Sergeant Hicks got him a giant shoe he found stuck on the barbed wire entanglement. Claude and Gerhardt were going off on their leave together.

  XII

  A RAINY AUTUMN night; Papa Joubert sat reading his paper. He heard a heavy pounding on his garden gate. Kicking off his slippers, he put on the wooden sabots he kept for mud, shuffled across the dripping garden, and opened the door into the dark street. Two tall figures with rifles and kits confronted him. In a moment he began embracing them, calling to his wife:

  “Nom de diable, Maman, c’est David, David et Claude, tous les deux!”

  Sorry-looking soldiers they appeared when they stood in the candlelight, plastered with clay, their metal hats shining like copper bowls, their clothes dripping pools of water upon the flags of the kitchen floor. Mme. Joubert kissed their wet cheeks, and Monsieur, now that he could see them, embraced them again. Whence had they come, and how had it fared with them, up there? Very well, as anybody could see. What did they want first, — supper, perhaps? Their room was always ready for them; and the clothes they had left were in the big chest.