CHAPTER XVIIIAT FOUR IN THE MORNING
THE morning papers! How many did Red have of them?
Robert Black had been away for almost a year. Jane Ray’s little shop had been so long closed that few now turned down the narrow street, forgetting that the sign no longer told where the rarest and most valuable things in town surely could be found. People had ceased to ask who was the tall young man with the interesting face who was said to write the most brilliant articles to be found in certain columns of one of the great dailies. Tom Lockhart was gone, and Harry Perkins, and many another figure from the suburban streets. Only an occasional youth could be seen now and then upon a delivery wagon. Girls were everywhere, taking the places of the young men who had gone. Everything was changed—everything; now that war had come so near that it could be felt.
Those morning papers! Red bought and bought, not satisfied with the morning and evening editions delivered at his door. He came home with bundles of them under his arm, and scanned them hurriedly, his face darkening as he read. For the news was heavy news, of losses and reversals, of a gathering tide which could not be stemmed, of worn and wasted French and British regiments falling slowly but surely back because it was not possible to holdanother hour against the tremendous odds of reinforced enemy lines.
“When will we get in? Great God, those fellows can’t hold out forever!” Red would shout, dashing the latest paper to the floor where its black and ominous headlines seemed to stare back at him with the inescapable truth in each sinister word. “We’ll get into it too late—they can’t stand such awful pressure. Oh, if we’d been ready!—instead of sleeping on our arms. Arms—we hadn’t any—though they kept telling us—the men who knew. We thought we were fine and fit—we—fat and heavy with easy lives. Yes, we’re awake now but we’ve a long way yet to run to get to the fire, and meanwhile, the world is burning up!”
So he would rage, up and down the long living room in his own home, unable to find a ray of light in the whole dark situation. Even more poignant than these were his anxieties of a personal sort. Where—when he stopped to think about it—was Robert Black, that he hadn’t been heard from now for many weeks? Black had gone across with one of the first divisions, one made up of men many of whom had had former army training, men fit to fight at once, who had gone away believing that they would soon see active service. By great good fortune—or so Black had esteemed it—he had been sent for at the last minute to take the place of an old regimental chaplain who had fallen seriously ill. The substitute’s early and persistent applications for a post had commended him as one who meant to go anyhow, and so might as well be given the opportunity first as last. That was the sort they had wanted, for that was the sort they were themselves.
“Why, Bob’s last letter’s dated a good two months back,” Red announced, one June morning of that secondsummer, scanning the well-worn sheets. How many times had he read that letter, his wife wondered as she saw him consulting its pages again. Black wrote remarkably interesting letters. In spite of censorship he somehow managed to get in all sorts of vivid paragraphs in which not the sharpest eye could detect forbidden information—there was none there. But there was not lacking keen character drawing, graphic picturing of effect of sun and shadow, stimulating reactions, amusing anecdote. Red had never enjoyed any correspondence in his life as he had that with the chaplain of the ——th regiment, ——th division. And this was for many reasons, chief of which was the great and ever-growing bond of friendship between the two men, which separation just after it had been made forever secure had only served incredibly to strengthen and augment.
“I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. I wish I could hear,” Red complained, replacing the thin sheets in the now tattered flimsy envelope with the foreign postmarks and the official stamps of various sorts which proclaimed it a military missive. “He was writing fairly regularly up to that date, but then he stopped short off, as if he had been shot. Oh, I didn’t mean that—queer how that old common phrase needs to be avoided now. It’s none too improbable, either, in his case, if he ever gets near the Front. He’ll be no rear-guard sort of chaplain—that’s easy enough to know.”
He went off about his work, on this particular morning, with a heavier heart than usual. He hadn’t counted up before, just how many weeks it was since he had heard from Black; he only knew that he had been scanning the mails with a disappointed eye for a good while now. Where could Black be—what had happened to preventhis writing as before? Hang it!—Red wished he could hear this very day. His mental vision called up clearly the man’s handwriting on the foreign envelope; he always liked the look of it so well. It was rather a small script, but very clear, black, and full of character; the t’s were invariably crossed with vigour, and there were only straight forward marks, no curlycues. He wished he could see that handwriting within the hour, wished it with a queer certainty that he should most certainly not see it, either to-day or to-morrow. Black was somewhere off the line of communication, he grew surer and surer of it.
As the day advanced Red found his presentiment that his friend was close to danger amounting to a conviction. Red was not an imaginative person, and ordinarily he was a persistent optimist; to-day it seemed to be impossible to summon a particle of optimism concerning either the duration of the war or the personal safety of the man he cared for so deeply. He did care for him deeply—he no longer evaded or made light of his affection for Robert Black. What was the use? It was a fact accomplished; nothing that happened or didn’t happen could now change it; everything seemed to intensify it.
Close to eleven o’clock of the evening of this day Red was returning from a call which had taken him out just as he was beginning to think longingly of rest and sleep. Passing a news-stand he had bought the latest evening edition of the latest city daily sent out to the suburbs, and had found in it only a deepening presage of coming disaster to the armies of the Allies. This paper was sticking out of his pocket as he walked wearily along the deserted streets of the residence district, through a night air still and heavy with the lingering heat of the day. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead. Was it hot andstill and heavy with languor and dread over there at this hour, too, he wondered, up on that bending Western front? Or were the shells bursting and the sky red and yellow with the flares of the guns, and black with smoke and death? Allowing for the difference in time it was almost four in the morning over there. Wasn’t it about this hour that things were apt to happen, over there, after a night of waiting? Wasn’t this often the “Zero” hour—“over there”?
To reach his own home he would naturally go by the manse, unless he went a little out of his way. It must be confessed that Red had acquired the habit, since Black left town, of going that little out of his way, when coming home at night from this part of town, to avoid passing the Stone Church and the deserted manse close by in its large shadow. He didn’t know quite why he should have yielded, at first unconsciously, afterward with full recognition of his feeling about it, to the wish not to see the drawn shades and darkened windows of his friend’s former habitation. But on this evening, somehow, almost without his own consent he found himself turning at that corner to go by the house.
Dark? Yes, it was dark—almost darker than usual, it seemed; though this was undoubtedly because the nearest arc-light was burning more feebly than ordinarily to-night. Anyhow, the place was enveloped in gloom. It presented a very different aspect from that which had belonged to it during the term of Black’s residence. His study had been one of the big square rooms upon the front, its windows always lighted in the evening, the shades drawn only low enough to insure privacy, not to prevent the warm glow of the study light from telling its friendly tale of the occupant within, at home to all comers at all hours, as he had been at pains to make understood.
Red didn’t like to look at those dark windows. Many and many a time during the last months before Black’s departure, after the friendship between the two men had become a known quantity no longer negligible, the big doctor had turned aside from the straight road home to make a late call in that study, the light beckoning him more and more irresistibly. Weary, or blue, or fuming over some unlucky or harassing happening in his work, he had gone stumbling or storming in, always to find a hearty welcome, and such quiet understanding and comradeship as soon eased the situation, whether he knew it then or only afterward. Many a pipe had he smoked while sitting in Black’s old red-cushioned rocker—to which he had taken an odd fancy—and many a story had he told, or listened to.... There could be no pipe-smoking there to-night, nor telling of stories. The fire upon that hearthstone was cold. God only knew when it would be lighted again, or whose hand would light it.
Red turned in at the walk which led to the manse door. He did not want to turn in, yet he could not go by. The lawn before the house was shaven; it had to be kept up because there was no dividing line between it and the close-cut green turf which surrounded the Stone Church. Between the vestry door and side door of the manse ran a short walk, so that the minister had only a few steps to take when he crossed the narrow space. Somehow Red could almost see the tall, well-built figure striding across that space, the strong face full of spirit....
He took a turn about the house, completely circling it, telling himself that now he was here he might as well see that all was as it should be from front to rear. Returning to the front, he heard a distant clock in the centre of the town booming out the slow strokes of the hour—eleven.Four o’clock it was then on that Western front, three thousand miles away. Was Black there—or anywhere near there? Wherever he was it might be that—well—was there any reason why Red shouldn’t be able to get him out of his mind? And was there any reason why Red shouldn’t do what he was now suddenly impelled to do? According to Black’s own code there was every reason why he should do it—and none conceivable against it. Sentimental superstition?—or great spiritual forces at work of which he could know nothing, except to feel their power?
He went over to the vestry door—a narrow door of classic outline and black oak austerity, appearing in the deep shadow like the entrance to the unknown. He leaned his uplifted arm against it, and rested his bared head against his arm. Somehow he felt nearer to his absent friend in this spot than he had ever felt before.
“O God,” he implored, under his breath, “wherever he is—take care of him. He’s worth a lot of taking care of—and he won’t do it himself—somehow I know that. Just do it for him—will You?”
On this same night, at a Field Hospital, ten miles back from the firing line on a certain sector of the French Front, Jane Ray went about her duties. It was a comparatively quiet night; no fresh casualties had come in for several hours, and none was expected before morning.
Beginning as nurses’ helper Jane had worked and studied at all hours, had faced several examinations, and was now, by virtue of the pressing demand and the changed requirements which in war time hasten such matters, an accredited nurse with a diploma. She had thought many times gratefully of a certain red-headed surgeon back inthe States, who had put her through many grilling tests of his own since he had learned what she had in view. Not once but often she had watched him operate; hours on end had she listened to informal lectures from his lips, delivered at the back of her shop when custom was slack. It had all helped immensely in her work of preparation, and in her dogged purpose to make herself fit for service in the least possible time. And now she was at the very goal of her desires, having for the last month been serving as near the active Front as a nurse may get, the Field Hospital to which the wounded are sent from the First-Aid Station.
It had become to her an almost passionate joy to give these poor fellows their first sense of real comfort. Though the resources at hand were often far less than adequate to the demand, when cases poured in till the hurriedly arranged accommodations were full to overflowing and there was no such thing as supplying every need, this was the time when Jane most exulted in her work. Physically strong, though she was often weary to exhaustion, a few hours of sleep would put her on her feet again, and she would go back to her task with a sense of being at last where she was born to be. She managed somehow to give to her patients the impression that no matter how busy or hurried she might be she had something to spare for each one of them, and this perhaps was one of the greatest services she rendered. Skilful though her hands and brain had become at ministering to the wants of the wounded bodies, her heart had grown still wiser in its knowledge of the larger needs of the tried spirits of those who lay before her. Tender yet bracing was the atmosphere which she carried everywhere with her. It is the aura which to a greater or less degree surrounds everytrue nurse, and Jane, in acquiring it, had but learned the rudiments of her profession. Yet perhaps she had rather more than the ordinary capacity for divination of the peculiar and individual necessities of the men under her care, for certain it was that most of them preferred her to any of the others, accomplished and devoted though they all were. It is quite possible that the fact that she was, as the boys put it among themselves, so “easy to look at,” may have accounted for a portion of her popularity, but surely not for all.
They did not stay long with her; it was a matter of but a few days in most cases, before they were moved back to the Evacuation Hospital, many miles in the rear. She had not time to get to know any of them well; yet somehow in even that brief interval of experience she and they usually arrived at a feeling of acquaintance which often became a memory not to be forgotten.
On this June night Jane found herself returning more than once to a certain patient who had been brought in early in the evening suffering from rather severe injuries. The surgeons had decided against immediate operation; he was to be retained here only long enough to recover from shock, and to be got into shape for the journey back to the Base. He was only a boy, or looked so, in spite of the lines which pain had brought into his face. He was not able to sleep, and for certain definite reasons he had been given nothing to make him sleep. Each time Jane came by she found him lying with eyes wide open; restless of body his injuries did not permit him to be, for he was strapped and bandaged into a well-nigh immovable position. Clearly his mind was doing double duty, and being restless for both.
As she stopped beside his cot again, he looked up at herand spoke, for the first time. His eyes had followed her all night, whenever she came in range, but she was used to that. Eyes wakeful at night always follow a nurse; she is a grateful vision to men long removed from the sight of women; the very lines of the uniform are restful to look at. The face beneath the veil-like head-dress need not be a beautiful one to be attractive; it needs only to be friendly and compassionate; if it can show a capacity for humour, so much the better. In Jane’s case, actual loveliness of feature drew the gaze of those tired young eyes, many of which had seen only ugliness and horror for a long, long time. The casualty cases thus far had been confined almost entirely to the French and British, with an occasional American enlisted in a foreign division. It was only within the last few days that the men from Jane’s own country had begun to come under her care, showing that at last, as they had so longed to be, they were “in.”
This boy, beside whom Jane paused in her rounds, and who now spoke to her, had had from the first something familiar about him. But she had not been able to place him in her remembrance and had decided that it was only the type she recognized, not the individual. Now, however, as she bent to catch the low-spoken words, she realized what had happened; here was a boy from home!
“You don’t know me, do you?” he said, with difficulty.
“I almost thought I did, but wasn’t sure. Do you come from my town and ought I to know you? You see—you must have changed quite a bit.”
She was looking intently into his face, and her reassuring smile answered his wistful one.
“No, I didn’t expect you to know me, but I—kind ofhoped—you would. I know you. You was there when I said I’d enlist—up on the hill.”
Her thoughts leaped back to that last Sunday of Robert Black’s departure and to the service on the hillside. Her face lighted with recognition, and the boy saw it.
“Oh, yes—I do remember—of course I do. I sewed a star on a service flag for you and the other three who went from the hill, and took it up to the schoolhouse before I went away. I think I know your name.” She racked her memory hastily for it and found it, and the boy’s eyes were suffused with joy as she spoke it. “Aren’t you—Enos Dyer?”
“Yes, I’m Enie Dyer, only I don’t like to be called that over here ‘cause it sounds like ‘Heinie.’ Say,”—he scanned her face anxiously,—“know anything ’bout where the preacher is now?”
“Mr. Black? Nothing at all. It is weeks since I had any news of him. His division has been sent up toward the Front, and they may be in things by now; we get only rumours here about what is happening on the other sectors.”
“I wish I knew,” he said anxiously. “I get to thinkin’ ’bout him a lot. He didn’t know me any, but I knew him all right. After that time he buried the Dunstan girl I used to come down to his church. I liked to hear him talk. But I always skun out the minute things was over, so he never really did lay eyes on me till that last day. I don’t s’pose he’d remember me.”
Jane would have liked to let him say more, to have questioned him closely, herself eager to hear the least mention of the name which was always in the background of her thoughts. But she knew that he must not be allowed to use his feeble powers in this way. So after assuringhim that Black was not the man to forget the four boys from the hill who had enlisted on that memorable day, she went on upon her rounds, her own mind filled with the vivid recollections young Dyer’s words had called up.
But she could not come near him on this night without his eyes imploring her to give him another word. So she learned that he was most unhappy lest the injuries he had received prevent his return to the Front, and was worrying badly about it. She became presently so interested in his state of mind that she called the attention of one of the surgeons to him. Doctor Mills read the record upon his cot-tag, looked at Dyer keenly through his big horn spectacles, and smiled, his own tired, thin face relaxing its tense look of care.
“You’ll get back, my lad,” he said, “when they’ve fixed you up. With that spirit you’ll get anywhere.”
Enos Dyer’s lips trembled. “It’s all right, then,” he murmured, with a sigh of relief. “I haven’t done nothin’ yet, an’ I figger to, ’fore I get through.”
“What were you doing when you got these?” The surgeon indicated Dyer’s bandaged shoulder and his slung leg.
“Just tryin’ a little job o’ my own, sir.”
“Not under orders?”
“Well, I guess I was under orders, sir—but the gettin’ through was sort o’ up to me.”
“I see. You’re a company runner?”
“Yes, sir.”
The surgeon went away. Jane did what she could to induce sleep for Dyer, who needed it badly, but his eyes were still wide when dawn drew near. By and by, as she came to give him water, which he drank thirstily, he said slowly:
“Did you hear the preacher the time he told about that feller Daniel in ’mongst the lions?”
“No, I don’t think so, Enos.”
“I was just wonderin’ ifhewas in ’mongst ’em now anywheres. If he is, I guess he won’t get hurt. I’ve thought about that story a lot since I heard him tellin’ it. I guess if God could take care of anybody when lions was walkin’ all ’round him, He could do it when anybody was fightin’, don’t you? And I guess the preacher’s fightin’, wherever he is.”
Jane’s lips smiled a little. “Chaplains don’t fight, you know.”
“I’ll bethedoes,” Dyer insisted.
She didn’t try to change his conviction, but somehow it took hold of her; and presently, in a strange hush that fell just before the dawn, when there came a cessation of sound of the guns which usually were to be heard clearly at this distance from the Front, she stood in a doorway that faced the east and took a well-worn letter from her pocket. In the faint light from within the ward her eyes once more scanned lines she already knew by heart.
Letters from Black had reached her infrequently and the latest was dated weeks ago. Of course he could give her no details of his movements, neither past nor expected; she understood also that he could say little of that which was personal to himself and Jane. No man writes for the scrutinizing eye of a censor that which he would say to one alone. Yet somehow he had managed to convey a very vivid sense of his presence, and of his constant thought of her, in the midst of his work among his men. The last paragraph, especially, was one to stay by her while she should have a memory, reserved though the words were:
“I am very sure that in all this experience you are having you must find the thing I so much want you to find. How can you escape it? It is all around you. I can’t get away from it a minute. You know what I mean. I never felt it so strongly, nor so depended upon it. Every hour it is in my thought of you. You are well up toward the Front now, I suppose. At any time a bomb may be dropped on your Hospital; it is always a shining mark for the enemy. Yet I am not anxious about you. For this I know:—whatever happens to you or me, it can do no harm to the eternal thing which is ours.”
She read the words again and again. Well she knew what they meant; in spite of the restraint in them they were full to the brim with his feeling toward her. Where was he now—near—or far? There had been a rumour here that the division in which he served had been suddenly rushed from its training trenches to the Front, in a desperate attempt to stem the creeping enemy tide threatening to become a deluge and wash away all defences. There were many rumours; few could be trusted. But it might easily be true; he might at this very hour be under fire, even though he remained in the shelter of trench or dugout. Would he stay in such shelter? The question had never occurred to her in just this form before. Her ideas of the duties of a regimental chaplain were all based on the knowledge that he was a non-combatant, like Cary. She had had far more fears for her brother, with his temperament, full of recklessness and daring, than for Robert Black. But now, though she scouted the idea of Black’s actually fighting, she had a sudden vision of him in danger. If he had gone with his men up to those front lines, where was he to-night?
Suddenly the distant sky-line burst into flame before hereyes. She had seen it before, that sky-line, during the months since she had come to the Field Hospital, but always before it had been when she was too busy to stop to look at it. Now, in the brief breathing space, she was at leisure to study it in all its sinister significance, and to listen to the distant thunder of the guns.
He might not be there—she was very sure he was not, for the returning wounded brought fairly accurate reports of what divisions were engaged in the fighting in this sector. But somewhere—somewhere—on that long, bending line, stretching over so many long miles, and now grown so thin and in many places so dangerously weak compared with the ever augmenting enemy forces—somewhere there he might be. According to that persistent rumour the American troops who had been rushed forward were at a point less than twenty miles away. Whatever happened, however, none of them would come through this particular Field Hospital, and it might be very long before she would know definitely how near Black had been to actual danger.
She looked at her little service watch—it was just past four. She must go back: it would not be long now before the ambulances would be rushing in with the fresh wounded sent back from that angry sky-line. The stretcher-bearers would be setting their woeful burdens down before her, and all she had to give must be theirs, for the hour.
For a moment she closed her eyes. She still held the letter in her hand; she lifted it and laid her cheek against it; then she pressed it to her lips.
“Oh, wherever you are,” she breathed, “I think you need me. I think you are thinking of me. But whether you are or not—I’m there.—Oh, Robert Black—I’m there!”
In a narrow, winding, muddy ditch—which was all it was, though it went by another name—with short, ladder-like places for the ascent of its sides here and there, Robert Black was waiting, with a detachment of his men, for a certain hour, minute and second previously fixed by orders received in the early evening. He was at a crisis in his experience which he had known would come some day, but it had been long delayed. Now it was at hand. These men with whom he had been stationed, throughout their voyage overseas, their foreign training, and their slow and tedious progress toward the French Front, were about to receive their first real test. At that fixed early morning hour they were going for the first time “over the top.”
By now Black knew most of them pretty well. In the beginning they had received him cautiously, watching him closely, as a man who comes to a regiment with a cross on his collar is bound to be watched. They hadn’t particularly liked their former chaplain, whose place Black had taken at almost the last hour before they sailed. This man had never been able to get very near to them, though he had tried conscientiously and persistently to do so. They weren’t exactly prejudiced against chaplains—they supposed they were somehow necessary and unavoidable adjuncts of military service—but they didn’t see so very much use in having them at all. So when Black came they had looked him over curiously and not without a certain amount of prejudgment.
The voyage over had been a rough one; a large proportion of the men had been seasick. Black, who had crossed the Atlantic many times on those trips back home to see his mother, was a first-rate sailor, and he had had his first chance with his men during those long days of storm andwet and dark discomfort. He had made the most of it, though he had taken care not to overdo the effort to bring cheer to those who if not seasick were mostly homesick, whether they succeeded in concealing it or not. He had gone about quietly but efficiently, and the impression he had given had been that of one who had cast in his lot with his regiment for better or for worse, though he wasn’t making any fuss about it.
When they had reached the other side and gone into camp, they soon discovered that the first impression they had had of their chaplain held; that he meant to share and share alike with them whatever fell to their lot. Though he rated as captain and had therefore the right to associate with the officers and to mess with them, he didn’t seem to be spending much time at it. He was very good friends with those in authority, who seemed to like him; but he apparently cared more about making friends with the private in the ranks than with the Major, or the Colonel commanding. He was not a joke-maker; he didn’t slap the boys on the shoulder nor shout at them; but he carried about with him an atmosphere of good cheer of a quiet sort. And when, now and then, it came to a contest of wits, and somebody tried to put the chaplain in a corner, he was sure to find his way out with a quick and clever retort which brought the laugh without making things too uncomfortable for the cornerer—unless he deserved it, in which case he was pretty sure to wish he hadn’t spoken.
As to preaching—they crowded to hear him, after the first tentative experiment. The same unescapable logic, the same clear and challenging appeal, the same unafraid plain-speaking which had won Redfield Pepper Burns won these men—who were only boys after all. When it cameto the matter of preaching they were keen and merciless critics. They didn’t want to be talked down to; they didn’t like to be beguiled into listening with song and dance; they wanted a man if he were going to speak to them at all to do it without mincing, or setting traps for their attention. They wanted him to look like a man and act like a man—and unequivocally and all the timebea man. In the nature of things, it wasn’t difficult for Robert Black to fill this bill. A great many words have been written in the effort to tell what soldiers want—if they want anything at all—from their chaplain. They are not hard to satisfy, critical though they are and pitiless, when they detect failure to measure up to their requirements. The greatest of these requirements is certainly simple enough and just enough; it’s only what is required of themselves, which is to be men and comrades, to the last ditch.
It was not the last ditch, but the first one, to which they had come this night. The trench was like other trenches, but they had not been in a front-line trench before; somehow it seemed different. The troops whose place they had taken were worn and dog-weary, they had quitted the place with evident satisfaction; they had held it five days after they had expected to be relieved—it was a mighty good place to get out of. And now, it was the new arrivals’ turn to face the music of the shells and the machine-gun fire and the snipers’ bullets—and all the rest that was waiting for them. Their chance had come at last.
Black had been ordered to stay in the rear, but he had courteously disputed the order, had had it out with his superior officer and had been told to go along. This, he understood, was a mere matter of form, to try him out.A chaplain had a perfect right to go where he would with his men, provided he had the nerve. And why shouldn’t Black have the nerve? He had been cultivating it for a good many years now, and having been born in Scotland he had started out with rather more than his share of it in the beginning. Besides, are shot and shell the only things to try what a man is made of?
The men in the trench liked having their chaplain with them; there could be no doubt of that, though they by no manner of means said so. They hadn’t been expecting to have him accompany them to the very Front, and when he came along as a matter of course they were glad of it. His uniform by now was quite as mud-stained and worn as theirs; the only difference was that they were expecting to get bullet holes in theirs, while his, they considered, with any sort of luck would be kept intact. Even so, he was a good sport to stay by until the very last moment, and they appreciated it. He was a comfortable sort to have around. He wasn’t old enough to be the father of any of them, but he was something like an older brother. And there was one thing about him they very definitely enjoyed, and that was his smile. It wasn’t a broad grin, but it was a mighty nice one, and when any man had said something that brought that pleasant laugh to Bob’s lips, that man always felt decidedly warm and happy inside. Because—well—the chaplain didn’t go around grinning conscientiously at everybody all the while, and his smile wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to win. Yes, the secret is out—they called him “Bob” behind his back, and they called him that because they liked him in that capacity of elder brother. To his face they called him “Parson.”
It was very still and dark in the trench; the raid was tostart with the opening of the barrage which would cover the advance. Night—and darkness—and quiet—and the hour before dawn at which the courage of the sons of men is at its lowest—no wonder that hearts beat fast and faces slackened colour beneath the tan, and the minutes at once crawled and raced. They were unquestionably nervous, these boys, hard as they tried to keep cool as veterans. How would they acquit themselves?—that was the thing that worried them. For the fact was that in this particular company there was not one who had ever seen actual warfare; they were all yet to be tried.
Black went from one to another, taking whispered messages, hastily scrawled notes, which they gave to him, and making clear his understanding of the various requests. They all wanted to shake hands with him, seeming to feel that this was the proper farewell to take of him who was to stay behind. He wasn’t armed, though he wore a helmet and gas mask, like themselves; his hands were free to take their consignments, as his spirit was free to put courage into them. Not that they realized that he was doing it; all they knew was that somehow after they had had a word with him, and felt that warm handshake of his, they knew that they were stronger. He believed in them—they understood that—and they meant to measure up. That was about what his presence amounted to, which was quite enough.
One boy, a slender fellow, not long out of hospital where he had been sent for a run of an epidemic disease, came to Black at almost the last moment with a diffident question. “Parson,” he whispered, “I want you to do something for me. If I—if I should get scared out there—or anything—and the boys should know about it—and it got around—or anything—I—I—wish you’d see it didn’tget back to my Dad. He—always said I’d get over bein’—shaky—when the time came. But—Parson, would you think it was awful wrong to—lie about it for me a little? You see, it would cut Dad up like everything—and I couldn’t bear——”
Black put his lips close to the young ear. “I won’t have to lie, Joe,” he said. “I haven’t the least doubt of you—not the least. Do you get that? I’m telling you the absolute truth.”
In the darkness Joe smiled. After a moment he whispered back. “Well, I guess I’ll have to buck up,” he said.
“You’ve bucked up now,” came back the whisper, and Black’s hand clasped his arm tight for an instant. “What a muscle you’ve got, Joe!” he declared.
The arm stiffened, the muscle swelled. “You bet,” agreed the boy proudly, and hitched up his cartridge belt. “That’s what trainin’ does to a fellow. Well—good-by, Parson.”
“God be with you, Joe! He will—remember that.”
“Yes, sir—if you say so.” And Joe walked away, less “shaky” than he had come.
Then, presently, it was the “Zero” hour. With the first boom and crash of the covering barrage the men were up and over the top. The farthest man in the line was Joe. No, not the farthest, though Joe had been assigned that place, for beyond and beside him, as he went over, was Robert Black.