bobbing head or two and the spurting flashes of the gun, and ducked
down again. “They’re in a shell-hole not more’n twenty, thirty yards
away,” he said rapidly. “Looks like only a handful. We’ll rush ’em out.
Here——” and he went on into quick detailed orders for the rushing.
Three minutes later he and his men swarmed out of their shelter and
went forward at a scrambling run, the bombers flinging a shower of
grenades ahead of them, the bayonet men floundering over the rough
ground with weapons at the ready, the Sergeant well in the lead.
Their sudden and purposeful rush must have upset the group of Germans,
because the machine-gun fire for a moment became erratic, the muzzle
jerked this way and that, the bullets whistled wide, and during that
same vital moment no bombs were thrown by the Germans; and when at last
they did begin to come spinning out, most of them went too far, and the
runners were well over them before they had time to explode. In another
moment the Sergeant leaped down fairly on top of the machine-gun, his
bayonet thrusting through the gunner as he jumped. He shot a second and
bayoneted a third, had his shoulder-strap blown away by a rifle at no
more than muzzle distance, his sleeve and his haversack ripped open by
a bayonet thrust.
Then his men swarmed down into the wide crater, and in two minutes the
fight was over. There were another few seconds of rapid fire at two or
three of the Germans who had jumped out and run for their lives, and
that finished the immediate performance. The Sergeant looked round,
climbed from the hole, and made a hasty examination of the ground about
them.
“’Tisn’t as good a crater as we left,” he said, “an’ it’s ’way out
front o’ the line the others is digging, so we’d best get back. Get a
hold o’ that machine-gun an’ all the spare ammunition you can lay hands
on. We might find it come in useful. Good job we had the way a Fritz
gun works shown us once. Come on.”
The men hastily collected all the ammunition they could find and were
moving back, when one of them, standing on the edge of the hole,
remarked: “We got the top o’ the ridge all right this time. Look at the
open flat down there.”
The Sergeant turned and looked, and an exclamation broke from him at
sight of the view over the ground beyond the ridge. Up to now that
ground had been hidden by a haze of smoke from the bursting shells
where our barrage was pounding steadily down. But for a minute the
smoke had lifted or blown aside, and the Sergeant found himself looking
down the long slope of a valley with gently swelling sides, looking
right down on to the plain below the ridge. He scanned the lie of the
ground rapidly, and in an instant had made up his mind. “Hold on
there,” he ordered abruptly; “we’ll dig in here instead. Sling that
machine-gun back in here and point her out that way. You, Lees, get
’er into action, and rip out a few rounds just to see you got the hang
o’ it. Heave those dead Boches out; an’, Corporal, you nip back with
half a dozen men and fetch along the tools and sandbags we left there.
Slippy now.”
The Corporal picked his half-dozen men and vanished, and the Sergeant
whipped out a message-book and began to scribble a note. Before he had
finished the rifle-fire began to rattle down along the line again, and
he thrust the book in his pocket, picked up his rifle, and peered out
over the edge of the hole. “There they go, Lees,” he said suddenly.
“Way along there on the left front. Pump it into ’em. Don’t waste
rounds, though; we may need ’em for our own front in a minute. Come on,
Corporal, get down in here. Looks like the start o’ a counter-attack,
though I don’t see any of the blighters on our own front. Here, you
two, spade out a cut into the next shell-hole there, so’s to link
’em up. Steady that gun, Lees; don’t waste ’em. Get on to your
sandbag-fillin’, the others, an’ make a bit o’ a parapet this side.”
“We’re a long ways out in front of the rest o’ the line, ain’t we?”
said the Corporal.
“Yes, I know,” said the Sergeant. “I want to send a message back
presently. This is the spot to hold, an’ don’t you forget it. Just look
down—hullo, here’s our barrage droppin’ again. Well, it blots out the
view, but it’ll be blottin’ out any Germs that try to push us; so hit
’er up, the Gunners. But——” He broke off suddenly, and stared out
into the writhing haze of smoke in front of them. “Here they come,” he
said sharply. “Now, Lees, get to it. Stand by, you bombers. Range three
hundred the rest o’ you, an’ fire steady. Pick your marks. We got no
rounds to waste. Now, then——”
The rifles began to bang steadily, then at a rapidly increasing rate as
the fire failed to stop the advance, and more dim figures after figures
came looming up hazily and emerging from the smoke. The machine-gunner
held his fire until he could bring his sights on a little group, fired
in short bursts with a side-ways twitch that sprayed the bullets out
fan-wise as they went. The rifle-fire out to right and left of them,
and almost behind them, swelled to a long, rolling beat with the tattoo
of machine-guns rapping through it in gusts, the explosions of grenades
rising and falling in erratic bursts.
Farther back, the guns were hard at it again, and the shells were
screaming and rushing overhead in a ceaseless torrent, the shrapnel to
blink a star of flame from the heart of a smoke-cloud springing out
in mid-air, the high explosive crashing down in ponderous bellowings,
up-flung vivid splashes of fire and spouting torrents of smoke, flying
mud and earth clods. There were German shells, too, shrieking over, and
adding their share to the indescribable uproar, crashing down along
the line, and spraying out in circles of fragments, the smaller bits
whistling and whizzing viciously, the larger hurtling and humming like
monster bees.
“Them shells of ours is comm’ down a sight too close to us, Sergeant,”
yelled the Corporal, glancing up as a shrapnel shell cracked sharply
almost overhead and sprayed its bullets, scattering and splashing along
the wet ground out in front of them.
“All right—it’s shrap,” the Sergeant yelled back. “Bullets is pitchin’
well forrad.”
The Corporal swore and ducked hastily from the _whitt-whitt_ of a
couple of bullets past their ears. “Them was from behind us,” he
shouted. “We’re too blazin’ far out in front o’ the line here. Wot’s
the good——”
“Here,” said the Sergeant to a man who staggered back from the rough
parapet, right hand clutched on a blood-streaming left shoulder, “whip
a field dressin’ round that, an’ try an’ crawl back to them behind us.
Find an officer, if you can, an’ tell him we’re out in front of ’im.
An’ tell ’im I’m going to hang on to the position we have here till my
blanky teeth pull out.”
“Wot’s the good——” began the Corporal again, ceasing fire to look
round at the Sergeant.
“Never mind the good now,” said the Sergeant shortly, as he recharged
his magazine. “You’ll see after—if we live long enough.” He levelled
and aimed his rifle. “An’ we won’t do that if you stand there”—(he
fired a shot and jerked the breech open)—“jawin’ instead”—(he slammed
the breech-bolt home and laid cheek to stock again)—“o’ shootin’”; and
he snapped another shot.
On their own immediate front the attack slackened, and died away,
but along the line a little the Sergeant’s group could see a swarm
of men charging in. The Sergeant immediately ordered the machine-gun
and every rifle to take the attackers in enfilade. For the next few
minutes every man shot as fast as he could load and pull trigger, and
the captured machine-gun banged and spat a steady stream of fire. The
Sergeant helped until he saw the attack dying out again, its remnants
fading into the smoke haze. Then he pulled his book out, and wrote
his message: “Am holding crater position with captured machine-gun
and eight men of No. 2 Platoon. Good position, allowing enfilade fire
on attack, and with command of farther slopes. Urgently require men,
ammunition, and bombs, but will hold out to the finish.”
He sent the note back by a couple of wounded men, and set his party
about strengthening their position as far as possible. In ten minutes
another attack commenced, and the men took up their rifles and resumed
their steady fire. But this time the field-grey figures pressed in,
despite the pouring fire and the pounding shells, and, although they
were held and checked and driven to taking cover in shell-holes on the
Sergeant’s immediate front, they were within grenade-throwing distance
there, and the German “potato-masher” bombs and the British Mills’
began to twirl and curve over to and fro, and burst in shattering
detonations. Three more of the Sergeant’s party were wounded inside
as many minutes, but every man who could stand on his feet, well or
wounded, rose at the Sergeant’s warning yell to meet the rush of about
a dozen men who swung aside from a large group that had pressed in past
their flank. The rush was met by a few quick shots, but the ammunition
for the machine-gun had run out, and of bombs even there were only
a few left. So, in the main, the rush was met with the bayonet—and
killed with it. The Sergeant still held his crater, but now he had only
two unwounded men left to help him.
The Corporal, nursing a gashed cheek and spitting mouthfuls of blood,
shouted at him again, “Y’ ain’t goin’ to try ’ hold on longer, surely.
We’ve near shot the last round away.”
“I’ll hold it,” said the Sergeant grimly, “if I have to do it myself
wi’ my bare fists.”
But he cast anxious looks behind, in hope of a sight of reinforcements,
and knew that if they did not come before another rush he and his
party were done. His tenacity had its due reward. Help did come—men
and ammunition and bombs and a couple of machine-guns—and not three
minutes before the launching of another attack. An officer was with the
party, and took command, but he was killed inside the first minute, and
the Sergeant again took hold.
Again the attack was made all along the line, and again, under the
ferocious fire of the reinforced line, it was beaten back. The line
had at the last minute been hinged outward behind the Sergeant, and so
joined up with him that it formed a sharpish angle, with the Sergeant’s
crater at its point. The enfilade fire of this forward-swung portion
and the two machine-guns in the crater did a good deal to help cut down
the main attack.
When it was well over, and the attack had melted away, the Captain of
the Sergeant’s Company pushed up into the crater.
“Who’s in charge here?” he asked. “You, Sergeant? Your note came back,
and we sent you help; but you were taking a long risk out here. Didn’t
you know you had pushed out beyond your proper point? And why didn’t
you retire when you found yourself in the air?”
The Sergeant turned and pointed out where the thinning smoke gave a
view of the wide open flats of the plain beyond the ridge.
“I got a look o’ that, sir,” he said, “and I just thought a commanding
position like this was worth sticking a lot to hang to.”
“Jove! and you were right,” said the Captain, looking gloatingly on
the flats, and went on to add other and warmer words of praise.
But it was to his corporal, a little later, that the Sergeant really
explained his hanging on to the point.
“Look at it!” he said enthusiastically; “look at the view you get!”
The Corporal viewed dispassionately for a moment the dreary expanse
below, the shell-churned morass and mud, wandering rivulets and
ditches, shell-wrecked fragments of farms and buildings, the broken,
bare-stripped poles of trees.
“Bloomin’ great, ain’t it?” he mumbled disgustedly, through his
bandaged jaws. “Fair beautiful. Makes you think you’d like to come ’ere
after the war an’ build a ’ouse, an’ sit lookin’ out on it always—I
_don’t_ think.”
“Exactly what I said the second I saw it,” said the Sergeant, and
chuckled happily. “Only my house’d be a nice little trench an’ a neat
little dug-out, an’ be for duration o’ war. Think o’ it, man—just
think o’ this winter, with us up here along the ridge, an’ Fritz down
in his trenches below there, up to the middle in mud. Him cursin’
Creation, and strugglin’ to pump his trenches out; and us sitting
nicely up here in the dry, snipin’ down in enfilade along his trench,
and pumpin’ the water out of our trenches down on to the flat to drown
him out.”
The Sergeant chuckled again, slapped his hands together. “I’ve been
havin’ that side of it back in the salient there for best part o’
two years, off and on. Fritz has been up top, keepin’ his feet dry
and watchin’ us gettin’ shelled an’ shot up an’ minnie-werfered to
glory—squattin’ up here, smokin’ his pipe an’ takin’ a pot-shot at us,
and watchin’ us through his field-glasses, just as he felt like. And
now it’s our turn. Don’t let me hear anybody talk about drivin’ the Hun
back for miles from here. I don’t want him to go back; I want him to
sit down there the whole darn winter, freezin’ an’ drownin’ to death
ten times a day. Fritz isn’t go in’ to like that—not any. I am, an’
that’s why I hung like grim death to this look-out point. This is where
we come in; this is _our_ turn!”
XVI
ACCORDING TO PLAN
“RATTY” TRAVERS dropped his load with a grunt of satisfaction, squatted
down on the ground, and tilting his shrapnel helmet back, mopped a
streaming brow. As the line in which he had moved dropped to cover,
another line rose out of the ground ahead of them and commenced to
push forward. Some distance beyond, a wave of kilted Highlanders
pressed on at a steady walk up to within about fifty paces of the
string of flickering, jumping white patches that marked the edge of the
“artillery barrage.”
Ratty Travers and the others of the machine-gun company being in
support had a good view of the lines attacking ahead of them.
“Them Jocks is goin’ along nicely,” said the man who had dropped beside
Ratty. Ratty grunted scornfully. “Beautiful,” he said. “An’ we’re
doin’ wonderful well ourselves. I never remember gettin’ over the No
Man’s Land so easy, or seein’ a trench took so quick an’ simple in my
life as this one we’re in; or seein’ a’tillery barrage move so nice an’
even and steady to time.”
“You’ve seed a lot, Ratty,” said his companion. “But you ain’t seed
everything.”
“That’s true,” said Ratty. “I’ve never seen a lot o’ grown men playin’
let’s-pretend like a lot of school kids. Just look at that fool wi’ the
big drum, Johnny.”
Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big drum was lugging
it off at the double away from the kilted line, and strung out to
either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed with
sticks and biscuit-tins and empty cans. Ratty and his companions were
clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, and bore boxes of very real
ammunition. In the “trenches” ahead of them, or moving over the open,
were other men similarly equipped; rolling back to them came a clash
and clatter, a dull prolonged _boom-boom-boom_. In every detail, so
far as the men were concerned, an attack was in full swing; but there
was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping whistle and sharp
crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking thunder of artillery (except
that steady _boom-boom_), no shell-scorched strip of battered ground.
The warm sun shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of
flags and tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki
with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition and stretchers
and all the other accoutrements of battle. There were no signs of
death or wounds, none of the horror of war, because this was merely
a “practice attack,” a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full
ten miles behind the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and
tapes, the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit-tins
and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The kilts came to
a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment later, the “barrage”
sprinted off ahead one or two score yards, halted, and fell to banging
and battering tins and drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly
moved on after them, to halt again at their measured distance until
the next “lift” of the “barrage.” It looked sheer child’s play, a silly
elaborate game; and yet there was no sign of laughter or play about the
men taking part in it—except on the part of Ratty Travers. Ratty was
openly scornful. “Ready there,” said a sergeant rising and pocketing
the notebook he had been studying. “We’ve only five minutes in this
trench. And remember you move half-right when you leave here, an’ the
next line o’ flags is the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements
along the edge.”
Ratty chuckled sardonically. “I ’ope that in the real thing them
machine-guns won’t ‘ave nothing to say to us movin’ half-right across
their front,” he said.
“They’ve been strafed out wi’ the guns,” said Johnny simply, “an’ the
Jocks ’as mopped up any that’s left. We was told that yesterday.”
“I dare say,” retorted Ratty. “An’ I hopes the Huns ’ave been careful
instructed in the same. It ’ud be a pity if they went an’ did anything
to spoil all the plans. But they wouldn’t do that. Oh, no, of course
not—I _don’t_ think!”
He had a good deal more to say in the same strain—with especially
biting criticism on the “artillery barrage” and the red-faced big
drummer who played lead in it—during the rest of the practice and at
the end of it when they lay in their “final objective” and rested,
smoking and cooling off with the top buttons of tunics undone, while
the officers gathered round the C.O. and listened to criticism and made
notes in their books.
“I’ll admit,” he said, “they might plan out the trenches here the same
as the ones we’re to attack from. It’s this rot o’ layin’ out the Fritz
trenches gets me. An’ this attack—it’s about as like a real attack as
my gasper’s like a machine-gun. Huh! Wi’ one bloke clockin’ you on a
stop-watch, an’ another countin’ the paces between the trenches—Boche
trenches a mile behind their front line, mind you—an’ another whackin’
a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An’ all this ‘Go steady here, this
is a sharp rise,’ or ’hurry this bit, ’cos most likely it’ll be open to
enfiladin’ machine-gun fire,’ or ‘this here’s the sunk road wi’ six
machine-gun emplacements.’ Huh! Plunky rot I calls it.”
The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing replies. Ratty
was new to this planned-attack game, of course, but since he had been
out and taken his whack of the early days, had been wounded, and home,
and only lately had come out again, he was entitled to a certain amount
of excusing.
Johnny summed it up for them. “We’ve moved a bit since the Noove
Chapelle days, you know,” he said. “You didn’t have no little lot like
this then, did you?” jerking his head at the bristling line of their
machine-guns. “An’ you didn’t have creepin’ barrages, an’ more shells
than you could fire, eh? Used to lose seventy an’ eighty per cent. o’
the battalion’s strength goin’ over the bags them days, didn’t you?
Well, we’ve changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You’ll see the differ
presently.”
Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable “differ” and a great
improvement on old ways. He and his company moved up towards the
front leisurely and certainly, without haste and without confusion,
having the orders detailed overnight for the next day’s march, finding
meals cooked and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously
known and “detailed” for them, coming at night to camp or billet
places left vacant for them immediately before, finding everything
planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, although he
admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that beyond the front line
this carefully-planned moving must cease abruptly. “It’ll be the
same plunky old scramble an’ scrap, I’ll bet,” he said. “We’ll see
then if all the Fritz trenches is just where we’ve fixed ’em, an’
if we runs to a regular time-table and follows the laid-down route
an’ first-turn-to-the-right-an’-mind-the-step-performance we’ve been
practisin’.”
But it was as they approached the fighting zone, and finally when they
found themselves installed in a support trench on the morning of the
Push that Ratty came to understand the full difference between old
battles and this new style. For days on end he heard such gun-fire
as he had never dreamed of, heard it continue without ceasing or
slackening day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground
veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred with
winking and spurting gusts of flame from our high-explosives. He walked
or lay on a ground that quivered and trembled under the unceasing
shock of our guns’ discharges, covered his eyes at night to shut out
the flashing lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the
sky. On the last march that had brought them into the trenches they
had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first the huge
monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little in advance of the
great piles of shells and long roofed sidings crammed with more shells,
then farther on past other monsters only less in comparison with those
they had seen before, on again past whole batteries of 60-pounders and
“six-inch” tucked away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses,
and finally up through the field guns packed close in every corner
that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in the
open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined village—a street
that was no more than a cleared strip of cobblestones bordered down
its length on both sides by the piled or scattered heaps of rubble and
brick that had once been rows of houses—with a mad chorus of guns
roaring and cracking and banging in numberless scores about them,
passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns ranged
battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of flame jumping and
flashing along their fronts. They found and settled into their trench
with this unbroken roar of fire bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud
and long that it seemed impossible to increase it. When their watches
told them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned was the
“zero hour,” the fixed moment of the attack, the sound of the gun-fire
swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of fury that eclipsed all that
had gone before. The men crouched in their trench listening in awed
silence, and as the zero hour approached Ratty clambered and stood
where he could look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant
shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn’t he heard the order to
keep under cover? Ratty dropped back beside the others. “Lumme,” he
said disgustedly, “I dunno wot this bloomin’ war’s comin’ to. Orders,
orders, orders! You mustn’t get plunky well killed nowadays, unless you
’as orders to.”
“There they go,” said Johnny suddenly, and all strained their ears for
the sound of rattling rifle-fire that came faintly through the roll of
the guns. “An’ here they come,” said Ratty quickly, and all crouched
low and listened to the rising roar of a heavy shell approaching, the
heavy _cr-r-rump_ of its fall. A message passed along, “Ready there.
Move in five minutes.” And at five minutes to the tick, they rose and
began to pass along the trench.
“Know where we are, Ratty?” asked Johnny. Ratty looked about him. “How
should I know?” he shouted back, “I was never ’ere before.”
“You oughter,” returned Johnny. “This is the line we started from back
in practice attack—the one that was taped out along by the stream.”