IV
When Rawley awoke he was astonished to find that night had come, but his first movement was checked by a whispered warning from Alf. “Shush, chum! There’s some ruddy gunners not mor’n five yards away. When I woke up bout an ’our ago there was a bloke standing an’ talking just outside. Gave me the fright of my life, it did.”
Rawley lay silent in the darkness. From the sounds that reached him he knew that a battery was bivouacked all round him, and that for the moment, at any rate, it was impossible to get through them unseen. All sounds of gunning had ceased, and the night was very quiet. He argued from this that the German attack had failed, but the occasional Verey lights that soared into his view through a chink in the debris seemed very close.
Hour after hour they lay cramped and aching in the darkness, but no chance of successful escape offered.
As dawn approached the quietness of the night gave place to intermittent gunfire, and with the first filter of grey light into their cramped hiding-place the throbbing rumble of a heavy barrage broke afresh. Several heavy shells burst quite close, shaking their little cubby-hole violently and sounding a tattoo of fragments on the debris above them. The sound of rifle and machine-gun fire came in gusts of fierce intensity that told of infantry attacks pressed home. Low-flying aeroplanes tore overhead with sudden brief tornadoes of sound, and the earsplitting pom, pom, pom, of the field battery nearby added to the din.
“Proper dorg fight!” said Alf. “Somebody’ll get ’urt if this goes on.”
“I’m dying to have a look at those guns out there,” said Rawley. “There they go again—battery fire. They must have got a hell of a good target. Aren’t you just itching to fire one of the little beggars again?”
“Not ’arf! But I ain’t too ’appy about our billet, chum. I reckon that machine-gun’s getting closer.”
Later they heard the jingle of harness and the thud of hoofs. “By gad, they’re getting the teams up,” whispered Rawley. “They’re going back.”
They heard the thunder of hoofs and the creak of wheels as the guns and wagons drove by. Alf thrust his head out cautiously. “They’ve gone, mate,” he announced.
They crept out and started back. The mist was still thick enough to shroud objects at a distance of more than thirty yards. The shelling was fairly heavy. Great dark uprearing fountains spouted now and then in the mist, and overhead heavy shrapnel burst with a stunning thunder-clap though the accompanying thick woolly cloud was but dimly visible behind the grey pall. They descended a grassy slope to a broad, flat depression where a dead Tommy lay huddled by a deep black shell crater. Rawley picked up the rifle and hurried on.
The ground rose again gently to a low crest outlined against the sky. Rawley pulled up suddenly near the top. “The mist is lifting,” he exclaimed. “We had better wait a bit and have a look at the lie of the land.” To their right was a short length of disused trench from which they could observe unseen. They dropped into it.
Ahead the mist seemed to be as thick as ever, but behind them visibility had improved greatly. Below them in the depression they had recently crossed they could see the dead Tommy quite plainly, though he must have been nearly two hundred yards away, and the slope beyond was clear, a low grassy hill, bare except for two or three shivered tree stumps. To their left, seemingly behind them, a machine-gun was stuttering in short bursts.
Movement caught the eye on the slope opposite. Two or three little figures were coming over the crest. “ ’Bout time we walk marched,” remarked Alf. Rawley, watching the distant figures, saw for an instant against the sky the silhouette of a long-necked helmet and high square pack. “My God, they’re Bosches!” he cried.
They regarded each other with consternation. “Jerry’s broke through,” grunted Alf. Moved by a common impulse they picked up the rifles. Rawley adjusted the sights. “About five hundred, I should think,” he said. He rested his elbow on the parapet of the shallow trench, cuddled the butt against his cheek and took aim. At his second shot a figure fell. But the others came on. They were trickling over the skyline all the way along the crest, and the slope was dotted with moving figures. But there was not a vestige of cover, and Rawley, firing deliberately, picked off man after man. Alf was blazing away light-heartedly. “Like a ruddy shooting gallery,” he cried as he rammed another clip into the magazine. “Walk up, walk up! All you ring you ’ave.”
Rawley cast anxious eyes towards his flanks. “We shall have to get back. They will be round behind us if we stay too long.”
They fired ten rounds rapid, rammed in a fresh clip, and climbed out of the trench. Bullets were cracking and whispering overhead, but twenty yards covered at top speed brought them to dead ground. They dropped into a walk and went down the reverse slope. The hollow below them was still bathed in mist, and shells that from their sound seemed to be British, were bursting somewhere ahead. Half-way down the slope they found themselves again enveloped in mist. At the bottom they jumped a ditch and ran suddenly into six or seven figures standing on a narrow road. They recognized the coal-scuttle steel helmets and high square packs of German infantrymen, but retreat was impossible. Bayonets were at their throats. Their rifles clattered on the road; their hands shot up.
V
In the very first-half second that he stood there with his arms raised above his head, Rawley realized with grim clarity the full significance of their position. They were caught, caught in civilian clothes with arms in their hands. It would be useless to claim treatment as prisoners of war. By the rules of international law they were liable to be shot. He felt strangely calm and detached as though he were a spectator of this drama rather than one of the principal actors in it, and he scanned the faces of his captors without emotion though he knew that he would find his fate written there.
There was no comfort to be found in the hard eyes that met his and that travelled ominously over his tattered civilian clothes. Barely two seconds had gone by since the first encounter. It needed only one impetuous word to set in motion the common impulse to plunge bayonets into these treacherous civilians.
A Feld-Webel pushed his way through the little group of men and confronted the two. He shouted at them angrily in German. Rawley answered calmly and clearly, “We are British soldiers,” and repeated in French, “Soldats anglais.” A torrent of exclamations, unintelligible but clearly hostile, broke from the German infantrymen. They pointed to the ragged civilian clothes, the dropped rifles, the linen bandoleers. The Feld-Webel silenced them and spoke again threateningly and accusingly to the prisoners. Rawley shook his head and repeated his assertion that they were British soldiers.
The Feld-Webel gave an order and the two prisoners were marched up the road. Thirty yards brought them to a place where the banks on either side rose to a height of six or seven feet. Half a dozen German wounded sat on the grass; one of them was being bandaged by a stretcher-bearer. Ten yards farther on was a chalk quarry cut in the side of the sunken road. An officer was coming towards them. The party halted while the Feld-Webel spoke to the officer. Rawley’s ignorance of German prevented him from following the conversation, but the drift of it was clear. The officer spoke to him in German. Rawley shook his head and replied in English. The officer spoke in halting French. Rawley repeated his parrot phrase, “Soldats anglais.” The officer shrugged his shoulders and walked slowly away. He seemed to be bored with the whole proceeding. A runner brought him a message, and the party stood waiting while he sat on the bank and read it.
The Feld-Webel, standing stiffly to attention, put in a word as the officer signed the receipt form. Without glancing up the officer said something and made a motion of his head. The Feld-Webel saluted quiveringly, about-turned, and bawled an order.
Two men marched the prisoners the ten odd yards up the road to the quarry and halted them against the chalky cliff. The remaining men back by the Feld-Webel were falling in in single rank. That curious feeling of being a spectator still clung to Rawley. He heard a shell whine overhead and
detonate on the hillside above him; and he noted with detached interest that it sounded like a British sixty-pounder. He also noticed with the same dream-like detachment that a party of three British prisoners, including an officer, were being escorted up the road.
Alf’s face was pale under its covering of dirt, and every few seconds he moistened his lips with his tongue. “I ’ope them blokes ’ave got safety catches,” he whispered hoarsely. “Playin’ about with firearms like that.”
Another shell came whining through the mist; its snoring hum increased rapidly to a savage resonant roar and it burst on the side of the road with a majestic pillar of spouting earth and vibrant hum of flying metal. The two men, half-way back to the firing party, had dropped flat with the speed of long practice. One of the firing party lay limply on the ground, the others cowered under the bank. Another savage whirlwind of sound swooped down through the mist and sent chalky boulders hurtling through the air.
Rawley, crouching at the foot of the chalk cliff, heard an explosive grunt. He lowered his hunched shoulders, and saw Alf lying face upwards beside him. He had the pathetic, uncomplaining look of a bludgeoned mouse. There was a large hole in his chest, and his face had that grey transparent look that Rawley had come to know so well. “Just what I was . . .” he began, but the words ended in a dry gurgle and his jaw dropped.
Another shell detonated lower down the road, and the splinters came droning through the air like giant bees. Rawley saw that the opposite bank was sloping, and not more than ten feet in height. He leapt to his feet, dashed across the road and scrambled up. In the thin mist on the bare slope beyond he was an easy mark, but no bullets followed him. He ran hard for fifty yards, and then dropped into a jog-trot. Intermittent machine-gun fire came from his left, and an occasional shell snored overhead and detonated behind him. Once, half-left, he saw two or three figures in coal-scuttle helmets passing through a broken farm gate, and to his right a few minutes later he saw a little party of British troops trudging along a track westwards.
He reached a half-demolished barn, and lay down panting in the lee of a ragged hedge. A yard or two away the body of a Tommy lay half in, half out, of the ditch. It hung head downwards, and the bayonet scabbard and blue enamel water-bottle were flung upwards across the sagging back. Rawley’s throat was parched with thirst. He had drunk nothing for many hours. He crawled over to the body and took the water-bottle.
He had already had proof how dangerous were his peasant clothes. He dragged the body clear of the ditch and turned it over. Rather gingerly he unbuckled the web belt and pulled off the equipment. The greatcoat was more difficult to remove. The heavy arms gave no assistance. But he managed it at last, and unbuttoned the tunic. That also was not removed without a struggle in which the dead seemed doggedly to combat the efforts of the living.
He pulled off his mud-stained peasant coat, and buttoned on the tunic. The greatcoat would only hamper his movements; that he flung over the half-undressed corpse. His civilian trousers were faded green corduroy, muddy and torn. He unwound one mud-caked puttee from the corpse, but then, overcome with disgust, he cut it in two with the dead man’s jack-knife, and bound a half round each shin. He buckled on the equipment, retrieved the steel helmet and rifle from the ditch, and went on. Now at least, if captured, he could claim treatment as a prisoner of war, and among the retreating British troops he would pass unnoticed as a straggler.
The mist was clearing. Splintered trees and the ragged hummock of flattened villages were the only landmarks, and he recognized none of them. The country seemed deserted. Once he saw a cavalry patrol moving along the margin of a splintered wood, and he saw a line of men digging on a distant hill slope. He crossed a broad main road, running almost at right angles to his line of march. It was deserted, and its bordering trees were shivered stumps.
An hour later he passed round the ragged stump of a sucrerie chimney, and ascended a long slope. From the top he had a wide view. The splintered wood and plaster heaps of several villages dotted the hollows and slopes, and to his right, northwards, a grey pimple of chalk stood out prominently on a scarred, flat-topped hill. He knew his whereabouts at last.
At dusk he stumbled down the steps of the cellar. Alf’s wire-netting bunk stood against one wall; his own valise rested in a corner. The smart brown suit-case lay under the bunk. He put his shrapnel helmet on the rickety table, and gazed at the familiar place with dazed eyes. It seemed weeks since he and Alf had left it. It was odd that nothing had changed. He dropped wearily upon the bunk and slept.
CHAPTER XXIV
I
Subdued daylight filtered down the cellar steps. Rawley was at breakfast. It consisted of the dead Tommy’s iron ration—a tin of bully beef, three biscuits, and tea. After it he filled the petrol cans at the well, stripped off his filthy clothes, and washed. Shaven and dressed again in officer’s uniform, he went up the steps. He thought he would walk into Albert and find out what was going on. Gunfire sounded very close, and east and south the sky was smeared with shrapnel bursts. Already he had seen enough to know that things were going very badly for the British Army.
On the Bapaume Road he met a party of about sixty men led by a second lieutenant. Their badges and shoulder-titles displayed a variety of units—British line regiments, highlanders, labour corps, and A.S.C. The young officer said that they were returned leave men who had been formed into platoons on the quay and rushed off to the danger zone. “They are collecting Town-Majors’ batmen, cooks, and sanitary men, I’m told, padre,” he said. “I’ve got some labour corps fellows myself, and I don’t believe they’ve ever handled a rifle before. Thank God we’ve got a navy. Well, I suppose we shall meet Jerry up this way somewhere. Cheerio, padre.” And the little party trudged on.
Rawley watched them disappear over a rise and followed slowly. He had half a mind to go back and attach himself to the party. But after all, he knew little about infantry work. If they had been gunners now.
Half-right, to the south-east, the gunfire sounded loudest, and without any definite purpose, he turned off the road and walked in that direction. An hour’s walk brought him to the rear of the forward zone. He passed some gun-wagons halted in a hollow, the wagon lines of some battery. Red telephone cable crossed his path and was looped over a rutted track on two tall poles striped black and white. Another hollow was full of cavalry horses, and from behind a bluff to his right two sixty-pounder guns barked every few seconds.
He crossed a narrow, sunken road, up which a four-wheeled-drive lorry was slowly towing a howitzer, and ascended a long, bare slope. From the top he looked across a slight hollow to the debris of a village on the slope beyond. By the powdered rubble heaps a battery of field-guns was in action, and he stood watching the little vivid flashes of light followed by the stabbing “pom, pom-pom-pom-pom” of the salvoes.
As he stood there a solitary figure came along the ridge towards him. It proved to be a young artillery subaltern who saluted punctiliously as he came up. “Can you tell me where I can find the 254th South Midland Battery?” he asked.
“I don’t know at all,” answered Rawley; “unless it’s that one over there. What is the latest news?” he added.
“I don’t know, but things seem to be rather bad.” He laughed a little self-consciously. “You see, padre, I’ve only just come out, and it’s all rather strange at first.”
Rawley nodded. “You haven’t chosen too good a time either.”
The young officer went on as though he were glad of somebody to talk to; “Yes, it’s awfully strange at first. People told me to go to Division and to go to Brigade and I rode about on wagons and lorries and tramped miles. And I lost my kit too. But I found brigade in the end. They were in a funny little farm-house with a big hole in the roof. They told me to report to this battery. Do you think it’s that one over there?”
“I don’t know,” answered Rawley. “But I would walk across and ask, if I were you.”
Just as he moved off a shell roared overhead
and burst a hundred yards to the rear. The young officer turned and regarded the plume of earth and smoke with a comic raising of the eyebrows. Rawley laughed. “That’s a five-nine,” he said. “You want to keep clear of those chaps.”
“I will,” called back the young officer, and strode on.
He had gone barely a hundred yards when Rawley saw him suddenly break into a run. Simultaneously came the hurtling roar of another shell. The luckless flying figure flung itself flat as the ground rocked to the bump and the column of flying clods spouted not a yard from him. The black inverted pyramid subsided, but the figure did not rise. Rawley went across the bare hill slope at the double.
The artillery subaltern was dead when Rawley reached him. His steel helmet had fallen off, and there was a piece of metal as big as a pocket knife embedded in his temple. Poor devil, he had had little enough run for his money.
Rawley walked-slowly away, his eyes fixed wistfully upon the battery among the rubble heaps across the dip. They had but five guns in action; they had probably been fighting continuously since that murderous barrage broke more than two days ago. But they were giving as good as they got—good luck to them. How futile and impotent one felt, being a spectator in times like these!
He turned suddenly back towards that shell crater and its huddled victim. Why not? he asked himself. Every man must be of value at such a crisis; and he was an experienced workman. His own division, he knew, was up North; it was unlikely that anyone would know him. But what did it matter, anyway, as long as they would let him take a hand with the guns.
He went down on one knee beside the body and exchanged the chaplain’s Maltese crosses on his lapels for the bronze grenades of the artillery. He gently raised the battered head and slipped from over it the sling of the box respirator; then he detached the leather-bottomed haversack and clipped it to his own Sam Browne. He remembered that he did not know the man’s name. It would be necessary to know it, for the poor fellow had been to brigade and they had probably informed the battery that he was coming. He felt between the collar and neck for the string and pulled out the identity disc. Lt. Kemp, it had on it, R.F.A., C. of E. He put on the steel helmet and was ready.
Behind the Lines Page 28
