XXXIIFRANCE, 1918. THE YANK
DICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several days. He was in the “Oregon” Forest with Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to tie to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of the necessities of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for strenuous field work but it had come to him in France; not the actions of the big fields so much as the extraordinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. Four days before, on his way in to Paris, he had met Boulding, who was taking out several fresh battalions to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan.
“I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old Yorick, steady as a tram-car, and we’ll be back in three days.”
Dicky stood in the twilight, half rain, half snow—one of the interminable waits for order, Boulding back in the ranks somewhere. The firing had died down and Dicky dropped his bridle rein to bang his arms about to get some blood stirring in them. One of the problems of life just now was why wet snow soaked through leather quicker than straight rain water; another was why letters from home always dragged around thewrong fronts before being delivered; another was how long was IT going to last; another was hot coffee.
His mount had turned gently away in the thickening dusk, turned on his toe corks through the slush to follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop—a water-soaked trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into an unused pit. Dicky stared down into the inky dark. The beast snorted. A flashlamp was procured from one of Boulding’s lieutenants and Dicky found his way down into the trench.
It became clear why Yorick couldn’t rise, even if unhurt. The trench bottom was a six-inch paste of water and clay. Holding the flashlight in front of him, Dicky approached the sprawled beast. Yorick looked like a monster in the process of being born out of the mud. There was something both humorous and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that came up into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s left foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to the left, at a decided angle from the way it should lie. Dicky felt alone in a harrowing under world. The leaf that had caused it all, or possibly one like it, protruded from the snaffle ring. Yorick had come up to his leaf all right, and then forgotten what he had gone after.
“Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work done, war over for you, nice warm ditch to lie up in at the last, and I’ve got to take all the responsibility.”
He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on the little twist of hair halfway between the eyes.
“I ought to take the saddle off first, but I’m not going to. So long, old kid, and best luck.”
The pistol banged in the dugout like a cannon cracker under a flower pot, and the voice of an American sentry above was heard to say:
“Some fool’s blowed his head off, down there. Why in hell can’t a man be patient!”
Dicky climbed up on the level ground, no sicker than before, but a trifle more tired.... He was chafed. Yorick had done some of it in the last four days, but not all. He was chafed in and out and over, chafed from his boots and belt and helmet, but especially from his key ring. This last had ground into him all day. He took it out now, as he waited for coffee. Meanwhile he edged as near as possible (without murdering anybody) to the trench stove Boulding’s cook had got going.
There was the key to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street—a thick brass stubby affair that belonged to the door of a house where hardware was well understood. This key couldn’t be thrown away. Though it was practically unthinkable—a man might some time get home. It had been done. There was a key to 54 Harrow Street. The woman who ran the place had told him to keep it with him, because it was a symbol of something which he had professed at the time to understand. Then there was a long, old-fashioned inside door key, black and a little bent—the meanest of all to dig into a man’s hip—this to the hall door of certain rooms in the same Harrow Streethouse. Its duplicate was in the hands of a girl he used to know. She had said she would look in on the apartment while he was gone, but she was married now. No use keeping it any longer.
He took it off the ring, but put it back again.
Certain things were good, but hard to get. Brandy was good. Coffee was good, especially hot. Saddle-horse stew was good. Porkpie, pork and beans, pork sausage and pancakes were reasonable and of good report, but keys on key rings that gored a man while he rode or slept, and stretched back into meanings of the Utterly Absurd that a man couldn’t get straight in Paris, much less in this slaughterhouse of the Western Front—keys on key rings were sheer perversities, especially when a man wasn’t game to toss them into any one of these open sewers....
They were saying at home that his stuff was blurred and unconvincing. Even John Higgins had been singularly silent of late. Chris Heidt, the managing editor of his newspaper connection, had recently written: “We miss that fine patriotic ring that we have come to expect from our correspondent. Your stuff shows subtleties and innuendoes and the dissatisfaction of the boys—the little things back of the lines that make for disorganization, rather than the big doings at the front.”
It was dawning on Dicky that there were two kinds of American patriots, soldier and civilian; and that for keenness and fire-eating zest, the man in the zone of advance was not to be compared to the paper-fed folkat home. In fact, there were only two ways for a writer to please the firesides of America, as the hot flames of Hun-hatred and world-correcting benefactions went up the chimney. One was to stay at home and write the war as you supposed it to be, and the other was to remember how you felt, how the war seemed to you, before you reached France, and write it from that angle.
Blurred, all right, and chafed. One thing he was getting to understand a little, and to have an affection for. That was the American soldier—not officer, so much, but the ruffian in the ranks,dogus bogus Americanus—the fellow fused of Irish, Scotch and Jew, of German, English, Russian and French; something of each in the solution, something of all. In the first place, this Yank was the funniest thing ever turned loose on the planet. His officers were occasionally funny in a different way.
Dicky vaguely perceived that an abyss was slowly but surely forming between this Yank and the patriots at home—an abyss only to be bridged by silence. Quite as slowly but surely Dicky’s heart opened to this enlisted man. One has to love something. Once or twice, things he saw this laughing maniac from America do made him very much ashamed of his own mental antics in a certain red room of Bombay.