“Sure. But a drink is clearly indicated. Pugh! Pugh! Two gins and its—beaucoup gin and beaucoup it.” They sat down on their home-made settee. “Well, here’s the very best!” said Piddock, raising his glass. “The very best to you and—you know.”
They set their glasses down, and Piddock rewound the gramophone and put on “Roses in Picardy.” They listened to the air in thoughtful silence.
Without warning the frenzied shriek of a shell hurtling through the outer night peremptorily engulfed the sound of the gramophone. The full-bodied ferocious note told that the shell was near the end of its flight, and that the point of impact would be very close. Cane and Whedbee had ceased mumbling figures: their heads went forward in strained attention. During the fraction of a second that elapsed before the inevitable impact the figures in the little candle-lit mess crouched motionless as a panther ready to spring. Only Piddock, with a lightning movement of his hand, whipped his glass from the table and drained it at a gulp.
Then came the rocking bump of impact and a mighty rending roar. The aeroplane fabric that covered the glassless window flew into ribbons before the draught of the titanic blow, and the walls of the mess-room bulged visibly inwards, it seemed, and then swung reluctantly back. Slabs of plaster thudded from the ceiling, and the one picture crashed to the floor.
Cane had relighted the candle before the whine and clatter of flying fragments had ceased. He was grinning at Piddock.
“You’re a funny fellow,” he cried. “Did you see him, Whedbee? Polishing off his drink! Ruling passion strong in death!”
From the outer darkness came a long-drawn “Oh-e-e-e! Ho-ee-e!” Rawley was first through the door, and stumbling among the debris that littered the road. A fresh hole of unusual size yawned beneath the stars, and a black cavity gaped in the stained lime-washed wall of the cottage beyond. The sound came from there.
Cane, behind him, switched on a torch. The beam shone on the white face of a man in shirt sleeves, sitting upright upon a palliasse. A paper-covered book was in his hand, and from the stump of candle stuck in a cigarette tin on the box beside him a thin spiral of smoke still rose. The beam moved downwards to his legs, and Rawley saw that they were buried beneath the brick and plaster wall which had been blown inwards by the blast of the shell.
It needed half an hour’s unremitting effort to release him: the mortar held the bricks together in great slabs, and a pick could not be used.
CHAPTER X
I
It was now officially admitted by headquarters that a push was imminent. Cane brought the news one evening on his return from brigade. “Zero hour and all that is, of course, still a secret known only to the few brass hats who dwell in and around the holy of holies. But we know this much: there will be no long-drawn-out preliminary bombardment as on the old Somme. Just a short, intense hate, and then our chaps go over.”
At night now, every man that could be spared from the guns was employed till dawn in unloading and stacking the great supplies of ammunition that would be necessary for the barrages and the preliminary bombardment. And the many other batteries that had recently taken up positions in and around the village were doing the same. After dark the road was blocked with transport, and two days of ceaseless rain had covered it with several inches of liquid mud. Double teams were necessary, and even then the heavy wagons were frequently stuck.
But at last the necessary amount of ammunition had been brought up and stacked, and everything was ready for the attack on the morrow.
It meant an early start for the gunners, for the barrage was to begin at 3.30 a.m., but Rawley lingered by the gun-pits before turning in. Apart from the tingling sensation of his own expectancy there was nothing to show that an attack would be made within a few hours. The moon, in its third quarter, shone serenely down upon the netting that screened the guns, and threw a chequered pattern upon the floor of the pits. Behind him the ragged edge of the stump of the church was tipped with silver. The noisy howitzer behind the mess was silent. The gunfire was confined to the long-drawn whine and distant crunch of a heavy, and the periodical vicious lash and crack of a whiz-bang. But on the road dark files of men passed every few minutes: they were the attacking infantry moving up to the assembly trenches.
Rawley was called at 3 a.m. Sitting on his bunk, he drank the mug of hot tea his servant brought him. Then he pulled on his boots and went out. The stars glittered coldly overhead, but the moon, now low on the horizon, was a blurred pinkish ball half submerged in the heavy ground mist. The air was damp and chilly.
The barrage opened perfectly in one great rippling roar, and the darkness was dispersed by the myriad flashes of the guns. It was intoxicating and exhilarating this giant’s tattoo that filled the vast auditorium of the night with throbbing sound and maintained its pitch tirelessly hour after hour. Dawn came, grey and desolate, and although the dancing flashes of the guns paled before it, the massed drumming of their voices did not cease.
Soon after the sun rose the first walking wounded began to trickle back—men in twos and threes, with supporting arms about each other’s shoulders, with bloody bandages about heads or thighs from which the trouser leg had been slit, and each with a white label dangling from a button. They rested on the bank beside the road and drank the water or smoked the cigarettes that were offered them before continuing their journey to the dressing-station. And an adventurous ambulance with its dark-green cover riddled with shrapnel bumped slowly down the pot-holed road with its fragile cargo.
In the gun-pits the men had thrown aside respirators, tunics and shirts, and stripped to the waist sweated at the nearly red-hot guns. Clouds of steam rose from the pools of water on the floor of the pits, water that had been cold before being poured through the bores; and the mounds of empty cases rose higher and higher.
The barrage ran its allotted course and ended, as far as B Battery was concerned, at 10.15, when extreme range had been reached. Everyone was asking “Who has won?” Nobody knew anything of what was happening. The wounded were the only source of information, and their news was very localized and often contradictory. But there had been very little hostile shelling since eight o’clock, and that was a good omen.
B Battery cleaned up and awaited the expected order to move forward. The backs of the gun-pits were broken down in preparation for hauling out the guns. Light kits stood ready packed and the mess functioned on the minimum of kit. Some batteries were already on the move.
The order to move came at last, and almost at the same moment hostile shelling began again on the ridge ahead. Cane rode off in the gathering dusk to choose the new position. The teams arrived shortly afterwards, and the guns, which had already been manhandled out of the pits, were limbered up and driven on to the road.
The whole British Army seemed to be moving forward that night. The road was encumbered with every kind of vehicle—G.S. wagons, eighteen-pounder guns, motor bicycles, 4.5 howitzers, limber wagons, maltese carts, staff cars, caterpillar tractors and eight horse teams of hairies dragging sixty-pounders, besides the usual ration parties, water carrying parties and platoons of relieving infantry. The darkness and the hostile shelling added to the confusion.
Along the ridge beyond the village ran a route nationale. Its bordering trees had always been a ranging mark for the enemy’s guns. One of the tall poplars lay across its intersection with the narrower road to the front, and the stream of traffic had perforce piled up behind the obstacle. A gang of sweating, swearing men were labouring desperately to remove it. Their figures could be seen hacking and hauling darkly against the glow of a distant burning dump, overhung by an immense black pall of smoke. Shells that approached with a vicious shriek and detonated with a reverberating “cr-rump” ranged at minute intervals up and down the crowded road, and from a copse to the right a heavy howitzer fired periodically, its blast almost unseating the horsemen on the road.
The tree was dragged away and the traffic streamed on, only to halt again a short distance farther on where a
ditched six-inch howitzer partly blocked the road. Baulks of timber were taken from a sapper bridging wagon, and dragged to the side of the road; the traffic bumped over them and round the obstacle.
The traffic thinned as it neared the front, and B Battery was able to make better progress. But the hostile shells became more numerous. Close ahead the ruins of a village was lit by their bursts. One landed on the maltese cart ahead of Rawley, and it disappeared.
Rumbald, his steel helmet askew, clattered up beside him. “We can’t get through this,” he panted. “I will go back and see if I can find a way round.”
Rawley jerked out sharply, “We’ve got to get through.” And when Rumbald persisted, he shouted, “Good God, Rumbald, don’t you realize this is a battle, and the infantry up there are relying on us for artillery support!”
A shrill, rising scream was cut short by a crash and a spurt of flame on the roadside. His mare reared straight up and came down trembling. In the brief, bright glow Rawley saw Rumbald’s big face glistening and streaked with perspiration. “Go back—hell!” he shouted.
He heard the hurtling shriek of a large calibre shell; the darkness lifted about a vivid flash surmounted by a great black canopy of rising earth. He turned in the saddle and yelled through his cupped hands—“Tr-rot!”
The battered gable end of a barn to the left glistened fitfully in the flash of bursting shells. The air sang and hummed with flying fragments of metal. He signalled “gallop” to the gun behind him. The six horses threw their weight upon the traces and stretched their necks. The drivers crouched low in the saddles, the men clutched desperately to the swaying caissons; and the gun behind rocked and bounced and struck sparks beneath its flying wheels.
Again he heard the hurtling shriek of a large calibre shell. The hot blast scorched his face, and the uprearing canopy of earth spread out above him like a pall. With his head bent sideways as to a gale he saw driver Tench slowly bow his head and then slide slowly from the saddle down among the galloping hoofs. By the light of the next flash he saw the huddled body, white face and shock of dark hair strike the road and remain motionless; and then the following gun wheels leapt upon it.
A fire burning in the shattered village spilled a ruddy pool of light upon the shell-pocked road and bordering hummocks of masonry. A driverless limber flashed out from the darkness beyond. Rawley saw the ruddy glow of the fire reflected in the glistening eyes of the terrified horses as they stampeded by with the leaping limber behind. They missed the gun by inches, but thirty yards further on they collided with a hummock of brickwork with a crash that splintered the limber to matchwood, and could be heard above the roar of the barrage.
Beyond the rubble heap of the village in the comparative peace of an occasional whiz-bang Rawley turned his mare and waited. One by one the wagons and guns appeared as long, dark, swiftly moving objects against the red glow of the fire. Piddock, a dark silhouette with tilted shrapnel helmet and bulging respirator, clattered up.
“Dirty night at sea,” he growled.
“Any damage?” asked Rawley.
“One wagon scuppered and a team knocked out, and Rumbald is back t’other side of the village with number two gun that’s ditched in a shell-hole big enough to sink a battleship.”
Major Cane appeared out of the darkness ahead and led them to the new position, a chawed-up depression in the old support line, where rusty wire and shell holes impeded the task of getting in the guns; but an old trench with infantry dug-outs gave accommodation for the men.
II
Soon after dawn Cane and Rawley, accompanied by linesmen, set off to observe and to try to get some idea of the new line held by the enemy. It was Rawley’s first view of a battlefield. They came down a gentle slope covered with rank grass and pitted with shell holes, and crossed the old fire trench by one of the wooden bridges prepared by the sappers. In the now deserted trench the rough ladders, made to assist the infantry in going over the top, still leaned against the parapet, and in the bay beneath the bridge one of the early casualties lay on the fire-step, with his muddy boots protruding from the great coat which covered him.
They passed through the rusty wire and knife rests into the low ground which two days previously had been no-man’s-land. Here and there a figure sprawled stiffly among the coarse grass and rusty tins, the face already blue-grey and the lips black, between which the teeth glimmered like those of a dead horse. Nearer the old German Line was evidence of the bombardment—countless shell holes, twisted scraps of barbed wire, the iron cases of trench mortar shells, ripped and spread fanwise by the explosion of the charge within, and more gruesome relics: a black German field boot, with an inch or two of shining white shin bone protruding from it.
The German fire trench was too broad to jump. Cut in the hillslope, it was backed by a tortured glacis of chalk. The duckboards were littered with broken revetment and chalk debris. Water bottles, gas masks, rifles, coal-scuttle helmets, and scraps of clothing and equipment littered the fire-step, and its defenders lay in grotesque attitudes among the ruins. One knelt as in prayer, with his head bowed on the fire-step. Another sprawled face downwards on the duckboards. Another sat drunkenly in the angle of a traverse with his cropped head thrown back as though singing a ribald chorus. A thin, red-headed corpse gazed at the sun with one rigid eye; the other side of his face was gone. And the occupants of one dug-out had been literally plastered round the doorway by the explosions of the attackers’ bombs. It was all clear and vivid in the bright morning light, and nothing moved.
Farther on, in a saphead, they came upon an overturned machine-gun with a half-fired belt still through the breech. Behind it sat a huge dead German, his black-booted legs spread out on either side in the firing position, his back against an ammunition box. He was tunicless, and his great hands and knotted forearms rested on the faded grey cloth of his breeches, where they had dropped from the firing knob. His grimy open shirt displayed a hairy chest matted with a purple crust from three or four bayonet jabs.
“Stout fellow!” said Cane, as they picked their way past him and up the sap. “But, damn him, he must have done a hell of a lot of damage before they got him.”
Through a wood they went by a trench only breast high, where branches, splintered wood, and fallen trunks littered the ground on either side. Above them towered the trees, gaunt and ragged, with limbs hanging lamely or stumps ending in white-splintered manes. And the work of destruction continued. A runaway express train, it seemed, was tearing across the sky, to end in mid-career in a stunning thunder clap; and in the clear sky overhead appeared miraculously a thick woolly black cloud. The sky was soon stained with wispy smears, the drifting ghosts of former heavy shrapnel bursts.
They found themselves at last in the new front Line, which at this point was an old German reserve trench with new fire-steps cut to face the enemy, and were able to shoot the battery from a position in a barricaded communicating trench running out towards the enemy.
III
On their return to the battery they found that it had received some attention from the enemy’s gunners. Number two pit had received a direct hit, and the fire which had been started thereby had only just been prevented from exploding the ammunition stacked at the back. Piddock and Sergeant Jameson had spent an anxious ten minutes removing from the danger zone some hundreds of shells that were already almost too hot to touch. And a little later Piddock had been blown down the steps of the mess dug-out by a shell which landed on the parados of the trench. His only injury, a glorious black eye, was the subject of much chaff.
“What with one thing and another we’ve had quite a chatty afternoon,” he told them with a grin; but Rawley noticed that the usual clog dance accompaniment to the gramophone was missing that evening.
Day succeeded day and the battle continued. To Rawley they were days of recurring pictures, like figures on a revolving frieze, a kaleidoscope of sound, movement, and colour. The gun-pits with the sunlight streaming through the camouflage netting and
mottling the backs and helmets of the sweating gunners; the gun-pits at night, leaping in the vivid flashes of the guns from shadowy mystery to the cardboard detail of theatrical scenery; the gun-pits in the rain, with water sluicing the bleached sandbags and trickling from the drenched netting overhead. The rutted road by day and night, in sunshine and in rain, with wounded in twos and threes trickling down it and little files of steel-hatted men passing up it. The mess dug-out with Cane, pipe in mouth, working out barrage tables by the light of a guttering candle. The tortured lunar-like landscape, hot and reeking beneath a brazen sun, boggy and shining and diluvian beneath a slanting rain, or ghostly and Dantesque in the greenish glow of Verey lights. The skyline familiar in every detail from the clustered bare poles of the wood to the ragged hummocks of the briqueterie, smeared by day with the dirty smudges of shell-bursts and illuminated at night by the soaring Verey lights, winking shrapnel bursts, and coloured S.O.S. rockets.
The throbbing roar of the guns was ever present, the crashing concussion of detonating shells, the nauseating stench of foul earth, chloride of lime, wet clothing, and sweating humanity.
No one knew what was happening. The newspapers spoke glibly of victories and substantial gains. B Battery fired countless attack bombardments and put down countless protective barrages in answer to supplicating S.O.S. rockets, but no orders came to move forward.
Typical British battle weather had set in, and after floundering through the water-logged trenches and mud from the O.P. to the battery, one arrived in a state of semi-exhaustion. Rawley, however, was consistently cheerful and even happy. The happiest moment of the day was when, after the exhausting trudge back from the O.P., he stumbled, tired and muddy, down the steps of his dug-out. Presently, as he sipped a mug of hot tea, his servant would pull off his muddy field boots. Afterwards he would strip and towel himself vigorously all over; and the evening ration cart would bring him a letter from Berney. His inward happiness was proof against the outward attacks of cold, fatigue and monotony.
Behind the Lines Page 11
