McDermott

McDermott

By Don Marquis

McDermott had gone over with a cargo of mules. The animals were disembarked at a Channel port, received by officers of that grand organization which guesses right so frequently, the Quartermaster Corps, and started in a southerly direction, in carload lots, toward the Toul sector of the Western Front. McDermott went with one of the carloads in an unofficial capacity. He had no business in the war zone. But the Quartermaster Corps, or that part of it in charge of his particular car, was in no mood to be harsh toward any one who seemed to understand the wants and humors of mules and who was willing to associate with them. And so, with his blue overalls and his red beard, McDermott went along.

“I’ll have a look at the war,” said McDermott, “and if I like it, I’ll jine it.”

“And if you don’t like it,” said the teamster to whom he confided his intention, “I reckon you’ll stop it?”

“I dunno,” replied McDermott, “as I would be justified in stoppin’ a good war. The McDermotts has niver been great hands f’r stoppin’ wars. The McDermotts is always more like to be startin’ wars.”

McDermott got a look at the war sooner than any one, including the high command of the Entente Allies, would have thought likely—or, rather, the war got a look at McDermott. The carload of mules, separated from its right and proper train, got too far eastward at just the time the Germans got too far westward. It was in April, 1918, that, having entered Hazebrouck from the north, McDermott and his mules left it again, bound eastward. They passed through a turmoil of guns and lorries, Scotchmen and ambulances, Englishmen, tanks and ammunition wagons, Irishmen, colonials and field kitchens, all moving slowly eastward, and came to a halt at a little village where they should not have been at all, halfway between the northern rim of the forest of Nieppe and Bailleul.

The mules did not stay there long.

“I’ll stretch me legs a bit,” said McDermott, climbing off the car and strolling toward a Grande Place surrounded by sixteenth-century architecture. And just then something passed over the Renaissance roofs with the scream of one of Dante’s devils, struck McDermott’s car of mules with a great noise and a burst of flame, and straightway created a situation in which there was neither car nor mules.

For a minute it seemed to McDermott that possibly there was no McDermott, either. When McDermott regained consciousness of McDermott, he was sitting on the ground, and he sat there and felt of himself for many seconds before he spoke or rose. Great guns he had been hearing for hours, and a rattle and roll of small-arms fire had been getting nearer all that day; but it seemed to McDermott that there was something quite vicious and personal about the big shell that had separated him forever from his mules. Not that he had loved the mules, but he loved McDermott.

“Mules,” said he, still sitting on the ground, but trying to get his philosophy of life on to its legs again, “is here wan minute an’ gawn the nixt. Mules is fickle an’ untrustworthy animals. Here was thim mules, wigglin’ their long ears and arsk-in’ f’r Gawd’s sake c’u’d they have a dhrink of wather, an’ promisin’ a lifelong friendship—but where is thim mules now?”

He scratched his red head as he spoke, feeling-of an old scar under the thick thatch of hair. The wound had been made some years previously with a bung starter, and whenever McDermott was agitated he caressed it tenderly.

He got up, turned about and regarded the extraordinary Grande Place. There had once been several pretty little shops about it, he could see, with pleasant courtyards, where the April sun was trying to bring green things into life again, but now some of these were in newly made and smoking ruins. The shell that had stricken McDermott’s mules from the roster of existence had not been the only one to fall into the village recently.

But it was neither old ruins nor new ruins that interested McDermott chiefly. It was the humanity that flowed through the Grande Place in a feeble trickle westward, and the humanity that stayed there.

Women and old men went by with household treasures slung in bundles or pushed before them in carts and perambulators, and they were wearing their best clothes, as if they were going to some village fête, instead of into desolation and homelessness; the children whom they carried, or who straggled after them, were also in their holiday best. Here was an ancient peasant with a coop of skinny chickens on a barrow; there was a girl in a silk gown carrying something in a bed quilt; yonder was a boy of twelve on a bicycle, and two things were tied to the handlebars—a loaf of bread and a soldier’s bayonet. Perhaps it had been his father’s bayonet. Quietly they went westward; their lips were dumb and their faces showed their souls were dumb, too. A long time they had heard the battle growling to the eastward; and now the war was upon them. It was upon them, indeed; for as McDermott gazed, another shell struck full upon a bell-shaped tower that stood at the north side of the Grande Place and it leaped up in flames and fell in dust and ruin, all gone but one irregular point of masonry that still stuck out like a snaggle tooth from a trampled skull.

These were the ones that were going, and almost the last of the dreary pageant disappeared as McDermott watched. But those who stayed astonished him even more by their strange actions and uncouth postures.

“Don’t tell me,” mumbled McDermott, rubbing his scar, “that all thim sojers is aslape!”

But asleep they were. To the east and to the north the world was one rip and rat-a-tat of rifle and machine-gun fire—how near, McDermott could not guess—and over the village whined and droned the shells, of great or lesser caliber; here was one gate to a hell of noise, and the buildings stirred and the budding vines in the courtyards moved and the dust itself was agitated with the breath and blast of far and near concussions; but yet the big open Place itself was held in the grip of a grotesque and incredible slumber.

Sprawled in the gutters, collapsed across the doorsills, leaning against the walls, slept that portion of the British army; slept strangely, without snoring. In the middle of the Grande Place there was a young lieutenant bending forward across the wreck of a motor car; he had tried to pluck forth a basket from the tonneau and sleep had touched him with his fingers on the handle. And from the eastern fringes of the village there entered the square, as actors enter upon a stage, a group of a dozen men, with their arms linked together, swaying and dazed and stumbling. At first McDermott thought that wounded were being helped from the field. But these men were not wounded; they were walking in their sleep, and the group fell apart, as McDermott looked at them, and sank severally to the cobblestones. Scotchmen, Canadians, English, torn and battered remnants of many different commands, they had striven with their guns and bodies for more than a week to dam the vast, rising wave of the German attack—day melting into night and night burning into day again, till there was no such thing as time to them any longer; there were but two things in the world, battle and weariness, weariness and battle.

McDermott moved across the square unchallenged. He had eaten and slept but little for two days himself, and he made instinctively for the open door of an empty inn, to search for food. In the doorway he stumbled across a lad who roused and spoke to him.

“Jack,” said the boy, looking at him with red eyes out of an old, worn face, “have you got the makin’s?”

He was in a ragged and muddied Canadian uniform, but McDermott guessed that he was an American.

“I have that,” said McDermott, producing papers and tobacco. But the boy had lapsed into slumber again. McDermott rolled the cigarette for him, placed it between his lips, waked him and lighted it for him.

The boy took a puff or two, and then said dreamily: “And what the hell are you doin’ here with them blue overalls on?”

“I come to look at the war,” said McDermott.

The soldier glanced around the Grande Place, and a gleam of deviltry flashed through his utter exhaustion. “So you come to see the war, huh? Well, don’t you wake it now. It’s restin’. But if you’ll take a chair and set down, I’ll have it—called—for—you—in—in—in ‘n ‘our—or so———”

His voice tailed off into sleep once more; he mangled the cigarette, the tobacco mingling with the scraggly beard about his drawn mouth; his head fell forward upon his chest. McDermott stepped past him into the Hôtel Faucon, as the inn had called itself. He found no food, but he found liquor there.

“Frinch booze,” said McDermott, getting the cork out of a bottle of brandy and sniffing it; “but booze is booze!”

And more booze is more booze, especially upon an empty stomach. It was after the fourth drink that McDermott pulled his chair up to one of the open windows of the inn and sat down, with the brandy beside him.

“I’m neglictin’ that war I come all this way to see,” said McDermott.

The Grande Place, still shaken by the tremendous and unceasing pulsations of battle, far and near, was beginning to wake up. A fresh, or, at least, a fresher, battalion was arriving over the spur line of railroad along which McDermott’s mules had been so mistakenly shunted, and was moving eastward through the town to the firing line. The men whom McDermott had seen asleep were rising at the word of command; taking their weapons, falling in, and staggering back to the interminable battle once more.

“I dunno,” mused McDermott, as the tired men straggled past, “whether I want to be afther j’inin’ that war or not. It makes all thim lads that slapey! I dunno phwat the devil it is, the Frinch booze bein’ so close to me, inside, or that war so close to me, outside, but I’m gittin’ slapey m’silf.”

It was, likely, the brandy. There had not been a great deal of French brandy in McDermott’s previous experience, and he did not stint himself. It was somewhere between the ninth and the fifteenth swallows of it that McDermott remarked to himself, rubbing the scar on his head:

“I w’u’d jine that war now, if I c’u’d be sure which way it had wint!”

And then he slid gently out of his chair and went to sleep on the floor just inside the open window of the Hôtel Fauçon.

The war crept closer and took another look at McDermott. As the warm golden afternoon waned, the British troops, fighting like fiends for every inch of ground, exacting a ghastly toll of lives from the Germans, were forced back into the eastern outskirts of the town. There, with rifle and machine gun, from walls, trees, courtyards, roofs and ruins, they held the advancing Germans for an hour. But they were pushed back again, doggedly establishing themselves in the houses of the Grande Place. Neither British nor Germans were dropping shells into that village now, each side fearful of damaging its own men.

A British subaltern with a machine gun and two private soldiers entered the inn and were setting the gun up at McDermott’s window when a German bullet struck the officer and he fell dead across the slumbering McDermott. Nevertheless, the gun was manned and fought for half an hour above McDermott, who stirred now and then, but did not waken. Just at dusk an Irish battalion struck the Germans on the right flank of their assaulting force, a half mile to the north of the village, rolled them back temporarily, and cleared the village of them. This counter attack took the firing line a good thousand yards eastward once more.

McDermott roused, crawled from beneath the body of the British officer, and viewed it with surprise. “That war has been here ag’in an’ me aslape,” said McDermott. “I might jine that war if I c’u’d ketch up wid it—but ‘tis here, ‘tis there, ‘tis gawn ag’in! An’ how c’u’d I jine it wid no weapons, not even a good thick club to m’ hands?”

He foraged and found a piece of sausage that he had overlooked in his former search, ate it greedily and then stood in the doorway, listening to the sound of the firing. It was getting dark and northward toward Messines and Wytschaete and southward for more miles than he could guess the lightning of big guns flickered along the sky.

“Anny way I w’u’d go,” mused McDermott, “I w’u’d run into that war if I was thryin’ to dodge ut. And anny wray I w’u’d go, I w’u’d miss that war if I was thryin’ to come up wid ut. An’ till I make up me mind which wan I want to do, here will I sthay.”

He opened another bottle of brandy, and drank and cogitated. Whether it was the cogitation or the drinks or the effect of the racket of war, his head began to ache dully. When McDermott’s scar ached, it was his custom to take another drink. After a while there came a stage at which, if it still ached, he at least ceased to feel it aching any more.

“The hotel here,” he remarked, “is filled wid hospitality and midical tratement, and where bet-ther c’u’d I be?”

And presently, once more, a deep sleep overtook him. A deeper, more profound sleep, indeed, than his former one. And this time the war came still nearer to McDermott.

The British were driven back again and again occupied the town, the Germans in close pursuit. From house to house and from wall to wall the struggle went on, with grenade, rifle and bayonet. A German, with a Scotchman’s steel in his chest, fell screaming, back through the open window, and his blood as he died soaked McDermott’s feet. But McDermott slept. Full night came, thick and cloudy, and both sides sent up floating flares. The square was strewn with the bodies of the dead and the bodies of the maimed in increasing numbers; the wounded groaned and whimpered in the shadows of the trampled Place, crawling, if they still could crawl, to whatever bit of broken wall seemed to offer momentary shelter and praying for the stretcher bearers to be speedy. But still McDermott slept.

At ten o’clock that night two Englishmen once more brought a machine gun into the Hôtel Fauçon; they worked the weapon for twenty minutes from the window within ten feet of which McDermott now lay with his brandy bottle beside him. Once McDermott stirred; he sat up sleepily on the floor and murmured: “An’ where is that war now? Begad, an’ I don’t belave there is anny war!”

And he rolled over and went to sleep again. The men with the machine gun did not notice him; they were too busy. A moment later one of them sank with a bullet through his heart. His comrade lasted a little longer, and then he, too, went down, a wound in his lungs. It took him some weary minutes to choke and bleed to death, there in that dark place, upon the floor, among the dead men and McDermott’s brandy bottles and the heap of ammunition he had brought with him. Hist struggle did not wake McDermott.

By midnight the British had been driven back until they held the houses at the west end of the town and the end of the spur railroad that came eastward from Hazebrouck. The Germans were in the eastern part of the village, and between was a “no man’s land,” of which the Grande Place was a part. What was left of the Hôtel Faucon, with the sleeping McDermott in it, was toward the middle of the south side of the square. In the streets to the north and south of the Place patrols still clashed with grenade and bayonet and rifle, but the Germans attempted no further advance in any force after midnight. No doubt they were bringing up more men; no doubt, with the first morning light, they would move forward a regiment or two, possibly even a division, against the British who still clung stubbornly to the western side of the town. All the way from Wytschaete south to Givenchy the battle-line was broken up into many little bitter struggles of this sort, the British at every point facing great odds.

When dawn came, there came with it a mist. And three men of a German patrol, creeping from house to house and ruin to ruin along the south side of that part of “no man’s land” which was the Grande Place, entered the open door of the Hôtel Fauçon.

One of them stepped upon McDermott’s stomach, where he lay sleeping and dreaming of the war he had come to look at.

McDermott, when he had been drinking, was often cross. And especially was he cross if, when sleeping off his liquor, some one purposely or inadvertently interfered with his rightful and legitimate rest. When this coarse and heavy-footed intruder set his boot, albeit unwittingly, upon McDermott’s stomach, McDermott sat up with a bellow of rage, instinctively and instantaneously grabbed the leg attached to the boot, rose as burning rocks rise from a volcano, with the leg in his hands, upset the man attached to the leg, and jumped with two large feet accurately upon the back of that person’s neck. Whereupon the Boche went to Valhalla. McDermott, though nearer fifty than forty years old, was a barroom fighter of wonderful speed and technique, and this instinctive and spontaneous maneuver was all one motion, just as it is all one motion when a cat in a cellar leaps over a sack of potatoes, lands upon a rat, and sinks her teeth into a vital spot. The second German and the third German hung back an instant toward the door, and then came on toward the moving shadow in the midst of shadows. For their own good they should have come on without hanging back that second; but perhaps their training, otherwise so efficient, did not include barroom tactics. Their hesitation gave McDermott just the time he needed, for when he faced them he had the first German’s gun in his hands.

“No war,” said McDermott, “can come into me slapin’ chamber and stand on me stomach like that, and expict me to take it peaceful!”

With the words he fired the first German’s rifle into the second German. The third German, to the rear of the second one, fired his gun simultaneously, but perhaps he was a hit flurried, for he also fired directly into the second German, and there was nothing the second German could do but die; which he did at once. McDermott leaped at the third German with his rifle clubbed just as the man pressed the trigger again. The bullet struck McDermott’s rifle, splintered the butt of it and knocked it from his hands; but a second later McDermott’s hands were on the barrel of the German’s gun and the two of them were struggling for it.

There is one defect in the German military system, observers say: the drill masters do not teach their men independent thinking; perhaps the drill-masters do not have the most promising material to work upon. At any rate, it occurred to McDermott to kick the third German in the stomach while the third German was still thinking of nothing else than trying to depress the gun to shoot or bayonet McDermott. Thought and kick were as well coordinated as if they had proceeded from one of McDermott’s late mules.

The Boche went to the floor of the Hôtel Faucon with a groan. “Gott!” he said.

“A stomach f’r a stomach,” said Mc-Dermott, standing over him with the rifle. “Git up!”

The German painfully arose.

“Ye are me prisoner,” said McDermott, “an’ the furst wan I iver took. Hould up y’r hands! Hould thim up, I say! Not over y’r stomach, man, but over y’r head!”

The Boche complied hurriedly.

“I see ye understhand United States,” said McDermott. “I was afraid ye might not, an’ I w’u’d have to shoot ye.”

“Kamerad!” exclaimed the man.

“Ye are no comrade av mine,” said McDermott, peering at the man’s face through the eery halflight of early morning, “an’ comrade av mine ye niver was! I know ye well! Ye are Goostave Schmidt b’ name, an’ wanst ye tinded bar in a dive down b’ the Brooklyn wather front!”

The man stared at McDermott in silence for a long minute, and then recollection slowly came to him.

“MagDermodd!” he said. “Batrick MagDermodd!”

“The same,” said McDermott.

“Gott sei dank!” said the German. “I haf fallen into der hands of a friend.” And with the beginning of a smile he started to lower his hands.

“Put thim up!” cried McDermott. “Don’t desave y’silf! Ye are no fri’nd av mine!”

The smile faded, and something like a look of panic took its place on the German’s face.

“Th’ last time I saw ye, ye was in bad company, f’r ye was alone,” said McDermott. “An’ I come over here lookin’ f’r ye, an’ I find ye in bad company ag’in!”

“Looking?” said the German with quite sincere perplexity. “You gome here looking for me?”

The wonder on the man’s face at this unpremeditated jest of his having crossed the Atlantic especially to look for Gustave Schmidt titillated McDermott’s whole being. But he did not laugh, and he let the German wonder. “And phwy sh’u’d I not?” he said.

The German thought intensely for a while. “Why should you gome all der vay agross der Adlandic looking for me?” he said finally.

“Ye have a short mimory,” said McDermott. “Ye do not recollict the time ye hit me on the head wid a bung starter whin I was too soused to defind m’silf? The scar is there yet, bad luck to ye!”

“But dot was nudding,” said the German. “Dot bung-starder business was all a bart of der day’s vork.”

“But ye cript up behint me,” said McDermott; “an’ me soused!”

“But dot was der bractical vay to do it,” said the German. “Dot was nuddings at all, dot bung-starder business. I haf forgodden it long ago!”

“The McDermotts remimber thim compliments longer,” said McDermott. “An’ b’ rights I sh’u’d give ye wan good clout wid this gun and be done wid ye. But I’m thinkin’ I may be usin’ ye otherwise.”

“You gome all der vay agross der Adlandic yoost because I hit you on der head mit a bung starder?” persisted the German, still wondering. “Dot, MagDermodd, I cannot belief—Nein!”

“And ye tore up y’r citizenship papers and come all the way across the Atlantic just to jine this gang av murtherin’ child-killers,” said McDermott. “That I c’n belave! Yis!”

“But I haf not dorn up my American cidizen papers—Nein!” exclaimed the German, earnestly. “Dose I haf kept. I gome across to fight for mein Faderland—dot vas orders. Ja! But mein American cidizenship papers I haf kept, and ven der war is ofer I shall go back to Brooklyn and once more an American citizen be, undill der next war. Ja! You haf not understood, but dot is der vay of it. Ja!”

“Goostave,” said McDermott, “ye have too many countries workin’ f’r ye. But y’r takin’ ordhers from m’silf now—do ye get that? C’n ye play that musical insthrumint there by the window?”

“Ja!” said Gustave. “Dot gun I can vork. Dot is der Lewis machine gun. Id is not so good a gun as our machine gun, for our machine gun haf been a colossal sugcess, but id is a goot gun.”

“Ye been fightin’ f’r the Kaiser f’r three or four years, Goostave,” said McDermott, menacing him with his rifle, “but this mornin’ I’ll be afther seein’ that ye do a bit av work f’r thim citizenship papers, an’, later, ye can go to hell, if ye like, an’ naturalize y’rsilf in still a third country. Ye will shoot Germans wid that gun till I get the hang av the mechanism m’silf. And thin I will shoot Germans wid that gun. But furst, ye will give me that fancy tin soup-bowl ye’re wearin’.”

Gustave handed over his helmet. McDermott put it on his red head.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” said McDermott, “will I jine this war, or will I not jine it. An’ the only way ye c’n tell do ye like a thing or do ye not is to thry it wance. Wid y’r assistance, Goostave, I’ll thry it this mornin’, if anny more av it comes my way.”

More of it was coming his way. The Germans, tired of trifling with the small British force which held the village, had brought up the better part of a division during the night and were marshaling the troops for their favorite feat of arms, an overwhelming frontal attack en masse. The British had likewise received reinforcements, drawing from the north and from the south every man the hard-pressed lines could spare. But they were not many, perhaps some three thousand men in all, to resist the massed assault, with the railroad for its objective, which would surely come with dawn. If troops were needed in the village they were no less needed on the lines that flanked it. The little town, which had been the scene of so much desperate skirmishing the day before and during the first half of the night, was now about to become the ground of something like a battle.

“There’s a French division on the way,” said the British colonel in command in the village to one of his captains. “If we can only hold them for an hour——”

He did not finish the sentence. As he spoke the German bombardment, precedent to the infantry attack, began to comb the western fringes of the town and the railroad line behind, searching for the hurriedly-digged and shallow trenches, the improvised dugouts, the shell holes, the cellars and the embankments where the British lay. The British guns to the rear of the village made answer, and the uproar tore the mists of dawn to tatters. A shell fell short, into the middle of the Grande Place, and McDermott saw the broken motor car against which the sleeping lieutenant had leaned the day before vanish into nothingness; and then a house directly opposite the Hôtel Fauçon jumped into flame and was no more. Looking out across the back of the stooping Gustave at the window, McDermott muttered, “I dunno as I w’u’d want to jine that war.” And then he bellowed in Gustave Schmidt’s ear: “Cut loose! Cut loose wid y’rgun! Cut loose!”

“I vill not!” shrieked Gustave. “Mein Gott! Dat is mein own regiment!”

“Ye lie!” shouted McDermott. “Ye will!” He thrust a bit of bayonet into the fleshiest part of the German’s back.

“I vill! I vill!” cried Gustave.

“Ye will that,” said McDermott, “an’ the less damned nonsinse I hear from ye about y’r own rigimint the betther f’r ye! Ye’re undher me own ordhers till I c’n make up me mind about this war.” The mists were rising. In the clearing daylight at the eastern end of the square, as if other clouds were moving forward with a solid front, appeared the first gray wave of the German infantry. Close packed, shoulder to shoulder, three deep, they came, almost filling the space from side to side of the Grande Place, moving across that open stretch against the British fire with a certain heavy-footed and heavy-brained contempt of everything before them. Ten steps, and the British machine guns and rifles caught them. The first wave, or half of it, went down in a long writhing windrow, across the east end of the square, and in the instant that he saw it squirm and toss before the trampling second wave swept over it and through it, the twisting gray-clad figures on the stones reminded McDermott of the heaps of heaving worms he used to see at the bottom of his bait-can when he went fishing as a boy.

“Hold that nozzle lower, Goostave!” he yelled to his captive. “Spray thim! Spray thim! Ye’re shootin’ over their heads, ye lumberin’ Dutchman, ye!”

“Gott!” cried Gustave, as another jab of the bayonet urged him to his uncongenial task.

And then McDermott made one of the few errors of his military career. Whether it was the French brandy he had drunk to excess the night before, or whether it was the old bung-starter wound on his head, which always throbbed and jumped when he became excited, his judgment deserted him for an instant. For one instant he forgot that there must be no instants free from the immediate occupation of guiding and directing Gustave.

“Let me see if I can’t work that gun m’self,” he cried.

As he relaxed his vigilance, pushing the German to one side, the Boche suddenly struck him upon the jaw. McDermott reeled and dropped his rifle; before he could recover himself, the German had it. The weapon swung upward in the air and—just then a shell burst outside the open window of the Hôtel Fauçon.

Both men were flung from their feet by the concussion. For a moment everything was blank to McDermott. And then, stretching out his hand to rise, his fingers encountered something smooth and hard upon the floor. Automatically his grasp closed over it and he rose. At the same instant the German struggled to his feet, one hand behind his back, and the other extended, as if in entreaty.

“Kamerad,” he whined, and even as he whined he lurched nearer and flung at McDermott a jagged, broken bottle. McDermott ducked, and the dagger-like glass splintered on his helmet. And then McDermott struck—once. Once was enough. The Boche sank to the floor without a groan, lifeless. McDermott looked at him, and then, for the first time, looked at what he held in his own hand, the weighty thing which he had wielded so instinctively and with such ferocity. It was the bung starter of the Hôtel Fauçon.

“Goostave niver knowed what hit him,” said McDermott. And if there had been any one to hear, in all that din, a note of regret that Gustave never knew might have been remarked in his voice.

McDermott turned his attention to the machine gun, which, with its tripod, had been knocked to the floor. He squatted, with his head below the level of the window sill, and looked it over.

“‘Tis not broken,” he decided, after some moments of examination. “Did Goostave do it so? Or did he do it so?” He removed his helmet and rubbed the scar under his red hair reflectively. “If I was to make up me mind to jine that war,” mused McDermott, “this same w’u’d be a handy thing to take wid me. It w’u’d that! Now, did that Goostave that used to be here pull this pretty little thingumajig so? Or did he pull it so? Ihaveut! He pulled it so! And thim ca’tridges, now—do they feed in so? Or do they feed in so? ‘T w’u’d be a handy thing, now, f’r a man that had anny intintions av jinin’ the war to know about all thim things!”

And, patiently, McDermott studied the mechanism, while the red sunlight turned to yellow in the Grande Place outside, and the budding green vines withered along the broken walls, and the stones ran blood, and the Hôtel Fauçon began to fall to pieces about his ears. McDermott did not hurry; he felt that there was no need to hurry; he had not yet made up his mind whether he intended to participate in this war. By the time he had learned how to work that machine gun, and had used it on the Germans for a while, he thought, he might be vouchsafed some light on that particular subject. It was one of McDermott’s fixed beliefs that he was an extremely cautious sort of man, though many of his acquaintances thought of him differently, and he told himself that he must not get too far into this war until he was sure that it was going to be congenial. So far, it promised well.

And also, McDermott, as he puzzled over the machine gun, was not quite the normal McDermott. He was, rather, a supernormal McDermott. He had been awakened rudely from an alcoholic slumber and he had been rather busy ever since; so many things had taken place in his immediate neighborhood, and were still taking place, that he was not quite sure of their reality. As he sat on the floor and studied the weapon, he was actually, from moment to moment, more than half convinced that he was dreaming—he might awaken and find that that war had eluded him again. Perhaps he is scarcely to be chided for being in what is sometimes known as a state of mind.

And while McDermott was looking at the machine gun, the British commander prayed, as a greater British commander before him had prayed one time, for assistance, only this one did not pray for night or Blucher as Wellington had done. Night was many hours beyond all hope and would probably bring its own hell when it came, and as for Prussians, there were too many Prussians now. His men would hold on; they had been holding on for epic days and unbelievable nights, and they would still hold while there was breath in their bodies, and when their bodies were breathless they would hold one minute more. But—God! For Foch’s poilus! There is a moment which is the ultimate moment; the spirit can drag the body until—until spirit and body are wrenched into two things. No longer. His men could die in their tracks; they were dying where they stood and crouched and lay, by dozens and by scores and by heroic hundreds—but when they were dead, who would bar the way to Hazebrouck, and beyond Hazebrouck, to the channel ports?

That way was all but open now, if the enemy but realized it. Any moment they might discover it. A half-mile to the south of the village the line was so thinly held that one strong, quick thrust must make a gap. Let the enemy but fling a third of the troops he was pounding to pieces in the bloody streets of the town, in the torn fields that flanked it, and in the shambles of the Grande Place that was the center of this action, at that weak spot, and all was over. But with a fury mechanical, insensate, the Germans still came on in direct frontal attacks.

The British had slain and slain and slain, firing into the gray masses until the water boiled in the jackets of the machine guns. Five attacks had broken down in the Grande Place itself—and now a sixth was forming. Should he still hold fast, the colonel asked himself, or should he retire, saving what machine guns he might, and flinging a desperate detachment southward in the attempt to make a stronger right flank? But to do that might be the very move that would awaken the Germans to their opportunity there. So long as they pounded, pounded at his center, he would take a toll of them, at least—but the moment was coming—

“I have ut!” cried McDermott, and mounted his gun at the window.

“It is time to retire,” said the British colonel, and was about to give the order.

“Right in their bloody backs,” said McDermott to himself.

And so it was. For the sixth advance of the German masses had carried them well into the Grande Place. McDermott, crouched at his window, cut loose with his gun at pointblank range as the first wave, five men deep, passed by him, splashing along the thick ranks from behind as one might sweep a garden hose down a row of vegetables. Taken thus in the rear, ambushed, with no knowledge of the strength of the attacking force behind them, the German shock troops swayed and staggered, faced about and fell and broke. For right into the milling herd of them, and into the second advancing wave, the British poured their bullets. The colonel, who had been about to order a retreat, ordered a charge, and before the stampeded remnant of the first two waves could recover themselves the British were on them with grenades and bayonets, flinging them back into the third wave, just advancing to their support, in a bleeding huddle of defeat.

McDermott saw the beginning of that charge, and with his bung starter in his hand he rushed from the door to join it. But he did not see the end of it, nor did he see the poilus, as they came slouching into the village five minutes later to give the repulse weight and confirmation, redolent of onions and strange stews, but with their bayonets—those bayonets that are part of the men who wield them, living things, instinct with the beautiful, straight, keen soul of France herself.

McDermott did not see them, for some more of the Hôtel Fauçon had fallen on him, crushing one of his ankles and giving him a clout on the head.

“Whoever it was turned loose that machine gun from the inn window, did the trick,” said the colonel, later. “It’s hardly too much to say that he blocked the way to Hazebrouck—for the time, at least, if one man can be said to have done such a thing—what’s that?”

“That” was McDermott, who was being carried forth, unconscious, to an ambulance. It was his blue overalls that had occasioned the colonel’s surprise. He was neither French nor British nor German; palpably he was a civilian, and a civilian who had no business there. And in his hand he clasped a bung starter. His fingers were closed over it so tightly that in the base hospital later they found difficulty in taking it away from him.

Owing, no doubt, to the blow on his head, McDermott was unable to recall clearly anything that had taken place from the moment he had first fallen asleep under the influence of French brandy until he awakened in the hospital nearly four weeks later. During this period there had been several intervals of more open-eyed dreaming, succeeded by lapses into profound stupor; but even in these open-eyed intervals, McDermott had not been himself. It was during one of these intervals that a representative of the French Government bestowed the Croix de Guerre upon McDermott, for it had been learned that he was the man behind the machine gun that had turned the tide of combat.

McDermott, his eyes open, but his mind in too much of a daze even to wonder what the ceremony was about, sat in a wheel chair, and in company with half a dozen other men selected for decoration, listened to a brief oration in very good French, which he could not have understood had he been normal. In answer he muttered in a low tone, rubbing his broken and bandaged head: “I think maybe I will jine that war, afther all!”

The French officer assumed that McDermott had spoken some sort of compliment to France and kissed McDermott on both cheeks, in front of the hospital staff, several American reporters, and as much of the French army as qould be spared to do honor to the occasion. The Croix de Guerre made no impression upon McDermott, but the kiss briefly arrested his wandering consciousness, and he cried out, starting up in his chair and menacing the officer: “Where is me bung starter?” Then he fainted.

A good many thousands of people in France and England and America learned from the newspapers the story of the nondescript in the blue overalls, who had behaved so gallantly at the crucial moment of a crucial fight. But McDermott never did. He seldom read newspapers. No one had been able to learn his name, so the reporters had given him a name. They called him “Dennis.” And it was “Dennis” who got the fame and glory. McDermott would not have identified himself with Dennis had he seen the newspapers. When he awakened from his long, broken stupor, with its intervals of dazed halfconsciousness, the first thing he did was to steal away from that hospital; he left without having heard of Dennis or of the decoration of Dennis.

There was one thing that he had experienced that did live hazily and confusedly in his memory, however, although he could not fix it in its relationship to any other thing. And that was the fact that he had met Gustave Schmidt. Three or four months after he slipped away from the hospital—a period of unchronicled wanderings, during which he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist several times—he limped into a saloon on the Brooklyn water front and asked Tim O’Toole, the proprietor, for his usual. He had just got back to Brooklyn, and he carried his earthly possessions in a bundle wrapped in brown paper.

“I hear Yordy Crowley isn’t givin’ his racket this year,” said McDermott, laying his bundle on the bar and pouring out his drink.

“He is not,” said Tim. “He is in France helpin’ out thim English.”

“Yordy will make a good sojer,” said McDermott. “He is a good man of his fists.”

“The Irish is all good sojers,” said Mr. O’Toole, sententiously. “There was that man Dinnis, now, that was in all av the papers.”

“I did not hear av him,” said McDermott. “An’ phwat did he do?”

“He licked th’ entire German army wan morn-in’,” said O’Toole, “an’ saved England, an’ the Quane of France kissed him for it. ‘Twas in all the papers. Or, maybe,” said Mr. O’Toole, “it was the King av Belg’um kissed him for ut. Anny-way wan of thim foreign powers kissed him wid the whole world lookin’ on.”

“An’ phwat did this Dinnis do thin?” asked McDermott.

“He attimpted to assault the person that kissed him,” said O’Toole. “Maybe ‘twas the King av Italy. ‘Twas in all the papers at th’ time. Some wan told me ye were in France y’rsilf, Paddy.”

“I was that,” said McDermott. “I wint wid mules.”

“Did ye see annything av the war?”

“I did not,” said McDermott. “Divil a bit of ut, barrin’ a lot o’ racket an’ a big roarin’ divil av a stame-boiler thing that come bustin’ through th’ air an’ took away the mules that was me passport. But I come near seein’ some av ut, wan time.”

“An’ how was it that ye come near it, an’ missed it?” inquired Tim.

“I wint to slape,” said McDermott. “The war was slapin’, an’ I laid m’silf down b’ the side av ut an’ took a nap, too. Later, I woke up in the hospital, some wan havin’ stipped on me whilst I was slapin’, or somethin’. They was afther keep-in’ me in th’ hospital indefinite, an’ I slipped away wan mornin’, dodgin’ the orderlies an’ nurses, or I might have been there yet eatin’ jelly an’ gettin’ me face washed f’r me. An’ afther I got back here I thried to jine that war, but th’ Amurrican Army w’u’d not have me.”

“And phwy not?”

“Because av me fut.”

“And how did ye hurt y’r fut?”

“Divil a bit do I know how,” said McDermott. “I’m tellin’ ye ‘twas done whilst I was aslape. I remimber gettin’ soused in wan av thim Frinch barrooms, an’ I w’u’d think it was a mule stipped on me fut whin I was slapin’ off me souse, excipt that thim mules was gone before I got me souse.”

“An’ ye saw naught av the war?” Tim was distinctly disappointed.

“But little of ut, but little of ut,” said McDermott. “But, Timmy,—wan thing I did whilst I was in France.”

“An’ phwat was that?”

“I avened up an ould grudge,” said McDermott. He put away a second drink, rolling it over his tongue with satisfaction. “Do ye mind that Goostave Schmidt that used to kape bar acrost the strate? Ye do! Do ye mind th’ time he hit me wid th’ bung starter? Ye do!”

“Phwat thin?”

“Well, thin,” said McDermott, “I met up wid him ag’in in wan av thim Frinch barrooms. I do not remimber phwat he said to me nor phwat I said to him, for I was soused, Timmy. But wan word led to another, an’ I give him as good as he sint, an’ ‘twas wid a bung starter, too. I brung it back wid me as a sooveneer av me travels in France.”

And, undoing his brown paper bundle, McDermott fished forth from among his change of socks and shirts and underwear the bung starter of the Hôtel Fauçon and laid it upon the bar for his friend’s inspection. Something else in the bundle caught O’Toole’s eye.

“An’ phwat is that thing ye have there?” asked Tim.

“Divil a bit do I know phwat,” said McDermott, picking the article up and tossing it carelessly upon the bar. “‘Twas layin’ by me cot in the hospital, along wid m’ bung starter an’ me clothes whin I come to m’silf, an’ whin I made me sneak from that place I brung it along.”

It was the Croix de Guerre.