TAKING PUNISHMENT
“C” Company of the Stonewalls progressed slowly for some distance up
the communication trench, with the whistling of bullets growing faster
the nearer they approached to the firing line. This trench too had
been badly damaged previous to the attack by the British artillery,
and the cover it afforded to the crawling line of men was frequently
scanty, and at times was almost nil. There were one or two casualties
from chance bullets as men crawled over the débris of wrecked portions
of the trench, but the line at last reached what had been one of the
German support trenches, and spread along it, without serious loss.
This trench had been reversed by our Engineers, that is to say, the
sandbags and parapet on what had been its face, looking towards the
British line, had been pulled down and re-piled on the new front of the
trench, which now looked towards the ground still held by the Germans.
The trench was only some three to four hundred yards behind what
was here the most advanced British line, the line from which some of
our regiments were attacking, and in which they were being attacked.
Practically speaking, therefore, the Stonewalls knew their position was
well up on the outer fringe of the infantry fighting, and through it
swirled constantly eddies from the firing line in the shape of wounded
men and stretcher-bearers, and trickling but constantly running streams
of feeders to the fighting--ammunition carriers, staggering under the
weight of ammunition boxes and consignments of bombs and grenades;
regimental stretcher-bearers returning for fresh loads; ration parties
carrying up food and water. There were still communication trenches
leading from the Stonewalls’ position to the firing line, but because
these had been and still were made a regular target by the German guns,
had been smashed and broken in beyond all real semblance of cover
or protection, and brought their users almost with certainty under
the bursting shrapnel or high explosive with which the trench was
plastered, most of the men going up or coming back from the forward
trench, and especially if they were laden with any burden, preferred to
take their chance and make the quicker and straighter passage over the
open ground.
The daylight was beginning to fade by now, the earlier because dark
clouds had been massing, and a thin misty drizzle of rain had begun
to fall; but although it was dusk there was no lack of light in the
fighting zone. From both the opposing trenches soaring lights hissed
upwards with trailing streams of sparks, curved over, burst into vivid
balls of brilliant light, and floated slowly and slantingly downwards
to the ground.
The Stonewalls could see--if they cared to look over their
parapet--this constant succession of leaping, soaring, and sinking
lights, the dancing black shadows they threw, and the winking spurts
of fiery orange flame from the rifle muzzles and from the bursting
grenades, while every now and again a shell dropped with a blinding
flash on or behind one or other of the opposing parapets. There were
not many of the Stonewalls who cared to lift their heads long enough
to watch the blazing display and the flickering lights and shadows.
The position of their trench was slightly higher than the front line
held by the Germans, and as a result there was always a hissing and
whizzing of bullets passing close overhead, a smacking and slapping
of others into their parapet and the ground before it; to raise a head
above the parapet was, as the men would have said, “Askin’ for it,” and
none of them was inclined needlessly to do this. But the other men who
passed to and fro across their trench, although they no doubt liked
their exposure as little as the Stonewalls did, climbed with apparent
or assumed indifference over the parapet and hurried stooping across
the open to the next trench, or walked back carefully and deliberately,
bearing the stretcher laden with the wounded, or helping and supporting
the casualties who were still able in any degree to move themselves.
The Stonewalls were given no indication of the time they were to remain
there, of when or if they were to be pushed up into the forward trench.
The thin rain grew closer and heavier, a chill wind began to blow,
setting the men shivering and stamping their feet in a vain attempt to
induce warmth. Some of them produced food from their haversacks and
ate; almost all of them squatted with rounded shoulders and stooping
heads and smoked cigarettes with hands curved about them to hold off
the rain, or pipes lit and turned upside down to keep the tobacco dry.
They waited there for hours, and gradually, although the sounds of
fighting never ceased on their front, the rolling thunder that had
marked the conflict during the day died down considerably as the night
wore on, until it became no more than a splutter and crackle of rifle
fire, a whirring and clattering outburst from some distant or near
machine gun, the whoop and rush and jarring burst of an occasional
shell on the British or German lines.
At intervals the fight flamed upward into a renewed activity, the rifle
fire rose rolling and drumming, the machine guns chattered in a frenzy
of haste; the reports of the bursting bombs and grenades followed
quickly and more quickly upon each other. Invariably the louder
outburst of noise roused the guns on both sides to renewed action. The
sky on both sides winked and flamed with flashes that came and went,
and lit and darkened across the sky, like the flickering dance of
summer lightning. The air above the trenches shook again to the rush of
the shells; the ground about and between the front lines blazed with
the flashes of the bursts, was darkened and obscured by the billowing
clouds of smoke and the drifting haze of their dissolving. Invariably,
too, the onslaught of the guns, the pattering hail of their shrapnel,
the earth-shaking crash of the high explosives, reduced almost
to silence the other sounds of fighting, drove the riflemen and
bomb-throwers to cover, and so slackened off for a space the fierceness
of the conflict.
To the Stonewalls the night dragged with bitter and appalling slowness;
they were cramped and uncomfortable; they were wet and cold and
miserable. The sides of the trench, the ground on which they sat, or
lay, or squatted, turned to slimy and sticky mud, mud that appeared
to cling and hold clammily and unpleasantly to everything about them,
their boots and puttees, the skirts of their coats, their packs and
haversacks, their hands and rifles and bayonets, and even to their
rain-wet faces.
Long before the dawn most of the men were openly praying that they
would soon be pushed up into the front rank of the fighting, not
because they had any longing or liking for the fight itself, not that
they had--any more than any average soldier has--a wish to die or to
take their risks, their heavy risks, of death or wounds, but simply
because they were chilled to the bone with inaction, were wholly and
utterly and miserably wet and uncomfortable, were anxious to go on
and get it over, knowing that when they had been in the front line
for a certain time, had been actively fighting for so long, and lost
a percentage of their number in casualties, they would be relieved by
other regiments, would be withdrawn, and sent back to the rear. That
sending back might mean no more than a retirement of a mile or two from
the front trench, the occupation of some other trench or ditch, no less
wet and uncomfortable than the one they were in; but, on the other
hand, it might mean their going back far enough to bring them again
into touch with the broken villages in the rear, with houses shattered
no doubt by shell fire but still capable of providing rough and
ready-made shelter from the rain, and, a boon above all boons, wood for
fires, with crackling, leaping, life-giving flames and warmth, with the
opportunity of boiling mess-tins of water, of heating tinned rations,
and of making scalding hot tea.
There might be much to go through before such a heaven could be
reached. There were certainly more long hours in the hell of the
forward line, there was black death and burning pain, and limb and
body mutilation for anything up to three-fourths of their number, to
be faced. There were sleeting rifle bullets, and hailing storms from
the machine guns, shattering bombs and grenades, rending and tearing
shrapnel and shell splinters, the cold-blooded creeping murder of a
gas attack perhaps; the more human heat and stir of a bayonet charge;
but all were willing, nay, more, all would have welcomed the immediate
facing of the risks and dangers, would have gladly taken the chance
to go on and get it over, and get back again--such of them as were
left--to where they could walk about on firm ground, and stretch their
limbs and bodies to sleep in comparative dryness. But no order came
throughout the night, and they lay and crouched there with the rain
still beating down, with the trench getting wetter and muddier and
slimier about them, with their bodies getting more numbed, and their
clothing more saturated; lay there until the cold gray of the dawn
began to creep into the sky, and they roused themselves stiffly, and
with many groans, to meet what the new day might bring forth to them.
The day promised to open badly for the Stonewalls. As the light grew,
and became sufficiently strong for the observation of artillery fire,
the guns recommenced a regular bombardment on both sides. From the
first it was plain that the support trench occupied by the Stonewalls
had been marked down as a target by the German gunners. The first
couple of shells dropped on the ground behind their trench and within
fifty yards of it, sending some shrieking fragments flying over
their heads, spattering them with the mud and earth outflung by the
explosions. Another and then another fell, this time in front of their
trench, and then one after another, at regular intervals of two to
three minutes, a heavy high explosive crashed down within a yard or
two of either side of the trench, breaking down the crumbling sides,
blowing in the tottering parapet, half-burying some of the men in a
tumbling slide of loose, wet earth and débris; or falling fairly and
squarely in the trench itself, killing or wounding every man in the
particular section in which it fell, blasting out in a fountain of
flying earth and stones and mud the whole front and back wall of the
trench, leaving it open and unprotected to the searching shrapnel that
burst overhead and pelted down in gusts along the trench’s length.
The Stonewalls lay and suffered their cruel punishment for a couple
of hours, and in that time lost nearly two hundred men, many of them
killed, many more of them so cruelly wounded they might almost be
called better dead; lost their two hundred men without stirring from
the trench, without being able to lift a finger in their own defense,
without even the grim satisfaction of firing a shot, or throwing a
bomb, or doing anything to take toll from the men who were punishing
them so mercilessly for those long hours.
Larry, Kentucky, and Simson lay still, and crouched close to the bottom
of the trench, saying little, and that little no more than expressions
of anger, of railing against their inaction, of cursings at their
impotence, of wondering how long they were to stick there, of how much
longer they could expect to escape those riving shells, that pounded up
and down along the trench, that sent shiverings and tremblings through
the wet ground under them, that spat at them time and again with earth
and mud and flying clods and stones. In those two hours they heard the
cries and groans that followed so many times the rending crash and roar
of the shell’s explosion on or about the trench; the savage whistling
rush and crack of the shrapnel above them, the rip and thud of the
bullets across trench and parapet. They saw many wounded helped and
many more carried out past them to the communication trench that led
back to the rear and to the dressing-stations. For all through the two
hours, heedless of the storm of high explosive that shook and battered
the trench to pieces, the stretcher-bearers worked, and picked up the
casualties, and sorted out the dead and the dying from the wounded, and
applied hasty but always neat bandages and first field-dressings, and
started off those that could walk upon their way, or laid those who
were past walking upon their stretchers and bore them, staggering and
slipping and stumbling, along the muddy trench into the way towards the
rear.
“I wonder,” said Larry savagely, “how much longer we’re going to stick
here getting pounded to pieces. There won’t be any of the battalion
left if we’re kept here much longer.”
“The front line there has been sticking longer than us, boy,” said
Kentucky, “and I don’t suppose they’re having any softer time than us.”
“I believe it’s all this crowd trampin’ in an’ out of our trench
that’s drawin’ the fire. They ought to be stopped,” said Billy Simson
indignantly. “Here’s some more of ’em now.... Hi, you! Whatjer want
to come crawlin’ through this way for? Ain’t there any other way but
trampin’ in an’ out on top of us ’ere?”
The couple of mud-bedaubed privates who had slid down into the trench
and were hoisting an ammunition-box on to the parapet stopped and
looked down on Billy crouching in the trench bottom. “Go’n put yer
’ead in a bag,” said one coarsely. “Of course, if you says so, me lord
dook,” said the other with heavily sarcastic politeness, “we’ll tell
the C.O. up front that you objects to us walkin’ in your back door an’
out the front parlor; an’ he must do without any more ammunition ’cos
you don’t like us passing through this way without wipin’ our feet on
the mat.”
“Oh, come on an’ leave it alone,” growled the first, and heaved himself
over the parapet. The other followed, but paused to look back at Billy.
“Good job the early bird don’t ’appen to be about this mornin’,” he
remarked loudly, “or ’e might catch you,” and he and his companion
vanished.
“What’s the good of grousing at them, Billy?” said Larry. “They’ve got
to get up somehow.” He was a little inclined to be angry with Billy,
partly because they were all more or less involved in the foolish
complaint, and partly no doubt just because he was ready to be angry
with any one or anything.
“Why do they all come over this bit of trench, then?” demanded Billy.
“And I’m damned if ’ere ain’t more of ’em. Now wot d’you suppose he’s
playin’ at?”
“They’re Gunners,” said Larry, “laying a telephone wire out, evidently.”
A young officer, a Second Lieutenant, and two men crept round the
broken corner of the trench. One of the men had a reel of telephone
wire, which he paid out as he went, while the other man and the officer
hooked it up over projections in the trench wall or tucked it away
along the parts that offered the most chance of protection. The officer
turned to the three men who crouched in the trench watching them.
“Isn’t there a communication trench somewhere along here?” he asked,
“one leading off to the right to some broken-down houses?”
“We don’t know, sir,” said Larry. “We haven’t been further along than
this, or any further up.”
“The men going up to the front line all say the communication trenches
are too badly smashed, and under too hot and heavy a fire to be used,”
said Kentucky; “most of them go up and down across the open from here.”
“No good to me,” said the officer. But he stood up and looked
carefully out over the ground in front.
“No good to me,” he repeated, stepping back into the trench. “Too many
shells and bullets there for my wire to stand an earthly. It would be
chopped to pieces in no time.”
“Look out, sir,” said Larry hurriedly; “there comes another one.”
The officer and his two men stooped low in the trench, and waited until
the customary rush had ended in the customary crash.
“That,” said the officer, standing up, “was about a five-point-nine
H.E., I reckon. It’s mostly these six-and eight-inch they have been
dumping down here all the morning.”
He and his men went on busily with their wiring, and before they moved
off into the next traverse he turned to give a word of warning to the
infantrymen to be careful of his wire, and to jump on any one they saw
pulling it down or trampling on it.
“Lots of fellows,” he said, “seem to think we run these wires out for
our own particular benefit and amusement, but they howl in a different
tune if they want the support of the guns and we can’t give it them
because our wire back to the battery is broken.”
The three regarded the slender, wriggling wire with a new interest
after that, and if the rest of the trench full of Stonewalls were as
zealous in their protection as they were, there was little fear of the
wire being destroyed, or even misplaced, by careless hands or feet.
Billy Simson cursed strenuously a pair of blundering stretcher-bearers
when one of their elbows caught the wire and pulled it down. “’Ow d’yer
suppose,” he demanded, “the Gunners’ Forward Officer is goin’ to tell
’is guns back there to open fire, or keep on firin’, if yer go breakin’
up ’is blinkin’ wire?” And he crawled up and carefully returned the
wire to its place.
“Look out,” he kept saying to every man who came and went up and down
or across the trench. “That’s the Gunners’ wire; don’t you git breakin’
it, or they can’t call up to git on with the shellin’.”
About two or three hours after dawn the German bombardment appeared
to be slackening off, but again within less than half an hour it was
renewed with a more intense violence than ever. The Stonewalls’ trench
was becoming hopelessly destroyed, and the casualties in the battalion
were mounting at serious speed.
“Hotter than ever, isn’t it?” said Larry, and the other two assented.
“We’re lucky to ’ave dodged it so far,” said Billy Simson; “but by the
number o’ casualties we’ve seen carted out, the battalion is coppin’ it
pretty stiff. If we stop ’ere much longer, there won’t be many of us
left to shove into the front line, when we’re needed.”
“D’ye notice,” said Kentucky, “that the rifle firing and bombing up in
front seems to have eased off a bit, and the guns are doing most of the
work?”
“Worse luck,” said Larry, “I’d sooner have the bullets than the shells
any day.”
“Ar’n’t you the Stonewalls?” suddenly demanded a voice from above them,
and the three looked up to see a couple of men standing on the rearward
edge of the trench.
“Yes, that’s right,” they answered in the same breath, and one of the
men turned and waved his hand to the rear.
“Somebody is lookin’ for you,” he remarked, jumping and sliding down
into the trench. “C Company o’ the Stonewalls, ’e wanted.”
“That’s us,” said Larry, “but if he wants an officer he must go higher
up.”
Another figure appeared on the bank above, and jumped hastily down into
the trench.
“Stonewalls,” he said. “Where’s ‘C’--why ’ere yer are, chums----”
“Pug?” said Larry and Kentucky incredulously. “We thought that--why,
weren’t you hit?” “Thought you was ’alf-way to Blighty by now,” said
Billy Simson.
“You were hit, after all,” said Larry, noticing the bloodstains and the
slit sleeve on Pug’s jacket.
“’It?” said Billy Simson, also staring hard. “Surely they didn’t send
yer back ’ere after bein’ casualtied?”
“Give a bloke ’alf a chance to git ’is wind,” said Pug, “an’ I’ll spin
yer the cuffer. But I’m jist about puffed out runnin’ acrost that
blinkin’ field, and dodgin’ Jack Johnsons. Thought I was niver goin’ to
find yer agin; bin searchin’ ’alf over France since last night, tryin’
to ’ook up with yer. Where’ve you bin to, any’ow?”
“Bin to!” said Billy Simson, indignantly. “We’ve bin now’ere. We’ve bin
squatting ’ere freezin’ and drownin’ to death--them that ’aven’t bin
wiped out with crumps.”
“We came straight across from where we left you to the old German
trench,” said Larry, “then up a communication trench to here, and, as
Billy says, we’ve stuck here ever since.”
“An’ ’ere,” said Pug, “I’ve bin trampin’ miles lookin’ for yer, and
every man I asked w’ere the Stonewalls was told me a new plice.”
“But what happened, Pug?” said Kentucky. “You were wounded, we see
that; but why ar’n’t you back in the dressing station?”
“Well,” said Pug, hesitatingly, “w’en I got this puncture, I dropped
back in the trench. I didn’t know w’ether it was bad or not, but one of
our stretcher-bearers showed me the way back to the fust aid post. They
tied me up there, and told me the wound wasn’t nothin’ worth worritin’
about, and after a few days at the Base I’d be back to the battalion as
good as ever; so I ’ad a walk round outside, waitin’ till the ambulance
come that they said would cart me back to the ’orspital train, and w’en
nobody was lookin’ I jist come away, and found my way back to w’ere yer
lef’ me. Then I chased round, as I’ve told yer, till I found yer ’ere.”
“Good man,” said Larry, and Kentucky nodded approvingly.
Billy Simson didn’t look on it in the same light. “You ’ad a chance to
go back, and you come on up ’ere agin,” he said, staring hard at Pug.
“For God’s sake, what for?”
“Well, yer see,” said Pug, “all the time I’ve bin out ’ere I’ve never
’ad a chance to see the inside of a German trench; an’ now there was
a fust class chance to git into one, an’ a chance maybe of pickin’ up
a ’elmet for a soo-veneer, I thought I’d be a fool not to take it.
You ’aven’t none of yer found a ’elmet yet, ’ave yer?” and he looked
inquiringly round.
“’Elmet,” said Billy Simson disgustedly. “Blowed if yer catch me comin’
back ’ere for a bloomin’ ’undred ’elmets. If I’d bin you, I’d a bin
snug in a ’ospital drinkin’ beef tea, an’ smokin’ a fag by now.”
“Ah!” said Pug profoundly. “But w’at good was a week at the Base to me?”
“You would ’ave missed the rest of this rotten show, any’ow,” said
Billy.
“That’s right,” assented Pug, “and I might ’ave missed my chance to
pick up a ’elmet. I want a blinkin’ ’elmet--see--and wot’s more, I’m
goin’ to git one.”