Chapter 13

"Up with ye!" he said, "every man. If you don't wake quick now, you'll maybe not have the chance to wake at all."

The men rolled over and sat and stood up blinking stupidly at him and listening in amazement to the noise outside.

"Rouse yourselves," he cried. "Get a move on. The Germans are almost on top of us. The front line's falling back. They'll stand here." He seized one or two of them and pushed them towards the door. "You," he said, "and you and you, get outside and round the back there. See if you can get a pickaxe, a trenching tool, anything, and break down that grating and knock a bigger hole in the window. We may have to crawl out there presently. The rest o' ye come with me an' help block up the door."

Through the din that followed, the telephonist fought to get his message through; he had to give up an attempt to speak it while a hatchet, a crowbar, and a pickaxe were noisily at work breaking out a fresh exit from the back of the cellar, and even after that work had been completed, it was difficult to make himself heard. He completed the urgent message for reënforcements at last, listened to some confused and confusing comments upon it, and then made ready to take some messages from the other end.

"You'll have to shout," he said, "no, shout--speak loud, because I can't 'ardly 'ear myself think--no, 'ear myself think. Oh, all sorts, but the shelling is the worst, and one o' them beastly airyale torpedoes. All right, go ahead."

The earpiece receiver strapped tightly over one ear, left his right hand free to use a pencil, and as he took the spoken message word by word, he wrote it on the pad of message forms under his hand. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the message took a good deal longer than a normal time to send through, and while he was taking it, the signaler's mind was altogether too occupied to pay any attention to the progress of events above and around him. But now the sergeant came back and warned him that he had better get his things ready and put together as far as he could, in case they had to make a quick and sudden move.

"The game's up, I'm afraid," he said gloomily, and took a note that was brought down by another orderly. "I thought so," he commented, as he read it hastily and passed it to the other signaler. "It's a message warning the right and left flanks that we can't hold the center any longer, and that they are to commence falling back to conform to our retirement at 3.20 _ac emma_, which is ten minutes from now."

Over their heads the signalers could hear tramping scurrying feet, the hammering out of loopholes, the dragging thump and flinging down of obstacles piled up as an additional defense to the rickety walls. Then there were more hurrying footsteps, and presently the jarring _rap-rap-rap_ of a machine gun immediately over their heads.

"That's done it!" said the sergeant. "We've got no orders to move, but I'm going to chance it and establish an alternative signaling station in one of the trenches somewhere behind here. This cellar roof is too thin to stop an ordinary Fizzbang, much less a good solid Crump, and that machine gun upstairs is a certain invitation to sudden death and the German gunners to down and out us."

He moved towards the new opening that had been made in the wall of the cellar, scrambled up it and disappeared. All the signalers lifted their attention from their instruments at the same moment and sat listening to the fresh note that ran through the renewed and louder clamor and racket. The signaler who was in touch with the rear station called them and began to tell them what was happening.

"We're about all in, I b'lieve," he said. "Five minutes ago we passed word to the flanks to fall back in ten minutes. What? Yes, it's thick. I don't know how many men we've lost hanging on, and I suppose we'll lose as many again taking back the trench we're to give up. What's that? No. I don't see how reënforcements could be here yet. How long ago you say you passed orders for them to move up? An hour ago! That's wrong, because the messengers can't have been back--telephone message? That's a lot less than an hour ago. I sent it myself no more than half an hour since. Oo-oo! did you get that bump? Dunno, couple o' big shells or something dropped just outside. I can 'ardly 'ear you. There's a most almighty row going on all round. They must be charging, I think, or our front line's fallen back, because the rifles is going nineteen to the dozen, a-a-ah! They're getting stronger too, and it sounds like a lot more bombs going; hold on, there's that blighting maxim again."

He stopped speaking while upstairs the maxim clattered off belt after belt of cartridges. The other signalers were shuffling their feet anxiously and looking about them.

"Are we going to stick it here?" said one. "Didn't the sergeant say something about 'opping it?"

"If he did," said the other, "he hasn't given any orders that I've heard. I suppose he'll come back and do that, and we've just got to carry on till then."

The men had to shout now to make themselves heard to each other above the constant clatter of the maxim and the roar of rifle fire. By now they could hear, too, shouts and cries and the trampling rush of many footsteps. The signaler spoke into his instrument again.

"I think the line's fallen back," he said. "I can hear a heap o' men running about there outside, and now I suppose us here is about due to get it in the neck."

There was a scuffle, a rush, and a plunge, and the sergeant shot down through the rear opening and out into the cellar.

"The flank trenches!" he shouted. "Quick! Get on to them--right and left flank--tell them they're to stand fast. Quick, now, give them that first. Stand fast; do not retire."

The signalers leaped to their instruments, buzzed off the call, and getting through, rattled their messages off.

"Ask them," said the sergeant anxiously. "Had they commenced to retire." He breathed a sigh of relief when the answers came. "No," that the message had just stopped them in time.

"Then," he said, "you can go ahead now and tell them the order to retire is cancelled, that the reënforcements have arrived, that they're up in our forward line, and we can hold it good--oh!"

He paused and wiped his wet forehead; "you," he said, turning to the other signaler, "tell them behind there the same thing."

"How in thunder did they manage it, sergeant?" said the perplexed signaler. "They haven't had time since they got my message through."

"No," said the sergeant, "but they've just had time since they got mine."

"Got yours?" said the bewildered signaler.

"Yes, didn't I tell you?" said the sergeant. "When I went out for a look round that time, I found an artillery signaler laying out a new line, and I got him to let me tap in and send a message through his battery to headquarters."

"You might have told me," said the aggrieved signaler. "It would have saved me a heap of sweat getting that message through." After he had finished his message to the rear station he spoke reflectively: "Lucky thing you did get through," he said. "'Twas a pretty close shave. The O.C. should have a 'thank you' for you over it."

"I don't suppose," answered the sergeant, "the O.C. will ever know or ever trouble about it; he sent a message to the signaling company to send through--and it was sent through. There's the beginning and the end of it."

And as he said, so it was; or rather the end of it was in those three words that appeared later in the despatch: "It is reported."

CONSCRIPT COURAGE

You must know plenty of people--if you yourself are not one of them--who hold out stoutly against any military compulsion or conscription in the belief that the "fetched" man can never be the equal in valor and fighting instinct of the volunteer, can only be a source of weakness in any platoon, company and regiment. This tale may throw a new light on that argument.

Gerald Bunthrop was not a conscript in the strict sense of the word, because when he enlisted no legal form of conscription existed in the United Kingdom; but he was, as many more have been, a moral conscript, a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting, very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circumstance and pressure from without himself. Before the War the Army and its ways were to him a sealed book. Of war he had the haziest ideas compounded of novels he had read and dimly remembered and mental pictures in a confused jumble of Charles O'Malley dragoons on spirited charges, half-forgotten illustrations in the papers of pith-helmeted infantry in the Boer War, faint boyhood recollections of Magersfontein and the glumness of the "Black Week"--a much more realistic and vivid impression of Waterloo as described by Brigadier Gerard--and odd figures of black Soudanese, of Light Brigade troopers, of Peninsula red-coats, of Sepoys and bonneted Highlanders in the Mutiny period, and of Life Guard sentries at Whitehall, lines of fixed bayonets on City procession routes, and khaki-clad Terriers seen about railway stations and on bus-tops with incongruous rifles on Saturday afternoons. Actually, it is not correct to include these living figures in his vague idea of war. They had to him no connection with anything outside normal peaceful life, stirred his thoughts to war no more than seeing a gasbracket would wake him to imaginings of a coalmine or a pit explosion. His slight conceptions of war, then, were a mere matter of print and books and pictures, and the first months of this present war were exactly the same, no more and no less--newspaper paragraphs and photos and drawings in the weeklies hanging on the bookstalls. He read about the Retreat and the Advance, skimmed the prophets' forecasts, gulped the communiques with interest a good deal fainter than he read the accounts of the football matches or a boxing bout. He expected "our side" to win of course, and was quite patriotic; was in fact a "supporter" of the British Army in exactly the sense of being a "supporter" or "follower" of Tottenham Hotspurs or Kent County. Any thoughts that he might shoulder a rifle and fight Germans would at that time, if it had entered his head, have seemed just as ridiculous as a thought that he should play in the Final at the Crystal Palace or step into the ring to fight Carpentier. It took a long time to move him from this attitude of aloofness. Recruiting posters failed utterly to touch him. He looked at them, criticized them, even discussed their "goodness" or drawing power on recruits with complete detachment and without the vaguest idea that they were addressed to him. He bought Allies' flag-buttons, and subscribed with his fellow-employees to a Red Cross Fund, and joined them again in sending some sixpences to a newspaper Smokes Gift Fund; he always most scrupulously stood up and uncovered to "God Save the King," and clapped and encored vociferously any patriotic songs or sentiments from the stage. He thought he was doing his full duty as a loyal Briton, and even--this was when he promised a regular sixpence a week to the Smokes Fund--going perhaps a little beyond it. First hints and suggestions that he should enlist he treated as an excellent jest, and when at last they became too frequent and pointed for that, and began to come from complete strangers, he became justly indignant at such "impudence" and "interference," and began long explainings to people he knew, that he wasn't the one to be bullied into anything, that fighting wasn't "his line," that he "had no liking for soldiering," that he would have gone like a shot, but had his own good and adequate reasons for not doing so.

There is no need to tell of the stages by which he arrived at the conclusion that he must enlist: from the first dawning wonder at such a possibility, through qualms of doubt and fear and spasms of hope and--almost--courage, to a dull apathy of resignation. No need to tell either the particular circumstances that "conscripted" him at last, because although his name is not real the man himself is, and one has no wish to bring shame on him or his people. I have only described him so closely to make it very clear that he was driven to enlistment, that a less promising recruit never joined up, that he was a conscript in every real sense of the word. We can pass over all his training, his introduction to the life of the trenches, his feelings of terror under conditions as little dangerous as the trenches could be. He managed, more or less, to hide this terror, as many a worse and many a better man has done before him, until one day----

The Germans had made a fierce attack, had overborne a section of the defense and taken a good deal of trenched ground, had been counter-attacked and partly driven back, had scourged the lost parts with a fresh tempest of artillery fire and driven in again to close quarters, to hot bomb and bayonet work; were again checked and for the moment held.

Private Gerald Bunthrop's battalion had been hurried up to support the broken and breaking line, was thrust into a badly wrecked trench with crumbling sides and broken traverses, with many dead and wounded cumbering the feet of the few defenders, with a reek of high-explosive fumes catching their throats and nostrils. The open ground beyond the trench was scattered thick with great heaps of German dead, a few more sprawled on the broken parapet, another and lesser few were huddled in the trench itself amongst the many khaki forms. The battalion holding the trench had been almost annihilated in the task, had in fact at first been driven out from part of the line and had only reoccupied it with heavy losses. Bunthrop had with his battalion passed along some smashed communication trenches and over the open ground this fighting had covered, and the sights they saw in passing might easily have shaken the stoutest hearts and nerves. They made the approach, too, under a destructive fire with high-explosive shells screaming and crashing over, around, and amongst them, with bullets whistling and hissing about them and striking the ground with the sound of constantly exploding Chinese crackers.

Bunthrop himself, to state the fact baldly, was in an agony of fear. He might have been tempted to bolt, but was restrained by a complete lack of any idea where to bolt to, by a lingering remnant of self-respect, and by a firm conviction that he would be dealt with mercilessly if he openly ran. But when he reached the comparative shelter of the broken trench all these safeguards of his decent behavior vanished. He flung himself into the trench, cowered in its deepest part, made not the slightest attempt to look over the parapet, much less to use his rifle. There is this much of excuse for him, that on the very instant that they reached the cover of the trench a bursting high-explosive had caught the four men next in line to him. The excuse may be insufficient for those who have never witnessed at very close hand the instant and terrible destruction of four companions with whom they have eaten and slept and talked and moved and had their intimate being for many months; but those who have known such happenings will understand. Bunthrop's sergeant understood, and because he was a good sergeant and had the instinct for the right handling of men--it must have been an instinct, because, up to a year before, he had been ledger clerk in a City office and had handled nothing more alive than columns of figures in a book--he issued exactly the order that appealed exactly to Bunthrop's terror and roused him from a shivering embodiment of fear to a live thinking and order-obeying private. "Get up and sling some of those sandbags back on the parapet, Bunthrop!" he said, "and see if you can't make some decent cover for yourself. You've nothing there that would stop a half-crippled Hun jumping in on top of you." When he came back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had passed. Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments--the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop's nerve. He flung down and flattened himself to the trench bottom again, squeezing himself close to the earth, submerged and drowned in a sweeping wave of panic fear. He gave no heed to the orders of his platoon commander, the shouting of his sergeant, the stir that ran along the trench, the flat spitting reports of the rifles that began to crack rapidly in a swiftly increasing volume of fire. A huge fragment of shell came down and struck the trench bottom with a suggestively violent thud a foot from his head. Half sick with the instant thought, "If it had been a foot this way!..." half crazed with the sense of openness to such a missile, Bunthrop rose to his knees, pressing close to the forward parapet, and looking wildly about him. His sergeant saw him. "You, Bunthrop," he shouted, "are you hit? Get up, you fool, and shoot! If we can't stop 'em before they reach here we're done in." Bunthrop hardly heeded him. Along the trench the men were shooting at top speed over the parapet; a dozen paces away two of the battalion machine-guns were clattering and racketing in rapid gusts of fire; a little farther along a third one had jambed and was being jerked and hammered at by a couple of sweating men and a wildly cursing boy officer. So much Bunthrop saw, and then with a hideous screeching roar a high explosive fell and burst in a shattering crash, a spouting hurricane of noise and smoke and flung earth and fragments. Bunthrop found himself half buried in a landslide of crumbling trench, struggled desperately clear, gasping and choking in the black cloud of smoke and fumes, saw presently, as the smoke thinned and dissolved, a chaos of broken earth and sandbags where the machine-guns had stood; saw one man and an officer dragging their gun from the débris, setting it up again on the broken edge of the trench. Another man staggered up the crumbling earth bank to help, and presently amongst them they got the gun into action again. The officer left it and ran to where he saw the other gun half buried in loose earth. He dragged it clear, found it undamaged, looked round, shouted at Bunthrop crouching flat against the trench wall; shouted again, came down the earth bank to him with a rush. "Come and help!" he yelled, grabbing at Bunthrop's arm. Bunthrop mumbled stupidly in reply. "What?" shouted the officer. "Come and help, will you? Never mind if you are hurt," as he noticed a smear of blood on the private's face. "You'll be hurt worse if they get into this trench with the bayonet. Come on and help!" Bunthrop, hardly understanding, obeyed the stronger will and followed him back to the gun. "Can you load?" demanded the officer. "Can you fill the cartridges into these drums while I shoot?" Bunthrop had had in a remote period of his training some machine-gun instruction. He nodded and mumbled again. "God!" said the officer. "Look at 'em! There's enough to eat us if they get to bayonet distance! We _must_ stop 'em with the bullet. Hurry up, man; hurry, if you don't want to be skewered like a stuck pig!" He rattled off burst after burst of fire, clamoring at Bunthrop to hurry, hurry, hurry. A wounded machine-gunner joined them, and then some others, and the gun began to spit a steady string of bullets again. By this time the full meaning of the officer's words--the meaning, too, of remarks between the wounded helpers--had soaked into Bunthrop's brain. Their only hope, his only hope of life, lay in stopping the attack before it reached the trench; and the machine-guns were a main factor in the stopping. He lost interest in everything except cramming the cartridges into their place. When the officer was hit and rolled backwards and lay groaning and swearing, Bunthrop's chief and agonizing thought was that they--he--had lost the assistance and protection of the gun. When one of the wounded gunners took the officer's place and reopened fire, Bunthrop's only concern again was to keep pace with the loading. The thoughts were repeated exactly when that gunner was hit and collapsed and his place was taken by another man. And by now the urgent need of keeping the gun going was so impressed on Bunthrop that when the next gunner was struck down and the gun stood idle and deserted it was Bunthrop who turned wildly urging the other loaders to get up and keep the gun going; babbled excitedly about the only hope being to stop the Germans before they "got in" with the bayonet, repeated again and again at them the officer's phrase about "skewered like stuck pigs." The others hung back. They had seen man after man struck down at the gun, they could hear the _hiss_ and _whitt_ of the bullets over their heads, the constant cracker-like smacks of others that hit the parapet, and--they hung back. "Why th' 'ell don't you do it yerself?" demanded one of them, angered by Bunthrop's goading and in some degree, no doubt, by the disagreeable knowledge that they were flinching from a duty.