The mule lines at Aveluy were restless and unsteady under the tormented
dark. All day long a six-inch high-velocity gun, firing at irregular
intervals from somewhere on the low ridge beyond the Ancre, had been
feeling for them. Those terrible swift shells, which travel so fast, on
their flat trajectory, that their bedlam shriek of warning and the
rending crash of their explosion seem to come in the same breathless
instant, had tested the nerves of man and beast sufficiently during the
daylight; but now, in the shifting obscurity of a young moon harrowed by
driving cloud-rack, their effect was yet more daunting. So far they had
been doing little damage, having been occupied, for the most part, in
blowing new craters in the old lines, a couple of hundred yards further
east, which had been vacated only two days before on account of their
deep-trodden and intolerable mud. All day our ’planes, patrolling the
sky over Tara Hill and the lines of Regina, had kept the Boche’s airmen
at such a distance that they could not observe and register for their
batteries; and this terrible gun was, therefore, firing blind. But there
came a time, during the long night, when it seemed to reach the
conclusion that its target must be pretty well obliterated. Squatting in
its veiled lair behind the heights of Ancre, it lifted its raking
muzzle, ever so slightly, and put another two hundred yards on to its
range.
The next shell screamed down straight upon the lines. The crash tore
earth and air. A massive column of black smoke vomited upwards, pierced
with straight flame and streaked with flying fragments of mules and
ropes and tether-pegs. Deadly splinters of shell hissed forth from it on
all sides. The top of the column spread outwards; the base thinned and
lifted; a raw and ghastly crater, like some Dantesque dream of the mouth
of Hell, came into view; and there followed a faint, hideous sound of
nameless things pattering down upon the mud.
Near the edge of the crater stood a big, raw-boned black mule. His team
mate and the three other mules tethered nearest to him had vanished.
Several others lay about on either side of him, dead or screaming in
their death agonies. But he was untouched. At the appalling shock he had
sprung back upon his haunches, snorting madly; but the tethering-rope
had held, and he had almost thrown himself. Then, after the fashion of
his kind, he had lashed out wildly with his iron-shod heels. But he was
tough of nerve and stout of heart far beyond the fashion of his kind,
and almost at once he pulled himself together and stood trembling,
straining on the halter, his long ears laid back upon his head. Then his
eyes, rolling white, with a green gleam of horror at the centre, took
note of the familiar form of his driver, standing by his head and
feeling himself curiously, as if puzzled at being still alive.
This sight reassured the black mule amazingly. His expressive ears
wagged forward again, and he thrust his frothing muzzle hard against the
man’s shoulder, as if to ask him what it all meant. The man flung an arm
over the beast’s quivering neck and leaned himself against him for a
moment or two, dazed from the tremendous shock which had lifted him from
his feet and slammed him down viciously upon the ground. He coughed once
or twice, and tried to wipe the reek of the explosion from his eyes.
Then, coming fully to himself, he hurriedly untethered his charge,
patted him reassuringly on the nose, loosed the next mule behind him on
the lines, and led the two away in haste toward safer quarters. As he
did so, another shell came in, some fifty yards to the left, and the
lines became a bedlam of kicking and snorting beasts, with their
drivers, cursing and coaxing, according to their several methods,
clawing at the ropes and hurrying to get their charges away to safety.
At any other time the big black mule—an unregenerate product of the
Argentine, with a temper which took delight in giving trouble to all in
authority over him—might have baulked energetically as a protest against
being moved from his place at this irregular hour. But he was endowed
with a perception of his own interests, which came rather from the
humbler than the more aristocratic side of his ancestry. He was no
victim of that childish panic which is so liable, in a moment of
desperation, to pervert the high-strung intelligence of the horse. He
felt that the man knew just what to do in this dreadful and demoralizing
situation. So he obeyed and followed like a lamb; and in that moment he
conceived an affection for his driver which made him nothing less than a
changed mule. His amazing docility had its effect upon the second mule,
and the driver got them both away without any difficulty. When all the
rest of the survivors had been successfully shifted to new ground, far
off to the right, the terrible gun continued for another hour to blow
craters up and down the deserted lines. Then it lengthened its range
once more, and spent the rest of the night shattering to powder the
ruins of an already ruined and quite deserted street, under the
impression that it was smashing up some of our crowded billets. A little
before daylight, however, a shell from one of our forward batteries, up
behind Regina Trench, found its way into the lair where the monster
squatted, and rest descended upon Aveluy in the bleak autumnal dawn.
This was in the rain-scourged autumn of 1916, when the unspeakable
desolation of the Somme battlefield was a sea of mud. The ruins of the
villages—Ovillers, La Boisselle, Pozières, Courcelette, Martinpuich, and
all the others which had once made fair with flowers and orchards this
rolling plateau of Picardy—had been pounded flat by the inexorable guns,
and were now mere islands of firmer ground in the shell-pitted wastes of
red mire. Men went encased in mud from boots to shrapnel helmet. And it
was a special mud of exasperating tenacity, a cement of beaten chalk and
clay. The few spidery tram-lines ran precariously along the edges of the
shell-holes, out over the naked, fire-swept undulations beyond Mouquet
Farm and Courcelette, where they were continually being knocked to
pieces by the “whizz-bangs,” and tirelessly rebuilt by our dauntless
pioneers and railway troops. Scattered all about this dreadful naked
waste behind our front trenches lurked our forward batteries, their
shallow gun-pits cunningly camouflaged behind every little swell of
tumbled mud.
This foul mud, hiding in the deep slime of its shell-holes every kind of
trap and putrid horror, was the appropriate ally of the Germans.
Stinkingly and tenaciously and treacherously, as befitted, it opposed
the feeding of the guns. Two by two or four by four, according to their
size, the shells for the guns had to be carried up from the forward
dumps in little wicker panniers slung across the backs of horses and
mules. It was a slow process, precarious and costly, but it beat the
mud, and the insatiable guns were fed.
After the night when the mule-lines at Aveluy were shelled, the big
black mule and his driver were put on this job of carrying up shells to
the forward batteries. The driver, a gaunt, green-eyed, ginger-haired
teamster from the lumber camps of Northern New Brunswick, received the
order with a crooked grin.
“Say your prayers now, Sonny,” he muttered in the mule’s big, waving
ear, which came to “attention” promptly to receive his communication.
“You’ll be wishing you was back in them old lines at Aveluy afore we’re
through with this job. Fritzy over yonder ain’t goin’ to like you an’ me
one little bit when he gits on to what we’re up to. It ain’t like
haulin’ fodder, I tell you that. But I guess we’ve got the nerve all
right.”
Instead of rolling the whites of his eyes at him, in surly protest
against this familiarity, the black mule responded by nibbling gently at
the sleeve of his muddy tunic.
“Geezely Christmas,” murmured the driver, astonished at this evidence of
goodwill, “but it’s queer, now, how a taste o’ shell-fire’ll sometimes
work a change o’ heart, even in an Argentino mule. I only hope it’ll
last, Sonny. If it does, we’re goin’ to git along fine, you an’ me.” And
the next time he visited the canteen he brought back a biscuit or two
and a slab of sweet chocolate, to confirm the capricious beast in its
mended manners.
Early that same afternoon the black mule found himself in new
surroundings. He was at the big ammunition dump which lay concealed in
an obscure hollow near the ruins of Courcelette. He looked with
suspicion on the wicker panniers which were slung across his sturdy
back. Saddles he knew, and harness he knew, but this was a contraption
which roused misgivings in his conservative soul. When the shells were
slipped into the panniers, and he felt the sudden weight, so out of all
proportion to the size of the burden, he laid back his long ears with a
grunt, and gathered his muscles for a protesting kick. But his driver,
standing at his head, stroked his muzzle soothingly and murmured:
“There, there, steady, Son! Keep your hair on! It ain’t goin’ to bite
you.”
Thus adjured, he composed himself with an effort, and the lashing kick
was not delivered.
“What a persuasive cuss you must be, Jimmy Wright!” said the man who was
handling the shells. “I wouldn’t trust you round with my best girl, if
you can get a bucking mule locoed that way with your soft sawder.”
“It ain’t me,” replied the New Brunswicker. “It’s shell-shock, I guess,
kind of helped along with chocolate an’ biscuits. He got a bit of a
shaking up when they shelled the lines at Aveluy night afore last, an’
he’s been a lamb ever since. Seems to think _I_ saved his hide for him.
He was the very devil to handle afore that.”
For some way from the dump the journey was uneventful. The path to the
guns led along a sunken road, completely hidden from the enemy’s
observation posts. The dull, persistent rain had ceased for a little,
and the broad patches of blue overhead were dotted with our droning
aeroplanes, which every now and then would dive into a low-drifting rack
of grey cloud to shake off the shrapnel of the German “Archies.” Of
German ’planes none were to be seen, for they had all sped home to their
hangars when our fighting squadrons rose to the encounter. The earth
rocked to the explosions of our 9.2 howitzers ranged about Pozières and
Martinpuich, and the air clamoured under the passage of their giant
shells as they went roaring over toward the German lines. Now and again
a vicious whining sound would swell suddenly to a nerve-racking shriek,
and an enemy shell would land with a massive _cr-r-ump_, and a furious
blast of smoke and mud would belch upwards to one side or other of the
sunken road. But none of these unwelcome visitors came into the road
itself, and neither the black mule nor Jimmy Wright paid them any more
attention than the merest roll of an eye to mark their billet.
“Change o’ heart hain’t spoiled old Sonny’s nerve, anyhow,” thought the
driver to himself, with deep approval.
A little further on and the trail up to “X’s Group,” quitting the
shelter of the sunken road, led out across the red desolation, in the
very eye, as it seemed to the New Brunswicker, of the enemy’s positions.
It was a narrow, undulating track, slippery as oil, yet tenacious as
glue, corkscrewing its laborious way between the old slime-filled
shell-pits. From the surface of one of these wells of foul-coloured ooze
the legs of a dead horse stuck up stiffly into the air, like four posts
on which to lay a foot-bridge. A few yards beyond, the track was cut by
a fresh shell-hole, too new to have collected any water. Its raw sides
were streaked red and white and black, and just at its rim lay the
mangled fragments of something that might recently have been a mule. The
long ears of Wright’s mule waved backwards and forwards at the sight,
and he snorted apprehensively.
“This don’t appear to be a health resort for us, Sonny,” commented the
New Brunswicker, “so we won’t linger, if it’s all the same to you.” And
he led the way around the other side of the new shell-hole, the big mule
crowding close behind with quivering muzzle at his shoulder.
However urgent Wright’s desire for speed, speed was ridiculously
impossible. The obstinate pro-German mud was not lightly to be overcome.
Even on the firmer ridges it clung far above the fetlocks of the black
mule, and struggled to suck off Wright’s hobnailed boots at every
labouring step. Though a marrow-piercing north-easter swept the waste,
both man and mule were lathered in sweat. Half their energy had to be
expended in recovering themselves from continual slithering slides which
threatened to land them in the engulfing horrors of the shell-holes. For
all that he had so little breath to spare, Jimmy Wright kept muttering
through his teeth strange expletives and objurgations from the
vocabulary of the lumber camps, eloquent but unprintable, to which the
black mule lent ear admiringly. He seemed to feel that his driver’s
remarks, though he could not understand them, were doubtless such as
would command his fullest accord. For his own part he had no means of
expressing such sentiments except through his heels, and these were now
all too fully occupied in their battle with the mud.
By this time the black mule had become absolutely convinced that his
fate was in the hands of his ginger-haired driver. Jimmy Wright, as it
seemed to him, was his sole protection against this violent horror which
kept bursting and crashing on every hand about him. It was clear to him
that Jimmy Wright, though apparently much annoyed, was not afraid.
Therefore, with Jimmy Wright as his protector he was safe. He wagged his
ears, snorted contemptuously at a 5.9 which spurted up a column of mud
and smoke some hundred yards to the left, and plodded on gamely through
the mud. He didn’t know where he was going, but Jimmy Wright was there,
and just ahead of his nose, where he could sniff at him; and he felt
sure there would be fodder and a rub down at the end of the weary road.
In the midst of these consoling reflections something startling and
inexplicable happened. He was enveloped and swept away in a deafening
roar. Thick blackness, streaked with star-showers, blinded him. Though
half-stupefied, he kicked and struggled with all his strength, for it
was not in him to yield himself, like a stricken horse, to any stroke of
Fate.
When he once more saw daylight, he was recovering his feet just below
the rim of an old shell-hole. He gained the top, braced his legs, and
shook himself vigorously. The loaded panniers thumping heavily upon his
ribs restored him fully to his senses. Snorting through wide red
nostrils, he stared about him wildly. Some ten paces distant he saw a
great new crater in the mud, reeking with black and orange fumes.
But where was Jimmy Wright? The mule swept anxious eyes across the waste
of shell-holes, in every direction. In vain. His master had vanished. He
felt himself deserted. Panic began to clutch at his heart, and he
gathered his muscles for frantic flight. And then he recovered himself
and stood steady. He had caught sight of a ginger-haired head, bare of
its shrapnel helmet, lying on the mud at the other side of the
shell-hole from which he had just struggled out.
His panic passed at once, but it gave place to anxious wonder. There,
indeed, was Jimmy Wright, but what was he doing there? His body was
buried almost to the shoulders in the discoloured slime that half filled
the shell-hole. He was lying on his face. His arms were outstretched,
and his hands were clutching at the slippery walls of the hole as if he
were striving to pull himself up from the water. This effort, however,
seemed anything but successful. The mule saw, indeed, that his protector
was slowly slipping deeper into the slime. This filled him with fresh
alarm. If Jimmy Wright should disappear under that foul surface, that
would be desertion complete and final. It was not to be endured.
Quickly but cautiously the mule picked his way around the hole, and
then, with sagacious bracing of his hoofs, down to his master’s side.
But what was to be done next? Jimmy Wright’s face was turned so that he
could not see his would-be rescuer. His hands were still clutching at
the mud, but feebly and without effect.
The mule saw that his master was on the point of vanishing under the
mud, of deserting him in his extremity. This was intolerable. The
emergency quickened his wits. Instinct suggested to him that to keep a
thing one should take hold of it and hold on to it. He reached down with
his big yellow teeth, took hold of the shoulder of Jimmy Wright’s tunic,
and held on. Unfamiliar with anatomy, he at the same time took hold of a
substantial portion of Jimmy Wright’s own shoulder inside the tunic, and
held on to that. He braced himself, and with a loud, involuntary snort
began to pull.
Jimmy Wright, up to this point, had been no more than half conscious.
The mule’s teeth in his shoulder revived him effectually. He came to
himself with a yell. He remembered the shell-burst. He saw and
understood where he was. He was afraid to move for a moment, lest he
should find that his shoulder was blown off. But no, he had two arms,
and he could move them. He had his shoulder all right, for something was
pulling at it with quite sickening energy. He reached up his right
arm—it was the left shoulder that was being tugged at—and encountered
the furry head and ears of his rescuer.
“Sonny!” he shouted. “Well, I’ll be d——d!” And he gripped fervently at
the mule’s neck.
Reassured at the sound of his master’s voice, the big mule took his
teeth out of Wright’s shoulder and began nuzzling solicitously at his
sandy head.
“It’s all right, old man,” said the New Brunswicker, thinking quickly,
while with his left hand he secured a grip on the mule’s headstall. Then
he strove to raise himself from the slime. The effort produced no
result, except to send a wave of blackness across his brain. Wondering
sickly if he carried some terrible injury concealed under the mud, he
made haste to pass the halter rope under his arms and knot it beneath
his chest. Then he shouted for help, twice and again, till his voice
trailed off into a whimper and he relapsed into unconsciousness. The
mule shifted his feet to gain a more secure foothold on the treacherous
slope, and then stood wagging his ears and gazing down on Jimmy in
benevolent content. So long as Jimmy was with him, he felt that things
were bound to come all right. Jimmy would presently get up and lead him
out of the shell-hole, and take him home.
Shell after shell, whining or thundering according to their breed,
soared high over the hole, but the black mule only wagged his ears at
them. His eyes were anchored upon the unconscious sandy head of Jimmy
Wright. Suddenly, however, a sharp voice made him look up. He saw a
couple of stretcher-bearers standing on the edge of the shell-hole,
looking down sympathetically upon him and his charge. In a second or two
they were beside him, skilfully and tenderly extricating Jimmy’s body
from the mud.
“He ain’t gone west this time,” pronounced one, who had thrust an
understanding hand into the breast of the tunic.
Jimmy Wright opened his eyes wide suddenly.
“Not by a d——d sight I ain’t, Bill!” he muttered rather thickly. Then,
his wits and his voice coming clearer, he added: “But if I ain’t, it’s
thanks to this here old —— of an Argentino mule, that come down into
this hole and yanked me out o’ the mud, and saved me. Eh, Sonny?”
The big mule was crowding up so close to him as to somewhat incommode
the two men in their task on that treacherous incline. But they warded
off his inconvenient attentions very gently.
“He’s some mule, all right,” grunted one of the bearers, as they got
Jimmy on to the stretcher and laboriously climbed from the shell-hole.