"Reedshires!--Get Over!"
Dennis sprang from his dug-out into the trench, and the first person he
encountered was Harry Hawke.
"Where's that wounded Highlander?" he cried, so fiercely that Hawke
stared at him open-mouthed.
"If you mean the singing bloke, sir--last I seed of 'im he was doin' a
bunk for his own battalion," replied the Cockney private. And Dennis
Dashwood's teeth closed with a snap, realising the utter futility of any
search for von Drissel just then.
"If you clap eyes on that man again, Hawke!" he exclaimed, "shoot him on
sight. He is a German spy!" And, leaving the astonished private to make
what he might of the information, he passed along the trench to find his
brother.
He came across him in whispered conversation with the Reedshires'
colonel in one of the trench bays on the right, and before he could
speak Captain Bob took him by the arm.
"It has come at last, old chap," he said, with the mysterious air of one
imparting an item of precious information.
"Yes," said Dennis grimly, "I know; we make the great attack at
half-past seven, and the Germans know it too. Look at this!"
Captain Bob and the C.O. read von Drissel's words by the light of a
star-shell, and the trio exchanged glances.
"Well, it can't be helped," said the C.O. "And I don't think the
information will do the enemy much good. Do you notice how dull the
sound of our guns is? It strikes one as odd."
It had not occurred to them before, but they realised it now as they
stood there in the trench bay, and others remarked the fact and wrote of
it afterwards. A hurricane of shells of every calibre, from the
whiz-bang of the field-guns to the enormous projectile of "Mother,"
passed continuously overhead in the darkness, to burst in the enemy
trenches, and yet the sound was less loud than many a purely local
bombardment had been.
It was a trying wait, and the dawn came with provoking slowness, a grey
mist veiling the ground until the sun gained power and the sky showed
pale-blue flecked with fleecy clouds. Men blew on their fingers, for the
morning was cold.
"It ain't 'arf parky," growled Harry Hawke.
"It'll be 'ot enough in a bit," said his pal, Tiddler. "What price Old
Street, 'Arry?"
"Chuck it!" replied the marksman of No. 2 Platoon. "No good thinking of
love and sentiment now." But for all that, perhaps, a fleeting vision of
his Lil passed through his untutored brain, and made him a shade paler
about the gills.
Tiddler noticed it and smiled to himself, knowing what it meant, for
when Hawke looked white it was time for his enemy to look out, and the
moment was rapidly approaching.
The trench was packed with men, all waiting. Those of the reserves who
were not yet in their places were pouring steadily up, and immediately
behind the front line Staff cars and motor cycles dashed backwards and
forwards; and overhead, where, oddly enough, the larks were trilling, an
English aeroplane was flying just above the scream of the shells.
Dennis saw it, and wondered how Claude Laval was faring; and as he
looked at his wrist-watch he saw that it was nearly six o'clock.
At that moment the most terrific bombardment the war had witnessed burst
with devastating fury upon the German lines. Nothing had been heard like
it, and men smiled grimly, knowing that their turn would come soon.
The C.O. left the bay, and walked along the front of his beloved
battalion from one end of it to the other; a quiet, keen-eyed English
officer, brave as a lion they all knew, but showing no trace of the
slightest excitement as his eye scanned the faces of the waiting men.
He had been appointed to the command when the Dashwoods' father was
given the brigade, and he realised that the brigadier expected great
things of his old battalion.
"I never saw a fitter lot," was his gratified comment as he returned to
the two brothers. "Heaven help the enemy yonder if our artillery has
only cleared the wire."
"It's sincerely to be hoped they have, sir," said Captain Bob dryly.
"There was a dickens of a lot of it. But we shall get through without a
doubt. Not long to wait now, for there go the trench mortars."
Mingling with the continuous roar of our guns came a still louder and
very insistent sound, to which they listened in silence, every officer
of the battalion with his eye on his watch.
"Well, good luck, old chap!" said Bob suddenly, gripping Dennis by the
hand. And the two brothers looked at each other with the same thought
behind the quiet confidence of their smile.
It might be the last time they would ever meet on earth, but they faced
the possibility without fear, and already a dense cloud of smoke,
released along our whole front, was shrouding the waiting line.
"Seven-thirty to the tick," said the C.O. "Reedshires--Get over!" And in
an instant the battalion was swarming out of its trench, and advancing
over the two hundred yards of broken ground which separated the brigade
from the enemy, with sloped arms.
It was terrible going, for the whole earth was honeycombed by craters
large and small; but out of the smoke-cloud rose a ringing cheer, which
was still floating on the air when the vicious tac-tac of machine-guns
from the German lines told that even high explosives had their
limitations, and that some at least of the enemy gun-emplacements
remained undestroyed.
"Double!" cried the C.O., seeing that a kilted battalion on his left was
racing forward as the best means of escaping the continuous stream of
bullets.
"Charge, boys, charge!" yelled Dennis, taking up the cry; and that
brown avalanche of eager, helmeted men poured on clear of the smoke into
the bright sunshine, which glinted on their fixed bayonets.
In spite of the carefully prepared staff maps and plans which they had
all studied closely, Dennis looked in vain for any sign of a definite
objective. There was no sandbagged parapet, nothing but a confused mass
of holes and heaps scattered broadcast over the landscape--the result of
the terrific spade-work of the guns--which had to be crossed before the
village was reached. The village, too, of which he caught a glimpse, was
only a pulverised mass of debris, with here and there the angle of a
shattered house or the ribs of a roof to mark what had once been human
habitations.
But he knew that the strength of the enemy's position lay in the
wonderful subterranean works, the deep dug-outs, the covered-in
communicating trenches, and for these he and his men rushed with great
determination.
Suddenly, from the other side of a chalk heap, a row of heads appeared,
wearing flat blue forage caps with white bands round them, and a shout
of rapture rose from No. 2 Platoon as they saw at last something to go
for.
Between them and the row of heads yawned a huge shell crater, and as the
platoon divided automatically to avoid the obstacle, a heavy volley
across the crater caught them, and several of the running men pitched
forward and lay where they fell.
Perhaps they had orders to retire, perhaps it was our yell that scared
them; but the heads disappeared; and when our men reached the spot where
they had been the Germans had vanished. One stout fellow, dropping into
a hole thirty yards away, was the only indication of what had become of
them; but it was sufficient, and with a "Come on, boys!" Dennis sprinted
for the spot.
He had armed himself with a rifle and bayonet for the advance; but,
changing it to his left hand, he opened the bag of bombs he had also
brought and, drawing the pin, flung one of them into the hole, a square
opening, evidently the entrance to a covered communication trench.
"Wait a moment!" he shouted, shouldering back the next man up, who in
his excitement was about to plunge in; and then he heard the bomb burst
below, and a shower of earth and fragments of clothing bespattered the
pair of them, a piece of the bomb making an ugly gash on the man's
cheek.
Then Dennis sprang down, regardless of the fumes. At the bottom of the
steps he was conscious of treading on something soft, but did not stay
to examine it, for a ray of light filtering in from a fissure in the
roof showed him dark forms scurrying away in the distance along the
boarded passage.
The hand-grenade had got a move on the enemy, and, followed by a dozen
men of the platoon, he led the way, gripping his rifle, and loosing a
couple of rounds from the hip as he ran.
One of the bullets evidently found its mark, for a man lay writhing on
the ground where another passage turned off at right angles. The man
tried to seize his legs, but instantly let go his hold with a hoarse cry
as Tiddler's bayonet settled all disputes, and Dennis darted round the
angle.
The passage ended in a strange place; a large dug-out which had been
partially unroofed by one of our shells earlier in the morning, and knee
deep amid the loose earth which had poured in, half filling it, twenty
Germans turned at bay, under the command of a very tall officer.
There were only eight men with Dennis, for the other four were still
groping their way somewhere behind in the darkness of the passage, and
the young lieutenant realised in a flash of time that he was seriously
outnumbered and must act promptly.
A big sergeant jumped at him with a shout, but before the lunging
bayonet had crossed his own, Dennis fired and shot the man dead.
"Put your hands up and surrender!" he said sternly in German to the
rest; and the first to obey was the tall officer, who came scrambling
over the loose earth with both arms outstretched.
"We are your prisoners, sir," he said, holding his revolver as though he
were presenting the butt to Dennis. And the men of the British platoon
lowered their bayonets with disappointment in their faces.
It meant some of their number escorting the prisoners to the rear, they
knew, and that was not the hope they had had in their hearts.
But their disappointment was short-lived, for, as the tall officer came
within a stride of the young lieutenant, he suddenly shouted: "Now you
have them, men! Down with these infernal English!" And, reversing his
own weapon, he fired three shots at Dennis Dashwood in rapid succession.
The treachery was so unexpected that Dennis could do no more than duck
his head, and even then the third bullet buckled the brim of his trench
helmet; but as the barrel of the German's revolver clicked harmlessly
round, showing that it was empty, Dennis lunged upward.
"Sorry, sir!" said a voice at his elbow. "He was your bird." And a man
of the platoon, who had been a gamekeeper before he joined up, withdrew
his own bayonet, which had buried itself simultaneously in the cowardly
brute's ribs.
But there was no time for thanks, for the enemy had responded to the
treacherous command, and a terrific hand-to-hand fight ensued in the
half-demolished dug-out.
When the magazines had been emptied, butt and bayonet came into play at
close quarters, and men clutched each other in a death struggle, and
rolled over and over, howling like wolves.
Once, indeed, Dennis found himself driven backwards into the mouth of
the passage by two beefy fellows attacking him at the same time, and it
was only by dropping his rifle and using his revolver that he saved
himself from certain death.
As it was, although the Reedshires had taken heavy toll and reduced the
odds considerably, three of the platoon were down, and a fourth reeled,
badly wounded, against the side of the dug-out.
The four who should have provided a welcome reinforcement had missed
the turning, and continued straight along the covered communication, and
now nine of the enemy, springing back on to the top of the fallen earth
to take breath, collected for a rush that could have but one end.
"Quick, men!" cried Dennis, snatching up the ex-gamekeeper's rifle,
which the poor chap would never use again, "get into the passage, and
slip in another clip! You've just time, if I can hold them up for a
moment!"
The survivors of that little band each told the story afterwards with
variations, but all were agreed on two points.
One was the blinding flash as a bomb fell into the middle of the Germans
through the shell-hole in the roof. The other was the voice of Captain
Bob, sounding strangely distinct in the death-like silence that followed
the explosion as he called out: "Have you had enough in there, or would
you like another one?"
Then they lifted up their voices in a great shout of "Hold on, sir!" And
Dennis yelled: "Bob, you juggins, do you want to do the lot of us in?"
"Oh, it's you, is it?" cried his brother, sliding through the opening
with a sergeant and a couple of bombers. "I might have known you'd be
mixed up in it somehow. We heard some German jabbering and chanced our
arm."
"And a lucky thing for us you did," said Dennis, pointing to the
hideously bespattered grey-green uniforms that littered the earth heap.
Only one of the nine men was moving, and after a convulsive opening and
shutting of his hands the movement ceased altogether. "How is it going
up above?"
"Top-hole, so far," said the Captain. "At least, as far as our battalion
is concerned, though there seems to be a bit of a check among those
chaps on our left. Nobody else down here? Very well; this is the
quickest way out, and every minute is an hour. We've got their
first-line trench, or all that was left of it." And they scrambled once
more up the land slide into the open-air.