"Four minutes!" A subaltern, who had reached the Brindle's Battalion
only the night before, stood with his back to the parapet, his wrist
turned so that he could study the face of his watch. Half-a-dozen
rifles spat at the German trench opposite. The attack was to be a
surprise, without preliminary artillery fire.
"Three minutes!" There was a slight catch in the lieutenant's voice as
he watched the ominous course of the hand of his watch ticking off the
seconds. Dennis Montague turned to look at him, wondering where he had
seen him before, and idly conjecturing how he had earned that little
splash of color on his breast.
A signaler looked up from his phone. "O.C. wants to know if everything
is ready, sir."
"Two minutes! Has every man his gas-helmet, water-bottle, iron ration?
Right. Tell the O.C. everything's O.K."
There was a coarse jest from a grizzled corporal; a few laughed
nervously. A little chap, who had lied about his age, caught his breath
in a sob he could not stifle. The young officer, who was beside him,
reached out his hand and patted the lad's shoulder.
"One minute!" Every man crouched for the spring--there was a mumbled
prayer--a curse--a laugh. Montague took a deep, quivering breath, and
his trembling hand felt for the bayonet-stud to see that it was firm.
"Come on, Brindles! Give 'em hell!" The subaltern leaped to the
parapet, stood silhouetted a moment against the dull, cloudy sky, and,
without a word, fell back into the trench--a corpse. And in that moment
Montague remembered him. He was the "decent enough fellow"--"lacking in
initiative."
Cursing, shouting, laughing, the men scrambled over the breastwork, and
were met by a torrent of machine-gun fire that swept through their
ranks with pitiless accuracy.
"Something's wrong!" yelled Major Watson from the center. "They knew we
were coming;" and he whirled around twice and dropped in his tracks.
Montague leaped forward with a hoarse, inarticulate shout, when he felt
a blow on his arm as though it had been struck by a red-hot iron. He
fell, but rose immediately, madly excited, muttering words that meant
nothing. The charge had stopped halfway, and all about him his comrades
stood irresolute, desperate, unable to advance, determined not to
retreat.
"Come on," shrieked the adjutant, "for God's sake!" And he fell,
choking, vomiting blood, with a bullet in his throat.
Without an officer left, the men looked wildly about, the bullets
spitting around them and taking their steady, merciless toll. With a
great feeling of ecstasy, Montague staggered to the front.
"Steady, the Brindles!" he yelled hoarsely. "Shake out the line to the
left--cold steel, Brindles! Come on!"
"Follow the Duke!" roared a dozen voices; and they hurled themselves
forward.
They hacked their way into the trench, but their triumph was
short-lived. Things had gone badly on the left, and the signal to
retire flashed along the line. With horrible blaspheming, the Brindles
gave up their trench and started back for their own line. When he was
half-way across a bullet struck Montague in the shoulder, then another
in the thigh, and he sank to the ground unconscious.
When he awoke the moonlight was streaming over the stricken field. He
bit his lip to keep from crying out at the sudden spasm of pain in his
shoulder, and then something he saw almost stopped the beating of his
heart. A figure was slowly crawling towards him, inch by inch, but
steadily, ominously coming nearer with every moment. His left arm was
helpless, and he tried to reach for his bayonet by turning over.
"Pard, are you dead?"
Never did sounds of sweetest music fall more gratefully on human ears
than the words uttered by Private Waller on the night of October 16,
1916, on No Man's Land, Somewhere in France.
"Thank God!" cried Montague, his voice weak and quavering.
"Waller--old--boy."
"Damn!" muttered Private Waller. The Germans, with customary
fiendishness, were searching the ground with rifle-fire to prevent any
attempt at rescue. "Are you much hurt, pard?"
"I'm used up pretty bad," Montague answered weakly, and in incorrect
English. Things change in No Man's Land.
"I'm the third as has come after you," whispered Waller; "Sykes and
Thompson got theirs."
"Coming--for me?" Montague's voice trailed off into a querulous sob.
"Sure--those of us as got back shook hands on it that we'd get the Duke
back dead or alive."
Montague tried to speak, but only two scalding tears slowly trickled
down his cheeks. He was weak from loss of blood, and he was learning a
bitter lesson in the moonlight on the stricken field.
"I'll hoist you up as easy as I can," whispered Private Waller eagerly,
"and I'll sort of crawl; and if they spot us, I'll let you down easy.
Come on, pard."
Fifty yards--that was all--but fifty yards of unspeakable agony. The
blood flowed again from Dennis's wounds and matted over Waller's hair.
A dozen times he would have fainted, but he grit his teeth, and
crawling, grasping, falling, Waller took him to the edge of the trench.
And then a bullet caught the little man, and he dropped.
"Good-bye, pard," he said.
So died Private W. Waller, of His Majesty's Canadian Expeditionary
Force.
X
Almost a year later, a one-armed man was walking along a quiet street
in the northern suburbs of a great Canadian city. He paused at a pretty
little cottage that nestled in a well-kept garden to speak to a young
woman whose black dress was mute testimony to her tragic bereavement.
"'Ow can I ever thank you, Mr. Montague," she said, "for giving me this
cottage and going guardian to little 'Arry? And your wife, too, is that
kind and beautiful that after she comes--and she is in and out nearly
hevery day--I feel as if an angel had been 'ere. Well, if here ain't
little 'Arry with his face all dirty!"
A sturdy urchin stumbled forward, and in some way the one-armed man
hoisted him to his shoulder.
"Hello, pard!" said Montague.
The little chap chuckled and pulled at his hat.
"I often wonders," said the little mother, "why you always calls him
'pard.' Bill used to call you his pard, but I knew all along you
wasn't. You was a gentleman, Mr. Montague."
"Mrs. Waller," said Montague, and his voice was very low and soft, "I
lay one night, wounded and dying, on No Man's Land. Your husband came
for me, and he called me 'pard,' and he died for me. Perhaps you may
understand a little of--what it means to me now."
Tears, bitter tears, the heritage of war. Mrs. Waller wept silently,
and Montague's eyes looked past the garden, past the countryside, and
saw neither trees nor houses, but a strip of land guarded by wire
entanglements, and two lines of trenches where men lived, and laughed,
and learned, and died.
* * * * *
A little later the same one-armed man stood at a gate that gave
entrance to a splendid lawn. It was his home, and as he stood for a
moment drinking in the calm and peace of Nature at sundown, a girl
emerged from the house and came towards him with outstretched hands.
Wonderfully happy, maimed, but filled with deep content, Dennis
Montague, the man who had scoffed, went forward to meet his wife, the
girl who had had the courage to hurt the thing she loved. And the
deepening rays of the setting sun spread a golden carpet for them to
walk upon.