[Cover Illustration]
[Illustration: “‘Hold tight to the rail,’ Jim’s voice said in Nora’s
ear.” (Page 67.)]
_Jim and Wally_] [_Frontispiece_
JIM AND WALLY
By
MARY GRANT BRUCE
Author of “Mates at Billabong,” “Norah of Billabong,” etc.
W A R D , L O C K & C O . , L I M I T E D
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO
1917
_To_
_G. E. B.,_
_Cork, 1915-16_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I WAR..................................... 9
II YELLOW ENVELOPES........................ 30
III WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME................. 43
IV TO IRELAND.............................. 53
V INTO DONEGAL............................ 74
VI OF LITTLE BROWN TROUT................... 98
VII LOUGH ANOOR............................. 113
VIII JOHN O’NEILL............................ 131
IX PINS AND PORK........................... 147
X THE ROCK OF DOON........................ 161
XI NORTHWARD............................... 183
XII ASS-CART _VERSUS_ MOTOR................. 197
XIII THE CAVE AMONG THE ROCKS................ 213
XIV A FAMILY MATTER......................... 229
XV PLANS OF CAMPAIGN....................... 242
XVI THE FIGHT IN THE DAWN................... 248
CHAPTER I
WAR
“For one the laurel, one the rose, and glory for them all,
All the gallant gentlemen who fight and laugh and fall.”
MARGERY RUTH BETTS.
THE trench wound a sinuous way through the sodden Flanders mud.
Underfoot were boards; and then sandbags; and then more boards, added as
the mud rose up and swallowed all that was put down upon it. Some of the
last-added boards had almost disappeared, ground out of sight by the
trampling feet of hundreds of men: a new battalion had relieved, three
nights before, the men who had held that part of the line for a week,
and when a relief arrives, a trench becomes uncomfortably filled, and
the ground underfoot is churned into deep glue. It was more than time to
put down another floor; to which the only objection was that no more
flooring material was available, and had there been, no one had time to
fetch it.
It was the second trench. Beyond it was another, occupied by British
soldiers: beyond that again, a mass of tangled barbed-wire, and then the
strip of No-Man’s Land dividing the two armies—a strip ploughed up by
shells and scarred with craters formed by the bursting of high
explosives. Here and there lay rifles, and spiked German helmets, and
khaki caps; but no living thing was visible save the cheeky Flemish
sparrows that hopped about the quiet space, chirping and twittering as
if trying to convince themselves and everybody else that War was
hundreds of miles away. The sparrows carried out this pleasant deception
every morning, abandoning the attempt as soon as the first German gun
began what the British soldiers, disagreeably interrupted in frying
bacon, termed “the breakfast hate.” Then they retreated precipitately to
the sparrow equivalent to a dug-out, to meditate in justifiable
annoyance on the curious ways of men.
In the second trench the men were weary and heavy-eyed, and even bacon
had scant attractions for them. It was their first experience of
trench-life complicated by shell-fire, and since their arrival the enemy
had been “hating” with a vigour that seemed to argue on his part a
peculiar sourness of temper. Now, after two days of incessant artillery
din and three nights of the strenuous toil that falls upon the trenches
with darkness, the new men bore evidence of exhaustion. Casualties had
been few, considering the violent nature of the bombardment; but to
those who had never before seen Death come suddenly, an even slighter
loss would have been horrifying. The ceaseless nerve-shattering roar of
the big guns pounded in their brains long after darkness had put an end
to the bombardment; their brief snatches of sleep were haunted by the
white faces of the comrades with whom they would laugh and fight and
work no more. They were stiff and sore with crouching under the parapets
and in the narrow dug-outs; dazed with noise, sullen with the anger of
men who have been forced to endure without making any effort to hit
back. But their faces had hardened under the test. A few were shrinking,
“jumpy,” useless: but the majority had stiffened into men. When the time
for hitting back came, they would be ready.
Dawn on the fourth morning found them weary enough, but, on the whole,
in better condition than they had been two days earlier. They were
getting used to it; and even to artillery bombardment “custom hath made
a property of easiness.” The first sense of imminent personal danger had
faded with each hour that found most of them still alive. Discipline and
routine, making each officer and man merely part of one great machine,
steadied them into familiar ways, even in that unfamiliar setting. And
above all was satisfaction that after months of slow training on
barrack-square and peaceful English fields they were at last in the
middle of the real thing—doing their bit. It had been conveyed to them
that they were considered to be shaping none too badly: a curt
testimonial, which, passing down the line, had lent energy to a hard
night of rebuilding parapets, mending barbed-wire, and cleaning up
battered sections of trench. They were almost too tired to eat. But the
morning—so far—was peaceful; the sunlight was cheery, the clean breeze
refreshing. Possibly to-day might find the Hun grown weary of hating so
noisily. There were worse things than even a trench in Flanders on a
bright April morning.
Jim Linton sat on a small box outside his dug-out, drinking enormous
quantities of tea, and making a less enthusiastic attempt to demolish
the contents of an imperfectly heated tin of bully beef. He was
bare-headed, owing to the fact that a portion of shrapnel had removed
his cap the day before, luckily without damaging the head inside it. Mud
plastered him from neck to heels. He was a huge boy, well over six feet,
broad-shouldered and powerful; and the bronze which the sun of his
native Australia had put into his face had been proof against the trench
experiences that had whitened English cheeks, less deeply tanned.
Another second lieutenant came hastily round a traverse and tripped over
his feet.
“There’s an awful lot of you in a trench!” said the new-comer,
recovering himself.
“Sorry,” said Jim. “I can’t find any other place to put them; they
_will_ stick out. Never mind, the mud will bury them soon; it swallows
them if I forget to move them every two minutes. Come and have
breakfast.”
“I want oceans of tea,” said Wally Meadows, dragging a biscuit-tin from
the dug-out, perching it precariously on a small board island in the
mud, and seating himself with caution. He glanced with disfavour at the
beef-tin. “Is that good?”
“Beastly,” Jim answered laconically. “Smith’s strong point is not
cookery. It’s faintly warm and exceedingly tough; and something with
moisture in it seems to have happened to the biscuits. But the tea is
topping. I told Smith to bring another supply presently. Bacon’s a bit
short, so I said we preferred bully.”
Wally accepted a tin mug of milkless tea with gratitude.
“That’s great,” he said, after a beatific pause, putting down the empty
mug. He pushed his cap back from his tired young face, and heaved a
great sigh of relief. “Blessings on whoever discovered tea! I don’t
think I’ll have any beef, thanks.”
“Yes, you will,” Jim said, firmly. “I know it’s beastly, and one isn’t
hungry, but it’s a fool game not to eat. If we have any luck there may
be some work to-day; and you can’t fight if you don’t eat something. The
first mouthful is the worst.”
His chum took the beef-tin meekly.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “If we only do get a chance of
fighting, I should think we’d have enormous appetites afterwards; but
one can’t get hungry hiding in this beastly hole and letting Brother
Boche sling his tin cans at us. Wouldn’t you give something for a bath
and twelve hours’ sleep?”
“By Jove, yes!” Jim agreed. “But I don’t mind postponing them if only we
get a smack at those gentry across the way first. Did you see
Anstruther?”
“Yes—he’s better. He dodged the R.A.M.C. men—said he wasn’t going to
be carted back because of a knock on the head. He’s tied up freshly and
looks awfully interesting, but he declares he’s quite fit.”
Captain Anstruther was the company commander, a veteran of
one-and-twenty, with eight months’ service. The two Australian boys,
nineteen and eighteen respectively, and fully conscious of their own
limitations, regarded him with great respect in his official capacity,
and, off duty, had clearly demonstrated their ability to dispose of him,
with the gloves on, within three rounds. They were exceedingly good
friends. Anstruther could tell stories of the Marne, of the retreat from
Mons, of the amazing tangle of the first weeks of war, which had left
him, then a second lieutenant, in sole command of the remnant of his
battalion. To the two Australians he was a mine of splendid information.
They were mildly puzzled at what he demanded in return—bush “yarns” of
their own country, stories of cattle musterings, of aboriginals, of
sheep-shearing by machinery, of bush-fire fighting; even of football as
played at their school in Melbourne. To them these things, interesting
enough in peacetime and in their own setting, were commonplace and stale
in the trenches, with Europe ablaze with battle all round them.
Anstruther, however, looked on war with an eye that saw little of
romance: willing to see it through, but with no illusions as to its
attractions. He greatly preferred to talk of bush-fires, which he had
not seen.
Yesterday a shell which had wrecked far too much of a section of trench
to be at all comfortable had provided this disillusioned warrior with a
means of escape, had he so wished, by knocking him senseless, with a
severe scalp-wound. Counselled to seek the dressing-station at the rear,
when he had recovered his senses, however, he had flatly declined; all
his boredom lost in annoyance at his aching head, and a wild desire to
obtain enemy scalps in vengeance. Jim and Wally had administered
first-aid with field dressings, and the wounded one, declaring himself
immediately cured, had hidden himself and his bandages from any
intrusive senior who might be hard-hearted enough to insist on his
retirement.
“It was a near thing,” Jim said reflectively.
“So was yours,” stated his chum.
“Oh—my old cap?—a miss is as good as a mile,” said Jim. “I’m glad it
wasn’t a bit nearer, though; it would be a bore to be put out of
business without ever having seen a German, let alone finding out which
of us could ‘get his fist in fust.’” He rose, feeling for his pipe.
“Have you eaten your whack of that stuff?”
“I’ve done my best,” said Wally, displaying the tin, nearly empty.
“Can’t manage any more. Let’s have a walk along the trench and see
what’s happening.”
“Well, keep your silly head down,” Jim said. “The parapet is getting
more and more uneven, and you never remember you’re six feet.”
Wally grinned. Each of the friends suffered under the belief that he was
extremely careful and the other destined to sudden death from
unwittingly exposing himself to a German sniper.
“If you followed your own advice, grandmother,” he said; “you being
three inches taller, and six times more careless! I always told your
father and Norah that you’d be an awful responsibility.”
“I’ll put you under arrest if you’re not civil,” Jim threatened. “Small
boys aren’t allowed to be impertinent on active service!”
They floundered along in the mud, ducking whenever the parapet was low:
sandbags had run short, and trench-repairing on the previous night had
been like making bricks without straw. The men were finishing breakfast,
keeping close to the dug-outs, since at any moment the first German
shell might scream overhead. The line was very thin; reinforcements,
badly enough wanted, were reported to be coming up. Meanwhile the
battalion could only hope that the shells would continue to spare them,
and that when the enemy came the numbers would be sufficiently even to
enable them to put up a good fight.
Captain Anstruther, white-faced under a bandage that showed red stains,
nodded to them cheerily.
“Ripping morning, isn’t it?” he said. “Hope you’ve had a pleasant night,
Linton!”
Jim grinned, glancing at his hands, which displayed numerous long red
scars.
“One’s nights here are first-class training for the career of a burglar
later on,” he said. “Mending barbed-wire in the dark is full of
unexpected happenings, chiefly unpleasant. I don’t mind the actual
mending so much as having to lie flat on one’s face in the mud when a
star-shell comes along.”
“Very disorganizing to work,” said another subaltern, Blake, whose
mud-plastered uniform showed that he had had his share of lying flat. In
private life Blake had belonged to the species “nut,” and had been wont
to parade in Bond Street in beautiful raiment. Here, dirty, unshaven and
scarcely distinguishable from the muddiest of his platoon, he permitted
himself a cheerfulness that Bond Street had never seen.
“Sit down,” Anstruther said. “There are more or less dry sandbags, and
business is slack. Why didn’t you fellows come down to mess? Have you
had any breakfast?”
“Yes, thanks,” Jim answered. “We fed up there—our men were inclined to
give breakfast a miss, so we encouraged them to eat by feeding largely,
among them. Nothing like exciting a feeling of competition.”
“Trenches under fire don’t breed good healthy appetites—at any rate
until you’re used to them,” Blake remarked.
“The men are bucking up well, all the same,” said Anstruther. “I’m jolly
proud of them; it’s a tough breaking-in for fellows who aren’t much more
than recruits. They’re steadying down better than I could have hoped
they would.”
“Doesn’t the weary old barrack-square grind stand to them now!” said
Jim. “They see it, too, themselves; only they’re very keen to put all
the bayonet-exercise into practice. Smith, my servant, was the mildest
little man you ever saw, at home; now he spends most of the day putting
a bloodthirsty edge on his bayonet, and I catch him in corners prodding
the air and looking an awful Berserk. They’re all chirping up
wonderfully this morning, bless ’em. I shouldn’t wonder if by this time
to-morrow they were regarding it all as a picnic!”
“So it is, if you look at it the right way,” said Blake. “Lots of jokes
about, too. Did you hear what one of our airmen gave the enemy on April
the First? He flew over a crowd behind their lines, and dropped a
football. It fell slowly, and Brother Boche took to cover like a rabbit,
from all directions. Then it struck the ground and bounced wildly,
finally settling to rest: I suppose they thought it was a delay-action
fuse, for they laid low for a long time before they dared believe it was
not going to explode. So they came out from their shelters to examine
it, and found written on it ‘April fool—_Gott strafe England_!’”
His hearers gave way to mirth.
“Good man!” said Anstruther. “But there are lots of mad wags among the
flying people. I should think it must make ’em extraordinarily cheerful
always to be cutting about in nice clean air, where there isn’t any
barbed-wire or mud.”
Feeling grunts came from the others.
“Rather!” said Garrett, another veteran of eight months’ service. “There
was one poor chap who had engine-trouble when he was doing a lone
reconnaissance, and had to come down behind the German lines. He worked
furiously, and just got his machine in going order, when two enemy
officers trotted up, armed with revolvers, and took him prisoner. Then
they thought it would be a bright idea to make him take _them_ on a
reconnaissance over the Allied lines; which design they explained to him
in broken English and with a fine display of their portable artillery,
making him understand that if he didn’t obey he’d be shot forthwith.”
“But he didn’t!” Wally burst out.
“Just you wait, young Australia—you’re an awful fire-eater!” said the
narrator. “The airman thought it over, and came to the conclusion that
it would be a pity to waste his valuable life; so he gave in meekly,
climbed in, and took his passengers aboard. They went off very gaily,
and he gave them a first-rate view of all they wanted to see; and, of
course, carrying our colours, he could fly much lower than any German
machine could have gone in safety. It was jam for the two Boches; I
guess they felt their Iron Crosses sprouting. Their joy only ended—and
then it ended suddenly—when he looped the loop!”
The audience jumped.
“What happened?”
“They very naturally fell out.”
“And the airman?” Wally asked, ecstatically.
“He had taken the precaution to strap himself in—unobtrusively. Didn’t
I tell you he appreciated his valuable life?” said Garrett, laughing.
“He came down neatly where he wanted to, made his report, and sent out a
party to give decent burial to two very dead amateur aviators. The force
of gravity is an excellent thing to back you up in a tight place, isn’t
it?”
“Well, it’s something to get one’s chance—and it’s quite another to
know when to take advantage of it,” said Anstruther. “I expect an airman
has to learn to make up his mind quicker than most of us. But there’s no
doubt of the chances that come to some people. A Staff officer was here
early this morning, and he was telling me of young Goujon.”
“Who’s he?” queried Blake, lazily.
“He’s a French kid—just seventeen. He was one of a small party sent out
to locate some enemy machine-guns that were giving a good deal of
trouble. They found ’em, all right; but when they were wriggling their
way back a shell came along and wiped out the entire crowd—all except
this Goujon kid. He was untouched, and he hid for hours in the crater
made by the explosion of the shell. When it got dark he crept out: but
by that time he was pretty mad, and instead of getting home, he wanted
to get a bit of his own back, and what must he do but crawl to those
machine-guns and lob bombs on them!”
“That’s some kid,” said Blake briefly.
“Yes, he was, rather. He destroyed two of the three guns, and then was
overpowered—_that_ wouldn’t have taken long!—and made prisoner: pretty
roughly handled, too. But before he could be sent to the rear, some of
our chaps made a little night-attack on that bit of German trench, and
in the excitement Goujon got away. So he trotted home—but on the way he
stopped, and gathered up the remaining machine-gun. Staggered into his
own lines with it. They’ve given him the Military Medal.”
“Deserved it, too,” was the comment.
“And he’s seventeen!” said some one. “He ought to get pretty high up
before the war is over.”
“I know a man who’s a major at nineteen,” Anstruther said, “Went out as
a second lieutenant and was promoted for gallantry at Mons; got his
captaincy and was wounded at the Aisne; recovered, and at Neuve Chapelle
was the sole officer left, except two very junior subalterns, in all his
battalion. He handled it in action, brought them out brilliantly—awful
corner it was, too,—and was in command for a fortnight after, before
they could find a senior man; there weren’t any to spare. He was
gazetted major last week.”
“Lucky dog!” said Blake.
“Well, I suppose he is. They say he’s a genius at soldiering, anyhow;
and, of course, he got his chance. There must be hundreds of men who
would do as well if they ever got it; only opportunity doesn’t come
their way.”
“They say this will be a war for young men,” Garrett said. “We’re going
back to old days; I believe Wellington and Napoleon were colonels at
twenty. And that’s more than you will be, young Meadows, if you don’t
mend your ways.”
“I never expected to be,” said Wally, thus attacked.
“But why won’t I, anyhow, apart from obvious reasons?”
“Because you’ll be a neat little corpse,” said Garrett. “What’s this
game of yours I hear about?—crawling round on No-Man’s Land at night,
and collecting little souvenirs? The souvenir you’ll certainly collect
will come from a machine-gun.”
Wally blushed.
“Well, there are such a jolly lot of things there,” he defended himself.
“Boche helmets—I’ve got three beauties—and belts, and buckles, and
things. People at home like ’em.”
“Presumably people at home like you,” Anstruther said. “But they
certainly won’t have you to like if you do it, and it’s possible their
affection might even wane for a German helmet that had cost you your
scalp. _Verboten_, Meadows; that’s good German, at any rate.
Understand?”
Wally assented meekly. Jim Linton, apparently sublimely unconscious of
the conversation, sighed with relief. His chum’s adventurous expeditions
had caused him no little anxiety, especially as they were undertaken at
a time when his own duties prevented his keeping an eye on the younger
boy—which would probably have ended in his accompanying him. From
childhood, Jim and Wally had been accustomed to do things in pairs: a
habit which had persisted even to sending them together from Australia
to join the Army, since Wally was too young for the Australian forces.
England was willing to take boys of seventeen; therefore it was
manifestly out of the question that Jim should join anywhere but in
England, despite his nineteen years. And as Jim’s father and sister were
also willing to come to England, the matter had arranged itself as a
family affair. Wally Meadows was an orphan, and the Linton family had
long included him on a permanent, if informal, basis.
“It’s jolly to get V.C.’s and medals and other ironmongery,” Anstruther
was saying; “but I’d like to be the chap who organized the Toy Band on
the retreat from Mons. He was a Staff officer, and he found the remains
of a regiment, several hundred strong, straggling through a village,
just dead beat. The Germans were close on their heels; the British had
no officers left, and had quite given up. The Staff chap called on them
to make another effort to save themselves, but they wouldn’t—they had
been on the run for days, were half-starved, worn out: they didn’t care
what happened to them. The officer was at his wits’ end what to do, when
his eye fell on a little bit of a shop—you know the usual French
village store, with all sorts of stuff in the window: and there he saw
some toy drums and penny whistles. He darted in and bought some: came
out and induced two or three of the less exhausted men to play
them—it’s said he piped on one penny whistle himself, only he won’t
admit it now. But you know what the tap of a drum will do on a
route-march when the men are getting tired. He roused the whole regiment
with his fourpence-worth of band and brought them back to their brigade
next day—never lost a man!”
“Jolly good work,” said Blake.
“He won’t get anything for it, of course,” said Anstruther. “You don’t
get medals for playing tin whistles; and anyhow, there was no one to
report it. But—yes, I’d like to have been that chap.” He rose and
stretched himself, taking advantage of a section of undamaged parapet.
“Brother Boche is rather late in beginning his hate this morning, don’t
you think?”
“Perhaps he’s given up hating as a bad job,” Wally suggested.
“We’ll miss the dear old thing if he really means to leave us alone,”
said Anstruther. “Just as well if he does, though: our line is painfully
thin, and it’s evident to anyone that our guns are short of ammunition:
we’re giving them about one shell to twenty of theirs. And don’t they
know it! They send us enormous doses of high-explosive shells, and in
return we tickle them feebly with a little shrapnel. They must chuckle!”
“I suppose England will wake up and make munitions for us when we’re all
wiped out,” said Garrett, scornfully. “They’re awfully cheery over
there: theatres and restaurants packed, business as usual, bull-dog
grit, and all the rest of it: Parliament yapping happily, and strikes
twice a week. And our chaps trying to fight for ’em, and dying for want
of ammunition to do it with. I suppose they think we’re rather lazy not
to make it in our spare time!”
“I’m afraid they won’t appoint me dictator just yet,” Blake remarked.
“If they would, I’d have every striker and slacker out here: not to
fight, but to mend barbed-wire, clean up trenches, and do the general
dirty work. First-rate tonic for a disgruntled mind. And I’d send what
was left of them to the end of the world afterwards. Will you have them
in Australia, Linton?”
“Thanks; we’ve plenty of troubles of our own,” Jim returned hastily.
“Don’t you think we were dumping-ground for your rubbish for long
enough?”
“You were a large, empty place, and you had to be peopled,” said Blake,
grinning. “And a good many of them were very decent people, I believe.”
“Well, they might well be,” Jim responded—“you sent them out for
stealing a sheep or a shirt or a medicine-bottle: one poor kid of six
was sent out for life for stealing jam-tarts. Many excellent men must
have begun life by stealing jam-tarts: I did, myself!”
“If you’re a sample of the after-effects, I don’t wonder we exported the
other criminals early,” laughed Blake.
“Well, if any of their descendants grew into the chaps that landed at
Gallipoli the other day, they were no bad asset,” said Anstruther. “By
Jove, those fellows must be fighters, Linton! I wouldn’t care to have
the job of holding them back.”
“I knew they’d fight,” said Jim briefly. Down in his quiet soul he was
torn between utter pride in his countrymen, and woe that he had not been
with them in that stern Gallipoli landing: the latter emotion firmly
repressed. It had been the fight of his boyish dreams—wild charging,
hand to hand work, a fleeing enemy: not like this hole-and-corner trench
existence unseen by the unseen foe, with Death that could not be
combated dropping from the sky. His old school-fellows had been at
Gallipoli, and had “made good.” He ached to have been with them.
An orderly came up hurriedly. Anstruther tore open the note he carried.
“There’s word of an enemy attack,” he said crisply. “Get to your
places—quick!”
The subalterns scattered along the trench, each to his platoon. They had
already inspected the men, making sure that no detail of armament had
been forgotten, and that rifles were all in order. Garrett, who
commanded the machine-gun section, fled joyfully to the emplacement, his
face like a happy child’s. The alarm ran swiftly up and down the trench:
low, sharp words of command brought every man to his place, while the
sentries, like statues, were glued to their peep-holes. Jim and Wally
fingered their revolvers, scarcely able to realize that the time for
using them had come at last. Field officers appeared, hurriedly scanning
every detail of preparation, and giving a word of advice here and there.
“Thank ’eving, we’re going to have a look-in!” muttered a man in front
of Jim: a grizzled sergeant with the two South African ribbons on his
breast. “Steady there, young ’Awkins; don’t go meddlin’ with that
trigger of yours. You’ll get a chanst of loosin’ off pretty soon.”
“Cawn’t come too soon for me!” said Hawkins, in a throaty whisper,
fondling his rifle lovingly. “They got me best pal yesterday.”
“Then keep your ’ead cool till the time comes to mention wot you think
of ’em,” returned the sergeant.
Jim and Wally found a chink in the sandbag parapet, and looked out
eagerly ahead. All was quiet. The sparrows, made bold by the
extraordinary peace of the morning, still chirped and twittered on
No-Man’s Land. No sound came from the German trenches beyond. Here and
there a faint smoke-wreath curled lazily into the air, telling of
cooking-fires and breakfast.
“How do they know they’re coming?” Wally whispered.
“Aeroplane reconnaissance, I suppose,” Jim answered, pointing to two or
three specks floating in the blue overhead, far out of reach of the
anti-aircraft guns. “They’ve been hovering up there all the morning.
Feeling all right, Wal?”
“Fit as a fiddle. I suppose I’ll be in a blue funk presently, but just
now I feel as if I were going to a picnic.”
“So do I—and the men are keen as mustard. I thought little Wilson would
be useless; you know how jumpy he’s been since we came here. But look at
him, there; he’s as steady and cool as any sergeant. They’re good boys,”
said the subaltern, who was not yet twenty.
“Mind your ’ead, sir!” came in an agonized whisper from a corporal
below; and Jim ducked obediently under the lee of the parapet.
“It’s quite hot,” he said, peering again through his peep-hole. “There’s
a jolly breeze springing up, though.”
The breeze came softly over No-Man’s Land, fluttering the wings of the
cheerful sparrows. Across the scarred strip of grass a low, green cloud
wavered upwards. It grew more solid, spreading in a dense wall over the
parapet of the German trench.
“What on earth——?” Jim began.
The green cloud seemed to hesitate. Then the wind freshened a little,
and it suddenly blew forward across No-Man’s Land, growing denser as it
came. Before it, the sparrows fled suddenly, darting to the upper air
with shrill chirpings of alarm. But one bird, taken unawares, beat his
wings wildly for a moment, flying forward. Then he pitched downwards and
the cloud rolled over him.
“What is it?” uttered Wally.
Before the parapet of the British trench ahead of them the cloud stood
for a moment, and then toppled bodily into the trench. It fell as water
falls like a heavy thing. From its green depths came hoarse shouts, and
rifles suddenly went off in an irregular fusillade. Then the cloud
rolled over, leaving the trench full of vapour, and stole towards the
second British line.
A great cry came ringing down the trench.
“Gas! It’s their filthy gas!”
It was a new thing, and no one was prepared for it. Across the Channel,
England was shuddering over the first reports of the asphyxiating gas
attacks, and the women of England were working night and day at the
first half-million respirators to be sent out to the troops. But to the
men in the trenches there had come only vague rumours of what the French
and Canadians had suffered: and they had been slow to believe. It was
not easy to realize, unseeing, the full horror of that most malignant
device with which Science had blackened War. A few of the officers had
respirators—dry, and comparatively useless. The men were utterly
unprotected. Like sheep waiting for the slaughter they stood rigidly at
attention, waiting for the evil green cloud that blew towards them,
already poisoning the clean air with its noxious fumes.
“Tie your handkerchiefs round your mouths and nostrils!” Jim Linton
shouted. “Quick, Wally!”
He caught at the younger boy’s handkerchief and knotted it swiftly. The
corporal shook his head.
“Most of ’em ain’t got no ’ankerchers, sir,” he said grimly. “They
_will_ clean their rifles with ’em.”
Then came another cry.
“Look out—they’re coming!”
Dimly, behind the cloud of gas, they could see shadowy forms clambering
over the parapet of the enemy trench; German soldiers, unreal and
horrible in their hideous respirators, with great goggle eyes of talc.
Ahead, the quick spit of machine-guns broke out spitefully; and, as if
in answer, Garrett’s Maxims opened fire. Then the gas was upon them:
falling from above over the parapet, stealing like a live thing down the
communication trench that led from the first line, where already the
Germans were swarming. Men were choking, gasping, fighting for air;
dropping their rifles as they tore at their collars, losing their heads
altogether in the horror of the silent attack. A little way down the
trench Anstruther was trying to rally them, his voice only audible for a
few yards. Jim echoed him.
“Come on, boys! it’s better in the open. Let’s get at them!”
He sprang up over the parapet, Wally at his side. There were bullets
whistling all round them, but the air was more free—it was Paradise
compared to the agony of suffocation in the trench. Some of the men
followed. Jim leaped back again, dragging at others; pushing, striking,
threatening; anything to get them up above, where at least they might
die fighting, not like rats in a hole. He was voiceless, inarticulate;
he could only point upwards, and force them over the parapet and into
the bullet-swept space. Wally was there—was Wally killed? Then he saw
him beside him in the trench, dragging at little Private Wilson, who had
fallen senseless. Together they lifted him and flung him out at the
rear, turning to fight with other men who had given up and were leaning
against the walls, choking. Above them Anstruther was getting the men
into some semblance of formation to meet the oncoming rush of Germans.
He called to them sharply, authoritatively.
“Linton!—Meadows! Come out at once!”
Jim tried to obey. Then he saw that Wally was staggering, and flung his
arm round him; but the arm was suddenly limp and helpless, and Wally
pitched forward on his face and lay still, gasping. Jim tried to drag
him up, fighting with the powerlessness that was creeping over him.
Behind him the roar of artillery grew faint in his ears and died away,
though still he seemed to hear the steady spit of Garrett’s
machine-guns. He sagged downwards. Then black, choking darkness rushed
upon him, and he fell across the body of his friend.
[Illustration: “Jim Linton sat on a small box outside his dug-out
. . .”]
_Jim and Wally_] [_Page 11_