"Well," he called cheerily, "I'm the first victim."
Grafton wondered. Was it possible that men were going to behave on a
battlefield just as they did anywhere else--just as naturally--taking
wounds and death and horror as a matter of course? Beyond were more
wounded--the wounded who were able to help themselves. Soon he saw them
lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a
battalion marching to storm a block-house. He got down, hitched his
horse a few yards from the road and joined it. He was wondering how it
would feel to be under fire, when just as they were crossing another
road, with a whir and whistle and buzz, a cloud of swift insects buzzed
over his head. Unconsciously imitating the soldiers near him, he bent
low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low,
horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue
shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him,
nauseating him like a fetid odour--the crunching noise was the sound of
a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward.
One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an
animal--he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, "Oh,
God"--there was a moment of suffering consciousness for him; a third
hopped aside into the bushes--cursing angrily. Still another, as he
passed, looked up from the earth at him with a curious smile, as though
he were half ashamed of something.
"I've got it, partner," he said, "I reckon I've got it, sure." And
Grafton saw a drop of blood and the tiny mouth of a wound in his gullet,
where the flaps of his collar fell apart. He couldn't realize how he
felt--he was not interested any longer in how he felt. The instinct of
life was at work, and the instinct of self-defence. When the others
dropped, he dropped gladly; when they rose, he rose automatically. A
piece of brush, a bush, the low branch of a tree, a weed seemed to him
protection, and he saw others possessed with the same absurd idea. Once
the unworthy thought crossed his mind, when he was lying behind a squad
of soldiers and a little lower than they, that his chance was at least
better than theirs. And once, and only once--with a bitter sting of
shame--he caught himself dropping back a little, so that the same squad
should be between him and the enemy: and forthwith he stepped out into
the road, abreast with the foremost, cursing himself for a coward, and
thereafter took a savage delight in reckless exposure whenever it was
possible. And he soon saw that his position was a queer one, and an
unenviable one, as far as a cool test of nerve was the point at issue.
The officers, he saw, had their men to look after--orders to obey--their
minds were occupied. The soldiers were busy getting a shot at the
enemy--their minds, too, were occupied. It was his peculiar province to
stand up and be shot at without the satisfaction of shooting
back--studying his sensations, meanwhile, which were not particularly
pleasant, and studying the grewsome horrors about him. And it struck
him, too, that this was a ghastly business, and an unjustifiable, and
that if it pleased God to see him through he would never go to another
war except as a soldier. One consideration interested him and was
satisfactory. Nobody was shooting at him--nobody was shooting at anybody
in particular. If he were killed, or when anybody was killed, it was
merely accident, and it was thus pleasant to reflect that he was in as
much danger as anybody.