said Rabbie. “When we’re in action I’m thinkin’ promotions are quick
enought oot here in the Suicide Club.”
III
IN THE WOOD
THE attack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more
than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance
line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards
into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently
woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had
happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently
unpleasant. It was plain from several indications—the direction from
which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of
some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and
crash of bombs behind him—that the battalion had been driven back,
as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course
of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks
past, that he was lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself
where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off
with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His
left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached
intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from
side to side—a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying
dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the
teeth.
He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that
for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and
wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it
would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him
within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of
the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.
Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when
he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it
was dry; and, after fifteen tortured minutes, thirst drove him to
the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg
to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a
long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had
ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against
the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to
a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a
desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to
crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little
nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of
coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took
hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt.
The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees,
bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about
that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to
bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful
when he lifted his hand to his head that he desisted and satisfied
himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then
he set out to crawl.
It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the
horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood
had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been
smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops,
and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and
little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and
broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs,
scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for
any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were
still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing,
the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or
break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered.
But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue
to fight, and the Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere
near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have
seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his
plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he
was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head
but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no
time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.
Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but
into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the
Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as
many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary
lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk,
each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a
pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he
collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the
struggle; and a score of times he roused himself and fought down
numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl
again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some
obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.
Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems
of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back
of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his
direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action
other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for
instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long
with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should
move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off
the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other
would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up,
a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there;
and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware
of grey coats moving along the trench towards him, had sense enough
to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed.
And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the
trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable
it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.
He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and
held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge
held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep
under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number
of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the
struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of
the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass
than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in
his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness,
but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles
of agony; and for all the splints encasing it and despite all the care
he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by
some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate
of the broken bones.
He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on
crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the
rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts,
the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole
these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set
him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of
his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of
bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about
him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because
they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere
near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he
was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and
his vision was blurred and dim, and at last he was forced to drop and
lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct
his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had
come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its
edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of
the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and
branches to fragments.
But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he
could barely raise himself on his shaking arms—had not the strength to
crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare
inches, and had to drop motionless again.
And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British
into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured
crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki
figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the
rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still
lay on the edge of the broken trench along which he had crept, and he
could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and
that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the
British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope
flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to
leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack
was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the
advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that
a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines,
its failure leave him still within the German.
Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and
he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they
hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned
the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling
British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered;
a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed
back. But almost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke
and swept forward, and this time, although the same flank and frontal
fire caught and smote it, the line straggled and swayed forward and
plunged into and over the German trench.
The Corporal lying there on the trench edge was suddenly aware of a
stir amongst the men below him. The edge where he lay half screened in
a debris of green stuff and huddled beside a couple of dead Germans
was broken down enough to let him see well into the trench, and he
understood to the full the meaning of the movements of the Germans in
the trench, of their hasty hauling down of the machine-guns, their
scrambling retirement crouched and hurrying along the trench back in
the direction from which he had come. The trench the British had taken
ran out at a right angle from this one where he lay, and the Germans
near him were retiring behind the line of trench that had been taken.
And that meant he was as good as saved.
A minute later two khaki figures emerged from a torn thicket of tree
stumps and branches a dozen yards beyond the trench where he lay,
and ran on across towards the denser wood into which the Germans had
retreated. One was an officer, and close on their heels came half a
dozen, a dozen, a score of men, all following close and pressing on
to the wood and opening out as they went. One came to the edge of the
trench where the machine-guns had been, and the Corporal with an effort
lifted and waved an arm and shouted hoarsely to him. But even as he
did so he realised how futile his shout was, how impossible it was
for it to carry even the few yards in the pandemonium of noise that
raved about them. But he shouted again, and yet again, and felt bitter
disappointment as the man without noticing turned and moved along the
trench, peering down into it.
The Corporal had a sudden sense of someone moving behind him, and
twisted round in time to see another khaki figure moving past a dozen
paces away and the upper half bodies of half a score more struggling
through the thickets beyond. This time he screamed at them, but they
too passed, unhearing and unheeding. The Corporal dropped quivering
and trying to tell himself that it was all right, that there would be
others following, that some of them must come along the trench, that
the stretcher-bearers would be following close.
But for the moment none followed them, and from where they had vanished
came a renewed uproar of grenade-bursts and rifle fire beating out and
through the uproar of the guns and the screaming, crashing shells. The
Corporal saw a couple of wounded come staggering back ... the tumult
of near fighting died down ... a line of German grey-clad shoulders
and bobbing “coal-scuttle” helmets plunged through and beyond the
thicket from which the khaki had emerged a few minutes before. And
then back into the trench below him scuffled the Germans with their
two machine-guns. With a groan the Corporal dropped his face in the
dirt and dead leaves and groaned hopelessly. He was “done in,” he told
himself, “clean done in.” He could see no chance of escape. The line
had been driven back, and the last ounce of strength to crawl.... He
tried once before he would finally admit that last ounce gone, but the
effort was too much for his exhausted limbs and pain-wrenched body. He
dropped to the ground again.
The rapid clatter of the two machine-guns close to him lifted his head
to watch. The main German trench was spouting dust and debris, flying
clouds of leaves, flashing white slivers of bark and wood, under the
torrent of shells that poured on it once more. The machine-guns below
him ceased, and the Corporal concluded that their target had gone
for the moment. But that intense bombardment of the trench almost
certainly meant the launching of another British attack, and then the
machine-guns would find their target struggling again across their
sights and under their streaming fire. They had a good “field of fire,”
too, as the Corporal could see. The British line had to advance for
the most part through the waist-high tangle of wrecked wood, but by
chance or design a clearer patch of ground was swept close to the
German trench, and as the advance crossed this the two machine-guns
on the flank near the Corporal would get in their work, would sweep
it in enfilade, would be probably the worst obstacle to the advance.
And at that a riot of thoughts swept the Corporal’s mind. If he could
out those machine-guns ... if he could out those machine-guns ... but
how? There were plenty of rifles near, and plenty of dead about with
cartridges on them ... but one shot would bring the Germans jumping
from their trench on him.... Bombs now ... if he had some Mills’
grenades ... where had he seen....
He steadied himself deliberately and thought back. The whole wood was
littered with grenades, spilt and scattered broadcast singly and in
heaps—German stick-grenades and Mills’. He remembered crawling past a
dead bomber with a bag full of Mills’ beside him only a score of yards
away. Could he crawl to them and back again? The Germans in the trench
might see him; and anyhow—hadn’t he tried? And hadn’t he found the
last ounce of his strength gone?
But he found another last ounce. He half crawled, half dragged himself
back and found his bag of grenades, and with the full bag hooked over
his shoulder and a grenade clutched ready in his hand felt himself a
new man. His strength was gone, but it takes little strength to pull
the pin of a grenade, and if any German rushed him now, at least they’d
go together.
The machine-guns broke out again, and the Corporal, gasping and
straining, struggled foot by foot back towards them. The personal
side—the question of his own situation and chances of escape—had
left him. He had forgotten himself. His whole mind was centered on the
attack, on the effect of those machine-guns’ fire, on the taking of
the German trench. He struggled past the break in the trench and on
until he had shelter behind the low parapet. He wanted some cover. One
grenade wasn’t enough. He wanted to make sure, and he wouldn’t chance a
splinter from his own bomb.
The machine-guns were chattering and clattering at top speed, and as
he pulled the pin of his first grenade the Corporal saw another gun
being dragged up beside the others. He held his grenade and counted
“one-and-two-and-_throw_—” and lobbed the grenade over into the trench
under the very feet of the machine-gunners. He hastily pulled another
pin and threw the grenade ... and as a spurt of smoke and dust leaped
from the trench before him and the first grenades _crash-crashed_,
he went on pulling out the pins and flinging over others as fast as
he could pitch. The trench spouted fire and dust and flying dirt and
debris, the ground shook beneath him, he was half stunned with the
quick-following reports—but the machine-guns had stopped on the first
burst.
That was all he remembered. This time the last ounce was really gone,
and he was practically unconscious when the stretcher-bearers found him
after the trench was taken and the attack had passed on deep into the
wood.
And weeks after, lying snug in bed in a London hospital, after a Sister
had scolded him for moving in bed and reaching out for a magazine that
had dropped to the floor, and told him how urgent it was that he must
not move, and how a fractured leg like his must be treated gently and
carefully if he did not wish to be a cripple for life, and so on and so
forth, he grinned up cheerfully at her. “Or-right, Sister.” he said,
“I’ll remember. But it’s a good job for me I didn’t know all that, back
there—in the wood.”
IV
THE DIVING TANK
HIS MAJESTY’S land-ship Hotstuff was busy rebunkering and refilling
ammunition in a nicely secluded spot under the lee of a cluster of
jagged stumps that had once been trees, while her Skipper walked round
her and made a careful examination of her skin. She bore, on her blunt
bows especially, the marks of many bullet splashes and stars and scars,
and on her starboard gun turret a couple of blackened patches of
blistered paint where a persistent Hun had tried his ineffectual best
to bomb the good ship at close quarters, without any further result
than the burnt paint and a series of bullet holes in the bomber.
As the Skipper finished his examination, finding neither crack, dent,
nor damage to anything deeper than the paintwork, “All complete” was
reported to him, and he and his crew proceeded to dine off bully
beef, biscuits, and uncooked prunes. The meal was interrupted by a
motor-cyclist, who had to leave his cycle on the roadside and plough on
foot through the sticky mud to the Hotstuff’s anchorage, with a written
message. The Skipper read the message, initialled the envelope as a
receipt, and, meditatively chewing on a dry prune, carefully consulted
a squared map criss-crossed and wriggled over by a maze of heavy red
lines that marked the German trenches, and pricked off a course to
where a closer-packed maze of lines was named as a Redoubt.
The Signals dispatch-rider had approached the crew with an enormous
curiosity and a deep desire to improve his mind and his knowledge on
the subject of “Tanks.” But although the copybook maxims have always
encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff
preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and
with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and
with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first,
nature to them, returned answers more baffling in their fullness than
the deepest silence would have been.
“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the
dispatch-rider.
“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The
armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by
an _in_-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just
inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set
o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits
us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally,
but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill at _con_-siderable range.”
Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and
there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile
amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.
“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’—trenches, an’ barbed
wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.
“_Almost_ anything,” repeated the spokesman, with just a shade of
indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any
almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was
the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it?
You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”
“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt
and incredulity.
“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our
average cruise.”
“But—but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut
off—surrounded—er——”
“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was
surrounded, _and_ cut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen
some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’
shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they?
So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he
went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried
to butt through it an’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook
bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”
“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful
o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she
upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we
had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”
“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when
we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat,
I must confess.”
“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she
floats?”
“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re
not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a
watertight tank—wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve
an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about
that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at
the Skipper folding up his map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul,
or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded
hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the
Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold
us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the
cliffs on the other side.”
The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling,
and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found
time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn
down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll
most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”
“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to
himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”
But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her
performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his
motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in
which direction he was likely to be the bigger fool—in believing or
in refusing to believe.