a handful of white cottages flitted past as he looked down between his
feet. His enemy could not be seen. The body of the monoplane hid him as
he flew below and slightly in rear, but the roar of his engine, louder
than the scout's own, could just be heard.
Now was the time--the scout turned off abruptly at a tangent along the
line he had marked out for himself and drove his engine at its fastest.
The speedometer needle oscillated over 101 miles an hour. He calculated
that he had approximately twenty miles to go ere he reached the patch
of country he wished to explore. He should reach the commencement of
the enemy's left flank at 12.39, and be able to spend six minutes in
flying over five miles of ground and then have a couple of minutes in
hand. To the trained intellect behind his keen eyes six minutes were
amply sufficient. Having run along the left flank it was simplicity
itself to turn to the right and glide down into his own lines. There
seemed nothing to stop him. The pursuing machine was being quickly left
behind. The slow biplane now far off to his right could not possibly
arrive in time. The sky in front was clear of any menace.
Again he began to draw close to the great belt of dust-cloud which
stretched out to his right and again the din of battle began to
overpower the roar of his engine. Directly ahead was a dark mass of
woodland. It was from thence that the enemy's screen around the right
flank of the scout's army commenced. He swerved slightly to the left,
behind it. The hour was a second or two over 12.38.
Below him was a network of country roads, and from four strands of that
network which ran in an approximately parallel direction, coincident
with his own course, arose long dense clouds of dust. It was the dust
of marching columns. The scout shot a glance back at his pursuer,
assured himself that it was five or six miles in rear, and slowed down
his engine as he entered upon a long, gradual descent over the route of
those marching columns.
For mile after mile on those four roads the dust cloud continued.
The scout checked off the distances by villages on his map. Adding
the length of the four roads together he estimated that about twenty
miles of road was occupied by the marching force. It was a whole army
corps, then, that was endeavouring to turn their flank. In the open
fields between the roads he could distinguish small bodies of cavalry
advancing in the same direction. The mass on the roads was certainly
infantry, broken here and there by long columns of artillery. The low
dense clouds of dust kicked up by the tramp of thousands of feet were
cut into short sections where the guns and wagons of the batteries
rolled onward. From a rough calculation of those intersected clouds
he decided that four brigades of artillery were on the march. He had
descended now to 2000 feet, and he kept at that height as he roared
over the plodding columns. Behind him his pursuer had lessened the
distance between them, was getting dangerously close. The biplane on
his right was also approaching. Nevertheless, the scout held on his way
comfortably. There was nothing to prevent him carrying out his plan.
He was already well beyond the prolongation of his own army's line of
battle when he reached the head of the marching infantry. Contrary to
his expectation, however, they were not wheeling to the right. They
continued straight on, marching away from the battle, it seemed. The
scout was puzzled for a moment. He searched the ground in front of him
for more troops. It was apparently empty. Then, from a fold in the
landscape considerably ahead, he saw another, smaller dust cloud arise.
At his highest speed he raced towards it, overtook it in less than
a minute. Below him a cavalry brigade, accompanied by two batteries
of horse artillery, was trotting sharply forward. What was their
objective? He scanned the country in front of them intently. Some three
miles ahead of the cavalry was a wooded hill. He picked it out on the
map, saw instantly that it commanded the main avenue of retreat of his
army. The enemy's plan was clear. He would occupy it with the cavalry
and the two batteries until the infantry got up. The threatened army,
then attacked in flank and rear, would find its retreat cut off. If
the scout's commander was aiming to repeat Salamanca, the enemy was
endeavouring to repeat Jackson's march at Chancellorsville. The danger
was pressing. The scout reckoned that within half an hour the hostile
cavalry would be in possession of that hill. In an hour the infantry
would begin to come up in support. Where was the Sixth Division that he
had been told would check the flank movement of the enemy? He searched
for it, saw a brown mass about two miles from the wooded hill. Its
cavalry might get there in a quarter of an hour by a rapid dash. He had
then a quarter of an hour to deliver his message and get the division
set in motion. The hour was 12.46.
He wheeled towards his own line and commenced a downward glide at a
gentle angle. Then, taking his hands from the controls, he rapidly
wrote down a clear concise statement of the case in his report book.
Even if he did not reach earth, his message might. He glanced up to
see that his indefatigable pursuer was now swooping down to cut him
off. Moments were precious. He ripped out the page, thrust it into the
weighted message bag and tied it up. Then he started his engine again,
aiming for the brown mass of the Sixth Division.
Something made him look to his left. He was startled to see a large
biplane rushing up at him from the direction of the wooded hill. It
had evidently descended to effect some repairs and had lain hidden
far behind his own line. He recognised it at once. It was by far the
swiftest and most powerful machine possessed by either army. On his
present course a few seconds would bring him within range of its
machine-gun. To his right the other machine was rapidly growing larger.
In front, the slow biplane had sailed over the battle lines, was
heading straight for him. The three machines were converging on him.
The scout saw that he would either be forced away from the battle or
destroyed, his message undelivered in either case.
He swerved his machine and climbed. If only he could get above the
Sixth Division for an instant, he would throw over the message-bag,
chance its being picked up. To do that it was necessary to get higher.
On his present or a lower level he would be riddled with machine-gun
bullets. His adversaries on either hand rose also, but he got the lead
of them.
As they rose in circles he watched for his opportunity when both should
be turned away from him. The moment came. He seized it and dived,
with his engine running at full speed. The earth rushed upwards, its
features enlarging themselves as though they swelled to burst. The
brown mass of the Sixth Division spaced itself out into battalions,
squadrons, below him, in front. They were exactly underneath. He flung
out the message-bag, with something like a prayer in his heart. On
either hand his adversaries were swooping down upon him. He thought
he heard the rattle of their machine-guns, but in the roar of his own
engine he could not be sure.
Down and still down the three machines rushed. Suddenly he noticed the
slow biplane in front--on an even lower level than himself. It was very
close. He saw the pale dot of the face of the man behind the gun. If
he swerved he would be under its fire in a moment. If he kept on his
course he must crash into it. His decision was instant, instinctive. He
held on. One thought dominated him as he dived straight at it. Had his
message been picked up? If not----? He saw the gleaming backs of the
outstretched plane almost under him. He set his teeth for the impact. A
second more--the wide stretch of yellow canvas suddenly jerked to the
left and crumpled in a blinding flash. He had not touched. He swerved
to the right with all his force in the tiniest fraction of a second and
shot past something that fell, flaming.... A shell from below had hit
the biplane at the moment almost of collision.
He had a confused sense of other shells exploding in the air. A battery
was seizing its chance to get the enemy's aircraft in a cluster,
regardless of the danger to him. He continued his rush downward,
feeling rather than knowing that the other two machines were in close
pursuit. If he could only be certain that his message had been picked
up!
He flung a glance back over his shoulder. The powerful biplane that had
risen from behind the wooded hill was close upon him. Why did they not
fire? He felt himself a target, was surprised not to see the gash of
bullets on his machine. The explanation flashed on him. The gun had
jammed. The biplane came at him as though it were itself a projectile.
Its crew had desperately resolved to ram him, to sacrifice themselves
rather than to allow him to bring his precious information to the
ground. They were almost upon him. He swerved and dodged. The biplane
shot past.
Immediately he saw the other machine close upon him, saw a spurt of
fire from the muzzle of its gun. He dived. A belt of trees rushed
up at him, fearfully close. Their dark foliage seemed to break into
puffs of black smoke over his eyes. He swerved instinctively, saw a
meadow burst through the dark smoke, fly skyward in a mist of blood.
With a last desperate effort he banked. His hands slid from the
controls--everything swam. He was vaguely conscious of a heavy impact
from underneath----
Something was burning his throat--he opened his eyes, gazed into a
man's face close to his. Consciousness came back in a rush. He pushed
away the brandy flask that was being pressed against his teeth and
struggled to his feet. Strong arms supported him. Several men were
round him, looking at him. He was close to a road, and along that road
he thought he saw batteries of artillery galloping at full speed.
He was not certain of their reality. They passed like phantoms in
his vision, wavering up and down. He wanted to do something--to ask
something--what was it? He all but fixed the elusive thought--and lost
it. His hand felt for the duplicate report-book in his pocket--his
desire was connected with that. The report-book had gone. Then a
fragment of his intangible preoccupation floated, visible as it were,
in his brain. He clutched at it.
"What--what guns are those?" he asked thickly.
"Divisional artillery--Sixth Division," came the reply. "All right. We
got your message."
The scout put his hand to his brow and then, dropping it, stared at it
stupidly. It was red.
"All right," said the voice. "You're hit--but not seriously. Lie down."
The scout collected all his faculties in an attempt to bring out one
more thought from the obscurity which filled his brain.
"What--what time--now?" he asked.
"Just one o'clock." The voice appeared to recede to an enormous
distance, although he felt the speaker's face close to his. "They're in
time--don't worry. Lie down. The ambulances are coming in a minute or
two."
The scout stood obstinately.
"The--the other--machines?"
"Bagged 'em both. You came down beautifully--like a kite." The voice
sounded from worlds away.
The aviator put his hand to his head.
"In time!" He breathed the words rather than spoke them. They came like
the sigh of a man utterly spent.
The man who had been supporting him turned round with a jump and
focussed his binoculars on the wooded hill. A crowd of white puffs was
breaking out in the air above it.
The scout, left unattended, swayed with hands stretched out like a
blind man. The field whirled round and round suddenly with a fearful
rapidity and then rushed up and struck him.
The man with the binoculars ignored his prone body.
"Beat 'em on the post!" he shouted in joyous excitement. "By the Lord!
Beat 'em on the post!"
KULTUR (1915)
The subaltern commanding this section of the trench sat in a hunched
position in the narrow corridor of earth topped with sandbags. His
knees drawn up to serve as a support for the writing-pad, he wrote
quickly between long pauses when he bit the end of his pencil and
stared reflectively at the brown clay wall some two feet in front of
his nose. At his side a man stood, bent and motionless, peering into
the lower end of a long box, very narrow in proportion to its length,
which he held against the side of the trench so that the other end just
rose above the wall of sandbags. Further view down the trench in that
direction was barred by the traverse--the thick dividing-wall of earth
that would localise the effect of a shell-burst or a bomb. All was
quiet. The subaltern might have imagined that only he and the look-out
at his side remained buried in this flat landscape where once two
armies had flung fire and noise and steel at one another, hidden from
the sight of those who should have come to tell him that the war was
over and the armies stolen away. He did not so imagine. Ever present
to his mind was the parallel line of sandbags, some fifty yards away,
between him and which stretched a tangle of wire overgrown with rank
grasses and tufts of corn. That parallel line was the great permanent
fact in his existence. He knew it in its every aspect better than he
had ever previously known anything on this earth. Not a spot on that
apparently deserted wall might change without his being interested to
the quick. Even as he wrote, the feeling and the knowledge of it were
concrete in his brain, constraining him to this cramped attitude.
Since October this wall of his had fronted the other wall and now it
was June. For nine long months, through snow and rain and sunshine,
from the long nights to the long pitiless days, these two walls had
remained the same, sheltering the same lurking enmities though the
individuals who temporarily incarnated them came and went. Sometimes
ablaze with stabs of darting flame, erupting bombs lobbed with a
deceptive innocent slowness through the air, belching a mass of men
who ran and stumbled and fell in an infinite variety of ways--men who
shouted and who screamed so that their voices pierced the appalling
uproar; sometimes stretching blank across the fields in a deathly
stillness as to-day; their position had never altered. The quagmire
between them, criss-crossed with barbed wire, had grown up into a waste
of grass and nodding poppies that nearly hid what looked like bundles
of weather-stained old clothes whence came a sickening, all-pervading
smell. Behind each wall, hundreds of men had died or been carried
away, maimed and broken, a lifelong burden for some human heart. Not
a sandbag of those piled to make the parapet which sheltered the
subaltern, but might have had a man's name written on it in memoriam
of a life suddenly extinguished. The necrology of the opposing parapet
would have been as full.
In the hush which brooded over so much death--past and to come--a
pause, it would seem, where the overhanging invisible demon of war
reflected on its work--a mood of questioning, of revolt, came over the
subaltern as he scribbled his pencilled lines.
"On a quiet evening like this one cannot help moralising a little,"
he wrote, "wondering what it's all for and what we purchase with our
death. This constant murdering of individuals on both sides who commit
the crime of inadvertently showing an inch of head--how does this help
matters?" The sharp crack of a rifle somewhere along the trench caused
the officer to raise his head, listening with all his faculties at
strain. The look-out at his side did not stir, no report followed the
first, and he bent himself again to his letter. "I don't want to appear
squeamish, fine-stomached in this rough game, but I don't think I shall
ever be able to kill cold-bloodedly. I have been unfitted by long
centuries of culture----"
He was interrupted by the appearance of another officer, who squirmed
himself round the traverse with a pronounced stoop necessitated by his
uncommon tallness. The fair-moustached, boyish face of the new-comer
was radiant with glee.
"I say, Lennard!" he said impetuously. "Ripping luck! We've just bagged
Fritz! You heard the shot just now? Folwell, my sergeant, got him. Been
waiting for him for over an hour, without moving a muscle. Topping
chap, Folwell. All he said was, 'Married life don't seem to 'ave
spoilt my aim, sir.' You remember, he asked for leave to get married?"
Lennard abandoned his letter and lit a cigarette.
"I wonder whether Fritz was married," he said with a little malicious
smile, the ideas recently in possession of him firing a final shot in a
faint rearguard action with the returning everyday occupants.
"Well, that's one more nuisance abated."
"Rather!" said the other, seating himself and likewise lighting a
cigarette. "Fritz must have bagged not less than a dozen of our chaps,"
he calculated, gazing reflectively at the thin spiral of tobacco smoke
which ascended straight in the still evening air. "Well, he's gone,
thank the Lord! and we got Hans yesterday and Karl the day before. I
must have a pot at old Hermann. If we could bag him we might hope for a
quiet life."
Lennard nodded. Each one of the German snipers--if sufficiently lucky
to carry on his profession for a day or two--acquired an individuality
and a name. Hermann was an especially dangerous neighbour who lurked
somewhere in a ruined cottage that lay between the lines where they
bent away slightly from each other. He rarely fired except to kill, and
hid himself so well that not one of the numerous patrols sent out had
succeeded in discovering his lair.
The two subalterns chatted awhile over their cigarettes, while the red
gold of the western sky faded into rose. They talked of the little
incidents of mess and trench, magnified by their isolation from the
main stream of life, and then, harking back, of the things that once
had been so important to them in London town, and were now so dwindled
and remote. A year ago Lennard was a critic who was read, and Wilson,
the tall subaltern, a painter whose first success was hanging on the
line. Both were, or had been, highly polished products of what we
called, proudly, civilisation. As they talked the old scenes came back
to them, obliterating the present. At last Wilson rose, responsive to a
subtle inner sense of time measured, independent of his consciousness.
"Well, so long, old thing," he said, standing up and straightening his
tall form, fatigued with so much bending. The momentary forgetfulness
was fatal. On the instant a rifle cracked and the lanky subaltern
collapsed as though his knees had been knocked from under him.
"My God!" cried Lennard, limb-paralysed by this brutally tragic
reassertion of his environment. Trembling, his heart seeming to stop
and swell within him, he bent down to his friend. He touched mere
clothed flesh, heavy and inert, on which the flies had already settled.
They buzzed away, indignantly asserting their right of pasture. A
madness of anger at this wanton annihilation of a life that was
not just a dull living but an irradiation of the spirit, connoting
civilisation, highly conscious, swept over him. He burst into a torrent
of incoherent wrathful curses.
"That was 'Ermann, sir," said the observer at the periscope. "I spotted
the flash, in among them bricks."
Lennard rose, fiercely vengeful.
"Let me look. Where did you see the flash?"
"Three o'clock from that bit of greenstuff in the middle, sir,"
replied the man, ceding his place at the periscope. "You'll see a dark
spot--that's 'is loophole."
Lennard gazed down into the mirror of the instrument. There was just
light enough for him to pick up the spot indicated.
"Very good." He strode, with bent back, down the trench, muttering to
himself.
It was night when, rifle in hand, he swung himself nimbly over the
parapet. For some minutes he lay flat on the ground at the other side,
not moving an inch. Over his head the crack of rifles and the loud,
rapid hammer taps of the Maxims recommenced their fusillade against the
heap of bricks. From the first shade of dusk he had arranged that a
constant enfilading fire be kept up on the sniper's lurking-place. He
had no intention of letting Hermann slip away--yet.
He raised his head slightly, fixed his bearings in the gloom and then,
still prone, began to nip a way through the wire entanglements. A
German flare went up, dazzling with a ghastly light, too brilliant
for distinct vision. He lay motionless. As it descended and fizzled
out upon the ground he had a clear view of his course. He was aiming
at a point in front of the German wire, whence he could enfilade the
gap between the heap of bricks and the hostile parapet. Over his head
the hard, sharp cracks of his own men's fire followed one another
continuously. They would not cease for nearly fifteen minutes yet.
Meanwhile Hermann would be lying close. He cut and wrenched at the
wire and wriggled forward, grimly disdainful of the barbs that plucked
and tore his clothes.
Again and again a soaring German flare stopped his progress. Clearly,
this incessant fusillade was making the enemy nervous. At each
illumination he lay as if he were one of the bundles of old clothes
that occasionally he pushed against. The British parapet darted with
fire--awoke a sympathetic crackling somewhere to the right.
At last. He settled himself in a comfortable firing position, couched
in the long damp grass. An insect, unaware in its littleness of the
large death that whistled above its world, quitted a pendent blade,
explored his cheek.
Crack--crack--crack! the last British rifles ceased. There was an
instant's stillness, and then yet another flare shot up from the
suspicious German trench. It fell, sizzled--illuminating the ruins that
he watched with all his faculties focussed, all his nerves coming to a
point on his trigger finger--and then the world plunged into blackness.
There was silence and impenetrable darkness.
Minute after minute dragged slowly past in a dead hush. Finger on
trigger, every fibre tense, the prone figure waited. A primeval self
awoke in him--a savage who stalked and could indefinitely maintain his
ambush. His senses were as keen as though hyper-stimulated by some
strange drug. A grim, patient lust to kill reigned in him.
The minutes passed slowly, slowly. He looked to one of them, not yet
arrived, as to a term. When? He felt it approaching, concentrated to
a still acuter degree his attention. The trigger seemed to be pressing
against his finger. What was that? Surely something was moving there in
the gloom--by the ruin. Why did not the flare he had ordered go up? His
whole soul went out in a desperate prayer for it as he held his breath
and strove with baffled eyes against the darkness.
Suddenly the craved-for light shot up. Perception and trigger-pressure
were instantaneous with the flash of its discharge. A running, stooping
figure pitched headforemost before the stab of flame from the rifle.
Immediately a vicious fire from the German parapet answered this
impertinence. The slayer lay still as death, listening with painfully
acute perception to the ugly _phat!_ of bullets in the earth around
him. A bomb fell, burst with a deafening report and a blinding flash of
flame so close that he marvelled at his escape. By an effort of will he
choked down the cough that the fumes provoked.
Rifle-fire at night is infectious. A sporadic and probably harmless
duel sputtered up and down the trenches. At last a gun, way back
somewhere, sent over a shell, and, as though obedient to this protest
from their big brother, the rifles were silenced, one by one. The
opposing trenches again lay in darkness and quiet.
The subaltern, assuring himself that all was still, wriggled forward
to the body of his victim, lay full-length beside it. Quickly he ran
through the dead man's pockets, stuffed a bundle of papers into his
own. Then, a rifle in each hand, he crawled back to his own parapet,
climbed over and lay down. In an instant he was sound asleep.