A Dash Straight Ahead
“The line moves steadily forward and a man from the back of the line rushes forward and breaks through with his rifle at the charge. It is the private who sat huddled in the trench. He makes a dash for the bushes, followed by other men. Men drop all along the line, but the clump of bushes is reached, and the men who made it are hidden from our view. Between us and the bushes men are lying where they fell, never to be walking mortals again.
“Suddenly the roar grows louder, and we can hardly hear each other shout, although we are standing side by side. The ground trembles and great holes are dug up by the flying shells. We hear the whine of the deadly fragments and the whiz of machine-gun bullets as they pass us on all sides. It seems death to move, but we go forward so we can see what is happening on the other side of the bushes. As we go we stumble over the bodies of men lying where they fell, some partly blown to pieces. At last we come upon the men again, and the lines are very thin. The private we have been following is still untouched, but something has happened to his rifle and he is down on one knee working fast and furiously until he has fixed it and loaded it. Just as he fixes it we notice another man less than a hundred feet away, and by the light of a flare we see that his uniform is not like that of our private. He is a German, and holds in his hands something that looks strangely like a small soup can with a stick attached to it. It is a deadly hand grenade. Before the American can dodge he throws it, the American starts forward to make another dash, and then the grenade explodes with a roar which shakes the earth, and the American falls, hit in the head. Slowly he rises to his feet in a dazed way and reaches for his rifle. He gropes for it without seeming to realize that it has been blown far out of his reach. He stands up straight and wipes his face, which is running with blood; he pushes his hair back, then takes a step to the left and falls over the body of a dead comrade, killed perhaps by the same grenade and at the same instant.
“But that soldier was not killed—he was blinded for life. He is myself.”
That is the story of Jesse A. Whaley, told by himself while an inmate of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind, where the blinded soldiers are aught trades and occupations in which the sense of touch serves for the lost eyes. To grip gun in a charge against the foe is possibly no more heroic than to grip life, resolutely to serve though blind.