BOOK III—INTO THE BLUE

I

I T’. two days since I made my last jotting. How much has happened since then! Since then we’ve smashed the Hun Front, crumpled it up and swept it back for a distance of fourteen miles. It’s difficult to say whether there is any Hun Front left; there’s a mob withdrawing in tumultuous retreat and picked suicide-troops, fighting stubborn rearguard actions.

To-day it is our turn to sit down and hold the line in depth. The troops which were behind us yesterday, have leap-frogged us and passed through us. They’re fresh and with their unspoilt strength are battering their way still further forward, herding the enemy into panic-stricken groups, and cutting them off from the main body with their tremendous weight of shel’s. Pressing on their heels, like policemen dispersing a riot, come the ponderous tanks, making no arrests and impersonally bludgeoning every protest into silence.

How far our chaps have penetrated by now we cannot guess, but their guns sound very faintly across the hazy summer distance. To-morrow we shall again hook in and gallop into the point of the fighting-wedge, while the troops who are up front to-day will sit tight and hold. This is war as we have always dreamt of it and never hoped to find it.

At last we have our desire; we have leapt out of our trenches, left the filth of No Man’s Land behind, and have slipped off into the blue, where we follow a moving battle across plains and wheat-fields to the unravished lands of Germany.

It’s the afternoon of August the ninth. It was on the evening of the seventh that we crept out on foot from the shadow of the Boves Woods. The roads were packed with infantry and tanks moving forward in a solid mass; this night everything was moving in the one direction—there was no returning traffic. Hidden in the ravines, just back of the guns, we came across the cavalry, ready to advance the moment a breach in the line bad been announced. In contrast with the nervous irritation of other nights, this night there was an uncomplaining austerity. Suspense was nearly at an end, anticipation of dying was soon to be replaced by death’s actual presence. The great question in all our minds was, did the Hun know? Had he known all the time? Was he planning to catch us and to forestall our attack by an offensive of his own before morning?

On our arrival at the gun-position in front of the orchard we found that everything was normal and quiet. The odd shell was coming over and bursting with its accustomed regularity in the accustomed places. The enemy had not changed his targets. From his Front-line in the valley below us, the normal amount of flares were going up. The machine-gun fire came in irregular bursts and lazily, as if the entire business were a matter of form and not to be taken too much to heart by anybody. The only noticeable difference was of our making. To drown the throb of our advancing tanks, a great number of bombing-planes had been sent up, which kept flying to and fro at a low altitude above the enemy’s trenches. This peaceful state of affairs was too good to last, so we at once set to work feverishly upon our final preparations. Not a man slacked or spared himself; each one knew that before morning his own life might depend upon the honesty of his effort. I don’t think, however, it was our own particular lives that concerned us so much as the lives of our pals.

We divided the men into parties, so many to dig the six gun-platforms and so many to sort and stack the ammunition. Every hour or so we changed them over, so that they might not get stale at their task. As soon as the platforms were sufficiently advanced, we man-handled the guns into position and gave them their lines. After that we felt more secure; if the enemy were to anticipate our offensive, we would now be able to reply.

Time did not permit of our constructing sufficient protection for our men; besides, in so exposed a position, we should either escape by reason of the enemy’s panic or else get wiped out. We threw up a wall of sand-bags and turf about the guns to save their crews from splinters, and dug a more or less splinter-proof hole in which the signallers and the Major could do their work. In this hole, by the light of a solitary candle we made out the barrage-table with the times, lifts, rates of fire and ammunition expenditure for the attack, and explained it to the sergeants in charge of the gun-detachments. At 3 a. m. we served the men with hot tea, bully beef and slices of bread. Then we sat down to await developments. Our attack was planned to open at 4.20, just as the dawn would be peeping above the horizon.

Luckily for us a heavy mist had risen up which, as night drew towards morning, had thickened to the density of a fog. It had the effect of blanketing sound. It needed to, for as the tanks lumbered nearer to the Front-line to their jumping-off points, the whole world seemed to shake with their clamour. It was like a city of giants marching nearer and forever nearer. Not even the droning of the bombing-planes could drown the ominous breathing of their engines and the clangour of their iron tread.

Whether it was the number and the low altitude of the planes or that the Hun had actually heard the unusual commotion behind our lines, by 3 a. m. he became suspicious. His harassing fire, which usually dies down about that hour, leapt up into a novel intensity. He began to search and sweep new areas, which before had been free from shell-fire, It was a good thing that our work was completed, for we had to throw ourselves down and hug the ground to avoid the splinters. Most of his shells went plus of us and plunged into the orchard behind. Little sudden illuminations sprang up where piles of ammunition had been struck and were burning. He was evidently making guesses and consulting his map for anything that seemed likely, for when his shelling was working most destruction, he would switch to a new target, where it was wasted. The fog and the night combined, entirely prevented him from seeing what he was doing and from observing the tell-tale conflagrations he had created. We thanked our lucky stars that our position was a bad one and that we weren’t in the orchard.

The most nerve-racking moments in any fight are the moments preceding the start of the fight. One suddenly becomes possessed of extraordinary lucidity, somewhat similar to the clarity of thought which is said to be experienced by the drowning. He reviews his entire life in a flash, its failures, successes, unkindnesses and follies. He appreciates with ineffectual poignancy the affections he has wasted and the generosities he has omitted. It is as though, after having walked through all his years, he unexpectedly went aeroplaning and saw below him the panorama of his chances and achievements; he sees the might-have-been high-roads he could have taken, leading to white cities on the hills, and the crooked lanes he did actually choose, losing themselves in quagmire. Most particularly, in the moments of waiting, he thinks of children, because they are immortality. He wishes with a passionate regret that he had foreseen this hour, and could have left someone behind him who would perpetuate his body long after it has been obliterated and defiled. All the purposes and dignities for which he was created become miraculously obvious to him now. He feels a dull resentment that this clearness of vision was denied him till the power to choose was beyond his choice.

Sometimes this startling mental lucidity takes the form of an unnatural clairvoyance; he acutely apprehends happenings which are out of all possible reach of his senses. His imagination becomes abnormally alert. Lying beneath the weight of darkness, hanging over the lip of the valley, divided from the enemy by a sea of fog, I saw with absolute distinctness the frenzy which was in progress behind the hostile lines. I retain pictures which are as clean-cut as if they had been witnessed. Nine-tenths of the opposing army are sleeping. The sentries have been posted, the distress signals have been arranged and the batteries allotted their several tasks. At sunset everything seems serene; but as night settles down and the mist rises, an unaccountable uneasiness oppresses the spirits of the one-tenth who watch. Each man feels it, but he fears to voice his alarm till he has proofs which would warrant it. He notes the unusual number of planes in the air; but they are neither machinegunning nor bombing, and on account of the intense darkness they cannot spy. He may report their presence to headquarters, but there are no grounds for being disturbed so long as they are doing no harm. Besides, he is no expert; he may be mistaken as to their numbers. Then, little by little, above their drone he hears another sound—the sound as of a tidal wave travelling towards him, growing more menacing and taller as it approaches. He peers into the fog and imagines stealthy figures moving. The scurrying of a rat makes him break into a cold sweat. He calls to the next sentry; but his voice will not carry. He realizes that whatever happens, he is alone and cut off. His flares and rockets, if he fires them, will bring him no assistance; they will be smothered by the mountainous wall of whiteness. Fear seizes him, which he can no longer master; at the same time the same fear seizes every other watcher. By telephone or runner they each one send bark tidings of their terror.

But the nine-tenths of the enemy who are sleeping are annoyed at being disturbed. “It is nothing,” they declare. The news spreads slowly from battalion to brigade, brigade to division, division to corps, from corps to army. Each headquarters, peevish at being aroused and hesitant about arousing its next senior headquarters, wastes time in checking back to the watcher in the front-line for confirmation of his doubts. What is it that he fears? No attack is to be expected; the Allies’ storm-troops are up north. There is positive evidence of that fact. The worst that can be looked for is a local raiding-party. What are the reasons for his panic?

The reasons for his panic! They are vague, indefinite; he has no reasons—only intuitions, doubts, conjectures. He knows that the night is black and that he is filled with a horrible foreboding.

There are too many men over there across No Man’s Land. He cannot prove it, but he can feel their bated breath.

Reluctantly the nine-tenths of the army who were sleeping, are awakened. They lie listening in their deep dug-outs, unwilling to believe that calamity threatens. Then suddenly, when it is too late to be prepared, the suspicion strengthens that a major offensive will open with the morning. There is only an hour till dawn—too little time to act. The infantry are ordered to stand to in the trenches and the batteries to increase their rate of fire. Messages are sent to the rear to hurry up the reserves. Brigades of artillery, which are out at rest, hook in and start forward at the gallop. Even the most autocratic old generals are convinced and, to save their reputations, forsake their beds and become officiously important. Meanwhile, the men in the Front-line shiver in the darkness. They know that they have no chance now and are merely waiting to be slaughtered.

And we, on our side of No Man’s Land, we wait also. We do not like the job in hand; we were not born to be butchers. We are very much the same as those chaps over there. If we could, we would prefer to live our lives out, shake hands with the enemy and go home to our families. We have no quarrel with them individually; but we have no means of telling them that. It seems stupid to have come so far, to have suffered such hardships, to have sat up so many weary nights, simply in order to do something for which four years ago we should have been hanged. But we can’t wriggle out of it. If we tried to break away, all along the roads of France armed men are stationed to turn us back. We are impotent to express any choice in the matter. Certain people have quarrelled—people who do not wear khaki and who will never face death at sunrise. Who they are and why they should have quarrelled, we do not properly understand. Probably they muddled themselves into this row; how they did it, they themselves could not tell us. They’re kings and statesmen and nobs—far too high up for us to criticise. All we know is that we are their sacrifice. Because they say it is right, the more men we kill at dawn, the more glory we shall earn. Later on, if we survive the war and kill only one man, they will tell us it is wrong, and we shall end on the scaffold.

It’s all very puzzling—devilishly puzzling, when one’s brains and hands and feet are numbed with cold. It’s always perishing at three in the morning——-But these thoughts don’t do a chap any good; there’s nothing to be gained by philosophizing. It’s been going on for four years now—this living in mud and bathing in sweat, and always killing something God hasn’t spoken. He must know what he wants. \

At 3.45 a. m. the sergeants reported that all their fuzes were set. At four o’clock the whistle was blown for the “stand to” and the gun-crews crouched behind their guns in readiness. They needed to crouch, for the enemy shelling was finding us out and growing momentarily in intensity. Evidently more of their artillery was coming up and getting into action. From four o’clock onwards every five minutes the whistle blew and through the darkness a spectral voice announced: “Fifteen minutes to go”; “ten minutes to go”; “five minutes to go.” From far and wide behind the fog other whistles were heard sounding, and other voices making the same announcement. The last five minutes were counted off separately and the final minute in intervals of ten seconds: “Thirty seconds to go, twenty, ten, five.” Then, “Let her rip,” and a shrill blast of the whistle.

As though red-hot needles were stabbing at the drums, our ears are ringing and deafened. The air quivers and the ground flies up as if it were about to open. Our eyes are scorched by a marching wall of flame, against which are etched our rapid gunners, hurling hell across the valley like men demented, and our gallant eighteen-pounders barking, recoiling and bristling like infuriated terriers. We’re off with a vengeance. The greatest offensive of the war has started. Shall we get away with it in so advanced a position? At all events, it’s an end of waiting—that at least is a comfort.

II

YESTERDAY’. attack was a complete success—so complete that, in spite of all our preparations, its magnitude took us unaware. Had anyone, had the faith to foresee a Him defeat of such dimensions, we should have been able to have made a more deadly use of our advantage. As it was we lost a certain amount of time and, as a consequence, wasted some of our chances.

The trouble was, as usual, that we were controlled too much from the rear by staff-people, who didn’t come up-front to see what was happening for themselves, but gathered all their information second and third-hand. When the psychological moment had arrived for us to go forward, they became nervous and held us back. There were interminable telephone conversations with observers, liaison-officers, battery-commanders, all and sundry, before they could be persuaded that we were not proposing to put our heads into a trap.

Staff-people are the most incorrigible pessimists. They will never believe the fighter when he sends back word that victory is in his hands. They make him leave off fighting to answer foolish questions; by the time they permit him to go on fighting the enemy has very frequently recovered himself. They are so cursed with a fatal belief in their own omniscience that they scarcely credit the combatants, who run all the risks, with sense.

In the old days battles were won by generals who led their troops. A person, sharing the dangers and setting an example by their courage. They were on the spot as eye-witnesses, and recognized to a second when the moment to take hazards had arrived. To-day of necessity our generals and their staffs are deskmen, with the natural caution and scepticism of deskmen. They sit far back of the line, remote from shell-fire, in chbteaux fitted out like surveyors’ offices with typewriters, photographs, scales and maps. They do all their fighting on paper. When they are directing an attack, they collect their information by telephone, doubt it, sift it, weigh it, ponder it and discuss it, when lightning action is all that is required. Many of them have never been anything but deskmen since this war started; their combatant experience was gained years ago in little sporting rough-and-tumbles with aborigines on the outskirts of civilization. Because they have never personally endured the modern hell into which they have to fling their men, they can form no mental picture of the situations that occur, and the prompt action that should be taken. They are equipped for planning the preliminary details of a show; but their control of an attack, when once it has started, is paralyzing. So much is this the case that it’s a common saying among the men that the battles which we win in the trenches are lost by the staff-people who are behind.

On the morning of August the eighth the weather conditions were all in our favour. The fog was worth several extra divisions to us. It kept the enemy guessing. We knew what we intended to do, but he had to find out. The fog enabled us to conceal our intentions up to the very last moment. Until we were upon him, he had no knowledge of the directions from which we were approaching; by the time we were upon him it was too late for him to take the proper defensive steps. The first warning he had was when out of the deathly stillness our murderous barrage came roaring and screaming about his head. Never on any front has there been so tremendous a concentration of guns as we let loose on him that morning. The weight of shells and mass of explosives that we threw over him literally rolled up the landscape and pinned everything living to the ground. It passed over his trench-system like a gigantic plough, burying men and weapons, and travelled on into the distance by a pre-arranged series of leaps and bounds. The tanks, following the curtain of fire and lumbering ahead of the infantry, trampled into flatness whatever resistance the creeping barrage had spared.

While the heavens were raining brimstone and fire up front, his back-country was faring no better, for every battery position, strong-point, support-trench, cross-road, regimental headquarters and camp of which we had knowledge was kept under continual bombardment by our siege-guns and heavies. Meanwhile our cavalry of the air were flying low along his roads, by which retreat was possible, machine-gunning and bombing. It was like stopping up all the holes and smoking a wild beast out of his lair. The remnants of his Front-line garrison, who had not been pulverised by our tanks or buried by our shelling, threw away their arms and came streaming through the dawn to encounter the mercy of our bayonets. Later, those who had been taken prisoners, straggled in groups of twos and threes past our guns. They looked more like animals than men, their eyes glaring, their heads nodding, their steps tottering. Some of them walked shufflingly, like blinded men, groping for their direction. Others ran panting at a wolf-trot, as if they still felt that they were pursued by death. All of them were polluted with the unspeakable stench of carnage; behind the smoke of battle, before we saw them, we could smell them coming.

If the weather conditions favoured our infantry and tanks, they were even more favourable to ourselves. Had there been no fog, the moment we opened fire our flashes would have been spotted, our positions on the map discovered and our batteries wiped out. As it was our flashes, as seen through the fog from the enemy’s commanding height of land, must have appeared a composite blur of flame, flickering across the landscape for miles from right to left. He made a strenuous effort to bombard us, but was hopelessly inaccurate and out for range. After shelling us in a random fashion for perhaps fifteen minutes, he seemed to get wind of the disaster that had happened up front and, putting his guns out of action, drew them back. When he opened up again, his shells came slowly, as though from a great distance, and landed anywhere and everywhere, haphazard.

The dawn rose slowly, as though reluctant to look upon our handiwork. If it seemed slow to us, how much slower it must have seemed to the men whom we were slaughtering. There was no rush of golden splendour, no valiant peering of the sun above a treed horizon—only a thinly diffused pallor, shapeless and ghastly, which made the mist appear more impenetrable than ever. Day evaded us, hiding his chalky face in his hands, like a clown who had gazed on tragedy. When light came there was no laughter in its glance; it was a dead thing drifting in a stagnant emptiness. The flashes of the guns tore rents in the filmy obscurity by which we were surrounded, but they could not disperse it. Our eyes were smarting, our ears deafened, our senses astounded. The ground beneath our feet quivered as though it were the crust of a volcano. Our nerves shied at each fresh concussion, and our bodies trembled. We longed for the sky to become clear that we might learn what was happening. We had signalling parties attached to the infantry with flags and lamps. It had been arranged beforehand that we should watch various points in the captured country for their messages. If they had tried to send any back, none had been observed.

As the strafe progressed, the mist was made doubly dense by the reek of battle. The atmosphere became choking with the fumes of high explosives and the enemy, in a desperate effort to silence us, commenced to shell us with gas. We lit innumerable cigarettes to steady our nerves and carried on mechanically with our destructive work. Running from gun-platform to gun-platform, we checked up the lays of the gunners. Every few minutes the whistle sounded for a lift in the barrage, and there was a momentary pause in the crash of discharge while the angle was changed and the range lengthened.

Along the road to our left, where shells were falling, ambulances lurched and panted, leaving behind a trail of blood. Wounded Tommies staggered by, with their arms about the shoulders of wounded Huns. Meeting these derelicts who were returning, fresh companies of supporting infantry moved up, undaunted by the spectacle of a fate which they might share. At the sight of us firing they waved their caps shouting, “That’s the stuff to give ‘em. Give ‘em one for us boys. Give ‘em hell.”

At what hour it happened I cannot, say for certain; the mist was clearing, the sun was beginning to be merry and the air was streaky with lavender-tinted smoke, when between the pollarded trees of the high-road batteries of French seventy-fives appeared, gallantly trotting to the carnage. They were the first of the sacrifice batteries moving up. Shells burst to right and to left of them; one fell directly among them. It made no difference; the guns and wagons which were behind, swerving aside and round the struggling mass, passed determinedly on to meet the vaster horror which lay before them. The drivers, sitting stiffly erect as on parade, rose and fell to the movement of the horses. The gunners clung tightly to the jolting vehicles, no tremor of emotion showing on their faces. They were going into open warfare, where men die cleanly among wheat-fields. The sight was superb and filled us with envy.

We had been firing at extreme range for some time; now at last across the wire the order came to stand down. This meant that where our shells had been falling, our infantry were preparing to advance; it also meant that unless we hooked in and followed up, we should be permanently out of action.

We felt disgraced to sit there doing nothing, while crowds of those about to die streamed past us. Yes, streamed past us; they came in droves, these young lads with their keen, bronzed faces. They came singing and twirling their caps on their bayonets, as if fear were an emotion unknown to their hearts. They came brushing through the wheat, following the tracks the tanks had made; they came cheering up the ravines and laughing along the high-road. They came carrying rifles, machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs—all the filthy inventions war has brought to perfection, whereby one man may torture another. They stuck wild-flowers in their tunics, as if off on a holiday. They never once acknowledged by word or gesture that, life might hold for them no more to-morrows. Brave hearts! And always as they passed, seeing us sitting beside our silent guns with our still more silent faces, they would throw back gay taunts about meeting us in Germany. We could not taunt back; we felt ourselves a farce. In our minds we saw the French sacrifice batteries going at the gallop into action, “Halt, action front.” popping off their rounds, hooking in again, and going on and on forever. Why had we been forced to march so far if, now that we were here, they did not intend to use us? They’d shown precious little consideration up to now; and now, when the battle was raging and we were needed and ought not to be spared, they were willing to spare us. Death didn’t in the least matter, if only we could earn our share in the glory.

Our little Major was fuming, mutinous and twitching with impatience, when Heming rode up and saluted, bringing the news that he had the teams, wagons and limbers halted behind the orchard. In a trice the Major was on the ‘phone, pleading for permission to breeze off with us into the blue and take a chance. His request was curtly refused; our division of artillery was to stay where it was and to hold the line in depth, in case the infantry was driven back by the Huns.

Major Charlie Wraith kicked the ‘phone over in his anger. He said a good many things which could quite easily have earned him a court-martial. Hold the line in depth, indeed—an old woman’s precaution! This was a fine time to be playing safe, when our infantry were out there, forging miles ahead without guns to protect them. If they got beaten back, whose fault would that be with no artillery to support them? It was the old story of the staff-people losing the battle for us. If victory were turned into defeat, the way it was at Cambrai, we should have our red-tabs to thank for it. It was about half-an-hour after this disappointment that belated word came through that the enemy’s resistance was stiffening and an attack was pending. One section from each battery had to go forward under two junior officers. Ours was ordered to report to the nth Battalion and to act under the direction of the infantry colonel. Its job was to follow within sight of the attack and to come into action in the open, if necessary, for the purpose of knocking out machine-gun nests or any other obstacles which were holding up the advance.

The Major turned to me. “You will take your section, and Tubby Grain will go with you.” As he walked away his throat thickened with something very like a sob. “By God, I’d revert to a one-pip artist and I’d give the very shirt off my back to see what you lads are going to see this morning.”

III

WE started off at 9 A. m. feeling like a pair of generals, Tubby and I with our brace of eighteen-pounders, our ammunition-wagons and our men. We were setting out practically as free-lances, to discover our own chances of glory. The only senior officer to whom we had to report was the battalion-colonel; there was no one in the rear with whom we had to keep in touch, who would have the power to hold us back. How much fighting we would see before dusk fell depended entirely upon our own initiative. We intended to see a lot.

We had been given maps, which would carry us about fifteen miles into what had been the enemy’s country. We had been given rations to last one meal for the men and horses, the usual twenty-four hours’ allowance for the battery not having arrived when we made our start. The Major promised to follow us up with provisions later, if that were possible; if it were not, we would have to forage for ourselves. In view of the extremely meagre breakfast we had had, this shortness of supplies was the one small cloud on our otherwise bright horizon. The last sight we had as we pulled out on our journey was the tragically covetous faces of the companions from whom we were parting. “Goodbye, old things,” they shouted. “Win a V. C. apiece. If you don’t, you’re not worth your salt.”

The road down to Domart was by this time heavily crowded with transport moving in both directions. The traffic moving forward consisted for the most part of tanks and lorries, carrying up infantry and ammunition. The returning traffic was made up almost solely of prisoners, walking wounded and motor-transport bringing bark our casualties. At first it was necessary to proceed at the walk in a crawling procession, which often halted. As Tubby rode beside me at the head of our column, we planned our individual campaign together. We arranged that I would lead the guns, while he rode ahead with mounted signallers and sent me back my targets. We weren’t going to miss a trick; we were going to take everything. Wherever there was a machine-gun to be knocked out, we’d be there to do it.

Through the stench and reek of battle the sun was shining valiantly. With the melting of the fog, our sense of tension had vanished. We felt tremendously sporting, as though we were riding out to a day of hunting. To keep our thoughts from growing serious, we made up poker hands out of the Army numbers on the ambulances that we passed.

Presently Tubby said, “Did you ever think that the thing might happen to you that has happened to those chaps?”

I followed his glance and saw that he was looking at three of our infantry sprawled out by the roadside; they had evidently all three been caught by the one shell. I nodded. “Oh yes, I’ve thought of that. I expect we all have.”

“But I don’t mean simply thinking of it,” he insisted. “What I mean is have you ever known in your bones that you weren’t going to last—that you were going to look exactly as those chaps look before the war is ended?”

“None of us knows that,” I said shortly, “and to believe that you know it is morbid.”

The worst thing that can happen to a man at the Front is for him to get the premonition that he is going to be killed. Whether it is that this feeling really is a warning or that the imagining that he has been forewarned attracts the thing that kids him, it is impossible to tell; it is, however, a fart that the belief seems to destroy a man’s magic immunity and one usually hears of his death within a short time of his making such a confession.

“I’m not morbid.” Tubby spoke quite wholesomely. “I’m not going queer, the way some chaps do, and I’m not afraid. I’m not asking you to be sorry for me, and I’m not pitying myself. If I were given the choice I’d sooner go west out here, doing something average decent, than drag on into peace times and disappoint myself. And I should disappoint myself; you know that.”

“Don’t, worry yourself, old son,” I replied cheerfully; “you’re not the only one. We shall all disappoint ourselves.”

He nodded. “Yes, every man disappoints himself, but not all along the line, the way I should, because of one wrong act.... I was only a kid when I crossed from Canada and I was horribly lonely and... I don’t suppose this is in the least interesting to you; I’ll put it briefly and then we’ll talk of something else. There was a girl and she seemed kind—not at all the sort of girl with whom I could be happy. I didn’t marry her and since I’ve been out here...”

He didn’t finish his sentence.

“She’s been blackmailing you?” I asked. “A lot of that’s done.”

He stared me honestly between the eyes. “Worse than that. It’s been hell. She writes me there’s another coming.”

Without giving me a chance to reply, he whirled his horse about and went away at a trot to the rear of the column.

Poor little Tubby! What a lot it must have cost him to be always cheerful and smiling. I understood now why he had gambled so heavily and, however much he won, had always remained in debt. What a nightmare his experience of war must have been to him, continually facing up to death with the knowledge that every time he came back alive the bill for the old sin would once more be presented. His case can be multiplied by thousands.

From the start of the war there have been girls who have made a trade of preying on the consciences of men who are risking their all in the trenches. Half the time their trump-card, that there is a child, is no more than a mean lie by means of which to extract money. In the light of this little glimpse of pitiful biography, the world to which we had said good-bye seemed full of treacherous traps to betray our manhood; this thing which we were now doing, despite its terrible cruelty, was clean and straight and redemptive. You rode into action with the sun shining to do one strong thing and, if need be, to die when your courage was at its highest. There wasn’t much to regret about that. It was easy to be good when to be brave was all that was required.

We had come down to Demart, the little village on the edge of No-Man’s Land, from which the offensive had started. The houses were bent and twisted. Their roofs were gone and their walls gaped with ugly holes where shells had torn through them. Of those which still stood, there was scarcely one which had not had a side taken out. Some of them were in flames; others had caved in and sprawled black and smouldering.. The ruins were filled with poisonous odours, gas, blood, decay, the fumes of explosives. Yet one noted the heroism of the little gardens which had somehow contrived to outlive this hell. Trees were dead and stood limply with their arms blown off or hanging laboriously at their sides by a shred; but flowers still smiled and lifted up their faces. All along the streets, outside improvised dressing-stations, our wounded lay on stretchers. There was no moaning—no giving way to pity. However terrible their wounds, they rested there in the sun with the blood drying on their cheeks, perfectly motionless and apparently happy that for a time their fighting days were ended. They were mostly blue and gray-eyed men, simple and childish looking in their helplessness. The stretcher-bearers were Hun prisoners, depressed fellows, who perspired freely beneath their enormous steel helmets and the bulky haversacks which they carried on their shoulders. They plodded to and fro like dumb animals, docile, obedient and eager to ingratiate themselves. One wondered why at dawn we should have attempted to kill each other, when a few hours later we could get along so comfortably.

On the far side of the village we began to climb the heavily entrenched slope, which the enemy had held that morning. Nothing of his trench-system was left. The shell-holes were nearly all fresh and stretched lip to lip as far as Dodo Wood, proving the accuracy and intensity of our barrage. However many men had perished, hardly a trace of them was left; they had been buried by the unseen thing that had murdered them.

At the edge of Dodo Wood a mounted man met us, bringing a message that the battalion we were supporting would probably attack at noon, and appointing as our place of rendezvous a deep ravine several miles ahead. We had lost so much time through halts in the traffic that it was already very nearly eleven. If we were to keep our appointment, our only chance was to strike off to the left across country and risk being still further delayed by wire entanglements and shell-holes. We picked up the track of one of our tanks and followed it round the edge of a high plateau.

It was curious to note how very slightly the plateau was fortified. The enemy must have been hugely confident of his ability to hold that ground. Here and there he had established strong-points, which our tanks had discovered and stamped fiat; but of trenches there were hardly any. One saw extraordinarily few dead and none at all of our own fellows. It was obvious that the enemy had not tried to make a stand; the moment his Front-line had been overwhelmed all the forces which were behind him had broken and fled, allowing our chaps to romp home. It was as unlike a modern battlefield as you could well imagine. The sun shone and larks sang overhead. Through the trampled wheat every now and then a hare scampered; save ourselves nothing human was in sight, living or dead. The armies of pursuers and pursued had slogged their way forward and vanished into the blue distance that lay ahead.

We came down by a gradual decline to the ravine which had been named as our rendezvous. It was an angry looking place, with steep grassy slopes rising up precipitously on either side and no possible means of escape, when once it had been entered, except by the exits at either end. The ravine, like the plateau, was empty and silent—nothing spoke, nothing stirred Unlike the plateau it was not merry with wind and sunshine; it was sinister, shadowy, and held a hint of menace. No one was there to meet us; so while Tubby rode on to find the infantry headquarters, I left the section to rest, while I reconnoitred a village about a quarter of a mile distant for a place at which to water the horses. One had to go cautiously in investigating country so recently captured, as there were quite likely to be pockets of Huns left behind, who had been overlooked in the rapidity of the advance. There was also this additional reason for caution, that in a moving battle it was impossible to tell where our Front-line was at any particular moment. It would be quite easy to go too far and find oneself in the hands of the enemy.

When I entered the village I found that it was as dead as Sodom. It stank like an open sewer. Into its streets mattresses, broken furniture, every kind of refuse, had been cast. It had evidently only recently been vacated by the enemy, for the signs of his going were everywhere. He must have surrendered it without firing a shot, for the only dead were his own soldiers, who had been killed by our bombardment, and one civilian woman with a little fair-haired child in her arms. I tied up my horse and with my groom entered several of the houses, thinking that we might find food to help us eke out our rations. The Hun, with a methodical orderliness which almost called for admiration, had anticipated our necessity and, even in the panic of his departure, had not left so much as a loaf of bread. Whatever he could not carry off he had polluted and rendered useless. The only food we found was in a Quartermaster’s store, where the Quartermaster, a man of immense proportions, sat huddled in a chair with a huge skull-wound in his forehead, contemplating a meal which he would never finish, over which the flies hummed a requiem.

We examined the wells behind the houses; all except three of them had been filled with rubbish. We rode down to the river; here the stench we had noticed on entering grew nauseating. Everything that could render the water undrinkable had been flung into it; dead men, dead horses and indescribable offal. It was horrible, this irreverent use they had made of men who had been their comrades. While we watched the little river which yesterday had been so clean and happy, strangling between its grassy banks, we heard the jingling of swords and the sharp trit-trotting of horsemen approaching. Round a bend in the empty street came the first of our cavalry, their chargers side-stepping and prancing, and their men bending forward with an expression of smiling expectancy. They were the most gallant sight of a gallant, morning, these magnificent animals, dumb and human, who had waited throughout the war for their chance and now, like unleashed hounds, came running hot upon the scent, eager to prove their mettle. The sight of them was inspiring and instinct with intelligence; it lifted the mere toil of killing out of its monotony and into the rarer atmosphere of valour.

They drew up by the river, but only for a moment. The dainty creatures lowered their muzzles to the water, screamed and jumped back, shaking their heads. They looked like high-born ladies, fresh from the toilet, scented and washed and contemptuous of anything that would soil their perfection. There was a look of inexhaustible youth about them, as though they had been pampered with the promise of unescapable immortality.

With a hunting cry and a touch of the spur, they went bounding off through the shining weather, leaving behind a memory which set a standard.

We were to see them not so many hours later, when their glory had been accomplished.

IV

WE watered our horses out of the buckets at the few wells which had not been poisoned. It was a lengthy process, but we were all finished and ready to move off by the time Tubby returned. He brought word that it had been found impossible to pull off the attack at the hour set. The country in front of us was studded with woods and cut up by gorges, which the enemy was holding with machine-guns. Moreover, by retiring the Hun had shortened the distance for his supports to come up and was now numerically much stronger than had at first been imagined. The bulk of our artillery were too far back to be brought up, so the tasks which ought to have been undertaken by the guns were to be carried out by bombing-planes. As soon as these were ready the assault would commence. Meanwhile our instructions were to push on to the head of the ravine and remain there concealed till we were ordered forward.

“It’s going to be a pretty sporting show, if I know anything about it,” Tubby said, when we were once again on the march. “The infantry are fed up to the back-teeth with the way in which the guns have failed to keep in touch with them. And I don’t wonder—you wait till you see the kind of country they’ve got to tackle. It’s no joke being a lone man on two legs, with hundreds of field-guns pointing at you and quite as many machine-guns singing your swan-song in the woods, and all their stuff coming over and none of yours going back It’s a bit stiff to tell chaps to advance against that, as though you expected ‘em to strangle whole batteries with their naked hands. It’s up to us to show them that the eighteen-pounders aren’t quitters. We’ll take as long a chance as any of them. If some of us aren’t pushing daisies by sunset, it won’t be our fault.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watched him. He wasn’t the same man who had made that shabby little confession to me earlier in the morning. He had been weak and conscience-haunted then; now he was eager and heroic. One no longer noticed that he was fat and good-natured and ordinary; a new boldness and dignity transformed him. The test of scarlet was discovering chivalrous values in Tubby of which he himself was only partly aware.

As though he recognised my thoughts, he nodded. “I’m happy. I wouldn’t have missed to-day for worlds.”

To the south of us, like hail-stones pounding on a roof of metal, a heavy bombardment had been steadily growing in violence. It was the French putting on an attack. Probably the seventy-fives we had seen trotting into action that morning were in it. Good luck to them. As suddenly, as it had opened, it died down, and was succeeded by the crackling of rifle-fire. We pictured the true-clad tiger-men of France going over, dropping on one knee to take aim, then up and on again to slake the thirst of their bayonets.

With a kind of glee, Tubby whispered, “Our turn next.”

Up to this point the ravine had been bare of any signs of battle; now dramatically, as we rounded a spur in the hillside, we found ourselves gazing on a scene which made us catch our breath. This must have been one of the enemy’s camps, cleverly selected because of the shelter which the steeply sloping banks afforded. The open space between the banks was so narrow that it looked like an emptied river-bed. In this open space were wagons, arrested in the act of pulling out. The drivers still sat on their seats, as though overcome by sleep, with their heads sagging against their breasts and the reins held limply in their hands. The teams still hooked to the vehicles, had crumpled forward in the traces. The doors of all the little wooden shacks along the side of the ravine were wide open. Between them and the wagons men lay sprawled upon the turf, as though caught midway in the act of running. The only living things which stirred, were wounded horses of appalling leanness, which were feebly grazing and on seeing us, tottered a few steps, and then waited, as if asking us to come to their help.

Instinctively, without an order being given, the entire column behind us halted. Death is horrible enough when it looks like death; but when it mimics life, it applauds its own terror. At first we had the feeling that we had stumbled on a sleepy hollow; were we to make a noise, all these sleeping forms would waken and rise from the ground.

How had the tragedy happened? Had our guns, after having allowed them to believe themselves secure, deluged then! with shells when the dawn was breaking? Or had our bombing-planes discovered them at the moment when they were escaping? However they had died, it was easy to reconstruct the scene’s mercilessness and agony. In contemplating it, we felt a momentary shame. The cowardice of war is forever treading hard on the heels of its valour. These men had had no chance to defend themselves. They had not seen the men by whom they were murdered. They had been roused from sleep by a commotion, to find death raining on them from the air.

As we renewed our advance, we discovered that not all of the men were dead. Some looked up with dimming eyes as we passed. They neither approved nor condemned us. They were beyond all that. We had neither the time nor the materials to help them. The shell-dressing, which we each carried, we might need for ourselves before the day was out. We had not dared to fill our water-bottles at the wells in the village; so our supplies were only what we had brought with us, and they were fast getting exhausted.

When we came to the head of the ravine, we were glad that we had not given water to the enemy, for there we found our own wounded scattered through the grass. They were too far forward for the stretcher-bearers to reach them for many hours yet. There was no one with the means or time to spend upon them; we were all fighting-men, under orders to press on at any moment. Nevertheless our gunners slipped down from the limbers and went among them, pouring the last of their water between their parching lips. At the sight of their suffering an illogical anger seized us against the brutes who had done this to men who were ours. We did not reason that we also were trying to wound and kill; we only felt a blazing indignation that those boys, who had passed through our guns cheering so gallantly in the early morning, should lie so silent now. After this, when an enemy asked for water, we turned from him in contempt; whatever drops we had to spare were for our friends. Mounted and eager to go forward, we sat pitilessly among the dying enemy.

We were there not to show mercy, but to avenge.

The sun grew dark while we waited; then rapidly the rain descended. We caught it in our cupped hands and on our tongues as it dripped from the edge of our steel helmets. The wounded in the grass lay back with their blackened lips wide apart, sucking in the moisture which the heavens, indifferently impartial, allowed to fall on both enemies and friends.

Tubby and his signallers had again gone forward to make connections with the infantry. I had arranged with him that we would follow in close support the moment he sent back word that the advance had commenced. By the number of planes that were in the air we knew that, the moment was at hand.

I glanced back at my men, trying to estimate how they had been affected by the scenes which they had already witnessed. In trench-warfare the gunners and drivers rarely see a battlefield until long after the wounded have been collected and carried back They never see their own infantry in the act of attacking, and they never see the bursting of their own shells. In a few minutes all these new experiences were to be theirs. There were no signs of trepidation on their faces—only an expression of stern and happy elation.——On the top of the bank one of Tubby’s mounted signallers appeared, waving his flag. I gave the order to “Walk, March,” then, to trot, and we were off.

For the first half mile we could see nothing very unusual. In front of us and on every side, climbing a gentle slope to the sky-line, was a vast wheatfield scarcely trampled. Here and there we saw a fallen man, who seemed only to be taking his rest. As far as evidences of battle were concerned, we might have been out on manoeuvres. As we neared the sky-line, I halted the guns and rode forward with my signallers. Over the crest a very different sight presented itself. The wheatfield ended and a splendid stretch of country, green and cool, resembling a parkland, commenced. Floating like islands in the greenness were dense clumps of trees. On the farthest edge of the plain were deep ravines, church spires and the roofs of houses. The atmosphere and barriers of woods, above which were washed clean by rain and made golden by the afternoon sunshine, was so clear that one’s eye-sight carried for miles and picked out each isolated movement. In the foreground our infantry wandered in apparently leisurely fashion, going forward in little groups of from five to ten. Every now and then a shell would burst near them or the turf would fly up in spurts of dust where a machine-gun had been brought to bear on them. Then they would scatter, throwing themselves flat. Presently some of them would rise and wander on again; those who did not rise would roll over once or twice, as a man does when he settles himself in bed, and then, having found his comfort, lies motionless. The thing was so quickly done that, for the beholder, it was robbed of its terror.

In front of the infantry the cavalry were in action. They pricked in and out the clumps of trees, not galloping or even trotting, but unhurriedly, as if out for an afternoon’s pleasure. The sun shone on their drawn blades and, over the green distance, at intervals their trumpets sounded.

Ahead of the cavalry the tanks nosed round the edges of the woods, dragging their bellies along the ground like satiated dragons. Now and then they spat fire and were lost to sight in undergrowth and deep shadows: usually when they re-appeared, there were little dots of smoke-gray pigmies fleeing calamitously before them. Along the ridge on the far horizon a road ran, which was black with escaping ants. Out of the ravines and gorges, leading up to the read, more panic-stricken ants swarmed tumultuously. Above them, darting and swooping like swallows after gnats, flew our bombing-planes and scouts It was all very sylvan and picturesque—more like a pageant which had been rehearsed and staged than the most dramatic happening in a war which had excelled all other wars in drama.

Half a mile away a flag began to wave: I read the signal and turned back to lead my guns into action. As we came out of the wheatfield at the gallop a general tried to stop us, shouting questions as to where we were going. We simply pointed ahead and went by him without slackening our pace. We downed trail behind a hedge and commenced firing over open sights; our target was the enemy transport retreating along the ridge. As our shrapnel began to burst in little puffs of smoke above the heads of an enemy already mad with terror, the wildest confusion resulted. Lorries were ditched. Batteries became entangled. Horses stampeded through the crowds of flying men, knocking them down and grinding their bodies beneath the wheels of the vehicles.

The enthusiasm of our gunners rose to fever-pitch when for the first time they could see the havoc which their shells were working. They became careless of their own safety and indifferent to death, if only we could push the Boche further back and make the day completely victorious. The same self-forgetfulness was seen on every hand. Out there in that green picture-world, the cavalry were pushing impetuously far ahead. They were so impatient to get forward that, when they were held up by machine-gun nests, they would not wait for the other arms to come up, but were charging the storm of lead with their naked steel and riding to almost certain annihilation. V. C.s were being won under our eyes by men whose heroism would not even be recorded. And no one cared—no one coveted glory for himself. We were fanatics, lifted far above self-seeking. It was the game that counted. Dust we were and to dust we would return; but the triumph of this day would live forever.

Distracting us from the white intensity of our effort we heard the droning of an engine and saw a shadow settling down; above our heads an aeroplane was hovering so low that we could see the moving lips of the pilot. A message, attached to yellow streamers, came drifting down. When the pilot was sure that we had received it, he again flew off up front. The message gave us the map-location of a machine-gun in action, which we were asked to do our best to knock out. Soon Tubby was again seen frantically signalling. He was telling us that the enemy, while undoubtedly in full retreat, was leaving behind him picked suicide-troops to hold machine-gun nests and strong-points. These people were lying doggo till our tanks had gone past them and were then resurrecting themselves and mowing down our men. We limbered up and once more went forward, the signallers and myself going in advance, the guns and ammunition-wagons strung out at safe intervals behind us.

We came across the parkland to a deep cutting, which was the entrance to a gorge. There was nothing to warn one that the cutting was there until the moment before he stood gazing down into it. The hollow between the two banks was full of dead cavalry. Some of the horses were sitting up on their haunches like dogs, swaying their heads slowly from side to side. One by one they would struggle to rise, only to sink back in despair. The riders lay beside their mounts, with their sword-arms flung wide and the sunlight flickering along their blades. From the semi-circle in which they were spread out, one judged that they had made their charge fan-wise, concentrating as they neared the object of their attack. One man out of so many had reached his objective; he had ridden down the Hun machine-gunner, burying the gun beneath the body of his horse and sabring the gunner as he fell.

And these were the magnificent exponents of glory whom I had seen in their pride that morning, prancing through the polluted village so capriciously that their feet seemed to spurn the ground. They had done their bit and by their sacrifice had brought us one step nearer to victory. It was heroic and magnanimous; but, when I remembered the beauty of their vigour as they bounded to the music of their hunting-calls, I could not believe that any gain was worth their anguish. The horrible unfairness of war was all that I could visualize?—that one man behind a machine-gun should be able to transmute so much loveliness into corruption in a handful of seconds. And then came another thought—the desire for revenge.

There was the sound of heavy firing further up the gorge. Tubby came riding back; his right arm was hanging loosely and a bullet had seared his forehead. His face was tense.. The little beast he rode was flecked with blood and wildly excited. He broke into a broad grin at catching sight of me. “By the Lord Harry, we’ve got our chance,” he panted. “My arm! No, it’s nothing—broken I guess.... There’s a place up here just behind a bend; If we can sneak a gun in quickly, we can blow the stuffing out of them. We’ll be on to them before they know we’re there. It’s a regular nest, four or five of ‘em spurting away like blazes. They’ve nailed our chaps so that they can’t budge. But if we look lively, it’s a cinch; we’ve got them cold.”

Following him cautiously, we came to the bend he had mentioned Twenty yards short, we unhooked and ran the gun up by hand. Had we driven straight on to the position, the heads of the horses would have shown up and we should have been wiped out before we had fired our first round. As it was there was a bunch of scrub, just tall enough to hide us. Peering through the branches, we could see about five hundred yards distant a barricade constructed of timbers and sandbags, from which came vicious sprays of death. Repeated endeavors had to be made to rush it. In front and all around lay our fallen infantry, their rifles with fixed bayonets tossed aside and their fingers dug into the turf. The postures in which they had collapsed were violently grotesque. There was forlornness, but little dignity about their twisted attitudes.

Behind the sandbags there was a sense of watching eyes; but only the sense—one saw no movement. The men who kept guard there were brave. They hadn’t a chance in the world. They must have known that their fate was sealed from the first. They were selling their lives dearly that their comrades, fleeing behind them, might gain time. Those comrades would never know how they had died—would never be able to thank them. There would be no Iron Crosses co reward their valour—they would be lucky if they were awarded the decency of a grave. We acknowledged their courage, and we hated them.

Our first shot went plus, our second minus, our third scored a direct hit on the barricade. As the sandbags crumbled and the gray uniforms became plain, our infantry leapt from their places of hiding, charging up the gorge with their cold bayonets. We saw hands thrust up in an appeal for mercy, then nothing but khaki, stabbing and cheeking wildly. When we had hooked in and rode by five minutes later, four men in smoke-gray lay watching the sky with unblinking eyes. They were decent looking men, with flaxen hair and high complexions. They were perfectly ordinary individuals, with nothing either noticeably noble or brutal in their appearance. Had we encountered them as waiters in a London or New York restaurant, they would probably have proved entirely in keeping with their situation. By the accident of war they had been called upon to perform a deed quite as desperate as that of the Roman Horatius, who kept the bridge against unnumbered foes. The gorge was one of the keys to the great plain across which the Huns were retiring. These four men, single-handed, with no hope of saving their own lives, had held up our advance for half an hour against repeated infantry and cavalry charges, accounting for fully twenty times their own number in casualties. It was an act of superb sacrifice, which could only have been inspired by the highest sense of duty and patriotism. Had we met them in fable, we should have done them homage; meeting them where we did, we clubbed them like rats escaping from a cage. Even now that they were dead we detested them.

At the top of the gorge we struck a level stretch of country, which appeared to be surrounded by a solid belt of forest; but from the map we learnt that the forest was actually made up of separate woods between which passed channels of sward. Hidden in these separate woods were towns and villages, the spires of whose churches peeped above the trees and speared the horizon. Across the plain ran a net-work of white roads, some of which were mere tracks trampled out of the chalk by military traffic, others of which dated back to the days before the coming of the Germans. The main road was the one which we had shelled from our first position. It was littered with men, horses, broken limbers, guns and abandoned transport. A hospital-tent stood at a road-juncture with the Red Cross flag still flying. Whatever it had been used for, it had been stripped naked—not a cot or a bandage had been left. We cast our eyes across the green level for miles; there were all the signs of recent frenzy, but nothing stirred. It was uncanny, this sudden disappearance of men and armaments. There was fighting behind us—we could hear that. There was fighting to the right and left; but before us only the silence. We began to suspect that we had pressed on too hurriedly and were in front of our own attack. This suspicion was strengthened when one of our own batteries, far in the rear, opened fire on us, mistaking us for the enemy. To avoid their shells, we clapped spurs to our horses and went forward for yet another mile at the gallop. Then we halted behind a cutting to consider matters.

Our position was trying. We were utterly exhausted and only upheld by the excitement. We had food for neither horses nor men. The water in the men’s bottles had been expended on the wounded: the horses had had nothing to drink since noon. There was very little chance of the Major’s keeping his promise and sending us up our rations; the battery must have moved by now and neither they nor we had any knowledge as to each other’s whereabouts. To add to our complications Tubby’s arm proved to have been badly smashed by a machine-gun bullet and, though he would not own it, he was suffering intensely. The light was beginning to fail and within two hours darkness would have settled. It was absolutely essential that we should find food and water, and discover what was the military situation. If we were actually in front of our attack, then it was evident that our people-had lost touch with the enemy; in which case, under the cover of night, the enemy was likely to return. If he did, we and our outfit would be killed or captured.

Tubby refused to stay with the guns and rest, so we started out in separate directions to reconnoitre. Tubby went mounted on account of his arm being in a sling; I went on foot, since thus I should afford a smaller target. Throughout the day, as our difficulties and exhaustion had increased, he had grown gayer and more reckless. He had treated his broken arm as nothing; in the presence of his gallant high spirits none of us had dared to recognise hardship. As he rode away he flung back his old jest, “How’s your father?” Several of the men, not to be outdone in this game of brave pretence, shouted after him, “He’s all right, sir. Till the war ends he’s got his baggy pants on.”

My direction took me over to a long line of woods on the right, from which came the spiteful sound of rifles firing in volleys. The sun had begun to set; as I glanced across the plain I could see Tubby, trotting far out into a sea of shadows and greenness. I felt misgivings for his safety; we had no information as to what lay ahead. Presently I met an infantryman with a bandaged forehead, who confirmed my doubts. He told me that he and fourteen others had pressed on, keeping the enemy in sight and supposing that the rest of the advance was following. The enemy had made a stand; it was then they had discovered that they were out of touch and unsupported. “My mates,” he said, “I don’t know whether they’re alive or dead. They were holding out when I left; they sent me back for help. Fritzie was getting ready to counter-attack. He may be coming any moment.” He looked back apprehensively and, without waiting to say more, staggered on. I reached and entered my wood.

Bullets were tearing through the leaves and branches, going by with the hiss of serpents. Beneath the shadow of the trees I found stables and a camp; but the Huns, before they had cleared out, had loaded up every particle of food and forage. Nothing but the bare buildings were left. Following a track, I came to water-troughs, but it would be impossible to lead our horses down to them while the rifle-fire lasted. On the farther edge of the wood I came across our infantry.

They were lying flat on their stomachs and crawling from point to point on their hands and knees, sniping at the enemy. They were very few in numbers, over fifty per cent of their force having fallen during the day. By their vigilance and the rapidity of their fire they were trying to create the impression that they were stronger than they were. I found their colonel. He was not certain, but believed they were the Front-line. The tanks and the cavalry had disappeared entirely. They might be still pursuing; they might have been captured; they all might have become casualties. At any rate, the line of these woods was the front that he intended to maintain throughout the night; so I arranged to run a telephone wire up to him and to stand to throughout the hours of darkness in case of a surprise attack. One definite piece of information I gleaned from him—that his left flank was “up in the air.” Any time that the enemy discovered the fact, he could get round behind this handful of men; in the direction which Tubby had taken there was nothing between himself and the enemy.

Hurrying back through the wood I found, when I came out on the farther side, that my section had followed me. While I had been gone, the sergeants had also learnt that nothing stood between themselves and the Hun. When I asked them whether they had news of Mr. Grain they shook their heads; the last they had seen of him was an insignificant dot dwindling into the distant landscape. They had left two mounted men in the cutting to guide him on to us if he returned.

The horses were “all in” by this time from lack of water, so there was nothing for it but for some of us to take a chance and go down to the trough with buckets. I lost two of my best drivers there.

We had one piece of luck to console us. In my absence the men had run across some of our fallen cavalry and had collected sufficient oats from their feed-bags to go the rounds and sufficient rations from the haversacks of the dead to last the men.

Just as we had finished watering and feeding, we saw a tank lumbering homewards round the point of the wood through the dusk. I galloped out to meet it. The officer in charge halted and put his head out on seeing me approaching.

“Hulloa, old bean,” he laughed, “what are you doing up here all on your wild lone? You know there’s nobody in front.”

I explained matters and asked if he had seen anyone like Tubby.

“A little fat chap with his arm in a sling?” he asked. “Yes, I saw him. I shouted to him and tried to stop him, but all he did was to ask me a silly question about my father. I don’t think he was all there. He rode on towards the village from which I was escaping. It was empty when first I entered, so I waddled about for half an hour mucking things up. By that time the Huns had found out that we weren’t following and they were coming back. So I skedaddled. If I were you I wouldn’t go and look for your friend—Hulloa, what’s that? You’d better duck!”

That was a burst of bullets, coming from a clump of trees to the left. The chap was right; the enemy was sneaking back.

I wheeled the guns about and went off at the trot to a little copse in which I had arranged with the infantry colonel to take up my position for the night. It was pitchy black when we arrived; the place stank of blood. It was already occupied by sleeping men; they did not speak to us, but we tripped over them in the darkness and felt them beside us when we lay down.

Having unlimbered our guns and got them on for line, we ran a wire up front to the colonel so as to keep in touch and open fire on the second if required. We divided our men into watches; they were wearied out, for it was many nights since they had slept. They lay down with all their equipment on, so as to lose no time in the event of an alarm. The girths of the saddles were loosened, but none of the harness was removed from the horses’ backs. If the enemy broke through, the first news we were likely to get would be when they were upon us. Our lives and those of the infantry might depend upon our promptitude of action.

It was just before dawn that Tubby’s horse rejoined us riderless. There was blood on the saddle and the reins were broken as though the little beast had wrenched itself free by jumping back from the thing to which it had been tied. It was a broncho trick it had, which was well known to all the battery. When in our lines it was never fastened, but allowed to stand. The broken lines proved that it had been in strangers’ hands; Tubby would never have tied it. When the men asked it what had happened to its master, it looked at them with quivering nostrils and frightened eyes and then, turning its intelligent head, gazed back ever the way that it had come.

With the first of the daylight we discovered why it was that the men with whom we had shared the wood had been so very silent—why they had not spoken when we had tripped over them, or been disturbed when we had lain down beside them.

Sticking out of the pocket of one of them was a London daily of fairly recent date. I picked it up in mere curiosity and glanced through its pages. Then suddenly, for fear anyone should want to borrow it, I hid it; away in my tunic. It contained an extraordinary story, affecting the honour of a man I loved well—an account of the police-court proceedings in the case of Mrs. Percy Dragott.

An odd way to get news of the secrets of a pal, with whom you eat and risk your life daily—by rifling the pocket of a stranger, whom you had thought to be sleeping and had discovered to be dead!

V

THE rest of the battery caught us up this morning in our copse which we tenant with the dead. We are resting to-day, holding the line in depth, while the troops who were behind us yesterday, have passed through us and beyond. Far out in the blue we can catch the rapid thud of their drum-fire. With them it is, as it was with us yesterday, thirst, heroism, cruelty, magnanimity mingling in an ecstatic trance, while the August woods drip scarlet with men’s triumphant carelessness of dying. From here the orchestra of murder has passed, leaving as record of its passage the brief putrescence of the earthly part of sacrifice guarded by the shadowy sunlit silence.

Is it worth it? What does it all mean, this furious display of homicidal passion? It’s easy for the armchair crusaders who sit at home to prate about the glory of war. One glimpse at the landscape on which I gaze would bruise their lips with reality and wash the mountebank valour with tears from their eyes. We who have seen war for what it is, will always speak of it as the filthiest of jobs, fit only for human orang-outangs or maniacs. A woman risks her life that a man may be born. It takes twenty-five long years of love to build his mind and spirit into manliness. What glory can there be in tearing the carefully planned strength of nations barbarously limb from limb in a second? This war may have been unavoidable, but our political and journalistic prophets have no right to dress it up to appear what it is not—war is an unclean orgy of jungle-cannibals revelling in the obscenity of entrails and blood. Half the time it is not even brave; there is nothing brave in smothering a front-line with shells which are fired from miles behind the danger; there is nothing brave in overwhelming a demoralized enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

Yesterday we slaughtered men like vermin and with as little thought. We were urged on by an impelling rage, which made us almost divine in our destroying eloquence. What we did was right; the feeling I have to-day is only the reaction of disgust. That I should be able to feel disgust and yet go on fighting, proves more than anything else the righteousness of our cause.

We shall win the war for freedom, but at what, a cost! If the British, who have already perished, were to march twenty abreast from sunrise to sunset, it would take them ten days to pass a given point. It would take the French eleven days, the Russians five weeks, the whole of the Allied dead two and a half months, and the skeletons of the fallen enemy six weeks more. If all the armies of men of whatever nations who have died fighting since August, 1914, were to march in review, twenty abreast, before the grand-stand of the living, it would take them four months to pass. This would not include the old men, women and children who have perished from disease and privation, from military brutalities, from the sinking of ships and the haphazard cruelties of shell-fire and bombs. Yet despite the tremendous thought of such a procession, the actual pathos of one man smashed in battle is more appalling.

Comparatively few people have seen that sight. If they had, the war would end tomorrow. The generals who plan our battles rarely see it; they are too far back. The war-correspondents who describe our battles do not see it; they collect their information second-hand at canteens, dressing-stations and Army Headquarters. Our civilians only read the correspondents’ descriptions. So it goes—the mere hands through which the news passes and the further back it travels, the more the vileness of the happening becomes misted over with lies and transmuted into something magnificent. Each informant, in the proportion that he is removed from the terror, is the more anxious to pose as an heroic eye-witness. The only eye-witnesses are the men who do the dying, and they do not feel themselves to be heroes. They are under fire on account of the accidents of medical fitness, youth and a properly developed sense of duty. They are people of inferior rank and of no social or military consequence. They are not literary, oratorical, articulate. Because they die, the world never learns what war is like. Even though they bear charmed lives and survive, they are muzzled by Army orders and the vigilance of the censor. Not a whimper of the truth escapes. In hospital or on leave they are eager to forget; moreover, they quickly learn that the Sir Galahad misconceptions of civilians make their facts sound like the whimperings of cowards. So they strike the attitude which is required of them, pretending that there’s a sporting fascination about blowing and being blown into atoms.

I glance up from my writing. Wherever my eyes wander they dwell on some shocking detail of defiled beauty or tattered flesh. From the shadow of trees and through parted grass, faces which yesterday were vivacious with health, stare vacantly at me growing green and yellow. They are more still than the sleepers of a Rip Van Winkle land. Their shoulders are bunched, their knees drawn up, their hands clenched. Beside them little piles of paper flutter or dance away like white butterflies drifted through the sunshine. The wind stoops over them like an invisible rag-picker, curiously fingering the scattered pages.

Early this morning some of the troops who passed through us to the fight, ransacked the pockets of their fallen comrades. The objects of their search were mainly matches and cigarettes, but in some cases they exchanged boots and puttees. I suppose they argued that you cannot rob a man who is dead; he has no further use for his possessions. Sooner or later some one is bound to rob him; that being the case, there is no one who can do it with less offence than men who are shortly to die themselves. Nevertheless it’s a strange and brutal logic, for these very men may themselves be equally stark and incapable of resentment by sundown. Moreover, they showed an unnecessary callousness in their borrowing, when they scattered letters from sweethearts, wives and mothers to the four winds of heaven. In peace-times we keep the memory of our friends alive with flowers; in war, the moment the breath has left a comrade’s body he ceases to be human and becomes the victim of disrespect.

What a chamber of horrors one day’s fighting has made of these woods! No human ingenuity can compete with the diabolical inventiveness of death. No two postures are alike in this array of corpses; each one strikes a different note of agony. Why should we have come so far, from Canada, Australia and the wideness of the world, to create this French landscape into such a slaughter-house? Why above all things, should we still be willing to hand over our bodies to add one touch more to its martyred picturesqueness? We must be drunk with visions so to carve out of living flesh the image of our despotic idealism. Saints or devils, whichever we are, war has made us more than men.

My mind is full of thoughts of Tubby. He has not returned. There is no news of him. He will not return now. He may be a prisoner. He may be lying up forward wounded. He may be sprawled on the ground, like one of these pitiful waxworks by which I am surrounded. Probably we shall never know his fate. Why did he come to the war? What hidden spark of divinity kindled his spirit to a flame? He never let us inspect anything but the earthy side of his nature. His faults, had he lived to be middle-aged, would probably have hardened into vices. He was typical of us—an ordinary, pleasant chap, a trifle specked with blackguardism, impatient of ideals and yet following in their tracks. His worst weakness was his unbalanced attitude towards women; his kindest quality that he was invariably good-tempered and generous. If he realised the possession of a soul, he never talked about it. His last recorded utterance, according to the tank-officer, was an undignified catch-phrase of the streets, “How’s your father?” Yet, incredible, lovable man, he rode out wounded to die for others as simply as if he had hailed from Nazareth.

We know nothing of each other, we men who eat and sleep, and suffer, and die together. How little we know was illustrated for me by what I learnt from that newspaper, picked out of a dead man’s pocket this morning.

The first I heard of a woman in Heming’s life was that day on the Somme when, thinking he was about to die, he asked me to write to Mrs. Percy Dragott. From time to time after that I saw her portrait in the English illustrated weeklies and gathered that she was playing with war work, taking part in charitable theatrical performances, bazaars for the mutilated, garden-parties for the blinded, etc.,—having a thoroughly enjoyable time and acquiring a reputation for patriotic fervour. The next occasion when her name cropped up was when the Major read aloud to Heming the unconcluded account of a tragedy. In the paper which I found this morning, I read that she was on trial for murder.

Mrs. Percy Dragott, it seemed, had arrived in London with no credentials several years before the outbreak of war, bringing with her an elderly husband, to whom she had been recently married, who had just retired from an appointment in the Indian Civil Service. At first by her charity, then by her beauty and finally by her brilliancy she had won for herself a place in London society. At the end of two years her husband, having served his purpose, had died, leaving her free to take full advantage of her popularity. She was emphatically a man’s woman and had found a ready welcome wherever brains were an asset, being particularly sought after by men in public life. Her little house in Mayfair, run with extravagant taste, though no one troubled to enquire where the money came from, had become a kind of salon. The names of the men to whom she had been rumoured to be about to become engaged would take two hands to reckon; they included artists, journalists, soldiers and at least one statesman. On looking back, a fact was brought to light which had escaped notice, namely that over all the men with whom she had been associated she seemed to have spread a blight—in one way or another, after dropping her acquaintance, they had each one failed. Yet until the murder had occurred, no breath of scandal had touched her. Even now the crime would never have been discovered had not the murdered man proved to be a British secret service agent.

Colonel Barton, as he had called himself, had been introduced to her as a somewhat romantic figure. The account he had given of himself was that he had been captured at Gallipoli and had made a sensational escape from a Turkish prison-camp. For the first time she, who had earned for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London, seems to have been fired with passion. Whether she actually fell in love or had only feigned to do so because she scented danger, it was impossible to say. The man’s case was plain; he had pretended to be infatuated with her in order that he might trap her. He had evidently learnt all that he wanted to know and was on the point of exposing her to the authorities, when he was found dead in his flat.

At first his death was taken to be an accident. It seemed that he had fainted and in falling had caught himself a heavy blow on the left temple. But when the rooms were searched, it was found that they had been already ransacked. Nothing that could be traced had been removed, but the thief had been identified as a woman by an initialed handkerchief, which she had left behind her. Moreover she had failed to discover all the papers which condemned her; lying full in sight on the desk was an unsealed, unaddressed envelope, containing the complete history which would have led to her arrest. The contention of the police was that Barton had been done to death by the popular and charitable society beauty.

Upon investigation she was proved to be a British subject in the Hun employ. Her motives for having turned traitor and spy were said to have been inspired by her resentment at the injustice of her birth; she was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman of title, had been well-educated, kept always abroad in the care of strangers and had been given to understand through her father’s lawyers that the moment she tried to hold direct communication with her father’s family her income would end. How much of this Dragott knew when he married her was not certain. He was a kindly, honourable, wellborn man and had arrived at an age when men attain a wise leniency of view towards social accidents. He became extremely fond of her and brought her back to England. She saw her native country for the first time in his company, and she saw it as a spy in the pay of Germany. After her husband’s death, it was German money which had maintained the elegant extravagance of the little house in Mayfair.

Up to this point her story called more for sympathy than condemnation. If she, an Englishwoman, was England’s enemy, it was the unkindness of English laws that had made her that. The loneliness and family ostracism of her girlhood, when combined with her more than ordinary beauty of body and brilliancy of mind, had warped her nature into a bitter desire to be revenged. How much her husband or any of her subsequent suitors had guessed of her real occupation it was difficult to establish; but there was evidence which indicated that more than one of them had suspected. She herself had made the statement that long before her husband’s death she had tried to break off her relations with Berlin, but had been compelled to continue them under threats. Her war-philanthropies had not been entirely camouflage; in particular a hospital, which she had established in France, had been the attempt of an unquiet conscience to make atonement. But she had found it impossible to disentangle herself from the web of intrigue in which she was caught. Whatever she did, whether her intentions were good or bad, was converted into a means of gathering information for the enemy. She emphatically denied that she had had any accomplices; none of the men who had been in love with her had wilfully betrayed their official secrets. It was because she had not wished to involve others in her own tragedy that she had persistently refused all offers of marriage, earning for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London. Above all things she denied that she had had anything to do with Barton’s death.

From the tone of the press it was evident that, in spite of the violent hatreds of war-times, a good deal of popular sympathy was felt for her. This was no doubt partly accounted for by her reckless endeavours to save her friends at the expense of incriminating herself still further. All the indiscreet conversations and confidences which had taken place across her table were being remembered and brought into the evidence. Some of the biggest and most trusted men in public life would shortly find themselves in the witness-box. Among the small fry Heming was mentioned as one of her admirers.

I’m wondering about Heming and trying to piece the little I know of his relations with her together. I’m sure he was in love with her to the point of marrying her; I believe she was in love with him to the point of confessing why she could not consent. His proposal must have taken place between the time when he was so severely wounded at Vimy and his unexpected return to the Front this Spring. It’s since his return that he has been so changed, so that we’ve all felt in our bones that he had come back for only one reason—to die. Poor Heming, all this summer while he’s been waiting for a soldier’s death to solve life’s complications, he must have been struggling between his instinct to protect this woman and his duty to betray her. I understand now his tenderness to Suzette and her child, who is also illegitimate.

If Heming does not know this latest development, it must be kept from him. There’ll be little chance of his seeing papers so long as the offensive lasts, with its stealth and night-marches. When whatever is left of the battery marches out to rest, he may be lying quietly, like Tubby, in some deserted wood beyond all caring. Tubby’s horrid little worry was quickly forgotten—in the flash of a second.

Poor Tubby, with his cheerful grin and his, “How’s your father?”

I must speak to the Major about Heming and get him to help me to keep him in ignorance.

Just as I had finished writing this sentence I looked up to see Suzette and Heming disappearing into the wood where our horse-lines are hidden. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that she’s infatuated with him; wherever he goes, though her feet stay still, her eyes and her heart follow. She’s still a woman in her every movement, despite her Tommy’s uniform. And Heming, what are his feelings? Is he using her as a means to drug memory? Or does she restore to him a chivalrous belief that he was in danger of losing? He never commits himself and rarely speaks to her except to give orders. Queer motives urge men to become heroes. What stories we should have if every man told honestly the reasons that sent him here! One has committed a sin; another has entrusted his heart to the wrong woman. They ride out into the hell of Judgment Day laughing, and perish insolently, that in their last moments they may appear again magnificent to themselves.

VI

IT’. midnight. We’re still in the copse. We believe we are to take part in a new attack tomorrow, but have received no orders as yet.

I am squatting on the ground beneath a low tent made of Hun great-coats and sacking pinned together. On one side of me, more than half filling the tiny space, the Major lies asleep; on the other is a shaded candle and the telephone which keeps us in touch with brigade. Every quarter of an hour the brigade-signallers buzz me to make sure that the line is holding up. Every now and then I draw the flimsy patch-work of the roof nearer together lest any light should be escaping. Ever since darkness settled, the Hun planes have been bombing our back areas, getting after our horse-lines, ammunition dumps and infantry concentrations. When one of them has scored a direct hit on a dump, all the country within the radius of half a mile is flooded with a pulsating wave of red. While it lasts, no movement remains hidden from the watchers in the sky; a man stands out as distinctly as a tower. In the welter of blackness the glow of a cigarette, a match struck however furtively, the leakage of light from a bivouac, show up as significantly as beacon-fires.

The human-eagles got after us in fine style two hours ago, coming so close that we had to ride our horses bare-back into the night, pursued from the air not only by bombs but also by machine-guns.

Now all our men who are not on duty are trying to snatch what rest they can before another disturbance starts. There always is another, and a next and a next. The Hun airmen, having exhausted their supply of bombs, have flown back to replenish. They’re due to return almost any minute and will do their best again to pick up our scent. If we don’t attack to-morrow, we can’t stay here, now that we have been spotted.

I’m appallingly sleepy and am scribbling chiefly in an effort to keep my eyes from closing. They feel as if they had been filled with dust; I have to wedge my lids up with my fingers to prevent them from falling. I can well understand how sentries drop off at their posts, despite the knowledge that they are committing a shooting offence. It’s strange to reflect that in civil life no money could have persuaded us to put up with one tithe of our discomforts, let alone with our dangers super-added. If we get back to a world of sheeted beds, all former necessities will seem forever luxuries.

Earlier in the evening I told the Major about Heming. He agreed with me that we must do our best to prevent him from learning about Mrs. Dragott. The Major was quite frank in the expression of his opinion. “There are some kinds of messes you ran live down,” he said; “the results of them may make you even stronger to face life. My kind of mess is a case in point. I go home on leave, expecting to marry my girl, and find that not only has she jilted me, but that she has the cheek to compel me to save her face by attending her wedding to another chap. Of course I had a lucky escape; if that was the sort she was, life with her would have been unbearable. At the same time the experience has crippled my belief in myself and, up to a point, my faith in women generally. I’m not particular whether I come out of the war—that’s the way I feel at present. But on one thing I am determined: I’ll prove to her before I die that she backed the wrong horse and was a rotten bad guesser. I’ll take every chance and try to win every decoration. When the war ends, if I’m still above ground, I’ll succeed all I can and collar a girl a thousand times more kind than she ever dreamt of being. So I suppose instead of smashing me, she’s really helped to make me. Now with Heming it’s quite different. He may not know it, but he’s still in love with his woman. By her method of refusing him, she made herself romantic to him. She pushed him from her when she confessed she was a spy; but at the same time she roused his pity and drew him to her. By no stretch of imagination can he ever win her, neither can he ever quite lose her. He’ll be lucky if he isn’t recalled to bear witness against her; if he is, he will smudge his own honour. And as for her, if she isn’t shot, she’ll certainly get penal servitude. The most fortunate thing that could happen to him is that he should fall in action. If we can help it, he must never hear of this tragedy. We’ve a month of hard fighting ahead of us. Many of us will go west before the days grow much shorter. I hope for his sake he’s one of them. I shan’t try to prevent his going.”

“And what about Suzette?” I asked.

He returned my question, “Well, and what about her?”

“We’ve no right to have her with us,” I said. “She might get killed.”

“And if she does,” the Major took me up, “that wouldn’t be the worst calamity that could befall her. Death’s not the final tragedy we used to think it; very often it’s the new start. Her life was probably gray enough before we found her—a peasant girl, who had been used by men and would probably be used by men to the end of the chapter. What kind of a career has she ahead of her if we throw her down now? There’s nothing but devastated country behind us. If I told her tomorrow that she’d got to buzz off, where would she go or who would care what happened? No, she’s going to stay with us; and if she comes through it all, we’ll make ourselves responsible for her and take her back with us to Canada. I tell you what it is, the more I see of that girl, the more grateful I am that she’s with us. She’s restored my ideal of women.——You think I’m talking like an ass, no doubt; but from Heming down, there’s not an unmarried man in the battery who’s not more or less in love with her. No, my boy, until we’ve been found out and have received direct orders to get rid of her, Suzette stops.”

“And Bully Beef?” I asked.

“And Bully Beef,” he answered. “He can always be left behind with the transport when we’re in action. Old Dan Turpin will look after him. He considers him his own kid already.”

I’ve been sitting here thinking over this conversation, and especially over one sentence, “Death’s not the final tragedy; very often it’s the new start.” Those words really explain our indifference in the face of shell-fire and torture. We no longer fear the separation of the spirit from the body. We don’t regard the reparation as extinction; we view it with quiet curiosity and suspect that it may only mean beginning afresh. Perhaps we’re exceptional in our battery, inasmuch as there are so many who would welcome the opportunity to begin afresh. Tubby certainly must be glad of it; going on the way he was, the noble part of him would never have had a chance. This war has made so many of us aware of a nobility which we never knew we possessed. We’re a little afraid that we shall lose it, if we live through to the corpulent days of peace. We would rather go west at the moment when we are acting up to our most decent standards. It’s odd, but when threatened by death, it’s the fear of life that assails us. The dread of old age grips us by the throat; the terror of old temptations, which of late we have been too athletic in soul to gratify, confronts us. The gray, unheroic monotony of unmerited failures and unworthy successes daunts us. We dread lest when war ends, the old grasping selfishnesses may re-assert themselves. To-day we have the opportunity to go out like vikings, perishing in a storm. To live a few years longer only to shuffle off, will not be rewarding.

At this point I have to leave off. A runner has just come in bringing us word that we are to be prepared to push forward at dawn.

VII

THE Major’s opportunity to prove his girl “a rotten bad guesser” came sooner than we expected. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see Charlie Wraith with a V. C. ribbon on his breast before many days are out. He hardly fills the bill for the popular conception of a hero, with his little bandy-legs and his deathly pallor; but it’s what a chap is that counts. This is how his opportunity occurred.

It was 6 A. M. when we moved off. We had been harnessed up and ready, awaiting our final orders for two hours. When they did arrive, they came with a rush, as per usual; we were scarcely given sufficient time to complete our march before we were required to be in action. Measuring off the distance on the maps which accompanied the orders, we discovered that to be in time for the attack it would be necessary for us to travel all the way at the hard trot. The Major went on ahead of us to reconnoitre the position, leaving Heming to lead the battery. Our direction lay across the plateau from which we had been turned back by enemy fire on the day we lost Tubby. The enemy had been pushed far back now; the roads were so thronged by our own transport that we had to forsake beaten tracks and take our chances across country. There was always the danger that we might mistake landmarks which we believed we had recognised from our maps, and so lose time; there was also the risk that in the open we might be held up by uncut wire-entanglements.

It was a gorgeous morning, blue and golden, with a touch of ice in the air. Over turf and woodlands, as far as eye could search, the dew had flung a silver mesh.

The sky was almost without a cloud; tumbling through its depths, like eels in a tank, aeroplanes looped and wriggled. The landscape was one continuous chain of island-woods, each one of which had been a machine-gun fortress of the enemy. We were told that in some of them the enemy were still fighting, though they knew that they were hopelessly marooned and that our advance had swept on many miles ahead. Under the shadow of trees villages were dotted about, most of them possessing a tall spired church. From what we could see in the hurry of our passage, every human habitation had been laid level with the ground. It was impossible to believe that this destruction was the result of British shells, since our artillery had been too far behind to do the damage. It must have been the deliberate demolition of the Hun when he knew that he had to retire. In his retreat he had stolen everything that he had not destroyed. No food, furniture or live-stock were left; all the inhabitants had been carried off captive.

The position we were looking for was in the neighbourhood of a crossroads, unpropitiously marked “Death Corner” on the map. It was at the entrance to a village which our infantry were rumoured to have captured at dawn; whether they had captured it or, having captured it, had been able to hold it, we did not know for certain.

Some parts of our journey we had to go at the walk on account of the roughness of the ground, but most of the way we went at the trot. As the sun grew stronger, our horses broke into a foam of sweat. Men and animals were wildly excited. This-was soldiering as depicted by battle-artists and recruiting posters—a very different job from the tedious, wakeful misery of night-marches. All the officers and mounted N. C. O’s had picked up swords from the fallen cavalry. A good many of the men had armed themselves with revolvers which they had salvaged from the dead. We didn’t know how close we were going to get to the enemy, but we had hopes.

What struck us most forcibly, especially as we drew nearer to the thunder of the guns, was the lightness with which our line was held. One saw no supporting troops; it seemed as though we had thrown every last man into the actual fighting. We began to apprehend why we had to keep on attacking: the Hun was falling back on his reserves; if we let him halt to regain his breath he would take the offensive. Were that to happen, our retreat might prove just as precipitate as our advance.

We were riding now through the batteries which had leap-frogged us yesterday. They were firing away like mad. The air was shaken with rapid concussions. It was impossible to make oneself heard; all our commands had to be given by signals. On ahead things looked pretty hot; the ground kept spouting up in fountains of dust and flame. Increasingly the enemy retaliation was finding us out. We clapped spurs to our horses and broke into a gallop.

Out of the cloud of drifting smoke our little Major emerged, signalling to us to follow him. He led us on clear beyond the other batteries, till we were almost treading on the heels of our infantry. We had scarcely downed trail, when he gave us our aiming-point and directions, and had us tearing off four rounds a minute. I looked at my wrist-watch. Pretty work! We had arrived just in time and had got into action on the second. As our teams trotted back to our temporary wagon-lines, a hail of shells came over, wounding several of the men and horses.

There was precious little information as to what had happened or was happening. Our infantry had captured the town immediately in front of us and were preparing to go forward behind our barrage to capture the next town which lay ahead. Everybody said that we had insufficient tanks for the task and that the enemy was making a determined stand. How much of this was conjecture and how much fact, nobody could assert positively. There was a feeling of tension and anxiety. No one was quite certain what he was expected to accomplish. Our own fear was that in firing without more exact information we might be killing our own men. The Major himself determined to go forward to ascertain the true condition of affairs. While he was gone, Heming returned from the wagon-lines, bringing with him two Hun field-guns he had found, so making us into an eight-gun battery.

We had been firing for about half an hour when a mounted signaller, sent back by the Major, rode up. He reported that the attack had been only partially successful, owing to the tremendous concentration of enemy machine-guns, which lay hidden in the wheat-fields between the two towns. Another attack was to take place within the hour; it was necessary that the battery should move up in order that our support might be more immediate and effective. The signaller added that the Major was at Death Corner, in full sight of the enemy and that his groom had been killed within five minutes of his arrival there.

We hooked in and started off by a mud-track. The mud-track was strewn on either side by men and horses, newly dead. Some of them we recognised as people who had passed us while we had been in action. The enemy shells were sweeping the track for all the world as though a gigantic hose were playing down its length. Now they would spray this part of it, then lift a hundred yards and spray that. Ahead of us stretched a billowy level of wheat-fields; to the right lay Rouvroy, the town which we had captured; at right angles to the track and passing in front of Rouvroy ran a road, which was clearly indicated above the wheat by a straight line of splintered trees. The point where the track met the road was Death Corner. It looked as unhealthy a spot as one could well imagine; everything was rocking in a whirlwind of explosions. Three hundred yards short of the corner we swung off to the left and came into action. Over the short distance which separated the battery from the Major we ran in a telephone wire. From where he was and indeed from any point on the high road, the entire battle-field lay exposed and, on its furthest edge, the entrenched town of Fouquescourt which it was essential we should possess.

The Major had arranged with the infantry that, at a given signal, we would at once open at an intense rate of fire and that behind our shells the advance against the town should commence. We had been firing for, perhaps, five minutes, when we received orders from our brigade headquarters, which were well in rear of us, to stop. The Major, watching from his point of vantage, saw that all of a sudden our advancing riflemen were left unprotected. He called to to know what was the matter and at once ordered us to go on. For the next two hours we purposely let our line to brigade go down so that we might be out of touch and left unhampered to do our work.

And what a two hours those next two hours were! The Hun was putting up the fight of his life. All through the three thousand yards of wheat-fields which separated Rouvroy from Fouquescourt wire-entanglements and machine-gun nests had been constructed. You could not see them for the grain, and did not know they were there until you were upon them. In the first advance which had failed, our men had walked straight into the traps and most of their officers had been shot down. In the second, which we had come up close to support, our men had wriggled their way forward and reached Fouquescourt, only to find that they were cut off and had left the enemy in the wheat behind them. In losing time we were giving the enemy his chance. He was bringing his guns up and getting them into better positions; every hour his artillery fire was becoming better directed and growing more intense. His airmen were regaining their courage, flying in leaps and bounds like great grasshoppers just above our heads, and picking off our men with machine-gun fire. We had to keep two Lewis guns mounted on the flanks of our battery to drive them off.

Things had reached a pretty desperate pass, everyone fighting without proper information and in many cases without leadership, when suddenly, silently and unheralded, out of the woods behind us appeared a cloud of cavalry. They drew up, as if on parade, about four hundred yards to our left flank and in line with ourselves. They were instantly spotted by a Hun plane, which flew to and fro over them, dropping bombs. He was so busily engaged that he did not notice one of our chaps swooping down on him. When he did see him, there was nothing for it but to escape. Then followed a wild chase; our chap hovering like a hawk on top and driving the Hun lower and lower towards the ground. Of a sudden the Hun burst into flames and shot downwards like a torch. But before he was caught he must have signalled back the cavalry target to his gunners, for right into the midst of the waiting horsemen the shells began to fall. Their courage was superb, the courage of the horses equalling that of the men. From the distance at which we watched, it was exactly like seeing rocks flung into a pond—only the rocks were high explosives and the pond was made up of living flesh. We saw the splash of bodies tossed high into the air, the ripple of horsemen reining back, and then the patient orderly reforming of their ranks.

A trumpet sounded. At a walk, and then at a gentle trot, a hundred men rode up on to the highroad and vanished into the sea of yellow on the other side. Then a hundred more. Then a hundred more, till none but those who could not rise were left. As each little company was displayed to the enemy, the high-road was swept with bullets as with pelting hall. Riders crumpled in their saddles; horses reared themselves up, pawing at the air and toppled over backwards. The survivors paid no heed to the agony which would certainly be theirs within the next few seconds; unhurriedly, keeping cool and using their heads, they set spurs to their horses and danced away to trample the machine-guns and clear a way for the infantry, or to die in the attempt. How many of them came back we did not count, but most of them found a grave in the sea of yellow.

The man at the telephone was beckoning to me. “The Major wants you to speak with him.” he said. “Hulloa! hulloa! That you, Major?”

“Is that you, Chris?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone you can leave with the guns?”

“There’s Edwine, Sir.”

“Then come up to where I am at once.”

I handed over the battery and went forward. At Death Corner I was met by a sight which I shall not easily forget. In the middle of the crossroads the dead lay in mounds. Many of them were men whom I recognised. The place was strewn with horses. The first to catch my eyes was old Fury, the Major’s rusty charger; his hind-legs had been shot away from under him and he sat with his front-legs thrust out like poles, balancing himself and swaying his head. Pressed flat behind a tree I saw the Major, peering out across the waving corn, where the cavalry were charging death at the gallop. Crouching low and dodging the shells, I gained his place of hiding.

“Some picnic, isn’t it?” were his first words. He was as happy and excited as if he were the spectator of a gigantic football match. How he had been able to survive at Death Corner for so long was a marvel. I looked at the picnic. All I could see was men creeping back on their hands and knees, riderless horses writhing and drowning in the sea of yellow, stranded tanks, smouldering heaps marking the spots where aeroplanes had crashed incandescent as comets and, across the plain of wheat, a wall of fire where our shells were falling and columns of suffocating smoke were curling above the funeral pyres of towns.

“Some picnic, all right,” I said. The Major laughed at me out of the corner of his eyes. “It’s the real thing—open warfare, what we always wanted. See here, Chris, I’ve collected some of these infantry chaps; their officers have been nearly all wiped out. I’m going to lead them forward to clean up some of those enemy machine-gun nests. They’ve got to be cleaned up, because, they’re cutting us off from our troops who are in Fouquescourt. God knows what’s happening up there. Someone’s got to fight his way through and find out. I want you to stop here and watch for any messages I send back.”

His eye caught Fury. “I can’t leave him like that.”

At the risk of his life he dodged across the open space to where his old companion sat swaying his head forlornly. I saw him pat the velvet neck and then fumble for his revolver. He looked at the revolver and then at the horse. He came back to me slowly, “I can’t. You do it when I’m gone.”

Along the edge of the wheat the infantry were lying waiting for him; they were the stragglers and survivors of the first two attacks. As he reached them he fell on his hands and knees and crawled away, while they followed him at intervals through the golden stalks.

Had the Huns seen him at that moment, they would not have considered him an object of terror, under-sized and wizened as he was. But it was Charlie Wraith, despite his physical deficiencies, who put heart into defeated men that day and by his magnificent contempt for death forced a way into Fouquescourt to the support of troops which had become isolated. How many enemy strongholds he bombed out he alone knows, and he refuses to tell. The men whom he led cannot tell, for most of them are dead. He had always yearned to kill Germans face to face, so he must have had a time entirely satisfactory and satisfying. It wasn’t his job as an artilleryman; but, as he said in excusing himself afterwards, it was a dirty job and with most of the infantry officers gone west, there was no one else to do it.

He got severely strafed on his return for having left his battery, which he ought to have been commanding. Then news began to come in of what he had actually accomplished and how it was he who had flashed back the reports which had enabled the front to be consolidated. He’s been recommended for the V. C. and it looks as though he would get it. So he’s attained the desire nearest to his heart; he’s healed his wounded pride and will be able to prove to the girl who flung him down that her knowledge of human arithmetic was faulty.

VIII

WE are still in the neighbourhood of Death Corner. It looks as though the attack has been pressed as far as it can go at this point. The whole of Fouquescourt is now in our hands, but beyond that lies Fransart and the railroad, which the enemy is holding heavily. To the south of us the French are trying to turn the enemy’s flank of Noyon, but apparently with little success, for the resistance in front of us grows stiffer rather than less. The Hun is a long way from being beaten yet. Whatever may be the morale of his rank and file, his storm-troops never fought better. For two days after we had surrounded Fouquescourt there were machine-gunners who still refused to surrender and kept up a running scrap from house to house, causing us many casualties and much annoyance.

Every twenty-four hours we had to shift our guns owing to the Hun aerial activity. By day the enemy airmen spot us; under cover of night they return to bomb us. They have not scored any direct hits on our guns yet, thanks to our precautions in changing our positions every nightfall, but they have made us pay heavily in the loss of men. With so much shifting and changing it is not possible to build any overhead protection; the most we can do is to scoop holes in the ground of sufficient depth to hide us from the splinters. Next night we have to scoop fresh holes and spread our blankets somewhere else.

Owing to the precariousness of the way in which our front is held we have to be on duty all the time. At night we never dare to undress, nor even to remove our boots. This is not like the old days, when we had an elaborate system of trenches and a wide No Man’s Land between ourselves and the enemy; to-day we have outposts dotted here and there, and a thin line of riflemen strung out through ditches and woods. In a moving battle one is never quite certain where our country ends and the Hun’s commences. If we were for a minute to relax our vigilance, we might be overwhelmed. But the vigilance when combined with the bombing and the shelling is very wearing.

The weather has become unusually hot. The men go about stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. We left all our surplus baggage behind before the offensive started, so there are few of us who have more than one change of underwear. The result is that all the time we feel prickly and dirty. We would give a month’s pay for a plunge in a river and a chance to clean ourselves. Try as we may to prevent it, already a number of the men are developing skin-diseases and nearly all of them are verminous. With the constant wearing of our boots, the feet of most of us are getting blistered and sore. One of our gun-detachments made a lucky find, which has caused them to be the envy of the battery. In what had been a Hun officers’ mess they found a quantity of woman s lingerie, all of the very daintiest—pink silk finery, with baby ribbons and much lace. They at once discarded their army shirts and now lend a touch of humor to our landscape as they fire their gun in their filmy attire.

The heat has caused the carcases of the dead horses to decompose more quickly than usual; they lie indecently throughout the wheat-fields and roads like huge inflated bag-pipes with their legs sticking woodenly in the air. For miles the atmosphere is tainted with the nauseating stench of decaying flesh. No one has the time or the energy for burying them; even our human dead have in very many cases not yet been accorded the common kindness of a grave. We are all too tired to form funeral parties and the risk of exposing one’s self is too great. All our movements have to take place under the cover of darkness; it is then that our ammunition is sent up. The Hun is perfectly aware of this; he keeps every road and suspected battery-position, with all its approaches, under constant bombardment from sundown to well after midnight.

Our rations, as may be imagined, are of the very plainest, consisting for the most part of bully beef, tea, and hard tack. To light fires to cook anything is dangerous; the smoke would give us away in a second. We have outrun our lines of communication. Our railhead is many miles behind. Everything has to be brought up to the battle area by motor-transport, across roads which the enemy did his best to destroy in his flight. We are entirely out of tobacco and cigarettes. Our only remaining smokes are Hun cigars, which we have found in abandoned billets or in the pockets of the dead.

It would have been normal to have supposed that in an advance of these dimensions we should have captured enough booty to have kept ourselves supplied. Where we are now was the Hun’s back-country a few days ago, to which his troops marched out to rest. His canteens were here, his workshops and hospitals. There were plenty of French civilians still in possession of these houses; the gardens and fields were under cultivation. Our advance was so unexpected and rapid that it gave him hardly any warning of our advent; and yet he contrived to strip everything and to carry it off in his wagons. Even the gardens are bare; nothing but the crops in the fields are left. The only fresh meat which any of us have had has been supplied us by our veterinary sergeant, who holds that horse-flesh is a perfectly healthy diet if you take only the best cuts. There are plenty of wounded horses wandering about, of no further service to the army.

War has certainly taught us one thing: that we all have a far greater power of endurance than we guessed. Here we are, having put up with every kind of hardship, having experienced every kind of shock, having lived with horror as a daily companion, having gone without sleep, without proper food or anything approaching cleanliness, and yet we are happy and cheerfully prepared for as much more punishment as may be allotted.

The extraordinary cheerfulness of our men, the kind of school-boy attitude they take up towards war, as though it were no more than a tremendous lark, is illustrated by the glee they displayed in firing the two whizz-bangs which Heming brought up to us when we were attacking Fouquescourt. I suppose they derived a grim satisfaction from pelting the enemy with his own shells. To have two more guns to serve meant that everybody had to do considerably more work. Besides the actual work of serving them, there was the added labour of hunting up and collecting the Hun ammunition which was scattered throughout the country-side. They did it all without a grumble, preferring to regard the undertaking as a joke at the enemy’s expense.

Yesterday we received an order that all captured ordnance had to be drawn back to a special park, some ten miles to the rear. When our men heard that, they went out and gathered together six hundred rounds per gun and spent the night in pooping them off into the enemy back-country just as fast as they could load and fire. Funny chaps! They won’t be so keen on working overtime when once they get back to their labour unions.

By the way, Suzette has just communicated to us an interesting fact about herself. She asked to be paraded before the Major, as though she were actually a Tommy instead of a civilian girl. In the queer broken English which she has picked up from our men, she told us that this was her country before the war came and she had to flee from it. Her home was in Fransart, which is the next town which we shall have to attack. She wanted to let us know this because she thought her knowledge of the district might be of value. And then came what was probably her real motive for asking to be paraded; a request that she might be allowed to accompany the next officer and party of signallers going up front.

“But why? What for?” the Major questioned.

“Eet was my ‘ome,” she said. “I wish zo much to zee eet before zee guns—-.” She puffed out her cheeks and then emptied them with an explosive sound. “Before zay make eet all flat.”

At first the Major refused her emphatically. But the Major has a soft place for Suzette; I’m not at all sure that he is not just as much in love with her as Heming. For some time I’ve had the feeling of a growing hidden rivalry between the two men—hidden because, being friends, they are ashamed to acknowledge rivalry. And then again, neither of them is willing to own her attraction. She has no right to be here. Were it discovered that the reason for her presence in a fighting unit was the Major’s or the Captain’s affection, the affair would wear a very different aspect in the eyes of not only the higher authorities, but also of the men in the battery itself. Compelled by her pleading, the Major has promised her that on the first quiet day he will allow her-to accompany one of us up front. In granting her request I think he is ill-advised. But it is clear to me now that, were she to make any request of him, however mad, he would not be able to withstand her.

As I look back, I am amazed that I have been so blind; I can remember incidents and chance phrases, insignificant in themselves, which pieced together prove beyond a doubt that the Major has been in love with her from the very first. A topsy-turvy world! Nothing really matters when you may be blown into eternity any second. All I hope is that no one else has noticed.

Charlie Wraith on that day at Death Corner, laughing like a boy playing pirates! It’s now plain what he was doing: he was winning the admiration of Suzette.

IX

DURING the last two days I have seen the best bit of fighting of the entire war. As a rule an attack is a big sprawling affair, the whole of which no one can foresee, and the whole of which in all its details no single person can command. Everyone sets out with general instructions; but the variations in the methods by which those instructions are carried out depend on personal initiative and chance. For the first time I was in an attack every phase of which one could follow up and watch. If a moving-picture man had been there, he could have made his fortune. From first to last the entire performance was stage-set and capable of being focussed.

I was sent up forward to do liaison work with the battalion which was holding the line in front of Fouquescourt. Everything was quiet and no attack was contemplated, so Suzette had her way and was allowed to accompany me. I did not much relish having the responsibility of a girl with me in what was practically the Front-line, though nobody by looking at her could have guessed that she was a girl. Her appearance was that of a slightly built boy, who was probably two years below the military age; but there was nothing to arouse suspicion in that, for many of our Tommies have obviously increased their age in order to get themselves into the Army. She accompanied me ostensibly as a telephonist in my signalling party.

Battalion headquarters were situated in a deep trench, which crossed the road which runs between Fouquescourt and Fransart. This road was raked day and night by hostile fire. The trench itself was anything but a pleasant spot. The moment one poked his head up to look over the top a bullet would whizz by; Hun snipers were everywhere and quite close up. Suzette’s idea in accompanying me had been to get a glimpse of Fransart before it was flattened by shells; but apart from the snipers this was impossible, for the fields sloped up into a ridge which hid all but the tops of the village trees from the trench where we were. This being the case there was not much sense in allowing her to remain in a place of danger, so I made up my mind to send her back to the battery with the runner who would carry down my situation report at nightfall.

I had never had much talk with Suzette; that afternoon as I sat in the hot sun-baked trench I got a glimpse of her mind for the first time. The rest of my party were sprawled out on their backs, trying to make up for broken nights, so we were quite by ourselves.

“Suzette,” I said, “why do you follow us? It isn’t a happy sort of life. Surely somewhere you must have friends.”

She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, “My friends! Zay was all in Fransart. You are my friends now.”

I tried to get her to outline to me what had happened to her since the start of the war, but she wasn’t to be drawn out on that point. “Ze Germans, zay was not nice,” she said; “zay killed my mother over zare.” It appeared that her mother had kept pigeons in the loft of their cottage. When the Germans discovered that the birds had rings on their legs, they had suspected that they were intended for the carrying of messages, and her old mother had been led out and shot. She herself had escaped through their outposts and regained the unconquered territory. What had happened between the time of her escape and our finding her she passed over in a phrase, “Eet was cold and un’appy, and zen you were kind.”

I found that what she really preferred to talk about was her girlhood, before calamity had touched her; so let her talk on. It was over there in Hallu Wood, from which the sniping was coming, that she had gone each spring with the village children to gather primroses. It was through these fields, where corpses were now lying, that she used to walk with her pail at milking-time. She peopled the battlefield with ghosts, recreating all the peasant ways of life that the ferocity of war had terminated. She made me see the old priest in his rusty black skirt and round felt hat, going down the lanes between the little cottages. She made me see the pool in the brook where her mother used to kneel with the village women, singing and banging the linen white against the stones. But most of all she made me see herself—Suzette, with the gold-brown plaits, whom all the boys used to follow with their eyes, before there was any Bully Beef or any hint of catastrophe in the world.

The ‘phone tinkled, breaking the spell, and the telephonist on duty called to let me know that I was wanted by the Major.

“Hulloa, sir, I was going to have called you up. I’m sending Suzette back. There is nothing for her to see up here.”

“Don’t send her back—not yet.” The Major’s voice sounded abrupt and agitated.

“But why——?”

“Here’s why. Bully Beef is lost and we don’t want her to know until we’ve found him.”

“Lost, but——”

“Yes, lost. I know what you are going to say; that he can’t have gone far and must have been picked up by some other unit. The fact is, however, that he’s as completely vanished as if the ground had opened and swallowed him. Keep her with you until we’ve made a proper search. We may not have to tell her.”

That night instead of returning with the runner to the battery, Suzette stayed with us in the Front-line. When night had fallen and the snipers could no longer see her, she sat on the lip of the trench, staring out into the darkness towards Fransart. Once she pointed to a lone tree on the ridge, saying that she could see the village from there and asking me to allow her to go forward; but the enemy patrols were likely to be abroad, so I had to deny her. Several times I heard her sigh heavily and more than once I could have sworn that tears glistened in her eyes. She was realising all that she had lost. But how much she had lost even she did not know as yet, for every time I phoned back to the battery and questioned I received the same answer; there was no news of her child.

At the Front men are missing very often for weeks before you find a trace of them. They stray into the enemy lines. They get wounded by a chance shell. Their nerve fails them at the moment when they have accomplished some heroic act and they desert. We had one man who brought in a wounded officer at the risk of his life and was recommended for a decoration. Then it was discovered that the man could not be found. When he was found, he was awarded the D. C. M. for valour and court-martialed for the cowardice of desertion. We never give up hope when a man goes missing until he is proved to be dead. But with a civilian it is different; there are no army records through which to trace and report them. Were Bully Beef found killed, it would be nobody’s business. At the Front one’s responsibility extends no further than to the men in khaki.

Next morning on enquiring across the ‘phone, I was told that they had picked up a rumour: a child had been seen on the road between the wagon-lines and Death Corner. If that were so, it would mean that Bully Beef had wandered out of the wagonlines in the direction of the battery in search of his mother. He had come up once or twice to the battery-position with the ammunition-wagons, and would have a vague idea of the way. Seeing that he had not arrived at the battery, it was likely that he had gone past it; in which case he must be somewhere in the wheatfields between Death Corner and Fourquescourt. A detail of men were out searching for him, led by Big Dan.

Then something arose which swung my thoughts clean away from this personal anxiety. To the south of us drum-fire had been pounding away all morning; we guessed that the French had been going after Noyon once again. At one o’clock we got a sudden intimation that within two hours we must capture Franeart and, if possible, the railroad which lay beyond. This left no time for the working out of the usual detailed plans for artillery co-operation. Moreover, we were too far forward to dare to send our instructions back by telephone; the Hun listening-machines would pick up our conversations and the enemy would be forewarned. We had to make out a rough barrage-table and run it back to the guns by messenger. When that was done it was necessary that I and my party should go forward to the jumping-off point with the infantry, since the ridge in front blocked the view of the area where the fighting was to take place. Suzette volunteered to accompany my party, and since I had far too few signallers for a show and no time to obtain more I was compelled to accept her. Leaving one man in the trench to watch for our messages, we struck out along the Fouquescourt-Fransart road and commenced to lay in wire to the point from which we proposed to observe the fight.

It was a brilliantly hot afternoon; all the parched landscape seemed to shift and quiver in the dancing haze. One’s clothes rasped the flesh like sand-paper and one’s eyes were blinded by perspiration. We made little progress with the laying of our wire, for every few minutes we had to go back to mend a break caused by shell-fire. At last we abandoned the idea of keeping in touch with the rear by telephone and determined to rely on visual signalling. We passed the ruined village of Fouquescourt on our right. It was seething in a cloud of smoke; the shriek of bursting shells was like the wild applause of waves breaking on a rock-bound coast. We abandoned the road and bore over towards the left, till we came to an old Hun trench, which ran straight up to Fransart and passed near to the lone tree on the ridge, from which we intended to signal back our messages. As we stole crouching between its shallow banks, we noted how our chaps had flung away the heavier part of their equipment; it was strewn with haversacks, Mill’s bombs and tins of bully. Then, when we almost thought that we had advanced too far, we came across them. They were kneeling close together, panting like over driven animals, their bayonets gleaming thirstily in the fierce sunshine. Many of them were reinforcements who had never been in battle before—men who had been sent to replace the heavy casualties of our encounters. Their faces were haggard with the struggle against terror and they trembled as they waited for our guns to open fire. One could pick out the veterans among them at a glance by their fatalistic carelessness. Having posted a signaller with flags and a lamp, I pushed forward to where the Company Commander was waiting to lead the advance. He was just on the crest, from where one could look down on the approaches to Fransart. The village itself was still hidden from sight, but one could see the little country road, running through fields straight and white as an arrow from Fouquescourt, and crossing the road a line of apple trees. It looked very sleepy and innocent. One would scarcely have been surprised to have seen blue-clad peasants rise out of the grass and commence to sharpen their scythes. There was no hint of murder and strife; the suspense of the crouching men behind us struck a false note of melodrama. The Company Commander consulted his wrist-watch, counting off the minutes.

He turned to me. “How many more do you make it?”

“Six minutes more to go,” I replied.

“What are you doing when the show has started?”

“I follow you up,” I said, “and keep you in sight. If you want to send any runners back, you’ll find some of my signallers in this trench.”

Then we again fell to watching the quiet country with a kind of wonder, counting off the minutes and the seconds.

There were only two minutes left when the infantry-officer jerked my elbow excitedly, “Good God, look at that!”

“At what?”

“Get your glasses out, man, they’re better than mine. That thing over there, moving towards the apple-trees down the road.”

I picked up the object with my naked eye when he pointed. It was a mere speck, creeping very slowly. It might have been a man crawling, only it was hardly big enough. Our riflemen already had their sights trained on it and their angers on the triggers, awaiting the order to fire. I raised my glasses. What I saw was a child, with chubby legs, short skirts and long hair to the middle of his back like a girl’s. His face was streaky with crying, and he kept digging his knuckles into his eyes. Through the glasses he looked so near that I could have touched him by reaching out my hand. It was horrible to see him out there, where in little over a minute our own shells would be falling. Our little Bully Beef, going in search of his mother! There wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have given up his life to restore him to her, and we were powerless to draw him back. The rifles were lowered as the word was whispered round; we watched his progress in fascinated suspense.

Suddenly, rising out of a ditch behind him, came another figure—Big Dan’s. Big Dan, who had promised to take care of him in his mother’s absence! He leapt up and ran towards the enemy lines down the ribbon of white road. He must have called to Bully Beef, for we saw the child turn and fling out his arms at recognising him. Dan picked him up, holding him tight against his breast, and stood there hesitating, waiting for the enemy to take their revenge. I could almost hear him singing defiantly, in his deep base voice,

Old soldiers never die,

They simply fade away.

Then a hundred yards in front, out of the apparent emptiness a Hun stood up waving a handkerchief; beside the Hun were a dozen rifles all pointing in Dan’s direction. He moved forward, with the child’s face looking back across his shoulder. As the first of our shells fell, he stepped down and was lost to sight in the German trench. Like a squall at sea our barrage descended and everything was blotted out.

I turned to the signaller who was nearest to me, “Where is Suzette?”

“Behind the next traverse, sir.”

“She did not see? She does not know?”

“She doesn’t know, sir.”

“Then until it is all over we must not tell her.” It took five minutes for the enemy retaliation to come back. It burst like a hurricane along the ridge and along the shallow hiding place in which we were. No man could hide there for long. The only safety was to get either in front of it or behind it. The Company-Commander gave the signal to advance. With the men running and crouching low, the river of bayonets streamed past me. Like a trickling stream, I watched their silver gleaming grow more distant above the tall rank grass which lined the lip of the trench. God knows to what fate they were going or how many of those splendidly fashioned men would remain unbroken by sunset. For myself. I had other things to think about.

My job was to keep the attack in sight and to be sure that my chain of signallers was in touch with the rear, so that I could get my orders through for the directing of fire. To keep the attack in sight it was necessary to push on nearer to Fransart, so I took Suzette and one man with me, leaving the rest of my party strung out behind. Where the apple-trees crossed the road, I saw our men leap out of the trench and start at the run across the open. Instantly a withering fire was brought to bear on them from a little village in advance and over to the right, which we had been informed had been in our hands since morning. They began to go down like nine-pins, pitching forward into the dust and rolling over on their sides. We stood up to signal back the news of what was happening, but the first flapping of the flags brought about our heads a storm of bullets. Our only chance was to run the message back through the enemy’s barrage. The signaller started off down the trench. We waited for his return, but we waited in vain. A runner reached us from the Company Commander, asking for guns to be brought to bear upon a machine-gun nest which was holding up the advance. I had only Suzette left, so she took the message and vanished into the enemy barrage behind me. Shortly after she had gone on her errand another infantry-runner met me, with the message that our chaps had got through Fransart and were in sight of the railroad on the other side, but that the enemy machine-guns, which they thought they had demolished, were firing in their backs. None of my men had returned. I thought I knew why, for the ridge was boiling. There was no one left to send, so I set off to run the information back myself.

I have read in history of men who were never afraid, but I have not met their like at the front. All the men out here have been afraid and will be afraid again tomorrow. They acknowledge their fear, and conquer and despise it. The difference between the brave man and the coward is that, whereas the coward gives way to his imagination, the brave man carries on as if he were untouched by terror. That day I was frankly afraid. As I entered the barrage every nerve in my body went on strike. Shells were exploding on the very lip of the trench; the shock of their concussion was like a blow aimed against my knee-joints. I felt blinded and faint. The smart of fumes was in my eyes; the reek in my throat was choking. I glanced across my shoulder to find that, where I had been standing a few seconds before, the trench had been blown up.

On in front across the part that I had to traverse, the grass was scorched and smoking. It was like being pummelled by a mob of invisible assassins. I staggered, and ran, and crawled, and panted; my heart was filled with hatred for the enemy miles behind at their guns, who bided their time and killed us at their leisure. Round each fresh traverse I expected to stumble across one of my men lying broken and sprawled out. Thinking that they might be in hiding I called their names again and again as I ran. I might just as well have called to the clouds in a storm at sea from a row-boat. I was mortally afraid that I should die alone. But beyond my terror was the sense of my obligation to those men up front, cut off from hope by the machine-guns firing in their backs: at any and every cost they must be helped.

X

I HAD reached the very heart of the barrage, when I felt a hand grabbing at my leg. I looked down and found two of my signallers and Suzette crouching in a hole which some infantry-men must have scooped for themselves. Had they not seized hold of me I should have gone past them, not knowing they were there. Bending down I shouted an enquiry as to whether they were wounded. They told me “No,” but that it was impossible to signal since every time they tried to use their flags they brought a hail of lead about their heads; moreover, so long as the barrage lasted all the chain of signallers behind them were held hammered against the ground. There was no one to read their messages and it was probable that more than one of the receiving-stations had been wiped out. Realising the truth of what they said, I sat down beside them to recover my breath. While we sat there, as suddenly as the storm of death had broken, it lifted and leapt half a mile to the rear to about the line on which battalion headquarters were established.

Getting my party on to their legs, I arranged to send all my messages back to the ridge by runner and to have them relayed on from there out of sight of the enemy by flag-wagging. Taking one man with me and Suzette, since she knew Fransart well, I again pushed forward.

I got as far along the trench as to where the apple-trees crossed the road; there I halted. The enemy was putting up an intense bombardment just in rear of the village to prevent the approach of our reinforcements. It was now some time since any messages from the infantry up front had reached me; I began to get nervous lest something disastrous had happened. At last I determined to leave the man behind me to relay orders, and to go forward with Suzette. I had another reason for wishing to get into the village; I wanted to see if I could find any traces of Bully Beef and Dan. From where I was I could make out the spot where the Hun had stood up and beckoned to them. There was little chance that they were alive, but I was anxious to satisfy myself.

Watching our chance, Suzette and I popped out on to the roadway and commenced to run, crouching low and zigzagging. At once we became a target for the sharpshooters in the uncaptured village, to our right flank. About our feet the dust began to go up in vicious spurts and about our heads we heard the sharp pizz pizz of bullets. The intoxicating excitement of danger got into our blood: we called to each other and laughed as we ran. God knows there was little enough to laugh about; of the company of a hundred and forty odd men who had attacked across that open space before us, upwards of a hundred were lying wounded and dead. But the curious psychology of battle is that no one ever thinks that other people’s misfortunes may befall himself. While the wine of adventure sings in his head he believes himself immortal. That is the explanation of the boys who go cheering across the Tom-Tiddler’s ground of death.

Breathless and still laughing we reached and jumped into what had been the Hun Front-line. Here the laughter was wiped from our lips in a second. Everything was scared and silent. Our attack had not been expected; the enemy had been caught for fair. Our wall of fire had descended on him, shattered him, choked him, buried him. The troops in this part of the line had been Bavarians: jovial, fresh-complexioned. fair-haired men. We knew them of old—genial fellows, with fine singing voices, who would exchange presents with you out in No Man’s Land, and kill you treacherously while your present was still in their hands, without any consciousness of broken honour or unkindness. Here in the polluted summer quiet they lay in every contortion of distress, mangled, smashed and ended, their blue eyes wide open, staring at the sky and still retaining an expression of panic astonishment. They had come to war as we had come to war; but they had not expected to die. That was what they seemed to be telling us: “Take example from us; turn back in time.”

We stumbled our way into a communication-trench, and hurried on, guessing at the direction our infantry must have taken. Here the brutality of what had happened was even more obvious; in the terror of their flight, the enemy had become jammed in the narrow space; they had fought with one another to escape and had trodden the wounded into the ground.

Now, following between the tunnelled roots of trees, we came to the village itself, lying in the heart of a little wood. The trench became so narrow that our equipment caught against its sides. Grass grew tall along its banks, and scattered through the grass were wild flowers. We had glimpses as we travelled of cottage gardens, bee-hives and curtained windows. But we were glad to keep our heads down, for shrapnel was stripping the leaves from the trees and bursting with the clash of cymbals above our heads. We were walking straight through our own barrage, and still there was no sign of our own infantry. We began to wonder whether we had gone beyond them or whether they had been all wiped out. Behind us in the houses of Fransart, which ought by rights to have been in our hands, we could hear the unmistakable cough of German machine-guns at work.

On the far side of the wood we stumbled on our men—twenty-six of them: all that were left. They were scattered at intervals along the trench, hugging the ground. As we stepped over them, going in search of their officer, they paid us no attention. They were most of them green troops—reinforcements, who were tasting the bitterness of battle for the first time. But so was Suzette; she showed no signs of faint-heartedness Her eyes were gray stars, deep and quiet, and an eager smile played about her firm young mouth. In looking at her I was reminded of Joan of Arc, and could believe that she too had talked with heavenly presences.

Twenty-five yards ahead there was a trench-juncture, at which a lad was sitting with his legs wide apart and a scarlet hole bored through the centre of his forehead. No one had gone to his help; he merely sat there in the sunlight with a puzzled expression, watching the blood splash slowly on his hands. When I made to cross the trench-juncture, one of the men pulled me back. “A Hun sniper,” he panted with an eloquent economy of words; “he gets everyone who goes there.”

“But what’s the matter with you chaps?” I asked. “It’s the booby-traps, sir,” he said; “they’ve blown a lot of us up. We daren’t stir.”

Then I saw what he meant. Across the trench, beyond where the wounded man was sitting, cobwebs of wires had been strung a few inches above the ground, attached to pegs. They looked innocent enough, but were just at the right height to catch the feet of men advancing in single file. Should anyone trip against them, the jerk on the pegs would explode a series of mines.

I turned to the man. “Are you the furthest up of the attack?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know what’s on ahead?”

“The railroad, sir, with a lot of freight-cars standing on the tracks. The Huns are hiding behind them and taking pot-shots at us.”

Just then the Company Commander hove in sight, crouching low to avoid the sharp-shooters and stepping warily between the wires of the traps. While I spoke to him. Suzette was dragging the wounded lad back from the trench-juncture and binding up his head.

“A pretty rotten mess. I call it,” the Company Commander growled pantingly, wiping the perspiration from his eyes. “We ought to have had tanks and aeroplanes to do this job and twice as many men. It’s sheer murder. My men haven’t a one per cent chance of coming out of the show alive; out of a hundred and forty I have twenty-six left. The enemy gets us from in front and from both flanks, while his machine-guns in Fransart are potting at our backs. And what the devil is our own artillery doing laying down a barrage behind us?”

The truth was the infantry had advanced too quickly, without first ascertaining that their gunners had been notified of their progress. They had also failed to “mop up” the enemy strongholds before pressing further forward. The consequence was that they had left pockets of resistance on every hand and that their own artillery was cutting them off from help. Their situation was desperate. There was only one remedy; to find out the exact locations of the machine-gun nests and to send the information back to the guns, that they might knock them out with high explosive; to send back orders to our artillery that the barrage should be raised; and to withdraw our troops from Fransart and subject the village to a fresh bombardment. But to what place could we safely withdraw our infantry while the bombardment was in progress—that was the question. To answer this question the Company Commander and I decided that a further reconnaissance was necessary. We did not know what lay on ahead or how near to us the Huns were; at all events, it could not be much more dangerous further forward.

Leaving instructions that the men should keep well under cover to avoid casualties in our absence, we set out. Treading gingerly up the trench mined with booby-traps, we came to a turning which led off to the right. Here things were comparatively quiet, all the firing passing well above our heads. We followed the turning for about two hundred yards, and then peered stealthily over the top. Not fifty yards away was the railroad, with the freight-cars either standing on the tracks or thrown over on their sides to form, a barrier. Poking out from loopholes, which had been cut in the woodwork, were the muzzles of rifles. We had seen all that was necessary; we knew that we must take, a gambler’s chance. I arranged with the Company Commander that he should lead his men still further forward to this trench so that they might be clear of our shellfire, and that he should see to the warning of our infantry who were in Fransart, while I ran the orders back to the guns and saw to it that reinforcements were sent up the moment our bombardment ended.

The return journey to the signalling-station where the apple-trees crossed the road, was as hot a piece of work as I remember. Suzette took it as coolly as if it were no more than a country-walk. We had to pass through both our own barrage and the enemy’s. Of the two ours was the worse. In Fransart itself the trench had been made more shallow by direct hits with shells. As we wriggled our way on hands and knees over dibris, we could see the Hun machine-gunner? blazing away from the attics of houses and our own men crawling through the undergrowth to rush the entrances with bombs. I remember discussing with my conscience the decency of permitting Suzette to run such risks. But I had no choice, for if I were killed, she might survive to get the messages back; in any case, when she learnt about Bully Beef, she would receive her death-warrant.

We found our signaller where we had left him and at once got him to work flag-wagging the information to the rear. The enemy spotted him after the first few minutes; but with a reckless disregard for his own safety, he carried on amid a hail of bullets till the task was ended. A quarter of an hour later, like a hurricane let loose, the levelling of Fransart commenced. The wood rocked as in a gale. Roofs were stripped from the houses; the walk shuddered and knelt slowly down like camels. This concentrated commotion was intensified for us by the contrast of the breathless stillness of the surrounding country. For myself I was picturing the wild scramble for life of the Huns whom we had seen firing from the windows of the attics. They were brave men, who had purposed to sell their lives dearly. To kill them without giving them a chance, in a way which they had not anticipated, was fair; but its fairness did not make it less appallingly dramatic.

I was roused from these thoughts by a trembling at my side; it came from Suzette. She was kneeling with her face cushioned in her hands and was weeping violently. I bent over her, asking what was the matter. “Eet was my ‘ome,” she said.

Suddenly she leapt to her feet and stood tiptoe, staring. I followed her gaze. Out of the wood where trees were crashing and the ground was billowing itself into mounds, two men were advancing. They walked gropingly and the arm of the taller was flung about the other’s neck. The taller man was wounded and in khaki; his companion was a plump little Bavarian—evidently one of the machine-gunners who had been firing in our backs. Every now and then we lost them as a shell burst in their path; but always they emerged through the smoke of the bombardment, dragging themselves by inches nearer to the comparative safety that was ours. Without a word of warning, Suzette burst from me and commenced to race towards them. It was sheer foolishness to venture into that inferno where every second seemed to be a man’s last. I started after her, intending if need be to hold her back by force.

As I drew nearer, I saw what her sharp eyes had discerned already, that the wounded man carried a child against hip breast; then I recognized who he was. At that moment he pitched forward, pulling the Bavarian with him to the ground. When the enemy had tottered slowly to his feet, he rose alone and had transferred the child to his own arms. But Suzette had reached him now; she snatched the child to her body. Like a drama played out, the last shell fell and the bombardment was ended.

I glanced behind me. Like a winding stream, following the serpentine wanderings of the trench, I saw the gleaming bayonets of our reinforcements shining above the tangled grass. Five minutes later when I re-entered the ravished wood, guiding up the supports to a new attack, I passed Suzette. She had forgotten that she was dressed in khaki. She sat among the dibris of splintered trees mothering Bully Beef, who was quite unhurt, while the plump little Bavarian smiled down on her in mild astonishment. At full length lay Dan, his old soldier’s face composed and kindly—his last fight ended. He had had his desire, as so often expressed in his favourite song: his duty accomplished, he had simply “faded.”

XI

IT is many days since I wrote the last line. This battle goes on and on. We are drunk for want of sleep and rest. How much farther can we drive these weary bodies of ours without their collapsing? We treat them as things of naught—as mere slaves whom we lash in action to carry our spirits forward. We do not wash them, feed them, clothe them with any care; we scarcely spare the time to keep them alive while the victory is so nearly within our grasp. It is amazing that such a multitude of diverse men should be agreed to have so little mercy on themselves.

One feels that there are two armies fighting, for every one that is apparent: the external, sullen army of heavy-eyed, red-rimmed flesh, and the invisible, eager, clear-eyed army of indestructible souls, which flogs the laggard army of the flesh forward. Behind us, all along the battlefields of the advance, the earth of men lies mouldering and putrescent, but their liberated spirits still fight beside our spirits, treading close upon the heels of the enemy.

The test of scarlet! We used to speak about it, but we never dreamt that it could be such a test. We never knew that human mechanisms could survive such ordeals and be patched up with courage to endure them afresh.

After the capturing of Fransart our corps was drawn out and French troops were thrown in to hold the line which we had broken. Then the terrible night-marches re-commenced, for the enemy must not know where we were going. Again we must play the game of hiding, and vanish entirely. We must be the will-o’-the-wisps of the Western Front and disclose ourselves unheralded at a point where we were least expected. We ourselves must have no knowledge of our destination; our job must be to move like ghosts and to cover as much ground as possible under the shadow of darkness.

At the end of the first stage we concealed ourselves in woods, which had in a day become familiar to all the English-speaking world. It was here that our cavalry surrounded an entire German cavalry division, entrained and on the point of pulling out. It was here that our infantry captured a Hun hospital, and set an example in chivalry by offering the nurses the choice between working for our wounded or a safe conduct to the lines of their own countrymen. It was here that Big Bertha was found—the long-range man-eater which had tried to murder Paris. But, sweetest of all memories, it was here, after the long drought, that the rain descended and we stripped off our clothes, stiff as boards with sweat, and ran naked through the leaves in the stinging downpour.

On the evening of the second stage we passed through wheat-fields, recently re-captured from the enemy, still strewn with Australia’s unburied dead. Here troops were busily at work gathering in the harvest of the trampled grain. We realised then that it was not our blood alone, willingly as it was shed, that would restore peace and happiness to the world, but the thrift that could satisfy man’s bitter cry for bread.

How many marches did we make? How often did we rest? I cannot remember now. What happened is all a blur. We crawled across a devastated land through a fog of moonlight, dawns and sunsets. We gave and obeyed orders mechanically. Our perceptions were dulled; we were mad for sleep. As soon as our eyes closed, the relentless word would go round to harness up and move on, always to move on; but to what were we marching?

It seemed as though all the world were dead and we were the only fighters left. Though the light failed and one could scarcely see his hand before his face, we knew by the heavy staleness in the air that we were traversing interminable grave-yards, where villages, trees, men and horses lay shallowly beneath the swollen sod. And yet we knew that there were other fighters besides ourselves. How the rumour reached us I cannot tell, but we were aware that the Americans were massing before St. Mihiel, and that they were piled up in their thousands behind Yprhs. Long after the graciousness of sleep had come to us, they would tramp in their millions above our quiet beds; we should feel the pressure of their heels upon our foreheads and should know that they were carrying on our work. It didn’t matter what happened to us; the work of victory would go on just the same. The Hun would not triumph. We should not have spent our youth in vain. In this knowledge, despite our weariness, we were glad.

I have a curious feeling that on those long night-marches I held conversations with men, with whom I certainly scarcely exchanged a word. At all events, though I did not speak to them, I knew what was happening inside their heads. Perhaps it was that we had all become abnormal with the strain and developed a mental telepathy which communicated thoughts without the fatigue of words. As we moved through the darkness it was as though each brain was a little lighted house, behind whose windows shadows came and went. I knew, for instance, what Trottot was thinking. He was brooding over his failure to disprove his reputation for being yellow. He was resentful of his sergeant who had kept him back at the wagon-lines whenever the shell-fire was intense up front. He was hungering for the chance to do something so reckless that everyone would have to vote him brave enough to be lead-driver of the gun. I knew what the Major was thinking: at the head of the column he was thinking unceasingly of Suzette. And Heming, bringing up the rear with the transport, he was thinking of two women and hoping that the next fight would be his last.

Sometimes I had the odd sensation that there were many more marching with the battery than would ever again answer the roll-call. I was riding at the head of my section half asleep about midnight, when a horseman came up at the gallop and reined in beside me. I expected to hear him deliver some message; instead he dropped into a walk at my side. His steel helmet shadowed his face. I was too weary to speak unnecessarily and took him for one of my sergeants. Perhaps I drowsed; when I again noticed him the moon was coning out from under cloud. Then I saw that he was wearing an officer’s uniform. That piqued me into wakefulness. I leant forward to get a closer glimpse of his features. As I did so, he flung his horse back on its haunches, wheeled to the left and vanished in the dark. During the brief space while I gazed on him, I recognized Tubby Grain.

Other men in the battery are telling similar stories. They have seen Big Dan, Standish and many of their fallen comrades. They ride on the limbers and the wagons; they plod persistently behind the guns. They do not seek to attract attention to themselves. They do not talk or inconvenience anybody. Having died in a foreign land, it seems normal and right that their spirits should still accompany us. At dawn they vanish. As regards Tubby Grain, since the first time I have never seen his face—only his plump little figure going at the trot through the darkness down the column.

And now our marches are, for the time being, at an end. Once again we have been flung in as the hammerhead of the attack. They say that Foch’s principle is to use up his storm-troops; he never relieves them when once an offensive has begun. We no longer guess—we know the task that lies before us. Last time it was the saving of Amiens; this time it is the breaking of the Hindenburg Line. Two nights ago we pulled into action across the bald chalky country that straddles the Cambrai-Arras road. To the north of us, rising out of the blackness of the Vimy Plain, we could see the ridge which was so long our home and which, because we were not allowed to die, we guarded with so much impatience. Ah, how impatient we were while the indignity of not dying was upon us! How little we valued the supreme gift of life! How we courted death in raid after raid throughout the summer! Had we known then how few sunny days remained for most of us, how much more gratefully we should have lived them. We have come back for what will probably be our severest test to very nearly the spot whence we started.

Nobody now garrisons what was once regarded as the Gibraltar of the Western Front. Our armies have swept forward like a tidal wave and are beating on the doors of the cities in the plain, which a month ago looked so distant and impregnable.

Our brigade has been pushed well up into the point of a narrow salient—a long thin cape of recaptured territory which projects far out into the enemy country. We are so far up that the Hun balloons are actually in rear of us and watch our every movement from either flank. Any time that they choose they can bring accurate fire to bear on us. We have been in some murder-holes before, but this is by long adds the worst. The Hun game is to obliterate us before we get started. All day and all night he bombards us without cessation. When high explosives have failed, he drenches us with gas.

Now that we are here there is no use in trying to disguise either our presence or our purpose. The old subterfuge of camouflage is of no avail. The country is too bare and too much overlooked for any precautions, however ingenious, to protect us. Our only chance is to hurry up and get the attack begun before we are all dead. There will be a percentage of safety when we begin to go forward; there is none in sitting still. That we may launch our offensive quickly, we are making every effort. No man’s life is precious. Guns and ammunition drive up in the broad daylight and are knocked out. No sooner are they knocked out than others are sent forward to take their places. The waste is stupendous. Direct hits are scored on ammunition-dumps; there is never an hour when explosives cannot be seen going up in flames—never an hour when horses and men cannot be seen rolling in their final agony. The spectacle is too ordinary to excite us. We are too much fatalists to be intimidated. With a misleading display of callousness, while the unlucky are dying, we who are whole carry on with our preparations for revenge, which the enemy watching from the sky does his utmost to prevent.

Our battery is in a narrow valley to the left of what was once a town. A sign-board, with the name painted on it, is its only means of identification: “This was a town.” It is the same with all the sites of former human habitation which lie behind us; if it were not for the sign-boards, they would be indistinguishable from the miles of shell-ploughed waste and mine-craters in which this abomination of desolation abounds. The country as far as eye can search, lies stark and evil as an alkali desert.

In our valley there is a stagnant malodorous swamp, close to which we have dragged in our guns so that their muzzles point out across it. It was once a river winding through a pleasant meadow, but gradually it has become choked by the refuse of dead things—dead men, dead horses, dead happiness. God knows what it hides. It has been kind to us, nevertheless, for it has saved us many casualties. All the enemy’s rounds which fall short of us plunge harmlessly into the liquid mud. We hear them coming with the roar of express engines. We make a bet where they are going to burst. Then a column of filth goes up from the swamp-and we know that this slough of despond has again preserved us.

If we have been lucky, others have been less fortunate. The valley being stiff with batteries, there are not enough good positions to go round. One watches the shells alight, then sees the men rushing for stretchers. In an endless chain the ammunition-wagons drive up, fling out their rounds and depart at the gallop. Let them move quickly and ever more quickly, there are always some of them that get caught. The place is rapidly becoming a shambles. No one’s life is worth a minute’s purchase. It would be interesting to know what premium we should have to pay if we wanted to insure ourselves.

The Major has just told me that the attack is to be launched tomorrow at dawn. It’s extraordinarily ambitious, for its third objective is fifteen thousand yards from where we are at present, and it’s ultimate goal is the capture, of Cambrai. Between ourselves and Cambrai stretches the most strongly fortified country of the entire German Front—a country naturally fortified by marshes and canals and made doubly impregnable by military cunning. The Hindenburg Line will have to be taken first before any general advance can be begun. After that certain sacrifice-tanks will go through and drown themselves in the canals to make a bridge over which the living tanks and cavalry may push forward to conquest.

We can stand any amount of pummelling now that we know the worst. “It’s going to be a top-hole show—Berlin or nothing;” those were the Major’s words. Judging by the pleased grins on the men’s faces, it won’t be nothing. We’re going to finish the job this time and be done with it forever. Since the men have heard the news, they’ve generated quite a “home for Christmas” air of jollity. There is only one man who looks sad—Captain Heming. He has received orders to start for Blighty at once to give evidence in the case of Mrs. Dragott.

“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” said the Major. “I’ll stand by you if there’s trouble. Please yourself.”

We’re wondering how he’ll decide. It depends on his evidence, whether it would save or condemn her.

If it would condemn her and he still loves her——

A man can live worse deaths than falling honourably in battle.

XII

IT is wonderful to lie here in the quiet and to know that it is all ended. Already the world is saying, “Let’s forget that there was a war.” That’s natural for people fatigued by contemplating tragedy; but which is the more inconvenient—to have been a spectator or an endurer of tragedy? It’s all very well for the spectators to say, “It’s over, thank God. We’re safe now, let’s go home and be gay as we once were.” But how can we, who were comrades in the ordeal, ever forget? And the rest of the world which only watched from afar, what right has it to forget? Now that it has been saved by other men’s loss, is it its obligations that it would forget? Would it forget the pain which our bodies will always remember? Would it forget the cold, the thirst, the weariness, the wounds, the forlornness, the despairing courage which it did not share? Would it forget the dead who forewent their gladness, believing that their immortality was secured by the gratitude which would commemorate their simple heroism? If it does forget, it absconds like a blackguard debtor, cheating both us and the dead. For we fought not for victory alone, but to establish a loftier standard, so that the world in recalling the price we paid might make itself kinder and better. As I lie here in hospital, six stories up, with the throb of London beating distantly like a receding drum beneath my window, I am sometimes uncertain whether any of the scenes I have lived through ever happened. The war grows unreal and vague. Surely those ex-plumbers, ex-bricklayers, ex-piano-tuners with whom I marched, are only imagined. At this distance it seems incredible that such men should have found the fortitude to make themselves the knights of Armageddon. They were so ordinary, so ignorant of their true greatness, so blind to the magnanimous courage of their martyrdom. Ordinary, ignorant and blind they were; perhaps their indifference to their worth was their outstanding glory. Yet these everyday men proved not by ones or twos, but in their millions that the spirit of righteous freedom only slumbers. In remembering their example never again can we believe ourselves ignoble or that the race of sacrificial men is ever ended.

My little Major, with the V. C. ribbon on his breast, came on leave from Mons the other day and hopped in, merry as ever, to see me. He was at the Front when the Armistice was declared: I was eager to hear about it. “How did the men take it?” I asked him. “Like any other happening,” he said.

“But wasn’t there any excitement or cheering?”

“There may have been, but I didn’t see it,” he told me. “We were marching up to a fresh attack when the word reached us. We halted and drew in to the side of the road, feeling a trifle discontented on account of the cold. One felt warmer, you understand, while in motion. It was a raw day, being November. When the news had been confirmed, we turned back to the last town in search of billets. The chaps cracked a smile then, when they discovered that they were to have a solid night’s rest with a roof above their heads.”

I levered myself up in bed and stared at Charlie Wraith. Despite all that I knew of the Front, I found it hard to credit this utter lack of emotion. In the old days all our talk had been of when the war would end—how we would throw aside authority, cock our guns up and fire off salvo after salvo to the heavens. We had promised ourselves that we would go over the top for a last time as a kind of sporting luxury, and beat up the Hun just once more for luck to prove that we still had plenty of ginger left. The flying-men had asserted that they would head their planes in the direction of Boche-land and send them off unpiloted to put the wind up the enemy. Every mad prank had been imagined and discussed for making our celebration memorable and effective. From the Channel to Switzerland the Front should blaze and be clangourous. And this was actually how the greatest war in history bad fizzled out: they had drawn in to the side of the road, felt cold and turned back to the nearest town in search of billets. Had the Major told me that the men had shewn resentment, feeling that they had been baulked of an immenser victory, I could have understood that.

But this account of stoical indifference was astounding. I tried to put some of my surprise into words.

“If they weren’t glad, perhaps they were disappointed?”

“Not disappointed,” he said. “We’d been through too much to be either happy or sad. I think we’d got past feeling anything. We were sort of numb. I’m no good at expressing myself. Some of the married chaps sighed contentedly and whispered, more to themselves than aloud, ‘Well, that’s that.’ They meant, I suppose, that they’d be seeing their wives again presently. But most of us didn’t say a word; we just carried on as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.”

I think this picture of dumb subjection to duty made me realise more than anything the sheer cost of victory in spiritual energy to the men who bought it with their blood. While London, New York and Paris went mad, climbing lamp-posts, changing hats, dragging tin cans through the streets and converting themselves into impromptu jazz bands, these men, whose valour was being commemorated, pulled in to the side of the road, felt cold, and limped back to the nearest town in search of billets. They were “sort of numb.” They’d been through too much to feel either happy or sad. “Well, that’s that,” they had said, and thanked God for the luxury of a secure night’s rest and the comfort of a roof above their heads.

And yet, why I should have been so surprised I don’t quite know. The Major’s picture was consistent with everything I had learned of the fighting man—precisely what one might have expected. That I should have been surprised only proves to me how thoroughly normal and civilian we are beneath our khaki. Here am I, a few weeks out of the line, finding myself amazed at conduct which would have been mine, had I lasted. “Well, that’s that”—it sums up in a phrase the whole philosophy of the Front, which teaches:—“Don’t whine. Endure what you can’t alter. Get over the hard bits of the road by pushing forward. Never know when you’re licked. Never be elated when you’ve won. Whether you win or lose, don’t sit down; seize on to the next most difficult thing that you may conquer. For it’s not the winning or the losing, it’s the eternal trying that counts—And that’s that.” It is the “eternal trying” of my last fight that lives most vividly in my memory. We were in that murder-hole, you will remember, to the left of the Cambrai-Arras road. Our job was to smash the Hindenburg Line and to go as much further as our strength would carry us. Our objective was to be the ending of the war or, in the words of the Major, “Berlin or nothing.”

The night before the show the enemy made a last determined effort to knock us out. We had distinct orders not to retaliate; our first round was to be fired with the opening of the offensive. So we had to lie down in silence and take our punishment.

Shortly after sunset the trouble commenced. The enemy must have run forward a number of guns.

Without warning a tremendous bombardment opened up. It was as though the walls of Heaven were tumbling about our heads. In our narrow valley, where batteries were lined up like taxi-cabs on a stand, shells of every kind and calibre began to fall—whizz-bangs, incendiary, high explosive, gas. Shooting at random over so small an area so densely packed, it was almost impossible not to hit something. As darkness thickened, the night became lurid with burning gun-pits and ammunition. Against the dancing flames men could be seen, running, gesticulating and working like fiends to put the fires out. High above the whistling of the shells we heard the ominous throb of planes, and bombs commenced dropping. By this time we had struggled into our gas-helmets and lay crouched in little groups in the bottom of shell-holes. We were of no use. We had been forbidden to reply. We were simply waiting to be slaughtered.

I don’t know what happened at the other batteries, but our Major took matters into his own hands. “We shall have no men left for tomorrow at this rate,” he said; so he ordered the chaps to get out of the bombarded area and to scatter. The instructions for the attack had just come in, and he had to make out the barrage-tables. To do this it would be necessary to light a candle, but it would be suicide to show any lights while the planes were overhead. Seizing his fighting map and scales, he retired in search of a dug-out; soon only I and one signaller were left. We had to remain on the position to answer the ‘phone and to keep in touch with the rear.

We lay there hugging the ground. We had had no time to build overhead protection; the weather being warm, we had contented ourselves with digging holes three feet deep and spreading over them ground-sheets to keep the rain out. Our sensations were those of men who were lying on an erupting volcano. The earth quivered under us and the air was thick with the avalanche of falling dibris. The valves of our gas-masks felt choked with dust; we were well-nigh suffocated and buried. The ground-sheets above our heads flapped in rags. Stones and bits of chalk, thrown up by the concussion, bruised us. We were always expecting that the next shell would end us. They came over with the galloping thud of cavalry, ker plunk, ker-plunk, ker-phunk. The roars of the explosions, which followed the thuds of impact, were like the fierce ha-has of ten thousand maniacs.

It was long past midnight before the strafe died down. By that time the Hun felt fairly confident that few, if any of us, had survived. One by one, through the altered landscape, our men crept back. By the red glow of dying conflagrations, they set patiently to work to clean their guns and set their fuses, so that all might be ready for revenge. We did not number them as they returned. It was impossible in the darkness, but we knew by the spattered human fragments that in the surrounding shell-holes many a stout fellow had gone west.

A little whiteness spread along the eastern horizon. We stared at our luminous wrist-watches. The second-hand had one more revolution to travel. The whistle sounded; our turn had come. If the enemy-had supposed that he had exterminated us. his disillusionment must have been bitter. There were batteries which he had crippled, but none that he had silenced. Like fiery serpents, even from where we were, we could see our bursting shrapnel hissing down on his tormented trenches.

And now, when it was too late, he made a furious effort to complete our destruction. He tried to bury us beneath the weight of metal that he sent racing through the semi-darkness. Men and guns were blotted out by the dust of explosions; but the whistle for each new lift in the barrage went on sounding. It seemed a miracle that our shells did not collide with his in mid-air.

His anger was not for long. Of a sudden, from intensity it died down into nothing. We knew what that meant: the bayonets of our infantry were tossing human hay in his trenches, our heavy artillery was raking his batteries, and our tanks were going forward, tracking down their prey like blood-hounds.

Dawn strengthened. From a shadowy hint of whiteness it became a pillar of flame, from a pillar of flame a shaft of dazzling brightness. We gazed on the night’s work. It was as though a gigantic plough had furrowed the valley from end to end. Guns leaned over on their axles with their wheels smashed; the men who should have been serving them lay scattered about, hair buried and scarcely recognisable. Charred piles of ammunition smoked lazily and occasionally sputtered like Camp fireworks. We marvelled how we had escaped; all the guns of our battery were still in action. Again it must have been the swamp that had saved them.

We could estimate the progress that our infantry were making by the orders to lengthen our range, which we kept receiving across the ‘phone. They were going very rapidly. The enemy resistance could not have been as strong as had been expected. We judged that the first wave of our attack must be almost through the Hindenburg Line. Soon it would be necessary for us to hook in and move forward if we were not to get out of touch.

It was eight o’clock when our teams arrived with Heming riding at their head. None of us commented on his presence. He had disobeyed the summons to England and was taking one last chance in battle of maintaining his silence forever. We knew then that the woman whom he had loved was guilty—that whatever he could have said would have told against her. His face had a sterner expression than I had ever seen it wear; it looked gray and haggard. Only his eyes had their steady gaze of untroubled brave resolution. He rode up to the Major and reported the number of the men and horses killed and wounded that night at the wagon-lines. “It was the bombing planes did it,” he said; “they were right on top of us. We’re short of gunners now, so I had to bring Suzette.”

Then he took his instructions and rode back to the teams to keep them out of shell-fire till they were needed.

An hour went by. The Major had got mounted and gone forward to a windmill, just behind the furthest point of our attack, from where he could watch developments and send back for us the moment we were required. He was determined this time to be in the thick of it. His last words had been that, if our Headquarters tried to hold us back, we were to let our wires to the rear go down and obey him only; he would be answerable.

Already several batteries had hooked in and disappeared over the crest at the gallop. We were beginning to feel impatient and fearful lest once again we were to see very little of the fun, when the Major’s orderly came in sight taking shell-holes like a steeple-chaser. Pulling his horse up on its haunches, he delivered a written message:

“Our infantry have broken the Hindenburg Line, but the enemy are massed behind it. They’ve led our chaps into a trap and are putting up their real fight in their support-trenches. Our tanks have gone on and cannot help. Much of our artillery fire is at too long range to be effective. Close support is absolutely necessary. Our infantry are being pushed back. Move the battery up by sections. Captain Homing taking the leading section and you the rear, with an interval of at least ten minutes between them. We are practically in sight of the Boche, so leave twenty yards between your guns and wagons. It’s a sacrifice job, so expect a hot time. My orderly will show Captain Homing where to come into action.”

Heming came up just as I had finished reading the crumpled slip of paper. I handed it to him. He glanced it through in silence. His face broke into a smile. “It may be death,” he said.

He signalled for his teams to come up. While they were hooking in, he spoke with me quietly. “Once on the Somme I asked you to give a message to a lady if I were wiped out. I wasn’t; but I may be to-day. If that happens, I want you to give her the same message. Tell her that I did everything that she might feel proud of our friendship.” He met my eye and looked away. “In years to come she’ll need something to make her feel proud, so don’t spoil it. Don’t tell her about Suzette.... But you chaps, however many of you are left—you’ll take care of Suzette. I know that!”

“We’ll take care of Suzette,” I said.

“And my message——?”

“I’ll deliver your message.”

The guns were pulling out. I watched them file off round the swamp, followed by their ammunition-wagons. When the last wagon was clear, Heming waved his hand to me.

“Good luck,” I shouted.

He galloped off to the head of the column. Then I noticed that someone was running to catch up behind. For a moment I thought it was a gunner of the detachments; then I recognised Suzette. They went at the walk across the valley; as they neared the top of the crest on the other side, shells began to burst. They were now a target for the enemy, and broke into first the trot and then the gallop. In a cloud of dust and smoke they disappeared from sight. Ten minutes later the centre section went forward. About fifteen minutes after that I pulled out taking with me the remaining section. I glanced back at my men. We’d been in tight corners before together. I would take a bet on how they would behave. Among them all there was only one query-mark—Driver Trottrot. He was riding lead of one of the first-line wagons. If he’d got over his fear of shell-fire, within the next hour he would have his chance to prove it.

There was only one road by which to climb the crest; it had been well advertised by the other batteries. As we reached the top, we were skeletoned against the sky-line and hell broke loose about us. Setting spurs to our horses, we went off at the wild tear. With the vehicles swaying and thundering behind us, we passed over the first line of resistance, which our infantry had captured that morning. The air was heavy with the smell of gas, but worse than the gas were the incendiary shells, which sent up showers of liquid fire where they struck, maddening the horses.

On account of the trench-systems it was impossible to go across the open country, so we had to bear to the right and come down on to the Cambrai-Arras road. It was crowded with transport—tanks, pontoons and lorries full of engineers, being rushed up to bridge and hold the canals in the belief that the attack was still going ahead. We had to slow down to the crawl in places. The road was a sure target for the enemy; he knew that it was our one means of advance and, consequently, gave it constant attention. One vehicle struck caused a block in the traffic for half a mile; men worked furiously among the falling shells to drag the cripples to one side. In the ditches, where they had fallen that morning, dead horses and men, both the enemy’s and ours, lay crushed and crumpled. No one wished to pay heed to them; we did our utmost to ignore them as though they were utterly negligible. But they seemed to cry out to us, appealing for our pity; then, when we shuddered, threatening us with the same terrifying, uncared-for Nemesis. When we let our eyes rest on them they were lying harmless and quiet, but we had the feeling that behind our backs they sat up with their wounds gaping, and gnawed their fists at us. Our animals shied at the corpses, breaking into a sweat and becoming unmanageable, If the dead were not a sufficient warning of what war could do to us, there was always the crimson returning tide of battered men, washing grievously past us back to Arras like a stream of blood.

Patriotism and glory! They sounded empty words compared with life. There was only one word that was an incentive to keep us steady—pride. We might survive; we did not wish to live with selves who would have to hang their heads. Yes, and there was another incentive—duty: the thought of comrades still further forward, to whom the roar of our eighteen-pounders would be happy as a peal of bells.

Crawling, hailing, trotting for brief spells, we had travelled about four thousand yards when we saw the windmill on the rise, from which the Major was observing, and in front of the windmill the Hindenburg Line which we were supposed to have smashed. In the plain which stretched behind the mill, our sacrifice batteries were strong out, belching fire. Across the plain our supporting infantry were trickling up in Indian file, winding their way about the batteries in action and side-stepping to avoid the bursting shells.

Suddenly we understood, as though the meaning of what for four years we had been doing were being revealed to us for the first time. In a flash we saw war’s glory, its wickedness, magnanimity, challenge and the amazing fortitude it begets in men. It taught unbrave, ordinary chaps how to try and go on trying, long after hope seemed at an end. Each one of those batteries out there in the plain was like a “Little Revenge,” surrounded and dragged down by weight of numbers; but out or sheer self-respecting stubbornness it never ceased spurting fire. Everyone of those infantry, plodding stolidly forward, was quaking at the thought of the Judgment Day up front; but each one of them would rather die a thousand deaths than shew the white-feather. The sight was blinding, maddening, intoxicating. If those chaps didn’t mind dying, why should we hang on to life?

Leaving the first-line wagons parked by the roadside, we set off at the gallop with the guns and firing-battery wagons to where we saw Heming’s four guns blazing away in the sunshine. The infantry stood aside to give us passage. They waved their caps and shouted. We could not hear a word of what they said; we only saw their lips moving. The pounding of our going drowned all other sounds.

We swung into line on Heming’s right, flinging our horses back on their haunches. Before we had had time to unhook, a shell had burst directly under the centre team of A. Sub’s gun; men and horses were rolling. We dragged our drivers out and had to shoot the horses before we could get the gun into action. Then Bedlam broke loose.

Whether it was that the enemy had seen the heads of our horsemen above the rise and had got the line on us over open sights, or whether he had seen the flash of Heming’s firing before we had come up, we could not tell. In any case he was upon us now. All along the line of guns his hurricane of shells began to burst. They fell on top and plus and minus of us. shutting us off from help. From our wagon-lines on the roadside our peril had been sized up and teams were coming at the gallop to drag us out. They never got as far as us. Two hundred yards short, as though he had been potting at them with a rifle, the enemy caught them, and they crashed and sank in a cloud of dust. No sooner were they down than fresh teams dashed out. By his riding I recognised the lead-driver of the foremost team as Trottrot. At last his opportunity had come. He was winning his spurs and proving to all the watching world that he was not yellow He would never reach us. He was riding towards certain and useless death. He was almost in the storm-centre, when I ran out and signalled him back.

In the middle of the battery, as cool and collected as if nothing were happening, Heming sat, his map-board on his knees. Suzette knelt beside him, doing his pencilling and listening through the ‘phone to the directions of the Major from up front. Now and then he looked up to give his orders for new ranges and angles; the expression on his face was triumphant. Every so often he left his map-board and walked among the men, encouraging them, “Stick to it, boys. We’ve got to blow the enemy out of the wire. It won’t take much longer now.”

But the boys were growing fewer. There were less and less of us to hear him every time he spoke to us. Three guns had been knocked out, and their crews were lying dead about them. Now there were only two left; now only one.

Suzette was setting fuzes. Heming was loading and putting on the ranges. I was laying and firing. We were all three wounded. We three had taken the places of the dead gunners and seemed to have been going through these motions, alone and mechanically, keeping the remaining gun in action, ever since eternity had begun.

Something happened to end it—a roar, a sheet of dame; then darkness.

A stream of warmth was trickling down my face and neck. I opened my eyes. The gun was lying over on its side; like worshippers at mass, Heming and Suzette were kneeling with clasped hands, their faces towards the red altar of the enemy. As I watched, their faces drew together and his arm went about her. Their action became symbolic; it was like England greeting France in the hour of agony.

Everything faded. The shock and clamour drifted into silence. The test of scarlet was ended.

Here in the white orderliness of a sheeted bed, with the accustomedness of peace on every hand, it is strange to remember.

THE END