Behind the Lines

by Morris, W. F. ;

  He met the battery sergeant-major as he came up the slope with the jagged brick heaps of the ruined village above him. “254th South Midland, sergeant-major?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The C.O. here?”

  He pointed to an officer seated on a heap of rubble. “Over there, sir.”

  Rawley went across and reported. The major looked tired and gaunt. He eyed Rawley up and down. “Right section,” he said. “You’ve got a sergeant who knows his job.” Rawley saluted and went with a new feeling of happiness to the section. Presently the major himself came along and stood watching for some minutes. “You been out before, Kemp?” he asked suddenly. “Yes, sir,” answered Rawley. The major nodded in a satisfied way and walked off.

  II

  About three o’clock in the afternoon the Bosche attacked. Rawley, who was acting as forward observation officer on the forward slope in front of the guns, saw them streaming over a ridge less than a thousand yards away. The battery awoke to frantic vigour, and the white fleecy puffs of low, bursting shrapnel soon built up a long-wreathed cloud in the still air. It was not easy to see what was happening. The ears were the only guide, and the very extravagance of the sounds made discrimination difficult. The hard rattle of machine-guns rose and fell amid the crackle of musketry. High explosive detonated with its reverberating “c-r-ump” and spouting columns of earth; heavy shrapnel burst overhead with stunning thunderclaps and thick woolly clouds of smoke; and low-flying aeroplanes roared over the battery and machine-gunned the crews.

  Infantry began to trickle back, bearded, hollow-eyed men in the last stages of exhaustion. They trudged past the battery singly and in twos and threes, without a glance to right or left. Heavy machine-gun fire came from the right flank where the enemy had penetrated up a broad, shallow valley. The major had the guns slewed round forty-five degrees and fired over open sights. A depleted squadron of dismounted cavalry came up the slope and passed forward by the guns. The men looked tired but determined. “For God’s sake sit tight and stop those fellows coming back,” roared the major to the captain in command as he went by.

  The guns were nearly red hot, and mounds of brass cases lay beside the trails; the shields were dented and silvered with bullet and shell fragments; and the personnel had been reduced by one third. But the machine-gun fire grew no louder. It grew spasmodic and became silent for long intervals. The hostile shelling died down. By dusk an unnatural calm reigned over the battlefield.

  The men lay down almost where they stood and slept beside the guns. Rawley passed the night among the rubble heaps in a shack made of a groundsheet spread over a broken wall, and he too was asleep almost as soon as he had closed his eyes.

  Dawn came cold and misty, and the weary gunners stretched their cramped limbs and warmed their hands on the canteens of hot tea. Heavy rifle fire punctuated by the staccato bursts of machine-gun fire broke suddenly from behind the thin grey curtain that hung over the ground. Conway, a Canadian subaltern who had spent the night as F.O.O. among the infantry, called for battery fire on S.O.S. lines, and immediately the covers were off and the guns were vomiting frenziedly into the mist. Time passed and the sound of rifle fire dwindled. Odd stragglers came through the mist. Conway said he was coming in. He could see very little, and the Bosches were round behind him on his right. Little parties of infantry passed slowly and sullenly. The major ordered up the teams and halted them in a little dip a hundred yards to his left rear.

  Conway came in with his signallers and cable. Close behind him came a few of the dismounted cavalry and the captain to whom the major had spoken. “God in Heaven,” stormed the major, “are you going back! What about my guns!”

  “What about my squadron!” echoed the captain with a wry smile. “That’s all that’s left of ’em.” He indicated the half-dozen men halted behind him. “It’s no good, major. They scuppered our posts and got up quite close in the mist before we could see them—hundreds of ’em. We worked our bolts till they jammed with the heat. And there’s nobody left.” The major ordered up the teams, and one by one the guns went back.

  The mist cleared as they went along. To the southward there was heavy hostile shelling. Little groups of men could be seen lining a railway embankment. They were very few and seemed to be unsupported by artillery. In the distance beyond the embankment the country was dotted with black slowly-moving blobs which field glasses revealed as small columns of German infantry. The major had the guns unlimbered, and they came into action at four thousand yards.

  Hostile shelling increased as time went on. A five-nine burst under number two gun, overturning it, killing the crew and smashing the recoil buffer. The major was hit in the leg and the arm by shrapnel, but he refused to go back. He sat in a shallow hole behind the guns and carried on. Half an hour later he was again wounded in the groin by a splinter of H.E. and had to go. Rawley heard Nisbett, the other subaltern, call across to Conway, “I’m sending the major back. He wants me to go to the teams and wagons and the skipper is to come up and take over the guns.”

  A little time later Rawley’s sergeant said, “I see the Captain has come, sir.”

  Then during a lull he heard Conway’s voice cry cheerily: “Hullo, Piddock! You’ve come up to a nice little dog fight.”

  Piddock! Rawley’s heart quickened its beat, but he did not look round. Conway’s voice went on, “We’ve only four guns left now, so we’ve amalgamated two sections. I’m taking this one, and the new chap, Kemp, is taking the other. That’s him over there—quite a stout feller.”

  Rawley heard no footsteps, but he knew that the captain was walking towards him. He did not turn; he went on stolidly with his self-imposed task of laying the gun. He wanted to prolong the doubt that something inside told him was a certainty.

  The sergeant at his elbow said, “The captain, sir.”

  Rawley turned slowly. It was Piddock; a little leaner perhaps and with three stars on his cuff, but otherwise the same old Piddock. Their eyes met. Piddock’s were filled with amazement; and then his face lighted up. “By God, it’s old Rawley!” he cried. He seized Rawley’s hand and wrung it. “I thought you were dead, old son!”

  Rawley was a little touched by the warmth of his greeting. “It was good of you to think that,” he muttered hoarsely.

  Piddock linked his arm in Rawley’s and walked him a yard or two from the guns. “Good of me!” he echoed. “I don’t know what the deuce you mean—or how on earth you turned up here; but I know I’m damned glad to see you, you old devil!”

  “Piddock,” said Rawley earnestly, “I don’t care what you do with me after—all this, but let me carry on now. It’s the one thing I ask—for old time’s sake.”

  Piddock rubbed the back of his head under the brim of his steel helmet. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he exclaimed. “But as for carrying on—good Lord, yes. What else? I’m mighty glad to have you, old son.”

  “Thanks,” mumbled Rawley gratefully. “And, I say, you won’t let the others know yet, will you? Remember, I’m Kemp for the moment.”

  Piddock stopped. “Look here, old bird, either I’m tight or you are. Are you fit to carry on?”

  “Don’t play the fool with me, Piddock,” cried Rawley. “I’m deadly serious. Damn it, you know you can trust me.”

  Piddock nodded and squeezed Rawley’s arm. “I know, but you seem so damned queer. And this Kemp business. . . .”

  “Can’t I be Kemp, just for the moment—till its over?” pleaded Rawley.

  “Call yourself Hindenburg if it amuses you, old son,” cried Piddock. “We’ll have a crack about this later; meantime—let’s get on with the purple war.” And he walked off with a puzzled expression on his face.

  III

  Nightfall brought respite to the weary men. The barrages died down to the perfunctory shelling of the old quiet sector trench warfare, and the familiar Verey lights soared majestically in the darkness. Even the machine-guns were silent or awoke only at long intervals
to stutter a few rounds and be quiet again like men turning over in their rest. It seemed as though the sated god of war dozed and muttered uneasily in his sleep.

  Rawley and Piddock sat beneath two battered sheets of galvanized iron laid across an old weed-grown trench. Piddock enveloped in an open British warm with high up-turned collar sucked at a foul old pipe and regarded Rawley whimsically. “Of course I’m all agog to know what you’ve been up to,” he said. “Dying and then turning up again here and calling yourself Kemp and all that!”

  Rawley regarded the glowing brazier they had made out of an old bucket. “Supposing,” he said after a moment’s silence, “supposing first of all you tell me what happened that afternoon after—after I disappeared.”

  Piddock extended his soiled field boots towards the the brazier and moved his pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Well, I was down at the wagon lines, you know, waiting to go off on leave. The adjutant rolled up and we were just going to start when Crookshaw came along and said he’d been ringing the battery and couldn’t get any reply. I told him the line had probably gone and he had better send somebody out to mend it. Then Cane’s servant turned up with his kit and said Cane had gone back with a bad Blighty one and that poor old Whedbee had been knocked out. I thought I ought to find out from you how things were going; so I rang up brigade, and brigade said they couldn’t get any reply from you either. The adjutant and I then thought it was time we went up and had a look round. So up we went.

  “Before we got to the battery we met Sergeant Jameson and another fellow coming back. He had a long and doleful story to tell. He said that soon after that bit of hate that knocked out Cane and poor old Whedbee the Bosche suddenly fairly plastered the position with gas—but of course you know all about this.”

  “No—go on,” said Rawley.

  “Well, anyway, Jameson said the stuff came in all of a sudden and so thick that a good number of the men were half gassed before they got their respirators on; and even then they found it beginning to leak through. It was some new potent stuff of the mustard variety.

  “Well, Jameson went along to find you, he said you and Rumbald were in the mess—the mess, of course, being out of sight round that curve of the river bank. Well, when he came round the curve he saw that a big one had landed on the mess and brought the whole damned issue in as Cane always said it would one day. He collected a party at the double and they set to work to try to lift up the roof. It was a pretty unpleasant job apparently. You know what it’s like working in respirators and with the Bosche shelling hard all the time. They got the roof up a couple of inches or so, far enough to prove that it was flat on the floor and that if anyone were underneath he couldn’t be alive. Then they chucked it and cleared out. Half the fellows were on their backs and the other half were blundering about like drunks. So we posted you and Rumbald as missing, believed killed.

  “And didn’t you dig out the mess dug-out later?” asked Rawley.

  Piddock knocked out his pipe on the heel of his boot. “No. You see the place was reeking with gas and we had to leave it for a bit, and meanwhile Jerry slogged it heavily. When we went back we found he’d knocked in the river bank in a couple of places and the whole position was a marsh. We had a hell of a job getting the guns out. More than half the battery had been evacuated from that damned gas, and so division sent us back. And incidentally I had a fortnight in the most topping little village you ever saw, miles away from the nearest bang and then I went on leave. So we never went back to that rotten position.”

  “Then you never found Rumbald’s body?”

  “No—nor yours,” he added with a grin.

  Rawley burst into a peal of laughter, but there was no merriment in it. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “Damn good, that! A pretty rotten mess I’ve made of things!” He nodded his head slowly. “And you thought Rumbald was killed by that roof coming in!”

  “Naturally; and you too. Wasn’t he then?”

  Rawley shook his head. “He was dead before that roof came in. That’s why I cleared out—deserted.” He looked up with a wry smile. “You see, I killed him.”

  Piddock took his pipe from his mouth and regarded the glowing bowl with raised eyebrows. “Look here, Rawley, old son, all this may seem quite ordinary to you, but personally I’m a bit out of my depth. You’ve been chucking the most amazing remarks at me ever since you did the bally resurrection trick at the guns this afternoon. Suppose you tell me all about it. Remember I’m a thickheaded cove with Mark 1 brains.”

  Rawley took the pouch held out to him and slowly filled his pipe. “The moral of the story is ‘Look before you leap,’ ” he said, with a wry smile. And he began, while Piddock listened without comment. “So you see, I’ve made a pretty box up of things all round,” he ended.

  Piddock thrust a bit of paper into the brazier and relighted his pipe. “Um,” he agreed. “But the question is, what can we do about it.”

  “There is nothing we can do about it,” Rawley told him. “I’m a deserter—and that’s all there is to it.”

  Piddock grimaced. “Not a deserter, old son—at least not in the ordinary unpleasant sense; and anyway, except you and me, no one knows it. So we can wash that out. Officially, you are missing, believed killed; but the problem is to revive you and account satisfactorily for the interval. You see, although this chap Kemp is dead, you couldn’t keep that up, because when things have settled down again—if they ever do—his people will be writing and there will be all sorts of complications. If it had been old Conway now, it would have been easy. He hasn’t a relation in the world. Went to Canada as a kid and lived in a shack in the wild and woolly North West ever since. He doesn’t know a soul in Europe. But damn it all there must be some way out, if only we could think of it. Anyway it’s up to me. After all it was through me you got into this mess. I must put on my thinking cap.” He knocked out his pipe. “Well, old son, what about it? I’m losing my beauty sleep. I think ‘kip’ is indicated, as the troops say.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  I

  The next two days were strenuous ones for man and beast; endurance was stretched to limit and beyond. The battery marched and fought and fought and marched without respite and without rest. But Rawley was content; he was even happy. Once more there was an object in life, something that demanded all one’s strength of body and of will. For the moment he was no longer a pariah; he was back again with the pack, inspired by the contagion of human effort concentrated to a single purpose. One might suffer hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain, death, and fear, but one suffered neither futilely nor alone. Consciousness of a noble purpose spurred one’s flagging efforts; hardships borne in common fed the warming fire of comradeship.

  The battery marched and fought and fought and marched, bending before the flood that day after day rolled farther westwards—sweeping before its angry crest the fast submerging wreckage of the human dam it had already broken. Somewhere behind them, they hoped and prayed, another dam was being built, against which the fierce grey flood would beat in vain. So they fought on without respite or relief, helpless to stem the advancing tide, but fighting stubbornly to delay it.

  One more gun had been crippled and abandoned, but the little unit of half a hundred men, worn out by ceaseless labour, lack of sleep, and constant shelling, moved doggedly across that smashed and pounded desert, halting while the gun numbers worked like fiends to hurl a hurricane of shrapnel from the two remaining battered and nearly red-hot guns, then retreating to avoid extinction. In front of them was but a straggling line of hollow-eyed and bearded infantry, the remnants of a score of units mixed with the gleanings of the back areas, farriers, labour corps, town majors’ batmen. Ranges that began at five thousand yards dropped steadily to as many hundreds; fuses were set almost at zero; and the gun shields rang like bells under the hammer blows of direct rifle fire; then up thundered the racing teams and the leaping guns were snatched again from the threshold of destruction.

  Those desperate days sucked all
volition from that devoted remnant; they responded only to one unconquerable idea that galvanized their exhausted bodies long after their numbed minds had ceased to function. At the call to action men lying log-like in the depths of fatigue sprang up and worked with frenzied vigour at the guns; and when the cease-fire sounded dropped where they stood and slept beside the trails. Like mechanical dolls when a penny is dropped into the slot, they functioned vigorously and efficiently, to lapse into death-like inertia the moment the need of action had passed. Thus did Piddock, hollow-eyed and gaunt, lead his devoted little remnant through the wreck of an army.

  II

  The end came one bright spring day. They had reached the limit of the old Somme battlefields. Behind them lay green country undefiled by war, where woods were bursting into bud and the white, tree-bordered roads ran back towards the distant spires of Amiens. Since morning the battery—if battery it could be called—had been in action in a shallow S-shaped valley. Heavy shrapnel rumbled across the sky and burst overhead with stunning thunderclaps. Machine-gun fire waxed and waned. The warm spring sun beat down upon the weary sweating men.

  Morning wore on to afternoon, and bullets began to whisper down the valley from the north. It was a situation which they had learned to expect. The enemy had found another gap and were trickling through it round the flank. Soon the position would be untenable: the haggard infantry would come trudging back, and the grey tide would lap westward again.