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16. The Quality of Mercy
- University Press of Kansas
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16 The Quality of Mercy Ididn’t see Jesse until the next morning.He wanted to know all about the business in the tank, but I was too tired to go into many details . I did tell him, though, about the rifle that had been shooting all afternoon from over around headquarters. By that time I had a pretty good idea who’d been shooting that rifle. There weren’t many men in the outfit who could make one hit after another at a thousand yards’ range. He grinned when I accused him of it. “Huh! Didn’t I tell you that whenever you got into trouble I’d be somewhere around? When Nayhone told me where he’d put you I knew who was in that tank all right. But I didn’t do so damned good for you at that. I missed two of those Heinies.” I was kept back of the lines for several days, and Floyd stayed back there with me.He had a way of falling out whenever he got so tired he couldn’t stand up. He’d get back behind the line companies and sleep until he was rested, then go up to the front again. He never asked anybody about it, and no one ever seemed to know it. It wouldn’t have made any difference to him if anyone had. You couldn’t do anything with him. What Floyd wanted to do he did. If an officer bawled him out for anything, he would snap back,“Yes sir! . . .Yes,sir!”He’d pile on the military courtesy.The officer would go off very much impressed. As soon as he was out of hearing Floyd would say: “To hell with that bird! He’s so damned ignorant he don’t know whether Jesus Christ died of pneumonia or was shot by the Indians.” the quality of mercy 181 The worst trouble I was having was my head.It was a mass of yellow blisters, like a burn. If one of the blisters broke and the water from it got on the skin anywhere else, there’d be a new blister. I dried them up as much as I could by doctoring them with a weak solution of iodine. But they gave me a pretty rough time. On the night of the twelfth we formed up and made one of those blind marches which are almost as bad as a battle. It was raining. Our route took us through woods that had been uprooted by shell fire, and across old trenches, and over open ground that was all deep pits of mud or mounds of slippery earth. Our battalion halted near the eastern edge of the Bois de Naulemont. The 2nd pushed on into the Bois de Foret. We had no more than got there than the Germans attacked the 2nd Battalion. Our battalions re-enforced it, and we drove the Germans back. But there were plenty of casualties on both sides. We found out from the prisoners we took that the Germans facing us there were members of the 1920 class. They were first-class fighting men, young and fresh and full of confidence. After that attack the 1st Battalion was re-enforced by a company from our battalion.Jesse and I were in it.There wasn’t much left of our old 3rd Battalion by that time. The next day was a day of red-hot fighting. We found ourselves tangled up with the Germans in the worst kind of local scrap. By afternoon everything was mixed up. The officers who were left were going around commanding men without respect to organization. One of them came along and ordered Jesse and me to go with him.We told him we were Intelligence men. “That doesn’t make a damned bit of difference,” he said. “Obey orders!” He put us in a shell hole.He said,“Stay there until you’re relieved.And shoot hell out of anybody that doesn’t talk English well and quickly!” The Germans had some of the best snipers I’ve ever seen, there in those woods. One of them got Major Smythe, our battalion commander . Jesse and I had some pretty close brushes with them. [18.206.14.46] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:50 GMT) 182 chapter sixteen By night we had cleared the Germans out of the Bois de Foret. But they still held...