bayonet, repeated again and again at them the officer’s
phrase about “skewered like stuck pigs.”
The others hung back. They had seen man after
man struck down at the gun, they could hear the
hiss
and
whitt of the bullets over their heads,
the constant cracker-like smacks of others that hit
the parapet, and—they hung back. “Why
th’ ’ell don’t you do it yerself?”
demanded one of them, angered by Bunthrop’s goading
and in some degree, no doubt, by the disagreeable
knowledge that they were flinching from a duty.
And then Bunthrop, the “conscript,” the
man who had held back from war to the last possible
minute, who hated soldiering and shrank from violence
and all fighting, who was known to his fellows as “a
funk,” the source of much uneasiness to company
and platoon commanders and sergeants as “a weak
spot,” Bunthrop did what these others, these
average good men who had “joined up” freely,
who had longed for the end of home training and the
transfer “out Front,” dared not do.
Bunthrop scrambled up the broken bank, seized the
gun, swung the sights full to the broad gray target,
and opened fire. He kept it going steadily, too,
with a sleet of bullets whistling and whipping past
him, kept on after a bullet snatched the cap from
his head, and others in quick succession cut away
a shoulder strap, scored a red weal across his neck,
stabbed through the point of his shoulder. And
when a shell-fragment smashed the gun under his hands,
he left it only to plunge hastily to the other gun
abandoned by all but dead and dying; pulled off a dead
man who sprawled across it and recommenced shooting.
He stopped firing only when his last cartridge was
gone; squatted a moment longer staring over the sights,
and then raised his head and peered out into the trailing
film of smoke clouds from the bursting shells.
Although it took him a minute to be sure of it he
saw plainly at last that the attack was broken.
Dimly he could see the heaped clusters of dead that
lay out in the open, the crawling and limping figures
of the wounded who sought safety back in the cover
of their own trench, and more than that he could see
men running with their heads stooped and their gray
coats flapping about their ankles. It was this
last that roused him again to action. He scrambled
hurriedly back down the broken parapet into the trench.
“Come on, you fellows,” he shouted to two
or three nearby men who continued to fire their rifles
over the parapet. “It’s no use waitin’
here any longer.” A heavy shell whooped
roaring over them and crashed thunderously close behind
the parapet. Bunthrop paid no slightest heed
to it. His wide, staring eyes and white face,
and blood smeared from the trickling wound in his
neck, his capless head and tumbled hair, his clay
and mud-caked and blood-stained uniform all gave him
a look of wildness, of desperation, of abandonment.
His sergeant, the man who had seen his fear and set
him to pile the sandbags, caught sight of him again
now, heard some word of his shoutings, and pushed
hastily along the trench to where he fidgeted and called
angrily to the others to “chuck that silly shooting—I’m
goin’ anyhow ... what’s the use....”
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