His hair a rat’s nest, and a heavy beard on his muddy-looking face, Hicks looked out of the entrance of the dugout.

“What’s the matter?”

The orderly turned about and marched back toward battalion headquarters with Hicks following him.

Major Adams belonged to that type of officer each of which you meet with the feeling that he is the sole survivor of the school of regular soldiers. He was a tall, slim, very erect person. His face was ascetic, though gossip about his personal affairs proclaimed him to be fiercely lustful. He wore his campaign hat adeptly. He limped as he walked, from an unhealed gunshot wound received in the Philippines. Campaign ribbons were strung across his breast. With him authority was as impersonal as the fourth dimension. He was adored and held in awe by half of the battalion.

Private Hicks stepped inside the major’s dugout and saluted.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Hicks, you were reported this morning to have gone to sleep while on outpost duty.”

[27]

[27]

Hicks started visibly. “That’s true, sir.”

“Well, what the hell kind of a soldier are you, anyway?” Major Adams fairly bit his words loose.

“I don’t know, sir. I mean, I guess I’ve been a pretty good soldier.”

“You have like hell, Hicks, and you know it. Now, why did you go to sleep on watch?”

Hicks knew that if he were court-martialled his sentence might be life imprisonment. It might be anything, he reflected, that the group of morons sitting in solemn judgment might decide to give him.

Major Adams also knew it.

“Sir, the hours are too long. Nobody can stay awake when he goes on watch eight hours every night.”

“Yes?” Major Adams raised an eyebrow forbiddingly.

“Well, sir, there’s two feet of water in the shell hole where my post is, and I guess I got so numb with cold that I went to sleep.”

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