# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 31/Number 1/The Plateau of Thirst

from The Red Book Magazine, May 1918, pp. 45–50, 145, 146. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
HERE the sons of Caesar's short-sworded legionaries join battle with their ancient trans-alpine enemy in all the white-hot fury of modern armaments: a faithful battle-picture by the author of “Nach Verdun.”
The PLATEAU of THIRST
By CAPTAIN F. BRITTEN AUSTIN
Illustrated by CLARK FAY
LIEUTENANT BARETTI edged along, stumbling in the darkness from traverse to traverse, behind the backs of his platoon as it crouched with fixed bayonets in the rock-hewn trench. He satisfied himself that each man had his full complement of cartridges, gas-mask ready, water-bottle filled, bombs handy. Face after face turned to him, tense with the strain of those counted moments that bore them inexorably toward the plunge into the timeless chaos of the assault, yet flashing eyes and teeth in a smile of confidence. They were plucked out of the gloom in the sudden and ceaselessly renewed irradiations of the sky above the dark bank of the trench. In the overpowering roar, the shattering near crashes of bombardment which reverberated harshly over the stony soil, they were as men dumb, speaking by signs, appalled into restricted gesture. A little farther along, in a widening of the trench, a group of men labored at la bombarda, a heavy trench-mortar. Their shadowy forms rang into sharp relief in the flash of its discharge as it coughed out its huge projectile toward the Austrian trenches near at hand. The resultant explosion momentarily eclipsed the fierce thunders of the general bombardment.
The Lieutenant completed his inspection and posted himself on the flank of his platoon. He glanced at the sky and then at his watch. The last preparation behind him, the minutes that must elapse before the terminal moment were a black gulf of time that he longed to leap. His whole being was tense like a bent bow, held breathlessly for the signal. Dimly apprehending the analogy, he wondered, with a little tremor of alarm, whether he would collapse to flaccidity under the strain. He was desperately anxious to justify his recent promotion, to show himself a capable officer in the new regiment to which he had been assigned. He wondered if his captain had confidence in him, wondered— He threw introspections by a jump to the fire-step of the and gazed over the parapet.
The loose stones of the soil in front of him were now dimly visible in the first paling of the dawn when they relapsed from the brighter illumination of the leaping gun-flashes. The stars were fading in a sky that no longer was in such sharp contrast of darkness to the dazzling spasms of the bombardment and the soaring flares from the Austrian trenches. He could not distinguish those trenches, stretched there like an invisible wall he was pledged to surmount, but their position was marked by continual red flashes breaking in the heart of a dark fog, sharply vivid in front of him and diminishing to mere twinkles of ruddy light far to right and left. The monstrous clamor of thousands of guns—firing in long-drawn-out bellows of coincident discharge upon a rolling drumbeat of individual reports—was beaten into the background by the crashes of the bursting shells and the appalling detonations of the great trench-mortar bombs. The Austrian trenches were in a whelm of fiercely reiterated explosions.
The enemy guns were replying. He heard the wail and rush of the shells overhead as they sped to silence the Italian batteries. Others were bursting nearer behind him, seeking the spots where the infantry would be concentrating to support the assault. None burst on the front line of his sector. He glanced to right and left, noting the indefinitely multiplied flashes and sparkles of flame over the glimmering plateau, trying to fix the outlines of the far-flung fight. His mind strove forward, far ahead in the smoke-hung twilight, to a village he knew only as a point on the map—his assigned objective.
He felt a hand upon his shoulder and turned to see his captain looking up at him.
“All well, Baretti?” asked the company-commander. “Good!” He glanced up to the sky. “It's going to be hot. Be careful the water-bottles are not wasted—collect them from casualties at every opportunity; and beware of the wells!” We uttered the last phrase with significance, gripped his subaltern's hand, and with a hearty “Good luck!” continued his way along the trench.
The dawn broke with a faint flush of primrose light behind a dark mountain mass on that eastern horizon toward which he gazed. Twinkling gun-flashes played in points of flame over the black silhouette. It was the Hermada—the mountain that the Italians had come to regard almost as a personal enemy. In the half-light, ever-widening stretches of the uneven desolation of the Carso Plateau were gradually revealed. It was blotted with drifting patches of brown shell-smoke, ragged against the pale sky. Sheets of white mist lay level in the hollows. To his left the starlike succession of dark hill-masses on the northern border of the Carso had their topmost peaks bathed in light. To his right, beyond one solitary riven tree-stump, the sterile earth dropped away into a white nothingness that hinted at the sea.
Above him the last stars were fading. The gun-flashes were almost imperceptible. But the mad frenzy of the bombardment had leaped to an incredible intensity. The blast and crash of near detonations succeeded each other without an instant's pause in a fury of violence that obscured the rolling thunder of the guns which hurled this continued paroxysm into being. Founts of black and brown smoke shot up ceaselessly, far and near, and rolled over the plateau.
The Lieutenant looked down along his trench, along the line of set faces that had glanced at the paling sky and bent forward in the crouch which precedes the leap. The moment was at hand. He looked at his watch, was startled to find how near it was. He shot a glance toward the objective, the Austrian trench passively suffering under the torment of the writhing shell-smoke, measured the dread hundred yards between, and then took his eyes no more from his watch. The hand crept towards the fatal figure. Two minutes! He filled his lungs for the shout. One minute! Ten seconds—twenty— He felt his men's eyes upon him. Thirty—forty—“Avanti!”
HE had uttered the cry like an automaton set to action on a point of time. He heard it, strangely loud, in the roar of a hundred throats that were as his own, of uncounted others. Avanti! He had leaped the parapet, was picking his way among the stakes that had supported barbed wire, was—marvelously—erect and moving on that ground hitherto under the ban of death. He had plunged blindly and now rose to consciousness as a swimmer who has dived into a paralyzingly cold sea rises and gasps as he turns his head with clearing vision.
A crowd of men was advancing with him, his own platoon. They plodded on, bent crouching, walking toward death. His consciousness translated this subliminal perception into an anxiety. Were they supported? Advancing alone? No. On either side swarms of men were streaming out of the Italian trenches, moving toward that whelm of brown smoke which hid the Austrians. His consciousness substituted another anxiety, as with the unwitting precision of a somnambulist he picked his way over the litter of the death-zone between the trenches. Their own barrage—they were heading straight into it! Then, as he heard again the strangely loud sonority of the “Avanti!” which reëchoed his own unconsciously uttered shout, he realized suddenly the silence of the guns. The barrage had lifted. It was the pause in which thousands of artillerymen, far back, were readjusting the range. Then, in one long rolling peal of thunder, a multitude of screaming rushes in the air, a shattering succession of crashes from a suddenly upflung wall of smoke stretched in front of him, the barrage fell again upon the doomed position. He felt it like a shield, protecting him. He pointed to it, urged his men toward it. “Avanti! Avanti!”
Suddenly into the fierce persistence of the Italian barrage came another sound, an appalling, infinitely reinforced sibilance swelling in the air like the rush of an approaching squall. In a fraction of a second the Lieutenant's mind leaped to its significance—the Austrian barrage! It fell in a long reiteration of stunning [crackles] of sharp reports in the air—behind him! He shouted in the ecstasy of relief: “Avanti! Avanti!”
The curtain of fire behind him continued. He went on, urging his men forward, careless that it was perhaps cutting off his supports. He had lost all sense of time; felt that he had been crossing the zone between the trenches for an eternity, had lived an eon on each step of the way. His mind was waiting expectant of one thing, he knew not what—something which had to be immeasurably torturingly postponed. He saw, suddenly, that he was quite close to the Austrian trench, saw with a shock of recognition—the rapid hammering of machine-guns that the Austrians, scrambling to their positions in all haste as the barrage lifted, had manned.
This was the sound for which the trembling germ—deep down in him had waited in a secret agony of expectation. It shocked him into complete consciousness. He waved to his men, saw some of them stumbling, running. “Avanti! Avanti!” Imitating him, they broke into a labored run among the ruins of the Austrian wire. An instant later, jostled by his comrades, he was scrambling over the wrecked parapet of the Austrian trench—dropped into it. It was empty in his immediate vicinity. Along it, a little way to his right, a group of helmeted men crouched beside a machine-gun sheltered by a heap of loose stones. They gazed toward the zone of death he had crossed. Their gun spat viciously, rapidly. Even as the now coolly normal part of himself shouted an order to his men, the spectator in him was vividly cognizant of the frowning determination on the faces of those enemies, absorbed in their task, unobservant of the menace on their flank. He saw one of them smile grimly, with a flash of teeth. A second later they were obliterated in the violent explosions, the gusty smoke, of a shower of bombs. When the smoke cleared, the gun was silent and the crew lay back staring at strange angles to the sky.
BARETTI found himself in touch with the lieutenant commanding the platoon on his flank. They grinned at each other. The front Austrian trench was cleared. Their protecting barrage had moved on, was now well ahead of them. “Avanti!”
His platoon well in hand, he scrambled out of the trench, advanced across the loose round stones of the sterile soil. Swarms of helmeted Italians were going forward to right and left of him. He saw his captain with a supporting platoon, acknowledged the gesture of the arm which waved him on. Little groups of Austrians came unexpectedly from behind heaps of stones, out of trenches, invisible until one halted upon the suddenly perceived brink. Their arms shot up above their heads. Their faces worked in an agony of apprehension, their eyes staring in the fear of death. They stumbled as they tried to place themselves at the mercy of their foes. He laughed in the glorious ease of it all as he signaled them to pass to the rear. The machine-guns were silent. The thundering wall of their own barrage seemed a shield behind which the Austrian shells could not pass.
Suddenly there was a splintering detonation, a puff of black smoke, a little way to his flank. Another and another followed, the wail of fragments and loose (illegible text) hurled through the air more terrible than the (illegible text) crash. He saw men felled, crawling with ghastly [groans]. The constantly recurring shell-bursts veiled his coming glimpses of the supporting companies, of attacking regiments on either side. Overhead he heard the constant crack-crack-crack of shrapnel, sharp in the turmoil of deafening noise, heard the bullets smite upon the stones and the whine of the ricochet.
Illustration: The rifle-fire leaped to a terrifying vehemence. To right and left, through the smoke, he saw men crouching, their rifles spitting. In front was a confused turmoil of men, the flash of sun upon steel, rifle-butts swinging like sledge-hammers. “Avanti!” he cried. “Charge!”
He glanced at his platoon. It was diminished. He shouted to the sergeants to keep the squads together. He felt that he was stumbling toward a crisis. In front, the protecting barrage was moving across a little bare hillock, left it behind. He recognized it. It was the point where the front of the attack was to halt, to await the reinforcement of following waves. He looked for his captain, saw him hurrying to get abreast of him. To his right another platoon was slightly ahead, advancing in a long line.
Illustration: The major sprang to his feet. “Hurry!” he cried. “Support the attack.”
A moment later there was a rapid hammering from the hillock. He saw the line of the flank platoon go down in a long swathe of prostrate bodies as though cut by a scythe. He shouted—flung himself flat upon the stones. The machine-gun bullets cracked viciously overhead, the reports of the weapons increasing and diminishing as the bullets swept over him, away from him. A squad of men dashed at the hillock, were smitten down in a burst of fire. From his prone position on the loose stones that bruised his knees, Baretti gazed toward it. He saw a dark opening on its face, low down. He understood. It was the mouth of a dolina, one of the many natural caverns of the Carso, which the Austrians employ as shelters for their troops. Machine-guns were firing through the aperture in almost perfect safety. It was a deadly obstacle to the advance. The assaulting troops had flung themselves flat. The shells continued to fall among them, their effect many times multiplied by the loose stones on which they burst. The dolina must be conquered if this section of the attack was not to be annihilated.
He saw his captain crawling among the prone men, giving orders. From what at first glance was a field of corpses commenced a deliberate rifle-fire. The machine-guns answered, viciously garrulous. His captain drew himself alongside Baretti, gave him instructions with a minimum of gesture.
A moment later he had passed an order along the remnant of his platoon. The men commenced to squirm themselves cautiously over to the left, while in front the rifles and machine-guns intensified their unequal duel. He followed, pulling himself over the loose stones that yielded under his clutch, moving behind the bodies of men who would move no more. He aimed for the left face of the hillock, crawled toward it through an eternally long space of time where he agonized in momentary expectation of a sweep of the machine-guns across his area, was so preoccupied with that danger that he was oblivious to the continually bursting shells. But the machine-guns were desperately endeavoring to keep down the rifle-fire from that stretch of prone bodies on the stones where it was impossible to distinguish the marksmen from the dead. He and his platoon crawled onward.
The hillock loomed up close. He saw the whiffs of dust, the bluish cloud of the vaporized oil of the machine-guns at the dark mouth of the cavern. At last! He rose to his feet, his men also. A group of them jostled with him as he climbed the blind flank of the hillock. He gave quick orders, seized a couple of bombs from the bag of a granatiére. Then, with a little knot of panting men behind him, he rushed over the top of the hillock, flung himself prone, head downward, and with a cautious sweep back of the hand, hurled his bombs quickly into the hole beneath him. The men with him did the same. He heard the quick, repeated dull thuds of the explosions. An eddy of acrid smoke billowed out from the aperture into his face, half choking him. An instant later, followed pellmell by the whole of his platoon, he had swung himself into the mouth of the cavern.
He bruised his shins over the machine-guns, tripped upon soft bodies as he stumbled into the darkness. Groans and cries were welling out of the black gulf. He felt for his torch, but before he had extricated it, sharp stabs of flame leaped in the darkness below him with reëchoing detonations. The men behind him flung bomb after bomb that fell deep, before the livid flash and stunning multiplied roar told of their explosion.
He waited for an instant, pressed back against the wall. Then, assured by the silence, revolver in one hand, electric torch in the other, he descended a steep stairway into a vast cavern. The beam of his lamp fell in a white circle upon stifling fumes. The men behind him coughed. From below came only whimpering moans.
Followed by his men, Baretti reached the floor, swept the beam of his torch around him. He saw only huddled bodies, a head that raised itself pitifully with open mouth as the light fell upon it. How far did the cavern extend? He knew many of these doline were capable of holding a battalion. The doubt had scarcely risen in his mind when there was a rush of feet in the darkness. A moment later, and his torch was extinguished, and he himself grappling body to body with a powerful man. He fought desperately, trying to get one hand free for his trench-knife. Around him he heard the scuffle of many bodies in struggle, cries, imprecations, yells of pain, a horrid moaning. He was held in a relentless grasp that forced him downward, his knees bending. Metal buttons on a tunic scratched across his face. A terrible grip was forcing its way over his collar to his throat, caught him, choked..... With a last desperate spasm of energy Baretti wrenched his knife free and struck. He reeled back, gasping, fell on his torch.
He raised himself, warding off the combatants who swayed against him in the complete blackness, and switched on the light. He flashed it over his fallen adversary. It was an officer, dead. In the illumination of the cavern it was now evident that the Italians were victors. The Austrians were backing away, holding their hands in the beam of light. Visibility made surrender possible; in the darkness it had been a struggle to the death. The prisoners filed out of the black depths into the ray of the lamp, a seemingly endless procession laying down their arms as they went. More than a company had taken refuge in the dolina. Men were detailed to lead them to the rear. They passed out, up the stairway.
Lieutenant Baretti followed with his men. It seemed an age that he had been in that subterranean darkness. As he emerged from the cavern, the sunlight blazed upon him, dazzling his vision, hot upon the face. It seemed to him that many hours must have elapsed since he had led his men over the parapet to the assault in that remote gray of the morning. Noon? He glanced at his watch. It marked nearly half-past seven. He smiled at his miscalculation and then was suddenly conscious of a gnawing hunger, of a parching thirst. His hands were trembling, his whole body lax. While his platoon, under the sections of a sergeant, collected its remnants in the shelter of the hillock, he munched a biscuit, drank a big swill from his water-bottle. In the full enjoyment of the act the warning of his captain flashed into his mind. He plucked the flask from his lips. He must be sparing with the water; the day was only beginning.
At that moment a sweaty, dust-grimed soldier came up and saluted.
“In command of the company, Signor Tenente,” he said. “A message from the major.” He held out a folded page from a notebook.
Baretti stared. In command—the others killed? He took the message, glanced at it. It bade the company press on swiftly to reinforce the firing-line. His mind jumped to the implication. The supporting wave had swept over them, passed onward. He looked around him, perceived little groups of infantrymen sitting or lying on the stones, careless of the great shells which continued to burst far and near. They were obviously awaiting orders. It was the remnant of the company. He waved to them, sent under-officers to collect them. Quickly he organised them into four groups, the skeletons of the four original platoons, under the command of three sergeants and a corporal. A sergeant of one of the other platoons, who had remained outside the dolina, informed him that the battalion had suffered heavy loss, that the other companies had just been pulled together and gone forward in support of the wave which had followed and then passed them. Baretti nodded, ascertained the position of the major, gave his orders.
Leaving a stretcher-bearer at the mouth of the dolina to guide the rescue-parties to the wounded inside, the fifty-odd men composing the company quitted the protection of the hillock and advanced in four groups. The men, refreshed by their halt, went forward without hesitation, the most with a philosophic resignation to fate, a few laughing at a crude joke uttered by the irrepressible company wit. Each, in accordance with Baretti's orders, was hung with several water-bottles collected from those who had no more need of them.
A brilliant sunshine blazed down upon the plateau. Overhead was a blue sky, dotted with white shrapnel-clouds floating low down in the windless air. Above the shrapnel, airplanes in swarms were wheeling and swooping, their wings flashing in the sun or passing into quasi-invisibility as they circled. The earth and air shook with the rolling thunders of two artilleries desperately at work, but neither barrage nor counter-barrage was observable. The near crashes were bewildering in their frequency. The plateau was sown with smoke-founts that rolled lazily from their eruption. Among them, ahead, men were advancing in ragged and unequal clumps. From far in front came a faint crackle of rifle-fire, the dread tapping of machine-guns, Through the haze the Lieutenant had a glimpse of the dark bulk of the Hermada, plumed with little wisps of smoke, towering over the plateau.
He pressed on, cheering his men forward. Faces turned to smile at him. He felt, suddenly, a great admiration for these men so stolidly plodding forward over the loose stones. The unrewarded peril into which they walked was poignantly vivid to him; he felt an altruistic pang which was the masquerade for deep-lying qualms his consciousness would have disowned. He led them without faltering, toward a shell-burst, disdainful of hurtling stones. He exulted in a flush of reckless courage.
They clambered over a low wall of piled, unmortared stones. Beyond was a little field of green, in surprising contrast to the stony desert over which they had advanced. Its expanse of young crop was disfigured by yawning shell-craters in which the smoke still reeked. At the farther side, crouching under the shelter of another wall, was a little group, map outspread before them on the earth. It was the major and the battalion headquarters staff.
He approached to ask for orders, but the major sprang to his feet, waved his arm.
“Hurry!” he cried. “Support the attack!” He pointed over the wall beyond him.
The Lieutenant broke into a run. “Avanti!” he cried. “Avanti!” came the antistrophe from his men.
The farther wall was scaled. Another field, smoke-hung, stretched in front of him. At its extremity, in a smother of fumes, he perceived figures in quick movement. From beyond them came the sound of heavy and sustained rifle-fire, increasing in savage bursts, dominated as always by the rapid persistence of machine-guns. He was suddenly conscious of the drone and crack of bullets above his head.
They plunged into the drifting smoke, crossed a wall beaten down into a shapeless line of stones. The rifle-fire leaped to a terrifying vehemence. The Lieutenant glanced around him to get his bearings. To right and left, through the smoke, he saw men crouching, lying, behind stones, their rifles spitting. In front was a confused turmoil of men erect, arms tossing, bodies bent and straightened in a series of darting motions, the flash of sun upon steel, rifle-butts swinging like sledge-hammers.
“Avanti!” he cried. “Charge!” He snatched a rifle from a man who reeled against him, leveled the bayonet, rushed toward the mêlée. In a fierce exultation he heard his men yelling as they surged abreast of him. Another moment! He agonized toward the fight ahead.
Too late! A confused mob of men came rushing back upon his advancing handful. They bore them back, heedless of his shouts, his entreaties. Outnumbered, flanked—he deduced the situation from their cries. A fierce rifle-fire from the whelm behind smote them down as they ran. With desperate efforts he rallied a line behind the broken-down stone wall. The remnant of his own company had lost its identity in this larger crowd.
He lay behind a heap-of stones, his newly acquired rifle ready to his hand, and passed orders down the line of shaken men. Ammunition was more evenly distributed. Bold spirits dashed out to snatch the bandoliers from the dead. He enjoined the strictest economy in ammunition—fuoco a comando, until further orders. This was the forefront of the battle, and no fresh supplies might be counted upon.
Illustration: Revolver in hand, he descended a steep stairway into a vast cavern.
The bullets still hailed around them, viciously ricocheting off the stones or thudding into the soft earth of the field. The shell-fire had diminished, but shrapnel still cracked above them, its fleecy white clouds floating slowly in the haze which obscured the blue sky. Suddenly there was a movement in front. A line of men sprang up as from nowhere and dashed toward them. The Lieutenant shouted an order.
Instantly there was one long, rippling crash of fire from the stone wall. It did not cease. The Lieutenant fired also, picking off his men. The line of figures exhibited sudden gaps, halted, stumbled, turned and raced for shelter. The last man disappeared. The fire from the stone wall diminished, ceased reluctantly with last shots from men oblivious to the transmitted command.
The counter-attack, a local little affair, had been repulsed. Was he in sufficient strength to advance? So the Lieutenant pondered, unconsciously chewing a biscuit. A burst of fire to his left made him look round. Another unit was trying its fortunes, was decisively driven back. He looked along his men and then behind him. The field was empty. Without supports it was madness. He could only hang on to his position. He ordered individual fire only when a target presented itself. Beyond him, in the thinning fumes, his front was quiet, apparently deserted.
Resigned to inaction, he suddenly felt atrociously thirsty. He pulled out his water-bottle, put it to his lips. Not a drop moistened them. With a curse of alarm he looked for the reason. A bullet had perforated the flask. He gasped, more thirsty than ever, his mouth parched. He glanced at the man upon his right hand, wondered, touched him. The man was dead. He reached for the man's water-bottle, unfastened it—and cursed again in disappointment. It was empty. A word passed down the line brought him the flask of another dead man. It contained a mouthful of tepid fluid. He drank it greedily.
The battle lulled upon this part of the front. The Austrians in front of him risked no further counter-attack. The Italians here were weakened, their supports gone astray or held up by the heavy barrage which wailed overhead. Far away he heard the uproar of a desperate fight, but he could see nothing of it. Only occasional shells burst near him. He received no orders from the battalion-commander.
A scorchingly hot breeze commenced to blow in little gusts across the plateau. The fumes of the battle drifted off before it. The view cleared. Baretti saw that he was on a summit of one of the undulations of this sterile wilderness. Ahead of him towered the Hermada, its great bulk dark with the woods that clothed it. Tiny puffs of smoke, white and dark-brown, clung around its sides and drifted from its crest. Far to his left the blue mass of the Dosso Faiti and its backing of higher peaks rose into the burning azure of the sky. The smoke which welled from it in confused masses spoke of a terrific struggle for its possession. Away to his right the sea glinted and glimmered into an horizon of haze. From it came heavy, rolling detonations, distinguishable in the general uproar of the battle to which he was now habituated. A squadron of monitors was assisting the attack, but he could see neither the ships nor their target.
A last curtain of smoke rolled away from his immediate front. A cluster of stone houses, hideously wrecked, with their beaten-in thatch still smoldering, lay in startlingly close proximity. Their outlines, sharp in the sunshine, quivered as he gazed at them through the heated air. He understood now the little cultivated fields he had crossed, so rare on the dreary waste of the Carso. This was the village which had been assigned as the objective for his battalion. He gazed at it with a new interest, though cautiously, from behind his pile of stones. It seemed deserted. In the center of a group of broken houses was the circular parapet of a well.
A MURMUR ran along the line. The panting men who lay in that fierce blaze of sunshine, which heated the stones in front of them until they were unbearable to the touch, had also seen the well. The sweat pouring down their sun-reddened faces, gasping in the furnace heat of the irradiation from the stony soil, they glared fiercely toward the water which was so near. The ruins of the village lay silent. There was not a hint of human occupation. The well seemed to become more and more prominent before their eyes, its invitation more and more pronounced.
“Let us advance, Signor Tenente!” shouted a man beyond the dead man at the Lieutenant's side. The Lieutenant hesitated, doubtful. It was improbable that the Austrians would so tamely abandon a position that gave such opportunities for defense. On the other hand they might have withdrawn in consequence of other movements in the battle of which he was ignorant. He also was parched with thirst, found himself involuntarily imagining the passage of cool water down his dry throat. “Avanti! Avanti!” came restlessly from his men. The village remained silent. His decision was a sudden impulse overcoming his doubts. The orders went along the line.
HALF of them settled comfortably in firing positions The other half clutched their rifles in readiness for the leap. “Avanti!” He gave the signal, rushed forward with the assaulting line, while the covering party opened in a long ragged volley.
They had not gone a dozen yards when the village reëchoed to the rapid reports of rifles, the decisive hammering of machine-guns. The survivors dashed back to their wall, lay panting, exasperated. The Lieutenant was among them.
Then followed an eternity of torture. Through hour after hour, while the intolerable sun climbed high into the the fierce blue that arched like an inclosing vault over the broiling landscape, the diminished line lay behind its defense of heaped stones. Far and near the battle crashed and roared and rolled. Overhead the rushing shells wove a web of invisible tracks. The drifting reek of past explosions filled the nostrils, choked the breath in chests that labored to respire the heated atmosphere. The men lay lax and faint, their swollen tongues protruding from cracked lips, while the perspiration rolled down their faces. The water-bottles had long since been emptied in the thirst of the battle-fever. The wounded raved, imploring shrieking for water in their delirium. Those untouched could only listen, appalled. Behind them the Austrian barrage was falling in a wall of constant explosions, cutting off all help. In front lay the ruined village quivering in the heat, deceptively quiet, its abandoned well a lure to death, yet almost irresistible. Sharp reports rang out from the houses if a head so much as showed an inch above the ruined wall. Vengeful shots sped back.
The battle had lulled in this corner of the field, though audibly fierce enough elsewhere. Only occasional shells fell in their vicinity or cracked in the air above. The airplanes were busy in other quarters. The line of men fronting the ruins seemed abandoned to their agony. More than one leaped up, wildly insane—fell huddled at a sharp crack from the village.
The blood throbbed in the Lieutenant's temples. He felt them distended almost to the bursting-point. A mist of blood was before his eyes. His dry tongue filled his mouth. His throat seemed to be closing up. He could scarcely breathe. An unutterable craving for water—just the smallest drop, his brain reiterated with every throb—dominated him. He felt everything slipping from him, felt his powers of command going, felt that he must leap up and shriek and end this interminable torture. If only he could suck something cool! He picked up a pebble. It burned his fingers.
Suddenly he saw an airplane swooping down toward them—an Italian machine. He recognized it mistily. A wave of new life swept into him. He shouted an order—but only an inarticulate sound came from his parched throat. With a sudden lucid impulse he fired his rifle at the village. His men understood, obeyed him in a long succession of shots. The airplane swooped lower. He waved to it. It swerved over the village, raced back toward the Italian lines.
The lieutenant waited in an agony of doubtful expectation. Had it understood? It had. A few minutes later great shells began to fall, in ever-increasing numbers, into the village. Once more it was whelmed in smoke. The bombardment continued, rendering it untenable by any living thing. The watching men behind the wall saw great stones leaping into the air on the founts of smoke.
Suddenly the shelling ceased. Like one man the line leaped erect, bounded forward. They did not shout. In their eyes was madness. The Lieutenant ran with the foremost, plunged into the drifting smoke. A few—a very few—Austrians darted out from behind ruins, held up weaponless arms. The Lieutenant found himself protecting a prisoner.
The Italians raced on, heading with a unanimous impulse for the well. A group of them reached it, were lowering the bucket, Suddenly a memory flashed into the Lieutenant's mind—his captain's warning—“Beware of the wells!” He dashed toward the group, shouting raucously. The bucket was poised upon the edge, a man's head plunged into it, the others clawing round him. He sprang at them, dashed the bucket into the well.
The men snarled at him angrily, like wild animals. He could not speak, pointed to the prisoner. The lieutenant indicated the well, brought himself to utterance with an immense effort. “Drink!” he said. The Austrian shrank back, shrieking a protestation.
TERROR fell upon the panting, gasping men clustered round the well. Only the sudden interposition of the Lieutenant's body saved the prisoner from a bayonet-thrust. The men gazed with an awful curiosity upon the soldier who had drunk. He stood blanched with fear, swaying on his legs.
A moment later there was an outburst of rifle-fire. An Austrian party was counter-attacking. The Italians flung themselves upon the earth, beat back the attack with deadly rifles. When it had ebbed they turned to their comrade. He was lying dead, with his face swollen and blackened.
What followed, the Lieutenant could not clearly recollect. An age-long period of shells bursting in the village, during which he tried to organize a line of defense on the farther outskirts, was the main feature of a memory full of curious aberrations. Then a counter-attack in force—made by troops of another Austrian regiment—fresh troops that pulled them back and back, from ruin to ruin. Then a sudden pang in the leg, and immobility. That was near the well.
He saw a mob of Austrians rush at it, parched, thirst-mad, as his own men had been. They fought with each other round the parapet, clawed at the bucket once more hoisted to the brink. Horror-stricken, he collected all his faculties in an attempt to shriek a warning. He fainted in the effort.
Under a cool, dark night of stars the Italian stretcher-bearers following in the wake of a later advance that had swept far beyond the village, carried him to the ambulance. He luxuriated in the sensation of a slaked thirst.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse