CHAPTER XVII

THE RAT IN THE NIGHT

Butte de Walincourt! Butte de Walincourt on the way to Bapaume! What a great and thrilling story history will have to tell of Butte de Walincourt--merely a hill of one hundred and fifty feet altitude and round as the crown of a Derby hat! The days and days when the blood of fighting men streamed down both sides of that fiercely contested ridge. The Germans never fought more furiously than they did to hold Butte de Walincourt. They protected its flanks and held on to it against magnificent assaults. But more determined was the work of the South Africans and the Durham regiments of England in the battle for the round top of the Butte. Countless times they made the summit, countless times they were driven down again. Great squads of them were slaughtered, but they would come back the more sturdily, yes, even fanatically. It was a specific, concrete test of the endurance and courage of the Boche against the British and the British handsomely won.

It was such an awful struggle, such a thrilling victory that in quick recognition the French Government has placed around historic Butte de Walincourt a high wired enclosure wherein after the war is to be built a superb memorial. Atop the round mound British commanders have already reverently erected a stone inscribed to the heroism of the South Africans and Durhams.

I had not the privilege of being in on this great fight, but the Oxfords and Bucks were brought up to the first line after the capture of Butte de Walincourt and they certainly picked out a lively job for us. It was the taking of a huge quarry behind the ridge. A dozen times in half as many days thousands of us poured into this quarry and routed the Germans only to be literally blown out of it again by the big German guns.

In the end our army was to sweep forward reclaiming many miles of wounded France, but there did not seem to be any prospect of advance in those days when we were tossed in and out of that quarry, each time paying heavily with lives. On the fifth day--it was in November, 1916--our battalion, badly battered, was relieved of this dangerous shuttle-cock existence and sent back to “Restville”--this particular “Restville” being pretty Beauval on the Albert-Amiens road, some thirty-one kilometres from Bapaume.

Most gratefully we “packed all our troubles in our old kit bags” and took our way down the friendly road. One of the joys of war is meeting the procession on the way to “Restville.” It was all in a huge cloud of dust--marching men, thundering motor trucks and lorries, the smoothly gliding motor cars of the officers of high command and the aviators, lumbering Paris ’buses. Shouts, yells and laughter, songs, French and English, and with the marching Tommies held not at all in check for their countless antics by their officers. For the officers, every one, had mighty good reason to be proud of their Tommies. Officers were constantly giving permission with a smiling nod to their soldiers to take advantage of invitations from the motor vehicles to the men on foot to “Get aboard, you bloomin’ hiker!” And the officers themselves were being picked up by comrades. One of the happiest features was the frequent reunions of intimate friends--friends who had been wondering about the fates of one another.

The gloom of war could not annihilate the wonderful esprit of the good French folks of Beauval. We were back on a holiday, we were enjoying a brief respite from grim gaming with death, and they tried to hide all signs of tragedy from us. With cabaret performances in the restaurants, baths, the cool shaves, the luxury of getting manicured, concerts, vaudeville shows, public and private dining, dancing, pretty girls, general cordiality--why, God bless Beauval! As, indeed, I can remember none other of these “Restvilles” of France without finding my heart prompting the same utterance.

This period of sunshine vanished quickly enough and November 14th found our battalion back on the front line at the Butte.

I am afraid there is nothing clairvoyant about me. I had no premonition whatsoever on leaving pleasant Beauval of the momentous episode so very nearly ahead in my life. I was all recollection then of the fine time I had had. I wanted to linger mentally with it as long as I could. Probably most delicious memory of all to the trench-worn, trench-soiled man I had been was that of the hot baths I enjoyed in Beauval. And the cold showers! I went in for about four of them the first day in and held that average pretty nearly every other day of our rest.

Well, that and all the other pleasant things were over, and back we were to the dirty, old trenches, back we were with our old comrades, the rats and moles, and Old Man Death blinking at us from the other side of No Man’s Land.

We got back in the trenches on the afternoon of November 15th, and we hadn’t been there but two hours when I received an order to report at Col. Reynold’s headquarters. It was a neat little dug-out he had, as spick and span as the man. The boards walling it were of spotless cleanliness, the desk at which he sat a model of orderliness, the Colonel himself calm and pleasant-voiced.

I do not mind admitting that when I left his quarters I was a very solemn-faced young man. All pretty memories of Beauval had been wiped out.

I had a large responsibility and a big peril to meet.

I reflected that I had come safely through narrow and dangerous ways; my life had been spared so many times in surroundings where it seemed I had no right to hope to survive.

The assignment from my Colonel was, in brief, that we had lost touch with the 48th Toronto regiment fighting on our left, that for the time all communications between us had mysteriously stopped. He was unaware whether the 48th had been engaged by the Germans or not. Indeed, he rather feared they had--feared they might have been struck at by a greatly superior force and possibly annihilated. The enemy had cut off telephone communications and what was worse had temporarily assumed an aërial superiority that had cleared our planes out of the sky.

The character and size of the German forces directly before us, the strength of their entrenchment, machine guns and field batteries comprised therefore a vital matter of which he was in almost complete ignorance. As to the numerical force of the enemy, we had no thought of waiting to find this out until we were attacked. It had been the British who conducted the offensive and meant just then to continue to do so. But, as an American says, we surely ought to know “what we were up against.”

He had given me the task of finding out.

Of course, you realize what that meant. I must sneak across No Man’s Land in the night, I must somehow burrow my way into the enemy’s territory, I must remain there long enough to get fairly accurate notes and sketches of the German position and an estimate of his number and artillery.

You will understand that it did not mean that I must cover the entire territory and lest I might bore my reader with the military technicalities of performing such a task, I will simply add that to the old soldier certain aspects are capable of equally certain deductions as to gun positions and the rest of it.

It was decided that I would start out at nine o’clock that night, and though the Germans were mercilessly strafing us, as though they were in contemplation of an onslaught of their battalions upon us, only our long-distance guns were taking up the challenge. That was a little courtesy to me. It was enough that I would have to cross No Man’s Land under enemy fire without placing on me the risk of losing my life by the fire of our own guns. Small arms would have no difficulty in carrying over the strip. No Man’s Land here was no more than five hundred yards across. So shells, machine-gun drums and snipers’ bullets from the Germans were ignored, our trenches making no answer.

There had been many rains and hardly had I gone over the top when I realized what lush traveling was ahead. I soon found myself in mud up to my knees. A tiny company of three men, a lance corporal and two privates, followed out into the corpse-strewn territory.

It looked from the very beginning as if the Germans had suspected what was afoot. They began making an especial display with their star-shells the very moment after we had started. When these flares went up, we stood stock still and held the position steadily. It is when you move that the light of the star-shells limns your figure and make you your enemy’s mark.

After the first outburst of star-shells, I ordered my men to go to their knees and advance on all fours, thus lowering our visibility. As I sank to my knees and put out my hands, one of them touched a man’s face. I drew the hand back with that instinctive recoil that is uncontrollable at the touch of cold, dead flesh. I groped for the poor fellow’s identification disk and papers, handed them over to the lance corporal, and then crawled onward.

But soon the sensation of pawing over the cold faces of the dead became common to all of us. There was no shock in it any more. But we were careful to gather up their disks and papers before moving along. The new shock came when I rested my hand on the back of a man lying with his face toward the German trenches.

He moved and I grasped him by the neck and was ready to use my trench knife when he grunted:

“Who the hell’s that?”

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

“Warwickshire--out on reconnaissance. Lost my way. Nearly walked into the Germans. Been wandering out two hours. Where am I, sir?”

I whispered directions as to his way back.

It took us all of four hours, owing to the caution we had every instant to use, to cross that swamp of heavy mud mingled with the bodies of the fallen.

We were soon so near the enemy lines it would be dangerous to keep my men with me any longer. I was reluctant enough to leave them, but finally ordered them into a big shell-hole shelter where they would be well hidden from the flaring sky lights. I continued along toward the German barbed wire which the intermittent flashes plainly revealed.

I made this advance wriggling on my stomach. The men accompanying me had evidently no expectation of seeing me come back. I wasn’t carrying a canteen full of confidence in that respect myself. You can’t help feeling grateful in just such a moment to have had your lance corporal and two men whisper most earnestly and sincerely, “Good luck to you, sir, good luck.”

I fervently wished for that.

Mystery, weirdness and soul-sickening loneliness for me was in the picture ahead, a picture you must keep in recollection that I could only see when it was under the uncanny illumination of the star-shells. Nature was on my side. The sky was a vast lowering, starless mist. The meshes of barbed wire wickedly expressed their purpose as man-traps, and beyond I could see the wavering man-deep furrows in the tumbled earth. And I give you my word, not a sound. That is, not a sound to indicate the presence of hundreds of human creatures just beyond me. No sound of their moving or their breathing. There was, however, one sound and a dreadful thing it is to hear. It was the soft scuffle of the rats among the dead.

But a few minutes later I had reason to be thankful to those rats. At the cost of a seared face and torn hands, I was slowly, cautiously snapping with my wire-cutter a quiet entrance to the Boche trenches. I had gone far when I put my clippers on a certain string of wire, and my hand stiffened, my arm trembled, tickled and went numb. Simultaneously, came the sharp, high ringing of a gong. They have “burglar alarms” attached to the barbed wire construction in front of German trenches.

My salvation was in the fact that they suspected an attack, not merely the presence of a scout. For the front line trenches began spilling everything in the way of deadliness that they had--rifle volleys, machine-gun patter, exploding bombs, and even shells. Also the Boches filled the sky with star-shells.

But when these showed no attacking force ahead, the fire ceased. Still they kept up with the star-shells. I did not attempt to move. I believe that my flesh was as cold as that of any dead man as I lay there in a heavy mesh of barbed wire. I cannot imagine but that I must have been plainly in sight to some of the peering eyes from the German trench. Yet they did not see me. I did not dare look up myself to see what activity of observation took place among them.

But suddenly the firing ceased and the star-shells waned. And here’s where my thankfulness to the rats comes in. I can only think that the commander of the trench decided that some burly rat had come into contact with the alarm wire. I know they sometimes rang false alarms like that in our trenches, which are similarly equipped with bells.

When I finally dared move and stare up through the murk, I saw two sentries posted at the entering trench. Heads and shoulders only showed. They stood statuesquely, save now and then the head of one of them bobbed in the sudden relaxation of the neck of a sleepy man.

Evidently after the big flare-up and the quieting of the alarm, these sentries didn’t think themselves called upon to be particularly alert. But I was altogether too close to them to take any rash chances. I laid in the ooze fully half an hour before I dared move again. In that time the sentries disappeared.

This was good fortune, indeed. Moreover, I had come to the inner edge of the wire entanglements and these were only loosely constructed and I could wriggle my way through if I worked patiently. Besides, as I had full reason to believe, these inner wires were not electrically charged and would not sound an alarm.

Some hundred or more feet from the spot where I had seen the two sentries I could make out the spur of the trench, a neatly placed corner from which a machine-gun could rake an attacking force. Toward the very end of that spur I went, still on my stomach. At such a time as this the likelihood of the spur being empty of the machine-gun crew was good.

I listened a long time and then risked it. I dropped into the trench. The mud in it made my fall soundless. Through this spur I picked my way to the communicating trench. These communicators are always purposely blocked off in a zig-zag manner. They run on the flank of the trenches that front the enemy--run from the front to the rear trenches. To traverse one of these communicating trenches is, naturally, to be able to know a great deal of the enemy’s entire position. Moreover, save for sentries, and a possible but improbable patrol, the communicator is not occupied. It is the sunken roadway of the trenches.

Once inside the trenches, I was less in fear of my life than when outside. Upon the outside obviously the greatest watchfulness is exercised. The idea of an enemy within them is scarcely, if ever, entertained. I actually wormed my way past the two sentries I had seen from the outside, but who had disappeared. They had stepped down from their parapets and their heads rested drowsily against the wall of the trench. Edging past them, I held my breath and you may be sure, was as nervous as a witch. They never even moved. But once past them I moved fast.

The utter blackness of the night was with me--was my friend. I no longer sneaked along. If observed that would most certainly bring suspicion upon me. In the murk of the trench they would only regard me as one of their own if I passed in a natural manner as one about his quite ordinary business. Of course, I was watchful and sought not to be seen at all. The zig-zag course of the communicating trenches helped this purpose along at this time.

I spent two hours in their trenches, unknown to the Germans. I made a few notes and sketches, but in the main carried the idea of the position and its strength in my mind. Once I got out and into No Man’s Land again, however, I would elaborate on the sketches. In case I was killed making my way back and my comrades found my body, the papers would prove valuable, my work would be, in any event, partly done.

And there I was all unsuspected in the quiet, gloomy trenches, when for some reason or other, the forces again took alarm. There came the roaring medley of guns and for me much worse--again the skies were splashed with illumination. I had just rounded a turn of the zig-zag communicator and came out in full sight of a German patrol. Two Huns faced me.