Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

We were working there in the Old Homestead the next day, shielding the camera lens as carefully as possible against the glare of the afternoon sun with a screen of broken matting, when the Authority arrived accompanied by the American girl. He had heard us discussing the location at the Club and had come to pay a visit. I was using a pair of field glasses, eight power, small Zeisses that you could cover with your two hands so that they gave no reflection, and was observing from the shadow in the angle of the broken balcony. The attack was about to start and we were waiting for the planes to come over and commence the bombardment which substituted for adequate artillery preparation due to the Government’s then shortage of heavy artillery.

We had worked in the house, concealing ourselves as carefully as rats do because the success of our work and the possibility of continued observation depended altogether on not drawing any fire on the seemingly deserted building. Now into the room came the Great Authority, and drawing up one of the empty chairs, seated himself in the exact center of the open balcony, steel helmet, over-sized binoculars and all. The camera was at an angle on one side of the balcony window as carefully camouflaged as a machine gun. I was in the angle of shadow on the other, invisible to anyone on the hillside, and always careful never to move across the sunny open space. The Authority was seated in plain sight in the middle of the sunny patch looking, in his steel hat, like the head of all the general staffs in the world, his glasses blinking in the sun like a helio.

“Look,” I said to him. “We have to work here. From where you’re sitting your glasses make a blink that everybody on that hill can see.”

“Ay dount think theys aneh dainjah een a house,” the Authority said with calm and condescending dignity.

“If you ever hunted mountain sheep,” I said, “you know they can see you as far as you can see them. Do you see how clearly you see the men with your glasses? They have glasses too.”

“Ay dount think theys aneh dainjah een a house,” the Authority repeated. “Wheah are the tanks?”

“There,” I said. “Under the trees.”

The two cameramen were making grimaces and shaking their clenched fists over their heads in fury.

“I go to take the big camera into the back,” Johnny said.

“Keep well back, daughter,” I said to the American girl. Then, to the Authority, “They take you for somebody’s staff, you know. They see that tin hat and those glasses and they think we’re running the battle. You’re asking for it, you know.”

He repeated his refrain.

It was at that minute that the first one hit us. It came with a noise like a bursted steam pipe combined with a ripping of canvas and with the burst and the roar and rattle of broken plaster and the dust smoke over us I had the girl out of the room and into the back of the apartment. As I dove through the door something with a steel hat on passed me going for the stairs. You may think a rabbit moves fast when it first jumps and starts zig-zagging away, but the Authority moved through that smoke-filled hall, down those tricky stairs, out the door, and down the street faster than any rabbit. One of the cameramen said he had no speed on the lens of his Leica which would stop him in motion. This of course is inaccurate but it gives the effect.

Anyway they shelled the house fast for about a minute. They came on such a flat trajectory you hardly had time to hold a breath between the rush and the jolt and roar of the burst. Then after the last one we waited a couple of minutes to see if it had stopped, had a drink of water from the tap in the kitchen sink, and found a new room to set up the camera. The attack was just starting.

The American girl was very bitter against the Authority. “ He brought me here,” she said. “ He said it was quite safe. And he went away and did not even say good-bye.”

“He cahnt be a gentleman,” I said. “Look, daughter. Watch. Now. There it goes.”

Below us some men stood up, half crouching, and ran forward toward a stone house in a patch of trees. The house was disappearing in the sudden fountainings of dust clouds from the shells that were registering on it. The wind blew the dust clear after each shell so that the house kept showing plainly through the dust as a ship comes out of a fog and ahead of the men a tank lurched fast like a round-topped, gun-snouted beetle and went out of sight in the trees. As you watched, the men who were running forward threw themselves flat. Then another tank went forward on the left and into the trees and you could see the flash of its firing and in the smoke that blew from the house one of the men who was on the gorund stood up and ran wildly back toward the trench that they had left when they attacked. Another got up and ran back, holding his rifle in one hand, his other hand on his head. Then they were running back from all along the line. Some fell as they ran. Others lay on the ground without ever having got up. They were scattered all over the hillside.

“What’s happened?” the girl asked.

“The attack has failed,” I said.

“Why?”

“It wasn’t pushed home.”

“Why? Wasn’t it just as dangerous for them to run back as to go forward?”

“Not quite.”

The girl held the field glasses to her eyes. Then she put them down.

“I can’t see any more,” she said. The tears were running down her cheeks and her face was working. I had never seen her cry before and we had seen many things you could cry about if you were going to cry. In a war everybody of all ranks including generals cries at some time or another. This is true, no matter what people tell you, but it is to be avoided, and is avoided, and I had not seen this girl doing it before.

“And that’s an attack?”

“That’s an attack,” I said. “Now you’ve seen one.”

“And what will happen?”

“They may send them again if there’s enough people left to lead them. I doubt if they will. You can count the losses out there if you like.”

“Are those men all dead?”

“No. Some are too badly wounded to move. They will bring them in in the dark.”

“What will the tanks do now?”

“They’ll go home if they’re lucky.”

But one of them was already unlucky. In the pine woods a black dirty column of smoke began to rise and was then blown sideways by the wind. Soon it was a rolling black cloud and in the greasy black smoke you could see the red flames. There was an explosion and a billowing of white smoke and then the black smoke rolled higher; but from a wider base.

“That’s a tank,” I said. “Burning.”

We stood and watched. Through the glasses you could see two men get out of an angle of the trench and start up a slant of the hill carrying a stretcher. They seemed to move slowly and ploddingly. As you watched the man in front sank onto his knees and then sat down. The man behind had dropped to the ground. He crawled forward. Then with his arm under the first man’s shoulder he started to crawl, dragging him toward the trench. Then he stopped moving and you saw that he was lying flat on his face. They both lay there not moving now.

They had stopped shelling the house and it was quiet now. The big farmhouse and walled court showed clear and yellow against the green hillside that was scarred white with the dirt where the strong points had been fortified and the communication trenches dug. There was smoke from small fires rising now over the hillside where men were cooking. And up the slope toward the big farmhouse lay the casualties of the attack like many scattered bundles on the green slope. The tank was burning black and greasy in the trees.

“It’s horrible,” the girl said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. It’s really horrible.”