One or two small parties led in night attacks overcame the worst of their fears.
Later on when the mud dried they could kill more; in the end all would be killed, and they would return with much honor to their land of sunshine.
To the officers who moved among them, absorbed in the questions of their care, there was never any silence or peace, and yet there was a strange content in the huddled, altered life of their wet ditch.
Every power of the will, every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes. Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, impervious to human ingenuity.
In the quieter hours of the night, they crouched side by side formulating fresh schemes and going over one by one the weak points of their defenses.
They hadn’t enough guns, or any reinforcements; they had no dry clothes. The men were not accustomed to wet climates or invisible enemies.
They wanted more sand-bags and more bombs, and it would be better for human beings not to be in trenches for three weeks at a time in the rain.
They sat there pitting their brains against these obstacles, creating the miraculous ingenuity of war. Personal questions dropped. Lionel saw that Winn was ill beyond mending, but he saw it without definite thought – it was one more obstacle in a race of obstacles. It wouldn’t do for Winn to break down. He fitted himself without explanations, selflessly, with magnificent disinterestedness, into his friend’s needs. He was like a staff in the hand of a blind man.
Winn himself had begun to wonder, moving about in his sea of mud, how much worse you could be before you were actually done. His cough shook him incessantly, his brain burned, and his hands were curiously weak. He was conscious that he had to repeat to himself all day long the things he had to do; even then he might have forgotten if there had not been Lionel. He might have forgotten to give orders. In spite of everything a strange inner bliss possessed him which nourished him like food. He had Claire’s letters, they never failed him, they were as regular as the beats of a heart. Something in him lived that had never lived before, something that did not seem likely ever to die.
It was helping him as Lionel was helping him to get through things. What he had to get through was dying. It was going to be quicker than the way they had of dying in Davos, but it mightn’t be quick enough; it might drive him out of his last fight, back to an inconceivable stale world.
This must not happen. Lionel must live and he must die, where he was. You could bully fate, if you were prepared to pay the price for it.
Winn was not sure yet what the price would be, he was only sure that he was prepared to pay it.
They were to be relieved next day. The men were so worn out that they could hardly move. Winn and Lionel found their own bodies difficult to control; they had become heavy and inert from want of sleep, but their minds were alive and worked with feverish swiftness, like the minds of people in a long illness, when consciousness creeps above the level of pain.
Winn had just returned from his evening round of the trenches. Lionel was resting in his dug-out; he heard Winn’s approach. Winn was coughing again – a little choking, short cough.
He bent double and crouched down beside Lionel without speaking.
“Well,” said Lionel, “to-morrow we’ll be out of this. About time too – with that cough of yours.”
Winn was silent for a moment, then he said, “I suppose you know I’m nearly done?”
Lionel bowed his head. “Yes,” he muttered, “I suppose I know it.”
After a pause Winn began again.
“There isn’t much good talking, of course. On the other hand, you may as well know what I feel. I’ve had tremendous luck in one way and another. I never expected to get the regiment, for instance – and your coming out here and all that. I’ve seen how jolly things could be.”
“You haven’t had them,” said Lionel in a low voice. “The things you wanted most, I mean. Your pitch was queered too soon.”
“I don’t know,” said Winn, painstakingly. “In a sense, of course, you haven’t had things if you’ve only seen ’em. Still when you come to think of it, you partly have. Look at the Germans; we’ve worked considerably into them without seeing ’em, haven’t we? What I mean is that I appreciate goodness now; I see its point. Not that I’d have kept clear a moment by myself. I hope you quite understand that? I’ve been a blackguard and I’d have been a worse one if I’d had the chance. But I’m glad I hadn’t the chance now. I don’t know that I’m putting the thing straight – but you know what she’s like? Thank God I couldn’t alter her!”
They listened for a moment to the night. Their ears were always awake, registering sounds from the sodden, death-ridden fields beneath them, and above, but they heard nothing beyond the drip of the rain, an occasional groan from a man tortured by rheumatism, and the long-drawn scream of a distant shell.
“You can call yourself what you like,” said Lionel at last. “I know what you are, that’s enough for me, and she knew it; that’s one reason I got to caring for her.
“I dare say that seems a rummy thing to you, to care for a woman because she cares for another man. But it’s a fact.”
Winn moved uneasily. Then he said abruptly, “Look here, young ’un, I was wrong before when I asked you to step in instead of me, but I’m not wrong now. You can take it from me she’ll marry you in the end. She’s young; be patient. I dare say she’ll think for a time she’s had enough, but she hasn’t. There’s no good living a lonely life. We may both get done in, of course. But I don’t fancy we shall. I want you to promise me not to get killed if you can help it.
“Keep away from me if you think I’m getting into trouble, because I sha’n’t be getting into trouble, I shall be getting out of it, d’you see?”
The guns sounded nearer, a machine gun rattled sharply in their ears, as if it had been let off in their dug-out.
“I sha’n’t care for anybody else,” said Lionel, quietly, “and I shall wait all my life for her. As for not being killed – you don’t want me to shirk my job, of course; bar that, I sha’n’t ask for trouble.”
Winn said, “All right – then that’s that! I’m going to sleep.”
They neither of them slept.
It came very quickly and confusedly toward dawn. The silence was rent across like a piece of torn silk. The crash of bombs, the peppery, sharp detonation of rifles broke up the sullen air. Out of the dark, vague shapes loomed, the trench filled with the sound of deep breathing and scuffling, and the shriek of sudden pain.
Death and mud and darkness closed together.
It was all over in half an hour, the attack was driven out, and the men moved uncertainly about, trying to discover their dead, and relieve their wounded.
The dawn was gray and in the half light, Winn saw Lionel’s eyes open and shut; the blood was pouring from a hideous wound in his side.
“You’ve got to live,” Winn said grimly, bending over him. “No damned nonsense about it! You’ve got to live.” Lionel’s eyes closed again and he knew nothing more of the rough bandaging, the endless waiting in the sodden trench while Winn sat motionless beside him, watching his flickering breath. In the hours of the interminable journey, Lionel roused himself sometimes and heard again like a perpetual refrain, “You’ve got to live.” The motor ambulance jarred and bumped it, the wheels of the train echoed it through the fever in his brain. He woke in England knowing that he was going to live.
A few hours later Winn went to see the general of his division. “I want you to let me have another twenty-four in, sir,” he explained. “They won’t expect an attack so soon. I know my men are not very fresh, but it’ll wake them up. They’ve stood a good lot. I’ve been talking to ’em. They want to get a bit of their own back. That trench of theirs is too near us in any case. They’d be better pushed back.”
The general hesitated, but Winn
’s fiery sunken eyes held and shook him.
“Well, Staines,” he said, “you know what you can do with your men, of course. Have it your own way. When do you want to attack?”
“Soon as they’ve settled off to sleep,” said Winn, “just to give ’em a night-cap.”
“Don’t lose too many men,” said the general, “and above all come back yourself.”
“That’s as may be,” said Winn. “If I can get the men over quietly in a bit of mist, I sha’n’t lose too many of ’em. I’ve told them if they’re too fagged to stand, they’d better fight. They quite agree about it.”
Winn led the attack with the last of his strength, and in the fierceness of his rage with life.
A white fog hung over the fields like the shadow of a valley filled with snow.
The men fought like demons – strange shapes in the fog, with here and there as the flames shot up, the flash of their black faces, set to kill.
Winn’s voice rallied and held them above the racket of the spitting rifles, and the incessant coughing of the guns. It was the Staines voice let out on a last voyage. To have gone back against it would have been more dangerous than to go on against the guns.
They seized the trench and held it, there were no prisoners taken in the dark, and after the first light they ceased to hear Winn’s voice.
The sun came out and showed them all they had won, and what they had lost.
Winn lay peacefully between the old trench and the new, beyond resentment, beyond confusion, in the direct simplicity of death.
THE END
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The Dark Tower Page 21
