Page:Weird Tales Volume 26 Number 01 (1935-07).djvu/29

waiter number 34 said almost dreamily. "But then, it is only natural that I should remember that particular hour."

Kearns' angry gaze ranged the club-room for the steward or the assistant steward.

"It was a crowded hour, sir. I was in a sector where the shelling was hardest. The Germans had got our exact range an hour and ten minutes before, and were shelling us out of existence. And we were taking it pretty hard. Most of us in the division were youngsters, and most were as raw as myself.

"There'd been an attempt to go over the top that morning. No-man's land was littered with evidence of our failure.

"Right in front of our trench there was a pile of legs and arms, where a shell had exploded in a freakish kind of way that had somehow blown bodies out of existence but left the limbs—piled 'em like an untidy little pile of cordwood. Shells do funny things sometimes, sir.

"Beside the pile was a body without a head. That had been our second lieutenant. His uniform was immaculate except for the underside of him that lay in the mud and blood. His body had been untouched. Only his head had been taken off, clean as a whistle, leaving a bit of the neck-bone sticking up.

"But we didn't mind those things so much, sir. You get sort of used to them when you fight to save your country's honor. It was something else we minded more.

"Hanging in the barbed wire was a thing almost as ripped up as any of the dead youngsters that littered the ground. This was a buddy of mine by the name of Carrigan. He'd got caught in the wire and had had his spine notched by a machine-gun bullet so that he'd been paralyzed and unable to free himself. He'd hung there ever since, still alive."

Kearns' eyes flashed into Harkness'. But Harkness shook his head almost imperceptibly, though his own face was stony with anger.

"You'd laugh, sir, if I told you all the freakish tricks I saw war play. And one of them was the way Carrigan kept on living while he hung in the barbed wire.

"The air was crowded with shrapnel pieces and bullets—actually choked with flying metal. But only a little of it hit Carrigan, and then not mortally. He seemed to hang in a charmed spot. But Carrigan didn't want to be in a charmed spot. He wanted the end to come.

"You see, first he'd had his foot taken off at the ankle, as he hung there, and the mud his legs were dragging in had somehow kept him from bleeding to death. Then he'd had half his face shot away. And finally, toward the end, a bit of shrapnel had raked across his abdomen in such a way as to slice it half open, so that he—he kept spilling his vitals, if you understand me, sir.

"It was then that he'd stopped screaming for death to take him and began—just screaming. He didn't seem to stop for breath at all. He just yelled, on and on, staring at the part of him trailing through the rip. And it was that screaming that affected us in the trench so much.

"As I say, we were just a bunch of kids, fresh out of school when we enlisted. And our minds didn't seem tough enough to stand that screaming.

"We tried to kill Carrigan, because we all had loved him. But our fingers shook a little so that none of us could hit him, any more than the bullets from the other side could. He just hung there with a broken spine, and with his foot shot off and his body sliced open like a melon, screaming on and on out of his half of a face.

"The barbed wire held him up solidly. It was fine, strong wire. I think it had