THE BATTLE HYMN
Kentucky was suddenly aware of an overpowering thirst. Pug being
appealed to shook his empty water-bottle in reply. “But I’ll soon get
some,” he said cheerfully and proceeded to search amongst the German
dead lying thick around them. He came back with a full water-bottle
and a haversack containing sausage and dark brown bread, and the
two squatted in a shell hole and made a good meal of the dead man’s
rations. They felt a good deal the better of it, and the expectation of
an early move back out of the firing line completed their satisfaction.
The Stonewalls would be relieved presently, they assured each other;
had been told their bit was done when the village was taken; and that
was done and the redoubt on top of it. They weren’t sure how many
Stonewalls had followed on in the wake of the tank, but they’d all be
called back soon, and the two agreed cordially that they wouldn’t be a
little bit sorry to be out of this mud and murder game for a spell.
An attempt was made after a little to sort out the confusion of
units that had resulted from the advance, the Stonewalls being
collected together as far as possible, and odd bunches of Anzacs and
Highlanders and Fusiliers sent off in the direction of their appointed
rallying-places. The work was made more difficult by the recommencing
of a slow and methodical bombardment by the German guns and the
reluctance of the men to move from their cover for no other purpose
than to go and find cover again in another part of the line. Scattered
amongst craters and broken trenches as the Stonewalls were, even after
they were more or less collected together, it was hard to make any real
estimate of the casualties, and yet it was plain enough to all that the
battalion had lost heavily. As odd men and groups dribbled in, Kentucky
and Pug questioned them eagerly for any news of Larry, and at last
heard a confused story from a stretcher-bearer of a party of Stonewalls
that had been cut off, had held a portion of trench against a German
bombing attack, and had been wiped out in process of the defense.
Larry, their informant was almost sure, was one of the casualties, but
he could not say whether killed, slightly or seriously wounded.
“Wish I knowed ’e wasn’t hurt too bad,” said Pug. “Rotten luck if ’e
is.”
“Anyhow,” said Kentucky, “we two have been mighty lucky to come through
it all so far, with nothing more than your arm scratch between us.”
“Touch wood,” said Pug warningly. “Don’t go boastin’ without touchin’
wood.”
Kentucky, who stood smoking with his hands buried deep in his pockets,
laughed at his earnest tone. But his laugh died, and he and Pug
glanced up apprehensively as they heard the thin, distant wail of an
approaching shell change and deepen to the roaring tempest of heart and
soul-shaking noise that means a dangerously close burst.
“Down, Pug,” cried Kentucky sharply, and on the same instant both flung
themselves flat in the bottom of their shelter. Both felt and heard the
rending concussion, the shattering crash of the burst, were sensible of
the stunning shock, a sensation of hurtling and falling, of ... empty
blackness and nothingness.
Kentucky recovered himself first. He felt numbed all over except in
his left side and arm, which pricked sharply and pulsed with pain at
a movement. He opened his eyes slowly with a vague idea that he had
been lying there for hours, and it was with intense amazement that he
saw the black smoke of the burst still writhing and thinning against
the sky, heard voices calling and asking was any one hurt, who was hit,
did it catch any one. He called an answer feebly at first, then more
strongly, and then as memory came back with a rush, loud and sharp,
“Pug! are you there, Pug? _Pug!_” One or two men came groping and
fumbling to him through the smoke, but he would not let them lift or
touch him until they had searched for Pug. “He was just beside me,” he
said eagerly. “He can’t be hurt badly. Do hunt for him, boys. It’s poor
old Pug. Oh, _Pug_!”
“H’lo, Kentuck ... you there?” came feebly back. With a wrench Kentucky
was on his knees, staggered to his feet, and running to the voice.
“Pug,” he said, stooping over the huddled figure. “You’re not hurt bad,
are you, Pug, boy?” With clothing torn to rags, smeared and dripping
with blood, with one leg twisted horribly under him, with a red cut
gaping deep over one eye, Pug looked up and grinned weakly. “Orright,”
he said; “I’m ... orright. But I tole you, Kentuck ... I tole you to
touch wood.”
A couple of stretcher-bearers hurried along, and when the damages
were assessed it was found that Pug was badly hurt, with one leg
smashed, with a score of minor wounds, of which one in the side and
one in the breast might be serious. Kentucky had a broken hand, torn
arm, lacerated shoulder, and a heavily bruised set of ribs. So Pug
was lifted on to a stretcher, and Kentucky, asserting stoutly that he
could walk and that there was no need to waste a precious stretcher on
carrying him, had his wounds bandaged and started out alongside the
bearers who carried Pug. The going was bad, and the unavoidable jolting
and jerking as the bearers stumbled over the rough ground must have
been sheer agony to the man on the stretcher. But no groan or whimper
came from Pug’s tight lips, that he opened only to encourage Kentucky
to keep on, to tell him it wouldn’t be far now, to ask the bearers to
go slow to give Kentucky a chance to keep up. But it was no time or
place to go slow. The shells were still screaming and bursting over and
about the ground they were crossing, gusts of rifle bullets or lonely
whimpering ones still whistled and hummed past. A fold in the ground
brought them cover presently from the bullets, but not from the shells,
and the bearers pushed doggedly on. Kentucky kept up with difficulty,
for he was feeling weak and spent, and it was with a sigh of relief
that he saw the bearers halt and put the stretcher down. “How do you
feel, Pug?” he asked. “Bit sore,” said Pug with sturdy cheerfulness.
“But it’s nothin’ too bad. But I wish we was outer this. We both got
Blighty ones, Kentuck, an’ we’ll go ’ome together. Now we’re on the way
’ome, I’d hate to have another of them shells drop on us, and put us
out for good, mebbe.”
They pushed on again, for the light was failing, and although the moon
was already up, the half-light made the broken ground more difficult
than ever to traverse. Pug had fallen silent, and one of the bearers,
noticing the gripped lips and pain-twisted face, called to the other
man and put the stretcher down and fumbled out a pill. “Swallow that,”
he said, and put it between Pug’s lips; “an’ that’s the last one I
have.” He daubed a ghastly blue cross on Pug’s cheek to show he had
been given an opiate, and then they went on again.
They crept slowly across the ground where the Germans had made one of
their counter-attacks, and the price they had paid in it was plain
to be seen in the piled heaps of dead that lay sprawled on the open
and huddled anyhow in the holes and ditches. There were hundreds upon
hundreds in that one patch of ground alone, and Kentucky wondered
vaguely how many such patches there were throughout the battlefield.
The stretcher-bearers were busy with the wounded, who in places still
remained with the dead, and sound German prisoners under ridiculously
slender guards were carrying in stretchers with badly wounded Germans
or helping less severely wounded ones to walk back to the British
rear. A little further on they crossed what had been a portion of
trench held by the Germans and from which they appeared to have been
driven by shell and mortar fire. Here there were no wounded, and of
the many dead the most had been literally blown to pieces, or, flung
bodily from their shelters, lay broken and buried under tumbled heaps
of earth. Half a dozen Germans in long, flapping coats and heavy
steel “coal-scuttle” helmets worked silently, searching the gruesome
débris for any living wounded; and beyond them stood a solitary
British soldier on guard over them, leaning on his bayoneted rifle and
watching them. Far to the rear the flashes of the British guns lit
the darkening sky with vivid, flickering gleams that came and went
incessantly, like the play of summer lightning. It brought to Kentucky,
trudging beside the stretcher, the swift memory of lines from a great
poem that he had learned as a child and long since forgotten--the
Battle Hymn of his own country. In his mind he quoted them now with
sudden realization of the exactness of their fitting to the scene
before him--“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His
truth is marching on.” Here surely in these broken dead, in the silent,
dejected prisoners, in the very earth she had seized and that now had
been wrested from her, was Germany’s vintage, the tramplings out of
the grapes of a wrath long stored, the smitten of the swift sword that
flashed unloosed at last in the gun-fire lightning at play across the
sky.
For the rest of the way that he walked back to the First Aid Post the
words of the verse kept running over in his pain-numbed and weary
mind--”... where the grapes of wrath are stored; trampling out the
vintage where the grapes of wrath ...” over and over again.
And when at last they came to the trench that led to the underground
dressing-station just as the guns had waked again to a fresh spasm of
fury that set the sky ablaze with their flashes and the air roaring to
their deep, rolling thunders, Kentucky’s mind went back to where the
great shells would be falling, pictured to him the flaming fires, the
rending, shattering crashes, the tearing whirlwinds of destruction,
that would be devastating the German lines. “Grapes of wrath,” he
whispered. “God, yes--bitter grapes of wrath.” And in his fancy the
guns caught up the word from his mouth, and tossed it shouting in
long-drawn, shaking thunder: “Wrath--wrath--_wrath_!”