BOOK III—INTO THE BLUE

I

I T’. two days since I made my last jotting. How much has happened since then! Since then we’ve smashed the Hun Front, crumpled it up and swept it back for a distance of fourteen miles. It’s difficult to say whether there is any Hun Front left; there’s a mob withdrawing in tumultuous retreat and picked suicide-troops, fighting stubborn rearguard actions.

To-day it is our turn to sit down and hold the line in depth. The troops which were behind us yesterday, have leap-frogged us and passed through us. They’re fresh and with their unspoilt strength are battering their way still further forward, herding the enemy into panic-stricken groups, and cutting them off from the main body with their tremendous weight of shel’s. Pressing on their heels, like policemen dispersing a riot, come the ponderous tanks, making no arrests and impersonally bludgeoning every protest into silence.

How far our chaps have penetrated by now we cannot guess, but their guns sound very faintly across the hazy summer distance. To-morrow we shall again hook in and gallop into the point of the fighting-wedge, while the troops who are up front to-day will sit tight and hold. This is war as we have always dreamt of it and never hoped to find it.

At last we have our desire; we have leapt out of our trenches, left the filth of No Man’s Land behind, and have slipped off into the blue, where we follow a moving battle across plains and wheat-fields to the unravished lands of Germany.

It’s the afternoon of August the ninth. It was on the evening of the seventh that we crept out on foot from the shadow of the Boves Woods. The roads were packed with infantry and tanks moving forward in a solid mass; this night everything was moving in the one direction—there was no returning traffic. Hidden in the ravines, just back of the guns, we came across the cavalry, ready to advance the moment a breach in the line bad been announced. In contrast with the nervous irritation of other nights, this night there was an uncomplaining austerity. Suspense was nearly at an end, anticipation of dying was soon to be replaced by death’s actual presence. The great question in all our minds was, did the Hun know? Had he known all the time? Was he planning to catch us and to forestall our attack by an offensive of his own before morning?

On our arrival at the gun-position in front of the orchard we found that everything was normal and quiet. The odd shell was coming over and bursting with its accustomed regularity in the accustomed places. The enemy had not changed his targets. From his Front-line in the valley below us, the normal amount of flares were going up. The machine-gun fire came in irregular bursts and lazily, as if the entire business were a matter of form and not to be taken too much to heart by anybody. The only noticeable difference was of our making. To drown the throb of our advancing tanks, a great number of bombing-planes had been sent up, which kept flying to and fro at a low altitude above the enemy’s trenches. This peaceful state of affairs was too good to last, so we at once set to work feverishly upon our final preparations. Not a man slacked or spared himself; each one knew that before morning his own life might depend upon the honesty of his effort. I don’t think, however, it was our own particular lives that concerned us so much as the lives of our pals.

We divided the men into parties, so many to dig the six gun-platforms and so many to sort and stack the ammunition. Every hour or so we changed them over, so that they might not get stale at their task. As soon as the platforms were sufficiently advanced, we man-handled the guns into position and gave them their lines. After that we felt more secure; if the enemy were to anticipate our offensive, we would now be able to reply.

Time did not permit of our constructing sufficient protection for our men; besides, in so exposed a position, we should either escape by reason of the enemy’s panic or else get wiped out. We threw up a wall of sand-bags and turf about the guns to save their crews from splinters, and dug a more or less splinter-proof hole in which the signallers and the Major could do their work. In this hole, by the light of a solitary candle we made out the barrage-table with the times, lifts, rates of fire and ammunition expenditure for the attack, and explained it to the sergeants in charge of the gun-detachments. At 3 a. m. we served the men with hot tea, bully beef and slices of bread. Then we sat down to await developments. Our attack was planned to open at 4.20, just as the dawn would be peeping above the horizon.

Luckily for us a heavy mist had risen up which, as night drew towards morning, had thickened to the density of a fog. It had the effect of blanketing sound. It needed to, for as the tanks lumbered nearer to the Front-line to their jumping-off points, the whole world seemed to shake with their clamour. It was like a city of giants marching nearer and forever nearer. Not even the droning of the bombing-planes could drown the ominous breathing of their engines and the clangour of their iron tread.

Whether it was the number and the low altitude of the planes or that the Hun had actually heard the unusual commotion behind our lines, by 3 a. m. he became suspicious. His harassing fire, which usually dies down about that hour, leapt up into a novel intensity. He began to search and sweep new areas, which before had been free from shell-fire, It was a good thing that our work was completed, for we had to throw ourselves down and hug the ground to avoid the splinters. Most of his shells went plus of us and plunged into the orchard behind. Little sudden illuminations sprang up where piles of ammunition had been struck and were burning. He was evidently making guesses and consulting his map for anything that seemed likely, for when his shelling was working most destruction, he would switch to a new target, where it was wasted. The fog and the night combined, entirely prevented him from seeing what he was doing and from observing the tell-tale conflagrations he had created. We thanked our lucky stars that our position was a bad one and that we weren’t in the orchard.

The most nerve-racking moments in any fight are the moments preceding the start of the fight. One suddenly becomes possessed of extraordinary lucidity, somewhat similar to the clarity of thought which is said to be experienced by the drowning. He reviews his entire life in a flash, its failures, successes, unkindnesses and follies. He appreciates with ineffectual poignancy the affections he has wasted and the generosities he has omitted. It is as though, after having walked through all his years, he unexpectedly went aeroplaning and saw below him the panorama of his chances and achievements; he sees the might-have-been high-roads he could have taken, leading to white cities on the hills, and the crooked lanes he did actually choose, losing themselves in quagmire. Most particularly, in the moments of waiting, he thinks of children, because they are immortality. He wishes with a passionate regret that he had foreseen this hour, and could have left someone behind him who would perpetuate his body long after it has been obliterated and defiled. All the purposes and dignities for which he was created become miraculously obvious to him now. He feels a dull resentment that this clearness of vision was denied him till the power to choose was beyond his choice.

Sometimes this startling mental lucidity takes the form of an unnatural clairvoyance; he acutely apprehends happenings which are out of all possible reach of his senses. His imagination becomes abnormally alert. Lying beneath the weight of darkness, hanging over the lip of the valley, divided from the enemy by a sea of fog, I saw with absolute distinctness the frenzy which was in progress behind the hostile lines. I retain pictures which are as clean-cut as if they had been witnessed. Nine-tenths of the opposing army are sleeping. The sentries have been posted, the distress signals have been arranged and the batteries allotted their several tasks. At sunset everything seems serene; but as night settles down and the mist rises, an unaccountable uneasiness oppresses the spirits of the one-tenth who watch. Each man feels it, but he fears to voice his alarm till he has proofs which would warrant it. He notes the unusual number of planes in the air; but they are neither machinegunning nor bombing, and on account of the intense darkness they cannot spy. He may report their presence to headquarters, but there are no grounds for being disturbed so long as they are doing no harm. Besides, he is no expert; he may be mistaken as to their numbers. Then, little by little, above their drone he hears another sound—the sound as of a tidal wave travelling towards him, growing more menacing and taller as it approaches. He peers into the fog and imagines stealthy figures moving. The scurrying of a rat makes him break into a cold sweat. He calls to the next sentry; but his voice will not carry. He realizes that whatever happens, he is alone and cut off. His flares and rockets, if he fires them, will bring him no assistance; they will be smothered by the mountainous wall of whiteness. Fear seizes him, which he can no longer master; at the same time the same fear seizes every other watcher. By telephone or runner they each one send bark tidings of their terror.

But the nine-tenths of the enemy who are sleeping are annoyed at being disturbed. “It is nothing,” they declare. The news spreads slowly from battalion to brigade, brigade to division, division to corps, from corps to army. Each headquarters, peevish at being aroused and hesitant about arousing its next senior headquarters, wastes time in checking back to the watcher in the front-line for confirmation of his doubts. What is it that he fears? No attack is to be expected; the Allies’ storm-troops are up north. There is positive evidence of that fact. The worst that can be looked for is a local raiding-party. What are the reasons for his panic?

The reasons for his panic! They are vague, indefinite; he has no reasons—only intuitions, doubts, conjectures. He knows that the night is black and that he is filled with a horrible foreboding.

There are too many men over there across No Man’s Land. He cannot prove it, but he can feel their bated breath.

Reluctantly the nine-tenths of the army who were sleeping, are awakened. They lie listening in their deep dug-outs, unwilling to believe that calamity threatens. Then suddenly, when it is too late to be prepared, the suspicion strengthens that a major offensive will open with the morning. There is only an hour till dawn—too little time to act. The infantry are ordered to stand to in the trenches and the batteries to increase their rate of fire. Messages are sent to the rear to hurry up the reserves. Brigades of artillery, which are out at rest, hook in and start forward at the gallop. Even the most autocratic old generals are convinced and, to save their reputations, forsake their beds and become officiously important. Meanwhile, the men in the Front-line shiver in the darkness. They know that they have no chance now and are merely waiting to be slaughtered.

And we, on our side of No Man’s Land, we wait also. We do not like the job in hand; we were not born to be butchers. We are very much the same as those chaps over there. If we could, we would prefer to live our lives out, shake hands with the enemy and go home to our families. We have no quarrel with them individually; but we have no means of telling them that. It seems stupid to have come so far, to have suffered such hardships, to have sat up so many weary nights, simply in order to do something for which four years ago we should have been hanged. But we can’t wriggle out of it. If we tried to break away, all along the roads of France armed men are stationed to turn us back. We are impotent to express any choice in the matter. Certain people have quarrelled—people who do not wear khaki and who will never face death at sunrise. Who they are and why they should have quarrelled, we do not properly understand. Probably they muddled themselves into this row; how they did it, they themselves could not tell us. They’re kings and statesmen and nobs—far too high up for us to criticise. All we know is that we are their sacrifice. Because they say it is right, the more men we kill at dawn, the more glory we shall earn. Later on, if we survive the war and kill only one man, they will tell us it is wrong, and we shall end on the scaffold.

It’s all very puzzling—devilishly puzzling, when one’s brains and hands and feet are numbed with cold. It’s always perishing at three in the morning——-But these thoughts don’t do a chap any good; there’s nothing to be gained by philosophizing. It’s been going on for four years now—this living in mud and bathing in sweat, and always killing something God hasn’t spoken. He must know what he wants. \

At 3.45 a. m. the sergeants reported that all their fuzes were set. At four o’clock the whistle was blown for the “stand to” and the gun-crews crouched behind their guns in readiness. They needed to crouch, for the enemy shelling was finding us out and growing momentarily in intensity. Evidently more of their artillery was coming up and getting into action. From four o’clock onwards every five minutes the whistle blew and through the darkness a spectral voice announced: “Fifteen minutes to go”; “ten minutes to go”; “five minutes to go.” From far and wide behind the fog other whistles were heard sounding, and other voices making the same announcement. The last five minutes were counted off separately and the final minute in intervals of ten seconds: “Thirty seconds to go, twenty, ten, five.” Then, “Let her rip,” and a shrill blast of the whistle.

As though red-hot needles were stabbing at the drums, our ears are ringing and deafened. The air quivers and the ground flies up as if it were about to open. Our eyes are scorched by a marching wall of flame, against which are etched our rapid gunners, hurling hell across the valley like men demented, and our gallant eighteen-pounders barking, recoiling and bristling like infuriated terriers. We’re off with a vengeance. The greatest offensive of the war has started. Shall we get away with it in so advanced a position? At all events, it’s an end of waiting—that at least is a comfort.

II

YESTERDAY’. attack was a complete success—so complete that, in spite of all our preparations, its magnitude took us unaware. Had anyone, had the faith to foresee a Him defeat of such dimensions, we should have been able to have made a more deadly use of our advantage. As it was we lost a certain amount of time and, as a consequence, wasted some of our chances.

The trouble was, as usual, that we were controlled too much from the rear by staff-people, who didn’t come up-front to see what was happening for themselves, but gathered all their information second and third-hand. When the psychological moment had arrived for us to go forward, they became nervous and held us back. There were interminable telephone conversations with observers, liaison-officers, battery-commanders, all and sundry, before they could be persuaded that we were not proposing to put our heads into a trap.

Staff-people are the most incorrigible pessimists. They will never believe the fighter when he sends back word that victory is in his hands. They make him leave off fighting to answer foolish questions; by the time they permit him to go on fighting the enemy has very frequently recovered himself. They are so cursed with a fatal belief in their own omniscience that they scarcely credit the combatants, who run all the risks, with sense.

In the old days battles were won by generals who led their troops. A person, sharing the dangers and setting an example by their courage. They were on the spot as eye-witnesses, and recognized to a second when the moment to take hazards had arrived. To-day of necessity our generals and their staffs are deskmen, with the natural caution and scepticism of deskmen. They sit far back of the line, remote from shell-fire, in chbteaux fitted out like surveyors’ offices with typewriters, photographs, scales and maps. They do all their fighting on paper. When they are directing an attack, they collect their information by telephone, doubt it, sift it, weigh it, ponder it and discuss it, when lightning action is all that is required. Many of them have never been anything but deskmen since this war started; their combatant experience was gained years ago in little sporting rough-and-tumbles with aborigines on the outskirts of civilization. Because they have never personally endured the modern hell into which they have to fling their men, they can form no mental picture of the situations that occur, and the prompt action that should be taken. They are equipped for planning the preliminary details of a show; but their control of an attack, when once it has started, is paralyzing. So much is this the case that it’s a common saying among the men that the battles which we win in the trenches are lost by the staff-people who are behind.

On the morning of August the eighth the weather conditions were all in our favour. The fog was worth several extra divisions to us. It kept the enemy guessing. We knew what we intended to do, but he had to find out. The fog enabled us to conceal our intentions up to the very last moment. Until we were upon him, he had no knowledge of the directions from which we were approaching; by the time we were upon him it was too late for him to take the proper defensive steps. The first warning he had was when out of the deathly stillness our murderous barrage came roaring and screaming about his head. Never on any front has there been so tremendous a concentration of guns as we let loose on him that morning. The weight of shells and mass of explosives that we threw over him literally rolled up the landscape and pinned everything living to the ground. It passed over his trench-system like a gigantic plough, burying men and weapons, and travelled on into the distance by a pre-arranged series of leaps and bounds. The tanks, following the curtain of fire and lumbering ahead of the infantry, trampled into flatness whatever resistance the creeping barrage had spared.

While the heavens were raining brimstone and fire up front, his back-country was faring no better, for every battery position, strong-point, support-trench, cross-road, regimental headquarters and camp of which we had knowledge was kept under continual bombardment by our siege-guns and heavies. Meanwhile our cavalry of the air were flying low along his roads, by which retreat was possible, machine-gunning and bombing. It was like stopping up all the holes and smoking a wild beast out of his lair. The remnants of his Front-line garrison, who had not been pulverised by our tanks or buried by our shelling, threw away their arms and came streaming through the dawn to encounter the mercy of our bayonets. Later, those who had been taken prisoners, straggled in groups of twos and threes past our guns. They looked more like animals than men, their eyes glaring, their heads nodding, their steps tottering. Some of them walked shufflingly, like blinded men, groping for their direction. Others ran panting at a wolf-trot, as if they still felt that they were pursued by death. All of them were polluted with the unspeakable stench of carnage; behind the smoke of battle, before we saw them, we could smell them coming.

If the weather conditions favoured our infantry and tanks, they were even more favourable to ourselves. Had there been no fog, the moment we opened fire our flashes would have been spotted, our positions on the map discovered and our batteries wiped out. As it was our flashes, as seen through the fog from the enemy’s commanding height of land, must have appeared a composite blur of flame, flickering across the landscape for miles from right to left. He made a strenuous effort to bombard us, but was hopelessly inaccurate and out for range. After shelling us in a random fashion for perhaps fifteen minutes, he seemed to get wind of the disaster that had happened up front and, putting his guns out of action, drew them back. When he opened up again, his shells came slowly, as though from a great distance, and landed anywhere and everywhere, haphazard.

The dawn rose slowly, as though reluctant to look upon our handiwork. If it seemed slow to us, how much slower it must have seemed to the men whom we were slaughtering. There was no rush of golden splendour, no valiant peering of the sun above a treed horizon—only a thinly diffused pallor, shapeless and ghastly, which made the mist appear more impenetrable than ever. Day evaded us, hiding his chalky face in his hands, like a clown who had gazed on tragedy. When light came there was no laughter in its glance; it was a dead thing drifting in a stagnant emptiness. The flashes of the guns tore rents in the filmy obscurity by which we were surrounded, but they could not disperse it. Our eyes were smarting, our ears deafened, our senses astounded. The ground beneath our feet quivered as though it were the crust of a volcano. Our nerves shied at each fresh concussion, and our bodies trembled. We longed for the sky to become clear that we might learn what was happening. We had signalling parties attached to the infantry with flags and lamps. It had been arranged beforehand that we should watch various points in the captured country for their messages. If they had tried to send any back, none had been observed.

As the strafe progressed, the mist was made doubly dense by the reek of battle. The atmosphere became choking with the fumes of high explosives and the enemy, in a desperate effort to silence us, commenced to shell us with gas. We lit innumerable cigarettes to steady our nerves and carried on mechanically with our destructive work. Running from gun-platform to gun-platform, we checked up the lays of the gunners. Every few minutes the whistle sounded for a lift in the barrage, and there was a momentary pause in the crash of discharge while the angle was changed and the range lengthened.

Along the road to our left, where shells were falling, ambulances lurched and panted, leaving behind a trail of blood. Wounded Tommies staggered by, with their arms about the shoulders of wounded Huns. Meeting these derelicts who were returning, fresh companies of supporting infantry moved up, undaunted by the spectacle of a fate which they might share. At the sight of us firing they waved their caps shouting, “That’s the stuff to give ‘em. Give ‘em one for us boys. Give ‘em hell.”

At what hour it happened I cannot, say for certain; the mist was clearing, the sun was beginning to be merry and the air was streaky with lavender-tinted smoke, when between the pollarded trees of the high-road batteries of French seventy-fives appeared, gallantly trotting to the carnage. They were the first of the sacrifice batteries moving up. Shells burst to right and to left of them; one fell directly among them. It made no difference; the guns and wagons which were behind, swerving aside and round the struggling mass, passed determinedly on to meet the vaster horror which lay before them. The drivers, sitting stiffly erect as on parade, rose and fell to the movement of the horses. The gunners clung tightly to the jolting vehicles, no tremor of emotion showing on their faces. They were going into open warfare, where men die cleanly among wheat-fields. The sight was superb and filled us with envy.

We had been firing at extreme range for some time; now at last across the wire the order came to stand down. This meant that where our shells had been falling, our infantry were preparing to advance; it also meant that unless we hooked in and followed up, we should be permanently out of action.

We felt disgraced to sit there doing nothing, while crowds of those about to die streamed past us. Yes, streamed past us; they came in droves, these young lads with their keen, bronzed faces. They came singing and twirling their caps on their bayonets, as if fear were an emotion unknown to their hearts. They came brushing through the wheat, following the tracks the tanks had made; they came cheering up the ravines and laughing along the high-road. They came carrying rifles, machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs—all the filthy inventions war has brought to perfection, whereby one man may torture another. They stuck wild-flowers in their tunics, as if off on a holiday. They never once acknowledged by word or gesture that, life might hold for them no more to-morrows. Brave hearts! And always as they passed, seeing us sitting beside our silent guns with our still more silent faces, they would throw back gay taunts about meeting us in Germany. We could not taunt back; we felt ourselves a farce. In our minds we saw the French sacrifice batteries going at the gallop into action, “Halt, action front.” popping off their rounds, hooking in again, and going on and on forever. Why had we been forced to march so far if, now that we were here, they did not intend to use us? They’d shown precious little consideration up to now; and now, when the battle was raging and we were needed and ought not to be spared, they were willing to spare us. Death didn’t in the least matter, if only we could earn our share in the glory.

Our little Major was fuming, mutinous and twitching with impatience, when Heming rode up and saluted, bringing the news that he had the teams, wagons and limbers halted behind the orchard. In a trice the Major was on the ‘phone, pleading for permission to breeze off with us into the blue and take a chance. His request was curtly refused; our division of artillery was to stay where it was and to hold the line in depth, in case the infantry was driven back by the Huns.

Major Charlie Wraith kicked the ‘phone over in his anger. He said a good many things which could quite easily have earned him a court-martial. Hold the line in depth, indeed—an old woman’s precaution! This was a fine time to be playing safe, when our infantry were out there, forging miles ahead without guns to protect them. If they got beaten back, whose fault would that be with no artillery to support them? It was the old story of the staff-people losing the battle for us. If victory were turned into defeat, the way it was at Cambrai, we should have our red-tabs to thank for it. It was about half-an-hour after this disappointment that belated word came through that the enemy’s resistance was stiffening and an attack was pending. One section from each battery had to go forward under two junior officers. Ours was ordered to report to the nth Battalion and to act under the direction of the infantry colonel. Its job was to follow within sight of the attack and to come into action in the open, if necessary, for the purpose of knocking out machine-gun nests or any other obstacles which were holding up the advance.

The Major turned to me. “You will take your section, and Tubby Grain will go with you.” As he walked away his throat thickened with something very like a sob. “By God, I’d revert to a one-pip artist and I’d give the very shirt off my back to see what you lads are going to see this morning.”

III

WE started off at 9 A. m. feeling like a pair of generals, Tubby and I with our brace of eighteen-pounders, our ammunition-wagons and our men. We were setting out practically as free-lances, to discover our own chances of glory. The only senior officer to whom we had to report was the battalion-colonel; there was no one in the rear with whom we had to keep in touch, who would have the power to hold us back. How much fighting we would see before dusk fell depended entirely upon our own initiative. We intended to see a lot.

We had been given maps, which would carry us about fifteen miles into what had been the enemy’s country. We had been given rations to last one meal for the men and horses, the usual twenty-four hours’ allowance for the battery not having arrived when we made our start. The Major promised to follow us up with provisions later, if that were possible; if it were not, we would have to forage for ourselves. In view of the extremely meagre breakfast we had had, this shortness of supplies was the one small cloud on our otherwise bright horizon. The last sight we had as we pulled out on our journey was the tragically covetous faces of the companions from whom we were parting. “Goodbye, old things,” they shouted. “Win a V. C. apiece. If you don’t, you’re not worth your salt.”

The road down to Domart was by this time heavily crowded with transport moving in both directions. The traffic moving forward consisted for the most part of tanks and lorries, carrying up infantry and ammunition. The returning traffic was made up almost solely of prisoners, walking wounded and motor-transport bringing bark our casualties. At first it was necessary to proceed at the walk in a crawling procession, which often halted. As Tubby rode beside me at the head of our column, we planned our individual campaign together. We arranged that I would lead the guns, while he rode ahead with mounted signallers and sent me back my targets. We weren’t going to miss a trick; we were going to take everything. Wherever there was a machine-gun to be knocked out, we’d be there to do it.

Through the stench and reek of battle the sun was shining valiantly. With the melting of the fog, our sense of tension had vanished. We felt tremendously sporting, as though we were riding out to a day of hunting. To keep our thoughts from growing serious, we made up poker hands out of the Army numbers on the ambulances that we passed.

Presently Tubby said, “Did you ever think that the thing might happen to you that has happened to those chaps?”

I followed his glance and saw that he was looking at three of our infantry sprawled out by the roadside; they had evidently all three been caught by the one shell. I nodded. “Oh yes, I’ve thought of that. I expect we all have.”

“But I don’t mean simply thinking of it,” he insisted. “What I mean is have you ever known in your bones that you weren’t going to last—that you were going to look exactly as those chaps look before the war is ended?”

“None of us knows that,” I said shortly, “and to believe that you know it is morbid.”

The worst thing that can happen to a man at the Front is for him to get the premonition that he is going to be killed. Whether it is that this feeling really is a warning or that the imagining that he has been forewarned attracts the thing that kids him, it is impossible to tell; it is, however, a fart that the belief seems to destroy a man’s magic immunity and one usually hears of his death within a short time of his making such a confession.

“I’m not morbid.” Tubby spoke quite wholesomely. “I’m not going queer, the way some chaps do, and I’m not afraid. I’m not asking you to be sorry for me, and I’m not pitying myself. If I were given the choice I’d sooner go west out here, doing something average decent, than drag on into peace times and disappoint myself. And I should disappoint myself; you know that.”

“Don’t, worry yourself, old son,” I replied cheerfully; “you’re not the only one. We shall all disappoint ourselves.”

He nodded. “Yes, every man disappoints himself, but not all along the line, the way I should, because of one wrong act.... I was only a kid when I crossed from Canada and I was horribly lonely and... I don’t suppose this is in the least interesting to you; I’ll put it briefly and then we’ll talk of something else. There was a girl and she seemed kind—not at all the sort of girl with whom I could be happy. I didn’t marry her and since I’ve been out here...”

He didn’t finish his sentence.

“She’s been blackmailing you?” I asked. “A lot of that’s done.”

He stared me honestly between the eyes. “Worse than that. It’s been hell. She writes me there’s another coming.”

Without giving me a chance to reply, he whirled his horse about and went away at a trot to the rear of the column.

Poor little Tubby! What a lot it must have cost him to be always cheerful and smiling. I understood now why he had gambled so heavily and, however much he won, had always remained in debt. What a nightmare his experience of war must have been to him, continually facing up to death with the knowledge that every time he came back alive the bill for the old sin would once more be presented. His case can be multiplied by thousands.

From the start of the war there have been girls who have made a trade of preying on the consciences of men who are risking their all in the trenches. Half the time their trump-card, that there is a child, is no more than a mean lie by means of which to extract money. In the light of this little glimpse of pitiful biography, the world to which we had said good-bye seemed full of treacherous traps to betray our manhood; this thing which we were now doing, despite its terrible cruelty, was clean and straight and redemptive. You rode into action with the sun shining to do one strong thing and, if need be, to die when your courage was at its highest. There wasn’t much to regret about that. It was easy to be good when to be brave was all that was required.

We had come down to Demart, the little village on the edge of No-Man’s Land, from which the offensive had started. The houses were bent and twisted. Their roofs were gone and their walls gaped with ugly holes where shells had torn through them. Of those which still stood, there was scarcely one which had not had a side taken out. Some of them were in flames; others had caved in and sprawled black and smouldering.. The ruins were filled with poisonous odours, gas, blood, decay, the fumes of explosives. Yet one noted the heroism of the little gardens which had somehow contrived to outlive this hell. Trees were dead and stood limply with their arms blown off or hanging laboriously at their sides by a shred; but flowers still smiled and lifted up their faces. All along the streets, outside improvised dressing-stations, our wounded lay on stretchers. There was no moaning—no giving way to pity. However terrible their wounds, they rested there in the sun with the blood drying on their cheeks, perfectly motionless and apparently happy that for a time their fighting days were ended. They were mostly blue and gray-eyed men, simple and childish looking in their helplessness. The stretcher-bearers were Hun prisoners, depressed fellows, who perspired freely beneath their enormous steel helmets and the bulky haversacks which they carried on their shoulders. They plodded to and fro like dumb animals, docile, obedient and eager to ingratiate themselves. One wondered why at dawn we should have attempted to kill each other, when a few hours later we could get along so comfortably.

On the far side of the village we began to climb the heavily entrenched slope, which the enemy had held that morning. Nothing of his trench-system was left. The shell-holes were nearly all fresh and stretched lip to lip as far as Dodo Wood, proving the accuracy and intensity of our barrage. However many men had perished, hardly a trace of them was left; they had been buried by the unseen thing that had murdered them.

At the edge of Dodo Wood a mounted man met us, bringing a message that the battalion we were supporting would probably attack at noon, and appointing as our place of rendezvous a deep ravine several miles ahead. We had lost so much time through halts in the traffic that it was already very nearly eleven. If we were to keep our appointment, our only chance was to strike off to the left across country and risk being still further delayed by wire entanglements and shell-holes. We picked up the track of one of our tanks and followed it round the edge of a high plateau.

It was curious to note how very slightly the plateau was fortified. The enemy must have been hugely confident of his ability to hold that ground. Here and there he had established strong-points, which our tanks had discovered and stamped fiat; but of trenches there were hardly any. One saw extraordinarily few dead and none at all of our own fellows. It was obvious that the enemy had not tried to make a stand; the moment his Front-line had been overwhelmed all the forces which were behind him had broken and fled, allowing our chaps to romp home. It was as unlike a modern battlefield as you could well imagine. The sun shone and larks sang overhead. Through the trampled wheat every now and then a hare scampered; save ourselves nothing human was in sight, living or dead. The armies of pursuers and pursued had slogged their way forward and vanished into the blue distance that lay ahead.

We came down by a gradual decline to the ravine which had been named as our rendezvous. It was an angry looking place, with steep grassy slopes rising up precipitously on either side and no possible means of escape, when once it had been entered, except by the exits at either end. The ravine, like the plateau, was empty and silent—nothing spoke, nothing stirred Unlike the plateau it was not merry with wind and sunshine; it was sinister, shadowy, and held a hint of menace. No one was there to meet us; so while Tubby rode on to find the infantry headquarters, I left the section to rest, while I reconnoitred a village about a quarter of a mile distant for a place at which to water the horses. One had to go cautiously in investigating country so recently captured, as there were quite likely to be pockets of Huns left behind, who had been overlooked in the rapidity of the advance. There was also this additional reason for caution, that in a moving battle it was impossible to tell where our Front-line was at any particular moment. It would be quite easy to go too far and find oneself in the hands of the enemy.

When I entered the village I found that it was as dead as Sodom. It stank like an open sewer. Into its streets mattresses, broken furniture, every kind of refuse, had been cast. It had evidently only recently been vacated by the enemy, for the signs of his going were everywhere. He must have surrendered it without firing a shot, for the only dead were his own soldiers, who had been killed by our bombardment, and one civilian woman with a little fair-haired child in her arms. I tied up my horse and with my groom entered several of the houses, thinking that we might find food to help us eke out our rations. The Hun, with a methodical orderliness which almost called for admiration, had anticipated our necessity and, even in the panic of his departure, had not left so much as a loaf of bread. Whatever he could not carry off he had polluted and rendered useless. The only food we found was in a Quartermaster’s store, where the Quartermaster, a man of immense proportions, sat huddled in a chair with a huge skull-wound in his forehead, contemplating a meal which he would never finish, over which the flies hummed a requiem.

We examined the wells behind the houses; all except three of them had been filled with rubbish. We rode down to the river; here the stench we had noticed on entering grew nauseating. Everything that could render the water undrinkable had been flung into it; dead men, dead horses and indescribable offal. It was horrible, this irreverent use they had made of men who had been their comrades. While we watched the little river which yesterday had been so clean and happy, strangling between its grassy banks, we heard the jingling of swords and the sharp trit-trotting of horsemen approaching. Round a bend in the empty street came the first of our cavalry, their chargers side-stepping and prancing, and their men bending forward with an expression of smiling expectancy. They were the most gallant sight of a gallant, morning, these magnificent animals, dumb and human, who had waited throughout the war for their chance and now, like unleashed hounds, came running hot upon the scent, eager to prove their mettle. The sight of them was inspiring and instinct with intelligence; it lifted the mere toil of killing out of its monotony and into the rarer atmosphere of valour.

They drew up by the river, but only for a moment. The dainty creatures lowered their muzzles to the water, screamed and jumped back, shaking their heads. They looked like high-born ladies, fresh from the toilet, scented and washed and contemptuous of anything that would soil their perfection. There was a look of inexhaustible youth about them, as though they had been pampered with the promise of unescapable immortality.

With a hunting cry and a touch of the spur, they went bounding off through the shining weather, leaving behind a memory which set a standard.

We were to see them not so many hours later, when their glory had been accomplished.

IV

WE watered our horses out of the buckets at the few wells which had not been poisoned. It was a lengthy process, but we were all finished and ready to move off by the time Tubby returned. He brought word that it had been found impossible to pull off the attack at the hour set. The country in front of us was studded with woods and cut up by gorges, which the enemy was holding with machine-guns. Moreover, by retiring the Hun had shortened the distance for his supports to come up and was now numerically much stronger than had at first been imagined. The bulk of our artillery were too far back to be brought up, so the tasks which ought to have been undertaken by the guns were to be carried out by bombing-planes. As soon as these were ready the assault would commence. Meanwhile our instructions were to push on to the head of the ravine and remain there concealed till we were ordered forward.

“It’s going to be a pretty sporting show, if I know anything about it,” Tubby said, when we were once again on the march. “The infantry are fed up to the back-teeth with the way in which the guns have failed to keep in touch with them. And I don’t wonder—you wait till you see the kind of country they’ve got to tackle. It’s no joke being a lone man on two legs, with hundreds of field-guns pointing at you and quite as many machine-guns singing your swan-song in the woods, and all their stuff coming over and none of yours going back It’s a bit stiff to tell chaps to advance against that, as though you expected ‘em to strangle whole batteries with their naked hands. It’s up to us to show them that the eighteen-pounders aren’t quitters. We’ll take as long a chance as any of them. If some of us aren’t pushing daisies by sunset, it won’t be our fault.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watched him. He wasn’t the same man who had made that shabby little confession to me earlier in the morning. He had been weak and conscience-haunted then; now he was eager and heroic. One no longer noticed that he was fat and good-natured and ordinary; a new boldness and dignity transformed him. The test of scarlet was discovering chivalrous values in Tubby of which he himself was only partly aware.

As though he recognised my thoughts, he nodded. “I’m happy. I wouldn’t have missed to-day for worlds.”

To the south of us, like hail-stones pounding on a roof of metal, a heavy bombardment had been steadily growing in violence. It was the French putting on an attack. Probably the seventy-fives we had seen trotting into action that morning were in it. Good luck to them. As suddenly, as it had opened, it died down, and was succeeded by the crackling of rifle-fire. We pictured the true-clad tiger-men of France going over, dropping on one knee to take aim, then up and on again to slake the thirst of their bayonets.

With a kind of glee, Tubby whispered, “Our turn next.”

Up to this point the ravine had been bare of any signs of battle; now dramatically, as we rounded a spur in the hillside, we found ourselves gazing on a scene which made us catch our breath. This must have been one of the enemy’s camps, cleverly selected because of the shelter which the steeply sloping banks afforded. The open space between the banks was so narrow that it looked like an emptied river-bed. In this open space were wagons, arrested in the act of pulling out. The drivers still sat on their seats, as though overcome by sleep, with their heads sagging against their breasts and the reins held limply in their hands. The teams still hooked to the vehicles, had crumpled forward in the traces. The doors of all the little wooden shacks along the side of the ravine were wide open. Between them and the wagons men lay sprawled upon the turf, as though caught midway in the act of running. The only living things which stirred, were wounded horses of appalling leanness, which were feebly grazing and on seeing us, tottered a few steps, and then waited, as if asking us to come to their help.

Instinctively, without an order being given, the entire column behind us halted. Death is horrible enough when it looks like death; but when it mimics life, it applauds its own terror. At first we had the feeling that we had stumbled on a sleepy hollow; were we to make a noise, all these sleeping forms would waken and rise from the ground.

How had the tragedy happened? Had our guns, after having allowed them to believe themselves secure, deluged then! with shells when the dawn was breaking? Or had our bombing-planes discovered them at the moment when they were escaping? However they had died, it was easy to reconstruct the scene’s mercilessness and agony. In contemplating it, we felt a momentary shame. The cowardice of war is forever treading hard on the heels of its valour. These men had had no chance to defend themselves. They had not seen the men by whom they were murdered. They had been roused from sleep by a commotion, to find death raining on them from the air.

As we renewed our advance, we discovered that not all of the men were dead. Some looked up with dimming eyes as we passed. They neither approved nor condemned us. They were beyond all that. We had neither the time nor the materials to help them. The shell-dressing, which we each carried, we might need for ourselves before the day was out. We had not dared to fill our water-bottles at the wells in the village; so our supplies were only what we had brought with us, and they were fast getting exhausted.

When we came to the head of the ravine, we were glad that we had not given water to the enemy, for there we found our own wounded scattered through the grass. They were too far forward for the stretcher-bearers to reach them for many hours yet. There was no one with the means or time to spend upon them; we were all fighting-men, under orders to press on at any moment. Nevertheless our gunners slipped down from the limbers and went among them, pouring the last of their water between their parching lips. At the sight of their suffering an illogical anger seized us against the brutes who had done this to men who were ours. We did not reason that we also were trying to wound and kill; we only felt a blazing indignation that those boys, who had passed through our guns cheering so gallantly in the early morning, should lie so silent now. After this, when an enemy asked for water, we turned from him in contempt; whatever drops we had to spare were for our friends. Mounted and eager to go forward, we sat pitilessly among the dying enemy.

We were there not to show mercy, but to avenge.

The sun grew dark while we waited; then rapidly the rain descended. We caught it in our cupped hands and on our tongues as it dripped from the edge of our steel helmets. The wounded in the grass lay back with their blackened lips wide apart, sucking in the moisture which the heavens, indifferently impartial, allowed to fall on both enemies and friends.

Tubby and his signallers had again gone forward to make connections with the infantry. I had arranged with him that we would follow in close support the moment he sent back word that the advance had commenced. By the number of planes that were in the air we knew that, the moment was at hand.

I glanced back at my men, trying to estimate how they had been affected by the scenes which they had already witnessed. In trench-warfare the gunners and drivers rarely see a battlefield until long after the wounded have been collected and carried back They never see their own infantry in the act of attacking, and they never see the bursting of their own shells. In a few minutes all these new experiences were to be theirs. There were no signs of trepidation on their faces—only an expression of stern and happy elation.——On the top of the bank one of Tubby’s mounted signallers appeared, waving his flag. I gave the order to “Walk, March,” then, to trot, and we were off.

For the first half mile we could see nothing very unusual. In front of us and on every side, climbing a gentle slope to the sky-line, was a vast wheatfield scarcely trampled. Here and there we saw a fallen man, who seemed only to be taking his rest. As far as evidences of battle were concerned, we might have been out on manoeuvres. As we neared the sky-line, I halted the guns and rode forward with my signallers. Over the crest a very different sight presented itself. The wheatfield ended and a splendid stretch of country, green and cool, resembling a parkland, commenced. Floating like islands in the greenness were dense clumps of trees. On the farthest edge of the plain were deep ravines, church spires and the roofs of houses. The atmosphere and barriers of woods, above which were washed clean by rain and made golden by the afternoon sunshine, was so clear that one’s eye-sight carried for miles and picked out each isolated movement. In the foreground our infantry wandered in apparently leisurely fashion, going forward in little groups of from five to ten. Every now and then a shell would burst near them or the turf would fly up in spurts of dust where a machine-gun had been brought to bear on them. Then they would scatter, throwing themselves flat. Presently some of them would rise and wander on again; those who did not rise would roll over once or twice, as a man does when he settles himself in bed, and then, having found his comfort, lies motionless. The thing was so quickly done that, for the beholder, it was robbed of its terror.

In front of the infantry the cavalry were in action. They pricked in and out the clumps of trees, not galloping or even trotting, but unhurriedly, as if out for an afternoon’s pleasure. The sun shone on their drawn blades and, over the green distance, at intervals their trumpets sounded.

Ahead of the cavalry the tanks nosed round the edges of the woods, dragging their bellies along the ground like satiated dragons. Now and then they spat fire and were lost to sight in undergrowth and deep shadows: usually when they re-appeared, there were little dots of smoke-gray pigmies fleeing calamitously before them. Along the ridge on the far horizon a road ran, which was black with escaping ants. Out of the ravines and gorges, leading up to the read, more panic-stricken ants swarmed tumultuously. Above them, darting and swooping like swallows after gnats, flew our bombing-planes and scouts It was all very sylvan and picturesque—more like a pageant which had been rehearsed and staged than the most dramatic happening in a war which had excelled all other wars in drama.

Half a mile away a flag began to wave: I read the signal and turned back to lead my guns into action. As we came out of the wheatfield at the gallop a general tried to stop us, shouting questions as to where we were going. We simply pointed ahead and went by him without slackening our pace. We downed trail behind a hedge and commenced firing over open sights; our target was the enemy transport retreating along the ridge. As our shrapnel began to burst in little puffs of smoke above the heads of an enemy already mad with terror, the wildest confusion resulted. Lorries were ditched. Batteries became entangled. Horses stampeded through the crowds of flying men, knocking them down and grinding their bodies beneath the wheels of the vehicles.

The enthusiasm of our gunners rose to fever-pitch when for the first time they could see the havoc which their shells were working. They became careless of their own safety and indifferent to death, if only we could push the Boche further back and make the day completely victorious. The same self-forgetfulness was seen on every hand. Out there in that green picture-world, the cavalry were pushing impetuously far ahead. They were so impatient to get forward that, when they were held up by machine-gun nests, they would not wait for the other arms to come up, but were charging the storm of lead with their naked steel and riding to almost certain annihilation. V. C.s were being won under our eyes by men whose heroism would not even be recorded. And no one cared—no one coveted glory for himself. We were fanatics, lifted far above self-seeking. It was the game that counted. Dust we were and to dust we would return; but the triumph of this day would live forever.

Distracting us from the white intensity of our effort we heard the droning of an engine and saw a shadow settling down; above our heads an aeroplane was hovering so low that we could see the moving lips of the pilot. A message, attached to yellow streamers, came drifting down. When the pilot was sure that we had received it, he again flew off up front. The message gave us the map-location of a machine-gun in action, which we were asked to do our best to knock out. Soon Tubby was again seen frantically signalling. He was telling us that the enemy, while undoubtedly in full retreat, was leaving behind him picked suicide-troops to hold machine-gun nests and strong-points. These people were lying doggo till our tanks had gone past them and were then resurrecting themselves and mowing down our men. We limbered up and once more went forward, the signallers and myself going in advance, the guns and ammunition-wagons strung out at safe intervals behind us.

We came across the parkland to a deep cutting, which was the entrance to a gorge. There was nothing to warn one that the cutting was there until the moment before he stood gazing down into it. The hollow between the two banks was full of dead cavalry. Some of the horses were sitting up on their haunches like dogs, swaying their heads slowly from side to side. One by one they would struggle to rise, only to sink back in despair. The riders lay beside their mounts, with their sword-arms flung wide and the sunlight flickering along their blades. From the semi-circle in which they were spread out, one judged that they had made their charge fan-wise, concentrating as they neared the object of their attack. One man out of so many had reached his objective; he had ridden down the Hun machine-gunner, burying the gun beneath the body of his horse and sabring the gunner as he fell.

And these were the magnificent exponents of glory whom I had seen in their pride that morning, prancing through the polluted village so capriciously that their feet seemed to spurn the ground. They had done their bit and by their sacrifice had brought us one step nearer to victory. It was heroic and magnanimous; but, when I remembered the beauty of their vigour as they bounded to the music of their hunting-calls, I could not believe that any gain was worth their anguish. The horrible unfairness of war was all that I could visualize?—that one man behind a machine-gun should be able to transmute so much loveliness into corruption in a handful of seconds. And then came another thought—the desire for revenge.

There was the sound of heavy firing further up the gorge. Tubby came riding back; his right arm was hanging loosely and a bullet had seared his forehead. His face was tense.. The little beast he rode was flecked with blood and wildly excited. He broke into a broad grin at catching sight of me. “By the Lord Harry, we’ve got our chance,” he panted. “My arm! No, it’s nothing—broken I guess.... There’s a place up here just behind a bend; If we can sneak a gun in quickly, we can blow the stuffing out of them. We’ll be on to them before they know we’re there. It’s a regular nest, four or five of ‘em spurting away like blazes. They’ve nailed our chaps so that they can’t budge. But if we look lively, it’s a cinch; we’ve got them cold.”

Following him cautiously, we came to the bend he had mentioned Twenty yards short, we unhooked and ran the gun up by hand. Had we driven straight on to the position, the heads of the horses would have shown up and we should have been wiped out before we had fired our first round. As it was there was a bunch of scrub, just tall enough to hide us. Peering through the branches, we could see about five hundred yards distant a barricade constructed of timbers and sandbags, from which came vicious sprays of death. Repeated endeavors had to be made to rush it. In front and all around lay our fallen infantry, their rifles with fixed bayonets tossed aside and their fingers dug into the turf. The postures in which they had collapsed were violently grotesque. There was forlornness, but little dignity about their twisted attitudes.

Behind the sandbags there was a sense of watching eyes; but only the sense—one saw no movement. The men who kept guard there were brave. They hadn’t a chance in the world. They must have known that their fate was sealed from the first. They were selling their lives dearly that their comrades, fleeing behind them, might gain time. Those comrades would never know how they had died—would never be able to thank them. There would be no Iron Crosses co reward their valour—they would be lucky if they were awarded the decency of a grave. We acknowledged their courage, and we hated them.

Our first shot went plus, our second minus, our third scored a direct hit on the barricade. As the sandbags crumbled and the gray uniforms became plain, our infantry leapt from their places of hiding, charging up the gorge with their cold bayonets. We saw hands thrust up in an appeal for mercy, then nothing but khaki, stabbing and cheeking wildly. When we had hooked in and rode by five minutes later, four men in smoke-gray lay watching the sky with unblinking eyes. They were decent looking men, with flaxen hair and high complexions. They were perfectly ordinary individuals, with nothing either noticeably noble or brutal in their appearance. Had we encountered them as waiters in a London or New York restaurant, they would probably have proved entirely in keeping with their situation. By the accident of war they had been called upon to perform a deed quite as desperate as that of the Roman Horatius, who kept the bridge against unnumbered foes. The gorge was one of the keys to the great plain across which the Huns were retiring. These four men, single-handed, with no hope of saving their own lives, had held up our advance for half an hour against repeated infantry and cavalry charges, accounting for fully twenty times their own number in casualties. It was an act of superb sacrifice, which could only have been inspired by the highest sense of duty and patriotism. Had we met them in fable, we should have done them homage; meeting them where we did, we clubbed them like rats escaping from a cage. Even now that they were dead we detested them.

At the top of the gorge we struck a level stretch of country, which appeared to be surrounded by a solid belt of forest; but from the map we learnt that the forest was actually made up of separate woods between which passed channels of sward. Hidden in these separate woods were towns and villages, the spires of whose churches peeped above the trees and speared the horizon. Across the plain ran a net-work of white roads, some of which were mere tracks trampled out of the chalk by military traffic, others of which dated back to the days before the coming of the Germans. The main road was the one which we had shelled from our first position. It was littered with men, horses, broken limbers, guns and abandoned transport. A hospital-tent stood at a road-juncture with the Red Cross flag still flying. Whatever it had been used for, it had been stripped naked—not a cot or a bandage had been left. We cast our eyes across the green level for miles; there were all the signs of recent frenzy, but nothing stirred. It was uncanny, this sudden disappearance of men and armaments. There was fighting behind us—we could hear that. There was fighting to the right and left; but before us only the silence. We began to suspect that we had pressed on too hurriedly and were in front of our own attack. This suspicion was strengthened when one of our own batteries, far in the rear, opened fire on us, mistaking us for the enemy. To avoid their shells, we clapped spurs to our horses and went forward for yet another mile at the gallop. Then we halted behind a cutting to consider matters.

Our position was trying. We were utterly exhausted and only upheld by the excitement. We had food for neither horses nor men. The water in the men’s bottles had been expended on the wounded: the horses had had nothing to drink since noon. There was very little chance of the Major’s keeping his promise and sending us up our rations; the battery must have moved by now and neither they nor we had any knowledge as to each other’s whereabouts. To add to our complications Tubby’s arm proved to have been badly smashed by a machine-gun bullet and, though he would not own it, he was suffering intensely. The light was beginning to fail and within two hours darkness would have settled. It was absolutely essential that we should find food and water, and discover what was the military situation. If we were actually in front of our attack, then it was evident that our people-had lost touch with the enemy; in which case, under the cover of night, the enemy was likely to return. If he did, we and our outfit would be killed or captured.

Tubby refused to stay with the guns and rest, so we started out in separate directions to reconnoitre. Tubby went mounted on account of his arm being in a sling; I went on foot, since thus I should afford a smaller target. Throughout the day, as our difficulties and exhaustion had increased, he had grown gayer and more reckless. He had treated his broken arm as nothing; in the presence of his gallant high spirits none of us had dared to recognise hardship. As he rode away he flung back his old jest, “How’s your father?” Several of the men, not to be outdone in this game of brave pretence, shouted after him, “He’s all right, sir. Till the war ends he’s got his baggy pants on.”

My direction took me over to a long line of woods on the right, from which came the spiteful sound of rifles firing in volleys. The sun had begun to set; as I glanced across the plain I could see Tubby, trotting far out into a sea of shadows and greenness. I felt misgivings for his safety; we had no information as to what lay ahead. Presently I met an infantryman with a bandaged forehead, who confirmed my doubts. He told me that he and fourteen others had pressed on, keeping the enemy in sight and supposing that the rest of the advance was following. The enemy had made a stand; it was then they had discovered that they were out of touch and unsupported. “My mates,” he said, “I don’t know whether they’re alive or dead. They were holding out when I left; they sent me back for help. Fritzie was getting ready to counter-attack. He may be coming any moment.” He looked back apprehensively and, without waiting to say more, staggered on. I reached and entered my wood.

Bullets were tearing through the leaves and branches, going by with the hiss of serpents. Beneath the shadow of the trees I found stables and a camp; but the Huns, before they had cleared out, had loaded up every particle of food and forage. Nothing but the bare buildings were left. Following a track, I came to water-troughs, but it would be impossible to lead our horses down to them while the rifle-fire lasted. On the farther edge of the wood I came across our infantry.

They were lying flat on their stomachs and crawling from point to point on their hands and knees, sniping at the enemy. They were very few in numbers, over fifty per cent of their force having fallen during the day. By their vigilance and the rapidity of their fire they were trying to create the impression that they were stronger than they were. I found their colonel. He was not certain, but believed they were the Front-line. The tanks and the cavalry had disappeared entirely. They might be still pursuing; they might have been captured; they all might have become casualties. At any rate, the line of these woods was the front that he intended to maintain throughout the night; so I arranged to run a telephone wire up to him and to stand to throughout the hours of darkness in case of a surprise attack. One definite piece of information I gleaned from him—that his left flank was “up in the air.” Any time that the enemy discovered the fact, he could get round behind this handful of men; in the direction which Tubby had taken there was nothing between himself and the enemy.

Hurrying back through the wood I found, when I came out on the farther side, that my section had followed me. While I had been gone, the sergeants had also learnt that nothing stood between themselves and the Hun. When I asked them whether they had news of Mr. Grain they shook their heads; the last they had seen of him was an insignificant dot dwindling into the distant landscape. They had left two mounted men in the cutting to guide him on to us if he returned.

The horses were “all in” by this time from lack of water, so there was nothing for it but for some of us to take a chance and go down to the trough with buckets. I lost two of my best drivers there.

We had one piece of luck to console us. In my absence the men had run across some of our fallen cavalry and had collected sufficient oats from their feed-bags to go the rounds and sufficient rations from the haversacks of the dead to last the men.

Just as we had finished watering and feeding, we saw a tank lumbering homewards round the point of the wood through the dusk. I galloped out to meet it. The officer in charge halted and put his head out on seeing me approaching.

“Hulloa, old bean,” he laughed, “what are you doing up here all on your wild lone? You know there’s nobody in front.”

I explained matters and asked if he had seen anyone like Tubby.

“A little fat chap with his arm in a sling?” he asked. “Yes, I saw him. I shouted to him and tried to stop him, but all he did was to ask me a silly question about my father. I don’t think he was all there. He rode on towards the village from which I was escaping. It was empty when first I entered, so I waddled about for half an hour mucking things up. By that time the Huns had found out that we weren’t following and they were coming back. So I skedaddled. If I were you I wouldn’t go and look for your friend—Hulloa, what’s that? You’d better duck!”

That was a burst of bullets, coming from a clump of trees to the left. The chap was right; the enemy was sneaking back.

I wheeled the guns about and went off at the trot to a little copse in which I had arranged with the infantry colonel to take up my position for the night. It was pitchy black when we arrived; the place stank of blood. It was already occupied by sleeping men; they did not speak to us, but we tripped over them in the darkness and felt them beside us when we lay down.

Having unlimbered our guns and got them on for line, we ran a wire up front to the colonel so as to keep in touch and open fire on the second if required. We divided our men into watches; they were wearied out, for it was many nights since they had slept. They lay down with all their equipment on, so as to lose no time in the event of an alarm. The girths of the saddles were loosened, but none of the harness was removed from the horses’ backs. If the enemy broke through, the first news we were likely to get would be when they were upon us. Our lives and those of the infantry might depend upon our promptitude of action.

It was just before dawn that Tubby’s horse rejoined us riderless. There was blood on the saddle and the reins were broken as though the little beast had wrenched itself free by jumping back from the thing to which it had been tied. It was a broncho trick it had, which was well known to all the battery. When in our lines it was never fastened, but allowed to stand. The broken lines proved that it had been in strangers’ hands; Tubby would never have tied it. When the men asked it what had happened to its master, it looked at them with quivering nostrils and frightened eyes and then, turning its intelligent head, gazed back ever the way that it had come.

With the first of the daylight we discovered why it was that the men with whom we had shared the wood had been so very silent—why they had not spoken when we had tripped over them, or been disturbed when we had lain down beside them.

Sticking out of the pocket of one of them was a London daily of fairly recent date. I picked it up in mere curiosity and glanced through its pages. Then suddenly, for fear anyone should want to borrow it, I hid it; away in my tunic. It contained an extraordinary story, affecting the honour of a man I loved well—an account of the police-court proceedings in the case of Mrs. Percy Dragott.

An odd way to get news of the secrets of a pal, with whom you eat and risk your life daily—by rifling the pocket of a stranger, whom you had thought to be sleeping and had discovered to be dead!

V

THE rest of the battery caught us up this morning in our copse which we tenant with the dead. We are resting to-day, holding the line in depth, while the troops who were behind us yesterday, have passed through us and beyond. Far out in the blue we can catch the rapid thud of their drum-fire. With them it is, as it was with us yesterday, thirst, heroism, cruelty, magnanimity mingling in an ecstatic trance, while the August woods drip scarlet with men’s triumphant carelessness of dying. From here the orchestra of murder has passed, leaving as record of its passage the brief putrescence of the earthly part of sacrifice guarded by the shadowy sunlit silence.

Is it worth it? What does it all mean, this furious display of homicidal passion? It’s easy for the armchair crusaders who sit at home to prate about the glory of war. One glimpse at the landscape on which I gaze would bruise their lips with reality and wash the mountebank valour with tears from their eyes. We who have seen war for what it is, will always speak of it as the filthiest of jobs, fit only for human orang-outangs or maniacs. A woman risks her life that a man may be born. It takes twenty-five long years of love to build his mind and spirit into manliness. What glory can there be in tearing the carefully planned strength of nations barbarously limb from limb in a second? This war may have been unavoidable, but our political and journalistic prophets have no right to dress it up to appear what it is not—war is an unclean orgy of jungle-cannibals revelling in the obscenity of entrails and blood. Half the time it is not even brave; there is nothing brave in smothering a front-line with shells which are fired from miles behind the danger; there is nothing brave in overwhelming a demoralized enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

Yesterday we slaughtered men like vermin and with as little thought. We were urged on by an impelling rage, which made us almost divine in our destroying eloquence. What we did was right; the feeling I have to-day is only the reaction of disgust. That I should be able to feel disgust and yet go on fighting, proves more than anything else the righteousness of our cause.

We shall win the war for freedom, but at what, a cost! If the British, who have already perished, were to march twenty abreast from sunrise to sunset, it would take them ten days to pass a given point. It would take the French eleven days, the Russians five weeks, the whole of the Allied dead two and a half months, and the skeletons of the fallen enemy six weeks more. If all the armies of men of whatever nations who have died fighting since August, 1914, were to march in review, twenty abreast, before the grand-stand of the living, it would take them four months to pass. This would not include the old men, women and children who have perished from disease and privation, from military brutalities, from the sinking of ships and the haphazard cruelties of shell-fire and bombs. Yet despite the tremendous thought of such a procession, the actual pathos of one man smashed in battle is more appalling.

Comparatively few people have seen that sight. If they had, the war would end tomorrow. The generals who plan our battles rarely see it; they are too far back. The war-correspondents who describe our battles do not see it; they collect their information second-hand at canteens, dressing-stations and Army Headquarters. Our civilians only read the correspondents’ descriptions. So it goes—the mere hands through which the news passes and the further back it travels, the more the vileness of the happening becomes misted over with lies and transmuted into something magnificent. Each informant, in the proportion that he is removed from the terror, is the more anxious to pose as an heroic eye-witness. The only eye-witnesses are the men who do the dying, and they do not feel themselves to be heroes. They are under fire on account of the accidents of medical fitness, youth and a properly developed sense of duty. They are people of inferior rank and of no social or military consequence. They are not literary, oratorical, articulate. Because they die, the world never learns what war is like. Even though they bear charmed lives and survive, they are muzzled by Army orders and the vigilance of the censor. Not a whimper of the truth escapes. In hospital or on leave they are eager to forget; moreover, they quickly learn that the Sir Galahad misconceptions of civilians make their facts sound like the whimperings of cowards. So they strike the attitude which is required of them, pretending that there’s a sporting fascination about blowing and being blown into atoms.

I glance up from my writing. Wherever my eyes wander they dwell on some shocking detail of defiled beauty or tattered flesh. From the shadow of trees and through parted grass, faces which yesterday were vivacious with health, stare vacantly at me growing green and yellow. They are more still than the sleepers of a Rip Van Winkle land. Their shoulders are bunched, their knees drawn up, their hands clenched. Beside them little piles of paper flutter or dance away like white butterflies drifted through the sunshine. The wind stoops over them like an invisible rag-picker, curiously fingering the scattered pages.

Early this morning some of the troops who passed through us to the fight, ransacked the pockets of their fallen comrades. The objects of their search were mainly matches and cigarettes, but in some cases they exchanged boots and puttees. I suppose they argued that you cannot rob a man who is dead; he has no further use for his possessions. Sooner or later some one is bound to rob him; that being the case, there is no one who can do it with less offence than men who are shortly to die themselves. Nevertheless it’s a strange and brutal logic, for these very men may themselves be equally stark and incapable of resentment by sundown. Moreover, they showed an unnecessary callousness in their borrowing, when they scattered letters from sweethearts, wives and mothers to the four winds of heaven. In peace-times we keep the memory of our friends alive with flowers; in war, the moment the breath has left a comrade’s body he ceases to be human and becomes the victim of disrespect.

What a chamber of horrors one day’s fighting has made of these woods! No human ingenuity can compete with the diabolical inventiveness of death. No two postures are alike in this array of corpses; each one strikes a different note of agony. Why should we have come so far, from Canada, Australia and the wideness of the world, to create this French landscape into such a slaughter-house? Why above all things, should we still be willing to hand over our bodies to add one touch more to its martyred picturesqueness? We must be drunk with visions so to carve out of living flesh the image of our despotic idealism. Saints or devils, whichever we are, war has made us more than men.

My mind is full of thoughts of Tubby. He has not returned. There is no news of him. He will not return now. He may be a prisoner. He may be lying up forward wounded. He may be sprawled on the ground, like one of these pitiful waxworks by which I am surrounded. Probably we shall never know his fate. Why did he come to the war? What hidden spark of divinity kindled his spirit to a flame? He never let us inspect anything but the earthy side of his nature. His faults, had he lived to be middle-aged, would probably have hardened into vices. He was typical of us—an ordinary, pleasant chap, a trifle specked with blackguardism, impatient of ideals and yet following in their tracks. His worst weakness was his unbalanced attitude towards women; his kindest quality that he was invariably good-tempered and generous. If he realised the possession of a soul, he never talked about it. His last recorded utterance, according to the tank-officer, was an undignified catch-phrase of the streets, “How’s your father?” Yet, incredible, lovable man, he rode out wounded to die for others as simply as if he had hailed from Nazareth.

We know nothing of each other, we men who eat and sleep, and suffer, and die together. How little we know was illustrated for me by what I learnt from that newspaper, picked out of a dead man’s pocket this morning.

The first I heard of a woman in Heming’s life was that day on the Somme when, thinking he was about to die, he asked me to write to Mrs. Percy Dragott. From time to time after that I saw her portrait in the English illustrated weeklies and gathered that she was playing with war work, taking part in charitable theatrical performances, bazaars for the mutilated, garden-parties for the blinded, etc.,—having a thoroughly enjoyable time and acquiring a reputation for patriotic fervour. The next occasion when her name cropped up was when the Major read aloud to Heming the unconcluded account of a tragedy. In the paper which I found this morning, I read that she was on trial for murder.

Mrs. Percy Dragott, it seemed, had arrived in London with no credentials several years before the outbreak of war, bringing with her an elderly husband, to whom she had been recently married, who had just retired from an appointment in the Indian Civil Service. At first by her charity, then by her beauty and finally by her brilliancy she had won for herself a place in London society. At the end of two years her husband, having served his purpose, had died, leaving her free to take full advantage of her popularity. She was emphatically a man’s woman and had found a ready welcome wherever brains were an asset, being particularly sought after by men in public life. Her little house in Mayfair, run with extravagant taste, though no one troubled to enquire where the money came from, had become a kind of salon. The names of the men to whom she had been rumoured to be about to become engaged would take two hands to reckon; they included artists, journalists, soldiers and at least one statesman. On looking back, a fact was brought to light which had escaped notice, namely that over all the men with whom she had been associated she seemed to have spread a blight—in one way or another, after dropping her acquaintance, they had each one failed. Yet until the murder had occurred, no breath of scandal had touched her. Even now the crime would never have been discovered had not the murdered man proved to be a British secret service agent.

Colonel Barton, as he had called himself, had been introduced to her as a somewhat romantic figure. The account he had given of himself was that he had been captured at Gallipoli and had made a sensational escape from a Turkish prison-camp. For the first time she, who had earned for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London, seems to have been fired with passion. Whether she actually fell in love or had only feigned to do so because she scented danger, it was impossible to say. The man’s case was plain; he had pretended to be infatuated with her in order that he might trap her. He had evidently learnt all that he wanted to know and was on the point of exposing her to the authorities, when he was found dead in his flat.

At first his death was taken to be an accident. It seemed that he had fainted and in falling had caught himself a heavy blow on the left temple. But when the rooms were searched, it was found that they had been already ransacked. Nothing that could be traced had been removed, but the thief had been identified as a woman by an initialed handkerchief, which she had left behind her. Moreover she had failed to discover all the papers which condemned her; lying full in sight on the desk was an unsealed, unaddressed envelope, containing the complete history which would have led to her arrest. The contention of the police was that Barton had been done to death by the popular and charitable society beauty.

Upon investigation she was proved to be a British subject in the Hun employ. Her motives for having turned traitor and spy were said to have been inspired by her resentment at the injustice of her birth; she was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman of title, had been well-educated, kept always abroad in the care of strangers and had been given to understand through her father’s lawyers that the moment she tried to hold direct communication with her father’s family her income would end. How much of this Dragott knew when he married her was not certain. He was a kindly, honourable, wellborn man and had arrived at an age when men attain a wise leniency of view towards social accidents. He became extremely fond of her and brought her back to England. She saw her native country for the first time in his company, and she saw it as a spy in the pay of Germany. After her husband’s death, it was German money which had maintained the elegant extravagance of the little house in Mayfair.

Up to this point her story called more for sympathy than condemnation. If she, an Englishwoman, was England’s enemy, it was the unkindness of English laws that had made her that. The loneliness and family ostracism of her girlhood, when combined with her more than ordinary beauty of body and brilliancy of mind, had warped her nature into a bitter desire to be revenged. How much her husband or any of her subsequent suitors had guessed of her real occupation it was difficult to establish; but there was evidence which indicated that more than one of them had suspected. She herself had made the statement that long before her husband’s death she had tried to break off her relations with Berlin, but had been compelled to continue them under threats. Her war-philanthropies had not been entirely camouflage; in particular a hospital, which she had established in France, had been the attempt of an unquiet conscience to make atonement. But she had found it impossible to disentangle herself from the web of intrigue in which she was caught. Whatever she did, whether her intentions were good or bad, was converted into a means of gathering information for the enemy. She emphatically denied that she had had any accomplices; none of the men who had been in love with her had wilfully betrayed their official secrets. It was because she had not wished to involve others in her own tragedy that she had persistently refused all offers of marriage, earning for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London. Above all things she denied that she had had anything to do with Barton’s death.

From the tone of the press it was evident that, in spite of the violent hatreds of war-times, a good deal of popular sympathy was felt for her. This was no doubt partly accounted for by her reckless endeavours to save her friends at the expense of incriminating herself still further. All the indiscreet conversations and confidences which had taken place across her table were being remembered and brought into the evidence. Some of the biggest and most trusted men in public life would shortly find themselves in the witness-box. Among the small fry Heming was mentioned as one of her admirers.

I’m wondering about Heming and trying to piece the little I know of his relations with her together. I’m sure he was in love with her to the point of marrying her; I believe she was in love with him to the point of confessing why she could not consent. His proposal must have taken place between the time when he was so severely wounded at Vimy and his unexpected return to the Front this Spring. It’s since his return that he has been so changed, so that we’ve all felt in our bones that he had come back for only one reason—to die. Poor Heming, all this summer while he’s been waiting for a soldier’s death to solve life’s complications, he must have been struggling between his instinct to protect this woman and his duty to betray her. I understand now his tenderness to Suzette and her child, who is also illegitimate.

If Heming does not know this latest development, it must be kept from him. There’ll be little chance of his seeing papers so long as the offensive lasts, with its stealth and night-marches. When whatever is left of the battery marches out to rest, he may be lying quietly, like Tubby, in some deserted wood beyond all caring. Tubby’s horrid little worry was quickly forgotten—in the flash of a second.

Poor Tubby, with his cheerful grin and his, “How’s your father?”

I must speak to the Major about Heming and get him to help me to keep him in ignorance.

Just as I had finished writing this sentence I looked up to see Suzette and Heming disappearing into the wood where our horse-lines are hidden. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that she’s infatuated with him; wherever he goes, though her feet stay still, her eyes and her heart follow. She’s still a woman in her every movement, despite her Tommy’s uniform. And Heming, what are his feelings? Is he using her as a means to drug memory? Or does she restore to him a chivalrous belief that he was in danger of losing? He never commits himself and rarely speaks to her except to give orders. Queer motives urge men to become heroes. What stories we should have if every man told honestly the reasons that sent him here! One has committed a sin; another has entrusted his heart to the wrong woman. They ride out into the hell of Judgment Day laughing, and perish insolently, that in their last moments they may appear again magnificent to themselves.

VI

IT’. midnight. We’re still in the copse. We believe we are to take part in a new attack tomorrow, but have received no orders as yet.

I am squatting on the ground beneath a low tent made of Hun great-coats and sacking pinned together. On one side of me, more than half filling the tiny space, the Major lies asleep; on the other is a shaded candle and the telephone which keeps us in touch with brigade. Every quarter of an hour the brigade-signallers buzz me to make sure that the line is holding up. Every now and then I draw the flimsy patch-work of the roof nearer together lest any light should be escaping. Ever since darkness settled, the Hun planes have been bombing our back areas, getting after our horse-lines, ammunition dumps and infantry concentrations. When one of them has scored a direct hit on a dump, all the country within the radius of half a mile is flooded with a pulsating wave of red. While it lasts, no movement remains hidden from the watchers in the sky; a man stands out as distinctly as a tower. In the welter of blackness the glow of a cigarette, a match struck however furtively, the leakage of light from a bivouac, show up as significantly as beacon-fires.

The human-eagles got after us in fine style two hours ago, coming so close that we had to ride our horses bare-back into the night, pursued from the air not only by bombs but also by machine-guns.

Now all our men who are not on duty are trying to snatch what rest they can before another disturbance starts. There always is another, and a next and a next. The Hun airmen, having exhausted their supply of bombs, have flown back to replenish. They’re due to return almost any minute and will do their best again to pick up our scent. If we don’t attack to-morrow, we can’t stay here, now that we have been spotted.

I’m appallingly sleepy and am scribbling chiefly in an effort to keep my eyes from closing. They feel as if they had been filled with dust; I have to wedge my lids up with my fingers to prevent them from falling. I can well understand how sentries drop off at their posts, despite the knowledge that they are committing a shooting offence. It’s strange to reflect that in civil life no money could have persuaded us to put up with one tithe of our discomforts, let alone with our dangers super-added. If we get back to a world of sheeted beds, all former necessities will seem forever luxuries.

Earlier in the evening I told the Major about Heming. He agreed with me that we must do our best to prevent him from learning about Mrs. Dragott. The Major was quite frank in the expression of his opinion. “There are some kinds of messes you ran live down,” he said; “the results of them may make you even stronger to face life. My kind of mess is a case in point. I go home on leave, expecting to marry my girl, and find that not only has she jilted me, but that she has the cheek to compel me to save her face by attending her wedding to another chap. Of course I had a lucky escape; if that was the sort she was, life with her would have been unbearable. At the same time the experience has crippled my belief in myself and, up to a point, my faith in women generally. I’m not particular whether I come out of the war—that’s the way I feel at present. But on one thing I am determined: I’ll prove to her before I die that she backed the wrong horse and was a rotten bad guesser. I’ll take every chance and try to win every decoration. When the war ends, if I’m still above ground, I’ll succeed all I can and collar a girl a thousand times more kind than she ever dreamt of being. So I suppose instead of smashing me, she’s really helped to make me. Now with Heming it’s quite different. He may not know it, but he’s still in love with his woman. By her method of refusing him, she made herself romantic to him. She pushed him from her when she confessed she was a spy; but at the same time she roused his pity and drew him to her. By no stretch of imagination can he ever win her, neither can he ever quite lose her. He’ll be lucky if he isn’t recalled to bear witness against her; if he is, he will smudge his own honour. And as for her, if she isn’t shot, she’ll certainly get penal servitude. The most fortunate thing that could happen to him is that he should fall in action. If we can help it, he must never hear of this tragedy. We’ve a month of hard fighting ahead of us. Many of us will go west before the days grow much shorter. I hope for his sake he’s one of them. I shan’t try to prevent his going.”

“And what about Suzette?” I asked.

He returned my question, “Well, and what about her?”

“We’ve no right to have her with us,” I said. “She might get killed.”

“And if she does,” the Major took me up, “that wouldn’t be the worst calamity that could befall her. Death’s not the final tragedy we used to think it; very often it’s the new start. Her life was probably gray enough before we found her—a peasant girl, who had been used by men and would probably be used by men to the end of the chapter. What kind of a career has she ahead of her if we throw her down now? There’s nothing but devastated country behind us. If I told her tomorrow that she’d got to buzz off, where would she go or who would care what happened? No, she’s going to stay with us; and if she comes through it all, we’ll make ourselves responsible for her and take her back with us to Canada. I tell you what it is, the more I see of that girl, the more grateful I am that she’s with us. She’s restored my ideal of women.——You think I’m talking like an ass, no doubt; but from Heming down, there’s not an unmarried man in the battery who’s not more or less in love with her. No, my boy, until we’ve been found out and have received direct orders to get rid of her, Suzette stops.”

“And Bully Beef?” I asked.

“And Bully Beef,” he answered. “He can always be left behind with the transport when we’re in action. Old Dan Turpin will look after him. He considers him his own kid already.”

I’ve been sitting here thinking over this conversation, and especially over one sentence, “Death’s not the final tragedy; very often it’s the new start.” Those words really explain our indifference in the face of shell-fire and torture. We no longer fear the separation of the spirit from the body. We don’t regard the reparation as extinction; we view it with quiet curiosity and suspect that it may only mean beginning afresh. Perhaps we’re exceptional in our battery, inasmuch as there are so many who would welcome the opportunity to begin afresh. Tubby certainly must be glad of it; going on the way he was, the noble part of him would never have had a chance. This war has made so many of us aware of a nobility which we never knew we possessed. We’re a little afraid that we shall lose it, if we live through to the corpulent days of peace. We would rather go west at the moment when we are acting up to our most decent standards. It’s odd, but when threatened by death, it’s the fear of life that assails us. The dread of old age grips us by the throat; the terror of old temptations, which of late we have been too athletic in soul to gratify, confronts us. The gray, unheroic monotony of unmerited failures and unworthy successes daunts us. We dread lest when war ends, the old grasping selfishnesses may re-assert themselves. To-day we have the opportunity to go out like vikings, perishing in a storm. To live a few years longer only to shuffle off, will not be rewarding.

At this point I have to leave off. A runner has just come in bringing us word that we are to be prepared to push forward at dawn.

VII

THE Major’s opportunity to prove his girl “a rotten bad guesser” came sooner than we expected. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see Charlie Wraith with a V. C. ribbon on his breast before many days are out. He hardly fills the bill for the popular conception of a hero, with his little bandy-legs and his deathly pallor; but it’s what a chap is that counts. This is how his opportunity occurred.

It was 6 A. M. when we moved off. We had been harnessed up and ready, awaiting our final orders for two hours. When they did arrive, they came with a rush, as per usual; we were scarcely given sufficient time to complete our march before we were required to be in action. Measuring off the distance on the maps which accompanied the orders, we discovered that to be in time for the attack it would be necessary for us to travel all the way at the hard trot. The Major went on ahead of us to reconnoitre the position, leaving Heming to lead the battery. Our direction lay across the plateau from which we had been turned back by enemy fire on the day we lost Tubby. The enemy had been pushed far back now; the roads were so thronged by our own transport that we had to forsake beaten tracks and take our chances across country. There was always the danger that we might mistake landmarks which we believed we had recognised from our maps, and so lose time; there was also the risk that in the open we might be held up by uncut wire-entanglements.

It was a gorgeous morning, blue and golden, with a touch of ice in the air. Over turf and woodlands, as far as eye could search, the dew had flung a silver mesh.

The sky was almost without a cloud; tumbling through its depths, like eels in a tank, aeroplanes looped and wriggled. The landscape was one continuous chain of island-woods, each one of which had been a machine-gun fortress of the enemy. We were told that in some of them the enemy were still fighting, though they knew that they were hopelessly marooned and that our advance had swept on many miles ahead. Under the shadow of trees villages were dotted about, most of them possessing a tall spired church. From what we could see in the hurry of our passage, every human habitation had been laid level with the ground. It was impossible to believe that this destruction was the result of British shells, since our artillery had been too far behind to do the damage. It must have been the deliberate demolition of the Hun when he knew that he had to retire. In his retreat he had stolen everything that he had not destroyed. No food, furniture or live-stock were left; all the inhabitants had been carried off captive.

The position we were looking for was in the neighbourhood of a crossroads, unpropitiously marked “Death Corner” on the map. It was at the entrance to a village which our infantry were rumoured to have captured at dawn; whether they had captured it or, having captured it, had been able to hold it, we did not know for certain.

Some parts of our journey we had to go at the walk on account of the roughness of the ground, but most of the way we went at the trot. As the sun grew stronger, our horses broke into a foam of sweat. Men and animals were wildly excited. This-was soldiering as depicted by battle-artists and recruiting posters—a very different job from the tedious, wakeful misery of night-marches. All the officers and mounted N. C. O’s had picked up swords from the fallen cavalry. A good many of the men had armed themselves with revolvers which they had salvaged from the dead. We didn’t know how close we were going to get to the enemy, but we had hopes.

What struck us most forcibly, especially as we drew nearer to the thunder of the guns, was the lightness with which our line was held. One saw no supporting troops; it seemed as though we had thrown every last man into the actual fighting. We began to apprehend why we had to keep on attacking: the Hun was falling back on his reserves; if we let him halt to regain his breath he would take the offensive. Were that to happen, our retreat might prove just as precipitate as our advance.

We were riding now through the batteries which had leap-frogged us yesterday. They were firing away like mad. The air was shaken with rapid concussions. It was impossible to make oneself heard; all our commands had to be given by signals. On ahead things looked pretty hot; the ground kept spouting up in fountains of dust and flame. Increasingly the enemy retaliation was finding us out. We clapped spurs to our horses and broke into a gallop.

Out of the cloud of drifting smoke our little Major emerged, signalling to us to follow him. He led us on clear beyond the other batteries, till we were almost treading on the heels of our infantry. We had scarcely downed trail, when he gave us our aiming-point and directions, and had us tearing off four rounds a minute. I looked at my wrist-watch. Pretty work! We had arrived just in time and had got into action on the second. As our teams trotted back to our temporary wagon-lines, a hail of shells came over, wounding several of the men and horses.

There was precious little information as to what had happened or was happening. Our infantry had captured the town immediately in front of us and were preparing to go forward behind our barrage to capture the next town which lay ahead. Everybody said that we had insufficient tanks for the task and that the enemy was making a determined stand. How much of this was conjecture and how much fact, nobody could assert positively. There was a feeling of tension and anxiety. No one was quite certain what he was expected to accomplish. Our own fear was that in firing without more exact information we might be killing our own men. The Major himself determined to go forward to ascertain the true condition of affairs. While he was gone, Heming returned from the wagon-lines, bringing with him two Hun field-guns he had found, so making us into an eight-gun battery.

We had been firing for about half an hour when a mounted signaller, sent back by the Major, rode up. He reported that the attack had been only partially successful, owing to the tremendous concentration of enemy machine-guns, which lay hidden in the wheat-fields between the two towns. Another attack was to take place within the hour; it was necessary that the battery should move up in order that our support might be more immediate and effective. The signaller added that the Major was at Death Corner, in full sight of the enemy and that his groom had been killed within five minutes of his arrival there.

We hooked in and started off by a mud-track. The mud-track was strewn on either side by men and horses, newly dead. Some of them we recognised as people who had passed us while we had been in action. The enemy shells were sweeping the track for all the world as though a gigantic hose were playing down its length. Now they would spray this part of it, then lift a hundred yards and spray that. Ahead of us stretched a billowy level of wheat-fields; to the right lay Rouvroy, the town which we had captured; at right angles to the track and passing in front of Rouvroy ran a road, which was clearly indicated above the wheat by a straight line of splintered trees. The point where the track met the road was Death Corner. It looked as unhealthy a spot as one could well imagine; everything was rocking in a whirlwind of explosions. Three hundred yards short of the corner we swung off to the left and came into action. Over the short distance which separated the battery from the Major we ran in a telephone wire. From where he was and indeed from any point on the high road, the entire battle-field lay exposed and, on its furthest edge, the entrenched town of Fouquescourt which it was essential we should possess.

The Major had arranged with the infantry that, at a given signal, we would at once open at an intense rate of fire and that behind our shells the advance against the town should commence. We had been firing for, perhaps, five minutes, when we received orders from our brigade headquarters, which were well in rear of us, to stop. The Major, watching from his point of vantage, saw that all of a sudden our advancing riflemen were left unprotected. He called to to know what was the matter and at once ordered us to go on. For the next two hours we purposely let our line to brigade go down so that we might be out of touch and left unhampered to do our work.

And what a two hours those next two hours were! The Hun was putting up the fight of his life. All through the three thousand yards of wheat-fields which separated Rouvroy from Fouquescourt wire-entanglements and machine-gun nests had been constructed. You could not see them for the grain, and did not know they were there until you were upon them. In the first advance which had failed, our men had walked straight into the traps and most of their officers had been shot down. In the second, which we had come up close to support, our men had wriggled their way forward and reached Fouquescourt, only to find that they were cut off and had left the enemy in the wheat behind them. In losing time we were giving the enemy his chance. He was bringing his guns up and getting them into better positions; every hour his artillery fire was becoming better directed and growing more intense. His airmen were regaining their courage, flying in leaps and bounds like great grasshoppers just above our heads, and picking off our men with machine-gun fire. We had to keep two Lewis guns mounted on the flanks of our battery to drive them off.

Things had reached a pretty desperate pass, everyone fighting without proper information and in many cases without leadership, when suddenly, silently and unheralded, out of the woods behind us appeared a cloud of cavalry. They drew up, as if on parade, about four hundred yards to our left flank and in line with ourselves. They were instantly spotted by a Hun plane, which flew to and fro over them, dropping bombs. He was so busily engaged that he did not notice one of our chaps swooping down on him. When he did see him, there was nothing for it but to escape. Then followed a wild chase; our chap hovering like a hawk on top and driving the Hun lower and lower towards the ground. Of a sudden the Hun burst into flames and shot downwards like a torch. But before he was caught he must have signalled back the cavalry target to his gunners, for right into the midst of the waiting horsemen the shells began to fall. Their courage was superb, the courage of the horses equalling that of the men. From the distance at which we watched, it was exactly like seeing rocks flung into a pond—only the rocks were high explosives and the pond was made up of living flesh. We saw the splash of bodies tossed high into the air, the ripple of horsemen reining back, and then the patient orderly reforming of their ranks.

A trumpet sounded. At a walk, and then at a gentle trot, a hundred men rode up on to the highroad and vanished into the sea of yellow on the other side. Then a hundred more. Then a hundred more, till none but those who could not rise were left. As each little company was displayed to the enemy, the high-road was swept with bullets as with pelting hall. Riders crumpled in their saddles; horses reared themselves up, pawing at the air and toppled over backwards. The survivors paid no heed to the agony which would certainly be theirs within the next few seconds; unhurriedly, keeping cool and using their heads, they set spurs to their horses and danced away to trample the machine-guns and clear a way for the infantry, or to die in the attempt. How many of them came back we did not count, but most of them found a grave in the sea of yellow.

The man at the telephone was beckoning to me. “The Major wants you to speak with him.” he said. “Hulloa! hulloa! That you, Major?”

“Is that you, Chris?”

“Yes.”