The time had come! Dripping sweat from every pore, desperately seized again with trembling, Jeb staggered to his feet and started forward.
Bonsecours' command had been well timed, for up and down the line other men bearing stretchers bounded forward. Jeb's partner in this work, a lanky middle-westerner, called "Omaha" for love--although "John Hastings" was stamped in his identification disk--sprang out at a dog-trot, crossing the trench bridge and quickly getting into the plain below as if he were an old hand at this game instead of undertaking it now for the first time.
Jeb, following closely at his heels, had become utterly terrified. His flesh was numb and his legs moved automatically, rather than by conscious effort. The former mite of courage had atrophied. He felt wretchedly alone and unprotected, as an atom of dust drifting across a sunbeam. He wanted to clutch at something--to hold himself back--to scream!
Half a mile to right and left the Germans were plastering No Man's Land with a pitiless fire, but thus far the ground immediately about him remained scarcely touched. Shells occasionally burst on the trenches just behind, but Barrow's unit luckily was being permitted to go without serious embarrassment. And yet Jeb knew that it was only a matter of time before he and Hastings would receive a blasting. He shivered, jabbering words he could not have recalled a minute later; once cursing himself for a coward, then calling himself a liar for having said it.
There were not as many prone men on the field as he had expected to find. To his bulging eyes which watched the first charge, men seemed to be falling everywhere, but as a matter of fact this was not so.
They had gone quite a third of the distance across when Hastings stopped and unrolled the stretcher, shouting:
The coolness of the voice, its utmost naturalness, gave Jeb a most agreeable feeling, and before remembering again that men who drop in battle are things of blood and pain, he was easing one gently over on the brown canvas.
They started to come in, Hastings at the forward handles, he at the rear; moving as fast as the added weight permitted, skirting shell holes and stepping over fragments of barbed-wire. Crossing the first trench bridge a hundred faces looked up at them, steadily, unemotionally. Another division had been brought up after the second wave swept out, and a few of these fellows now said quietly: "Bravo!" But their thoughts were with the chap who lay silent on the canvas.