John Walters

by Sapper

  For a moment there was dead silence, and then the girl turned her stricken face to the man beside her. “Dear God!” she muttered, “is this why you made love to me? To make me a spy?”

  “Marie – no, on my honour; I swear it!” Forgetful of the man sitting at the table Fritz stretched out his hand in an agony of supplication.

  “Lieutenant Rutter.” With a snarl the Colonel stood up. “You forget yourself. I am speaking. A truce to this fooling. Mademoiselle” – he turned again on the girl – “we have other things to do beside babble of love. Call it spying if you will, but we want information, and you can help us to get it – must help us to get it.”

  “And what if I refuse?” Superbly she confronted him; her voice had come back; her head was thrown up.

  “In the first place you will not marry Lieutenant Rutter; and in the second place – have you heard that the Comte de St Jean was taken prisoner at Verdun?”

  “Philippe. Oh, monsieur, where is he?” The girl threw herself on her knees before him. “I implore you – he is my only brother.”

  “Indeed. Well, if you desire to see him again you will carry out my suggestion. Otherwise–” he paused significantly.

  “Oh, you could not! You could not be so cruel, so vile as to harm him if he is a prisoner. It would break my mother’s heart.”

  “Mademoiselle, there is nothing which I would scruple to do – nothing – if by so doing I advanced the glorious cause of our Fatherland.” The man’s small eyes gleamed with the fire of a fanatic; revolting though he was, yet there was an element of grandeur about him. Even the Kid, watching silently from the bed, felt conscious of the power which seemed to spring from him as he stood there, squat and repulsive, with the lovely French girl kneeling at his feet. He saw her throw her arms around his knees, and turn up her face to his in an agony of pleading; and then of a sudden came the tragedy.

  Discipline or no discipline, a man is a man, and Fritz Rutter had reached the breaking-point. Perhaps it was the sight of the woman he loved kneeling at the feet of one of the grossest sensualists in Europe, perhaps – But who knows?

  “Marie,” he cried hoarsely, “it’s not true. Philippe is dead; they cannot hurt him now. Get up, my dear, get up.” With folded arms he faced the other man as the girl staggered to her feet. Heedless of the blazing passion on the Colonel’s face, she crept to Fritz and hid her face against his chest. And as she stood there she heard the voice of her tormentor, thick and twisted with hate.

  “For that, Lieutenant Rutter, I will have you disgraced. And then I will look after your Marie. Orderly!” His voice rose to a shout as he strode to the door.

  “Goodbye, my love.” Fritz strained her to him, and the Kid saw her kiss him once on the lips. Then she disengaged herself from his arms, and walked steadily to where the Colonel still shouted up the entrance. Outside there was the sound of many footsteps, and the girl paused just behind the cursing maniac in the door.

  “So you will look after me, will you, monsieur?” Her voice rose clear above the noise, and the man turned round, his malignant face quivering. The Kid watched it fascinated, and suddenly he saw it change. “I think not,” went on the same clear voice; and the guttural cry of fear rang out simultaneously with the sharp crack of a revolver.

  “My God!” Rutter stood watching the crumpling figure as it slipped to the ground in front of the girl; and then with a great cry he sprang forward. And with that cry, which seemed to ring through his brain, there came the power of movement to the Kid. He hurled himself off the bed towards the girl – his girl – his lady of the jasmine. But he was too late. The second shot was even truer than the first, and as her head hit the floor she was dead.

  Regardless of Rutter the Kid knelt down beside her, and as he did so, he got it – in the face.

  “What the blazes are you doing?” roared an infuriated voice. “Damn you! you young fool – you’ve nearly killed me.”

  Stupefied the boy looked around. The same dug-out; the same officers of B Company; the same beer bottles; but where was the lady of the jasmine? Where was the man who lay dead in the doorway? Where was Rutter?

  He blinked foolishly, and looked round to find the lamp still burning and his brother officers roaring with laughter. All, that is, except the Doctor on whose stomach he had apparently landed.

  But the Kid was not to be put off by laughter. “I tell you it happened in this very dug-out,” he cried excitedly. “She killed the swine in the doorway there, and then she killed herself. This is where she fell, Doc, just where you’re lying, and her head hit the wall there. Look, there’s a board there, nailed over the wall – where her head went. Don’t laugh, you fool! don’t laugh – it happened. I dreamed it. I know that now; but it happened for all that – before the big advance. I tell you she had light golden hair – ah! look.” The Doctor had prised off the board, and there on the wall an ominous red stain showed dull in the candlelight. Slowly the Doctor bent down and picked up something with his fingers. Getting up he laid it on the table. And when the officers of B Company had looked at it, the laughter ceased. It was a little wisp of light golden hair – and the end was thick and clotted.

  “Tomorrow, Kid, you can tell us the yarn,” said the Doctor quietly. “Just now you’re going to have a quarter-grain of sleep dope and go to bed again.”

  The following evening the officers of B Company, less the Kid, who was out, sat round the table and talked.

  “What do you make of it, Doc?” asked the Company Commander. “Do you really think there is anything in the Kid’s yarn? I mean, we know he dreamed it – but do you think it’s true? I suppose that tired as he was he would be in a receptive mood for his imagination to run riot.”

  For a long while the Doctor puffed stolidly at his pipe without answering. Then he leaned forward and put his hand in his pocket.

  “Imagination, you say. Do you call that imagination?” He produced the lock of hair from a matchbox. “Further, do you call that imagination? I found it under the pillow this morning.” On the table beside the matchbox he placed a small pocket- handkerchief, and from it there came the faint, elusive scent of jasmine. “And last of all, do you call that imagination? I found it in one of the books yonder.” He placed an old envelope in front of him, and the others crowded round. It was addressed to Ober-Lieutenant Fritz Rutter.

  Chapter 4

  The Man-trap

  Should you, in the course of your wanderings, ever run across Brigadier-General Herbert Firebrace, do not ask him if he knows Percy FitzPercy. The warning is probably quite unnecessary: not knowing FitzP yourself, the question is hardly likely to occur to you. But I mention it in case. One never knows, and Herbert will not be prejudiced in your favour if you do.

  As far as I know, the story of their first – and last – meeting has never yet been told to the world at large. It is a harrowing tale, and it found no place in official communiqués. Just one of those regrettable incidents that fade into the limbo of forgotten things, it served as a topic of conversation to certain ribald subalterns, and then it gradually disappeared into obscurity along with Percy FitzPercy. Only it took several months for the topic to fade; Percy beat it in about ten seconds.

  Before the war Percy had been, amongst other things, an actor of indifferent calibre; he had helped a barman in Canada, carried a chain for a railroad survey, done a bit of rubber-planting, and written poetry. He was, in fact, a man of many parts, and cultivated a frivolous demeanour and an eyeglass. Unkind acquaintances described him as the most monumental ass that has yet been produced by a painstaking world; personally, I think the picture a trifle harsh. Percy meant well; and it wasn’t really his fault that the events I am about to chronicle ended so disastrously. Unfortunately, however, he was unable to get the General to see eye to eye with him in this trifling matter; and so, as I have already said, Percy beat it in about ten seconds.

  The whole trouble started over the question of mantraps. “If,” remarked a Sapper subaltern one night
after the port had been round more than once – “If one could construct a large conical hole like an inverted funnel in the front-line trench, so that the small opening was in the trench itself, and the bottom of the funnel fifteen or twenty feet below in the ground, and if the Huns came over and raided us one night, one might catch one or two.” He dreamily emptied and refilled his glass.

  “By Jove, dear old boy” – Percy fixed his eyeglass and gazed admiringly at the speaker – “that’s a splendid idea! Sort of glorified man-trap – what! – dear old thing.”

  “That’s it, Percy, old lad. Why don’t you make one next time you’re in the trenches?” The speaker winked at the remainder of the party.

  “ ’Pon my soul, dear old man, I think I will.” Percy was clearly struck with the idea. “Cover the hole, don’t you know, with trench-boards by day, and have it open at night. Great idea, old sport, great idea!”

  “You could go and fish for them in the morning with a sausage on the end of a string,” murmured someone. “Get ’em to sing the ‘Hymn of Hate’ before they got any breakfast.”

  “Or even place large spikes at the bottom on which they would fall and become impaled.” The first speaker was becoming bloodthirsty.

  “Oh, no, dear old chap! I don’t think an impaled Hun would look very nice. It would be quite horrible in the morning, when one started to count up the bag, to find them all impaled. Besides, there might be two on one stake.” Exactly the objection to the last contingency was not clear; but after dinner attention to such trifles is of secondary importance.

  “Percy inaugurates new form of frightfulness,” laughed the Major. “May I be there when you catch your first!”

  The conversation dropped; other and more intimate topics anent the fair ones at home took its place; but in the mind of Percy FitzPercy the germ of invention was sown. When he went back to his battalion that night, in their so-called rest-billets, he was thinking. Which was always a perilous proceeding for Percy.

  Now it so happened that his part of the line at the moment had originally belonged to the Hun. It was a confused bit of trench, in which miners carried on extensively their reprehensible trade. And where there are miners there is also spoil. Spoil, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is the technical name given to the material they remove from the centre of the earth during the process of driving their galleries. It is brought up to the surface in sandbags, and is then carried away and dumped somewhere out of harm’s way. In reality it is generally stacked carefully in the trenches themselves, thereby completely blocking all traffic; which is by the way.

  But after mining has been in progress for some time, and various craters have been blown and sapped out to, and after trench mortars have “strafed” consistently for many months and torn the original surface of the ground to pieces, the actual position of the trenches themselves become haphazard. They cease in many cases to bear the slightest likeness to the ordinary trenches of commerce; they become deep gorges in mountains of sandbags. I have sometimes wished that those officers who apparently write home to devoted bands of female workers asking for more sandbags would get in touch with me instead. I shall be delighted to let them have anything up to five million, all filled, by return; which is again by the way.

  To return to Percy. In his part of the front sandbags grew like pebbles on a shingly beach; and from time to time fresh cuts off the trenches were opened to allow for further expansion in the sandbag family. The existing front line in one place had started life as a cut off the old trench, and had gradually been taken into use as a permanency, and it was at this point that he stumbled on the great discovery which was destined to cause all the trouble. How he first stumbled is not recorded; but early one morning Percy FitzPercy could have been seen like a terrier with his nose down a rabbit-hole, lying flat at the bottom of the trench, peering into a noisome and foul-smelling cavity underneath him.

  “My dear old boy,” he remarked enthusiastically to a brother subaltern, who was watching the proceeding coldly, “it’s an old German dug-out; I’m certain it’s an old German dug-out.”

  “I don’t care a damn if it is,” answered the other, without enthusiasm. “It stinks like a polecat, and is undoubtedly full of all creeping things. For heaven’s sake, let’s go and get something to eat.”

  Slowly and reluctantly Percy allowed himself to be led away, thinking deeply. Only the week before had the Hun attempted a raid and actually entered the trench close to the spot in question, and here was apparently a ready-made man-trap should he do so again. After breakfast he would explore his find; after breakfast he would himself set to work and labour unceasingly. As I have said, Percy FitzPercy meant well.

  It is possible that lesser men might have been deterred by the unpromising results of that exploration. Descending gingerly through the hole, which had been widened sufficiently to allow of the passage, Percy switched his torch around the cavity he found himself in. Above his head long rounded timbers, side by side and touching one another, formed the roof, which was in good condition, save in the centre, where the blue sky shone through the hole he had entered by. In one corner stood a bedstead covered by a moth-eaten blanket, while all over the floor crumbling sandbags and old clothes and equipment gave it the appearance of a rag-and-bone shop. In one place the wall had fallen in, a mound of chalk filled the corner, and from a score of vantage points elderly rodents watched with increasing disfavour this unexpected human invasion.

  Up above in the trench the disfavour was repeated in that picturesque phraseology for which Thomas is famous.

  “Wot are you a-doing ’ere?” An incensed sergeant rounded the corner, and gazed wrathfully at three privates, each armed with a spade and wearing gas helmets. “Wot ’ave you got them ’elmets on for?” He approached the fatal hole, and recoiled slightly. “Gaw-lumme! Wot’s that smell?”

  “Percy,” answered a sepulchral voice. “Our little Perce.”

  “Wot yer mean – Percy? Wot’s that ’ole?” A cloud of dust at that moment rose through it, and he recoiled still farther. “Oo’s down there?”

  “Percy,” answered the same sepulchral voice. “Percy FitzP carrying hout a reconaysance in force. ’E’s found a ’Un smell factory, and ’e’s fair wallowing in it.”

  At that moment a voice came gently through the opening. “I say, you fellahs, just come down here a moment, and bring your shovels – what?”

  A face, covered with a fine coating of blackish-grey dust, popped out of the bottom of the trench. “We’re fairly going to catch the old Hun before we’ve finished.”

  With a choking gasp the sergeant lost all self-control and faded rapidly away, while the three privates slowly and reluctantly followed the face through the hole.

  It was fortunate – or possibly, in view of future events, unfortunate – that during the next two hours no responsible individual came along that particular piece of front line. Incidentally there was nothing surprising in the fact. In most places, especially during the day, the front line is held but lightly by isolated posts, which are visited from time to time by the company or platoon commander, and more rarely by the Colonel. On this particular occasion the CO had already paid his visit to the scene of activity. The company commander was wrestling with returns, and Percy himself led the long-suffering platoon. And so without hindrance from any outsiders the fell business proceeded.

  Volumes of evil-smelling dust poured out into the trench, punctuated from time to time with boots, a few rats who had met with an untimely end, some unrecognisable garments, and large numbers of empty bottles. An early investigation had shown the indomitable leader that the old shaft which had led down to the dug-out in the days when it was used was completely blocked up, and so the hole through the roof was the only means of entrance or exit. Moreover, the hole being in the centre of the roof, and the dug-out being a high one, there was no method of reaching it other than by standing on the bed or the decomposing chair. Once the bird was in there, granted the bed had been removed,
there was therefore no way by which he could get out without being helped from above. And so with joy in his heart the indefatigable Percy laboured on, what time three sweating privates consigned him to the uttermost depths of the pit.

  Now one may say at once that Percy had all the makings in him of the true artist. Having decided to stage his performance, he had no intention of letting it fail through lack of attention to detail. Life in the front trenches is not at any time an enlivening proceeding; the days drag wearily by, the nights are full of noises and Verey lights – and this particular part of the line was no exception to the general rule. So our hero was not distracted by mundane influences or stress of work from elaborating his scheme. In addition, once the miasma had subsided, and the idea had been explained to them, the three supers became quite keen themselves. It was one of them, in fact, who suggested the first detail.

  “ ’Ow are we to know, sir,” he remarked, as they sat resting on an adjacent fire-step after three hours’ strenuous exhuming, “that supposing two of the perishers fall through the ’ole they won’t escape? Two men could get out of that there place without no bed to ’elp ’em.”

  “By Jove, yes!” Percy scratched his forehead and left furrows of white in the general darkness. “By Jove, yes; you’re quite right – what? Break one’s heart to lose the blighters, don’t you know. You’re a doocid clever fellow to think of that, Jenkins.”

  “Tomkins, sir,” murmured the originator of the brainwave, slightly abashed by the unexpected praise.