Tells how I looked at the Scuppers through a field glass, and of how I resolved on a very hazardous enterprise.
I must tell you in some detail of this experience of my own since, as I said, the whole story hangs upon it.
You will understand that at the time of Tom’s tragic exploit the big bulge in the straining line which the Germans had made in their drive toward the Marne, and which was known as the Marne salient, had been entirely wiped out by the allied forces. The line ran almost straight between Soissons and Rheims with the little village of Pevy, where the Germans had erected the cross, lying a short distance within the enemy lines. So the line remained for some time while Marshal Foch was pressing forward elsewhere.
My first experience of actual warfare was when I joined the boys near Jonchery, prepared to accompany them northward toward the Aisne River. There was not much fighting in that advance. The Germans picked up like a lot of squatters and retreated so fast that twice we lost touch with them altogether, but we had the heroic satisfaction of capturing no end of deserted baggage. I think I never saw so many musical instruments and parrots as they left behind, and, indeed, the love of pets and music which those wretches showed has always been a matter of marvel to me. One of these squawking birds, I remember, was flapping its wings, all bewildered, upon the top of a post, to which (I was told) several British Tommies had been tied and tortured, and shrieking, “Cut their throats, cut their throats!” at the top of its expressionless voice. They are strange people who are so gentle and patient that they can teach these birds as no others can and then can play a tune on the mandolin and then torture a man to death.
After several days of this inglorious marathon race, the Germans made a stand upon the summit of a hill. I understood that our immediate objective was Pevy, which I remembered as the village where Tom’s grave was, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to know that this place must presently fall to our troops and that the grave would be at least on friendly soil.
But Pevy was not to be so easily taken. The hill which confronted us descended in an almost sheer precipice upon the near side and I think I never saw such a rocky chaos as it presented.
My friend, Lieutenant Wells, let me view it through his field glass, and a more depressing, bleak and desolate place I never beheld—a jungle of gray boulders it was, and naked earth, as if the hill had been split open like an apple and one-half taken away.
“That’s where Fritzie mowed us down a while ago, when he was headed for the Marne,” said the lieutenant.
“You mean from the summit?” I asked.
“Yes, our boys tried to scale that stone-yard and stop the advance. We outnumbered them three to one just there, but they held out. Some of us got on top, but it was no use.”
I don’t know what put it into my head unless it was the knowledge that this place was near upon Pevy and west of Rheims, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was the very “rocky hillside” which the American newspaper had mentioned as the place where Tom fell. I remembered the phrase “in the fighting west of Rheims,” and also “the rocky hillside where the Germans put up such a stubborn resistance.”
“Do you suppose that is where Slade, the aviator, fell?” I asked.
“Thatchy?” he queried. “Yes, it is. Just a little to the left,” he added, moving the glass for me. “Do you see two big rocks with points? One a little higher than the others?”
Our detachment had gone on along the road which flanked the hill, for, of course, there was no intention of surmounting the forbidding place, and it was important that we pass out of range of it before the enemy gain the vantage point of the summit.
For half a minute I looked upon the very spot where Slade had fallen—two big, gray rocks somewhat more than midway up that cheerless cliff and I thought of that traveller described in a poem of Scott’s, who died in some remote, forlorn spot—unfriended and alone. The two rocks formed a sort of gutter on the precipitous hill, and a quantity of descending debris had fallen against them, forming a chaotic mass there.
“I suppose he rolled down against those and caught there,” I said, still looking at the place through the glass.
“Guess so,” said the lieutenant, half interested. “They call them the Scuppers. I heard a couple of Signal Corps men saying that the Huns must have found Slade in the Scuppers—God-forsaken looking place, huh?”
I could not speak just then. Of all the lonesome places to die, that gray, cold, forsaken waste seemed the most terrible—a spot more barren and heartless than the sea, and ugly with a kind of brutal ugliness. And that, I reflected, was where Tom Slade of my own home town in far-off America fell to his heroic death. I wondered how long he had lain there and suffered beyond the help of surgeons and nurses.
“He’s buried in Pevy,” I said; “they had the decency to take him there and give him a Christian grave.”
The lieutenant had already taken his glass from me and was moving away. He was not greatly interested in Tom Slade.
“Do you think,” I said, “that if I climbed up there and looked at the place, I could manage to get the rest of the way to the summit and join the detachment before they reach Pevy? I want to be in at the finish.”
“You might do it in a newspaper or in the movies,” he said, for he would never let me forget that I was a fountain-pen warrior.
“Please remember,” said I (for I was getting a little weary of such talk), “that the correspondents have done great work in this war. As for the movies, I’ll show you that I am as good as Douglas Fairbanks himself, for I am going to climb——”
“Scale that dizzy height, you mean,” he taunted; “that’ll sound good in a special article.”
“Indeed!” said I. “Well, then, I am going to ‘scale that dizzy height’ and see where Tom Slade fell, for he came from the little town in Jersey where I belong.”
“You’ll be killed by the Germans,” said he.
“You forget I have my trusty fountain pen with me,” I replied, scathingly.
He tried to dissuade me, saying that when I reached the summit I was just as likely to fall in with the enemy as with our own men and that unless I expected to defeat them single-handed I had better follow the route prescribed by the officers. But I was a free agent in such matters; no charge of desertion or disobedience could be laid against me, and I was resolved that come what might I would take some memento from that lonely spot back to my young friend in America.
Little I thought at the time what that memento would be.