There Is Confusion/Chapter 30

The interminable voyage was over and Peter debarked to spend still more interminable days at Brest. Dr. Meriwether Bye left immediately for La Courtine, where Peter later caught sight of him once more on his way to the front. The somewhat exalted mood to which his long and intimate talks with Meriwether had raised him vanished completely under the strain of the dirt, the racial and national clashes, and above all the persistent bad weather of Brest.

This town, the end of Brittany and the furthest western outpost of France, always remained in Peter's memory as a horrible prelude to a most horrible war. Brest up to the time that Europe had gone so completely and so suddenly insane, had been the typical, stupid, monotonous French town with picturesquely irregular pavements, narrow tortuous streets, dark, nestling little shops and the inevitable public square. Around and about the city to all sides stretched well ordered farms.

Then came the march of two million American soldiers across the town and the surrounding country. Under their careless feet the farms became mud, so that the name Brest recalls to the minds of thousands nothing if not a picture of the deepest, slimiest, stickiest mud that the world has known. All about were people, people, too many people, French and Americans. And finally the relations between the two nations, allies though they were, developed from misunderstandings into hot irritations, from irritations into clashes. First white Americans and Frenchmen clashed; separate restaurants and ​accommodations had to be arranged. Then came the inevitable clash between white and colored Americans; petty jealousies and meannesses arose over the courtesies of Frenchwomen and the lack of discrimination in the French cafés. The Americans found a new and inexplicable irritation in the French colored colonials. Food was bad, prices were exorbitant; officers became tyrants. Everyone was at once in Brest and constantly about to leave it; real understanding and acquaintanceship were impossible.

Peter thought Dante might well have included this place in the description of his Inferno. Here were Disease and Death, Mutilation and Murder. Stevedores and even soldiers became cattle and beasts of burden. Many black men were slaves. The thing from which France was to be defended could hardly be worse than this welter of human misunderstandings, the clashing of unknown tongues, the cynical investigations of the government, the immanence of war and the awful, persistent wretchedness of the weather.

The long wait turned into sudden activity and Peter's outfit was ordered to Lathus, thence to La Courtine, one of the large training centers. It was at this latter place that he caught sight once more of Meriwether Bye. He seemed unusually alert and cheerful, Peter thought, and when the two got a chance to speak to each other, this impression was confirmed. The young white physician had the look of a man who sees before him a speedy deliverance.

"He thinks he's going to die and chuck this whole infernal business," Peter said to himself. "Wish I could be as sure of getting out of it as he is." Somehow the brief encounter left him more dispirited than ever. "Come out of it, ole hoss," Harley Alexander used to say to him. "What'd your 'grand white' friend do to you?"

"Oh, you shut up!" Peter barked at him.

His real depression, however, dated back to the time im​mediately after his company had left Brest. The awful condition of things in the seaport town was general rather than specific, and for the first time since Peter had entered the war he was feeling comparatively calm. His long and intimate talks with Meriwether had produced their effect. He had not realized that any such man as the young Quaker physician had existed in the white world. He had too much sense and too many cruel experiences to believe that there were many of Meriwether's kind to be found in a lifetime's journey, but somehow his long bitterness of the years had been assuaged. Henceforth, he told himself, he would try to be more generous in his thoughts of white men—perhaps his attitude invited trouble which he was usually only too willing to meet halfway.

At Lathus, Harley Alexander met him in the little place. "Seems to me you're got up regardless," Peter had commented. Alexander, one of the trimmest men in the regiment, was looking unusually shipshape, almost dapper.

The other struck him familiarly across the shoulder. "And that ain't all. Say, fellow, there's a band concert to-night right here in this little old square. I'm goin' and I'm goin' to take a lady."

"Lady! Where'd you get her?"

"Right here. These girls are all right. Not afraid of a dark skin. 'How should we have fear, m'soo,' one of them says to me, 'when you fight for our patrie and when you are so beau?' 'Beau' that's handsome, ain't it? Say this is some country to fight for; got some sense of appreciation. Better come along, old scout. There's a pile of loots getting ready to come, each with a French dame in tow."

"I'll be there," Peter told him, laughing. "But count me out with the ladies. I can't get along with the domestic brand and I know I'll be out of luck with the foreign ones."

Some passing thought wiped the joy of anticipation from ​Harley's face. "My experience is that these foreign ones are a damn sight less foolish than some domestic ones I've met. Well, me for the concert."

But that band concert never came off. At sunset a company of white American Southerners marched into Lathus down the main street, past the little place. There was a sudden uproar.

"Look! Darkies and white women! Come on, fellows, kill the damned niggers!"

There was a hasty onslaught in which the colored soldiers even taken by surprise gave as good as they took. Between these two groups from the same soil there was grimmer, more determined fighting than was seen at Verdun. The French civil population stood on the church-steps opposite the square and watched with amazement.

"Nom de dieu! Are they crazy, then, these Americans, that they kill each other!"

The next day saw Peter's company on its way to La Courtine, a training center, where there were no women. Thence they moved presently to the front in the Metz Sector.

The injustice and indignity rendered the colored troups at Lathus, plus the momentary glimpses which he caught of Meriwether and his exaltation, plunged Peter into a morass of melancholy and bitter self-communing which shut him off as effectually as a smoke-screen from any real appreciation of the dangers which surrounded him on the front.

In the midst of all that ineffable danger, that hellish noise, he was harassed by the inextricable confusion, the untidiness of his own life. God, to get rid of it all! Once he spent forty-eight hours with nine other men on the ridge of a hill under fire. The other fellows told stories and swapped confidences. But he stayed unmoved through it all, impervious alike to the danger and the good man-talk going on about him.

​When the call came for a reconnoitering party, he was one of the first to step forward. He went out that night into the blackness, the hellishness of No Man's Land. He saw a dark figure rise in front of him, heard a guttural sound and the next moment his left arm, drenched with blood, hung useless at his side. Raising himself he shot at the legs which showed a solid blackness against the thinner surrounding darkness. Wriggling on his belly, he pushed forward to where he thought he heard sounds, a struggle. "Something doing," he told himself, "might as well get in on that."

But when he drew near the darkness was so intense that he did not dare interfere. Two men, at least, were struggling terribly but he could not tell which was which. They were breathing in terrific grunts, so heavily that they had not noticed the approach of his smoothly sliding body. Suddenly what he had hoped for, happened. A rocket shot up in the air flared briefly and showed him the two men. One was Meriwether Bye, the other was a German, his hand in the act of throwing a hand grenade.

Peter lurched forward and at that ghastly short range shot the German through the stomach. But he was too late, the grenade had left the man's hand. The earth rocked about him, he could see Meriwether fall, a toppling darkness in the darkness. He started toward him but his foot caught in a depression and he himself fell sideways on his wounded arm. There was a moment of exquisite pain and then the darkness grew even more dark about him, the silent night more silent.

When he came to, it was still dark, though the day, he felt, rather than saw, was approaching. His arm hurt unmercifully. He had never known such pain. He raised himself on his one arm, and felt around with his foot. Yes, there was a body, he prayed it might not be the German. Crawling forward he plunged his hand into blood, a depthless pool of sticky blood. Sickened, he drew back and dried it, wiping it ​on his coat. More cautiously, then, he reached out again, searching for the face, yes, that was Meriwether's nose. Those canny finger-tips of his recognized the facial structure. His hand came back to Meriwether's chest. The heart was beating faintly and just above it was a hole, with the blood gushing, spurting, hot and thick.

He sat upright and wrenching open his tunic tore at his shirt. The stuff was hard to tear but it finally gave way under the onslaught of teeth and fingers. Faint with the pain of his left arm and the loss of his own blood, he set his lips hard, concentrating with all his strength on the determination not to lose consciousness again. Finally grunting, swearing, almost crying, he got Meriwether's head against his knee, then against his shoulder, and staunched the wound with the harsh, unyielding khaki. His canteen was full and he drenched the chilly, helpless face with its contents. All this time he was sitting with no support for his back and the strain was telling on him.

Against the surrounding gray of the coming morning, southward toward his own lines, he caught sight of darker shapes, trees perhaps, perhaps men—if he could only get to them! Placing Meriwether's face upwards he caught him about his lean waist, buckling him to his side with an arm of steel, and rising to his knees he crawled for what seemed a mile toward that persistent blackness. Twice he fell, once he struck his left arm against a dead man's boot. The awful throbbing in his shoulder increased. But at last he was there, at last in the shelter of a clump of low, stunted trees. With a sob he braced himself against them, letting Meriwether's head and shoulders rest against his knees. The blood had begun to spurt again and Meriwether stirred. Peter whispered:

"Bye, for God's sake, speak to me. This is Peter, Peter Bye, you remember?"

​The young doctor repeated the name thickly. "Yes, Peter. I know. I'm dying."

"Not yet. Man, it's almost day, they'll come to us. Pull yourself together. We'll save you somehow."

Meriwether whispered, "I'm cold."

Could he get his coat off? How could he ever pull it off that shattered arm? Still he achieved even this, wrapping it around the white man's shivering form, raising that face, gray as the gray day above them, high on his chest, cradling him like a baby.

The chill was the chill of death, a horrible death. Meriwether coughed and choked; Peter could feel the life struggling within the poor torn body. Once the cold lips said: "Peter, you're a good scout."

Just before a merciful unconsciousness enveloped him for the last time, Meriwether sat upright in the awful agony of death. "Grandfather," he called in a terrible voice, "this is the last of the Byes."

When the stretcher-bearers found them, Meriwether was lying across Peter's knees, his face turned childwise toward Peter's breast. The colored man's head had dropped low over the fair one and his black curly hair fell forward straight and stringy, caked in the blood which lay in a well above Meriwether's heart.

"Cripes!" said one of the rescue men, "I've seen many a sight in this war, but none ever give me the turn I got seein' that smoke's hair dabblin' in the other fellow's blood."