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No Man's Land

by H. C. McNeile · English · Gutenberg #23874 · 444,252 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: No Man's Land

Author: H. C. McNeile


        
Release date: December 16, 2007 [eBook #23874]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23874

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NO MAN'S LAND ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



Transcriber's note:

   In the original book, the author was given as "Sapper," the
   pseudonym of Herman Cyril McNeile.  This e-book uses the
   author's real name.





NO MAN'S LAND

by

H. C. McNEILE

Author of
  "Men, Women, and Guns,"
  "Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E.," and
  "The Lieutenant and Others"







Hodder and Stoughton
London ---- New York ---- Toronto
MCMXVII




TO

THE INFANTRYMAN




PREFACE


During the first few days of November 1914 Messines was lost--in
silence; during the first few days of June 1917 Messines was
regained--and the noise of its capture was heard in London.  And during
the two and a half years between these two events the game over the
water has been going on.

It hasn't changed very much in the time--that game--to the player.  To
those who look on, doubtless, the difference is enormous.  Now they
speak easily of millions where before they thought diffidently of
thousands.  But to the individual--well, Messines is lost or Messines
is won; and he is the performer.  It is of those performers that I
write: of the hole-and-corner work, of the little thumb-nail sketches
which go to make up the big battle panels so ably depicted over the
matutinal bacon and eggs.

And as one privileged to assist at times in that hole-and-corner work,
I offer these pages as a small tribute to those who have done so far
more than I: to the men who have borne the burden of the days, the
months, the years--to the men who have saved the world--to the
Infantrymen.




CONTENTS


PART I

THE WAY TO THE LAND


PART II

THE LAND:

    I. A DAY OF PEACE
   II. OVER THE TOP
  III. THE MAN-TRAP
   IV. A POINT OF DETAIL
    V. MY LADY OF THE JASMINE
   VI. MORPHIA
  VII. BENDIGO JONES--HIS TREE
 VIII. THE SONG OF THE BAYONET


PART III

SEED TIME:

    I. THE SEED
   II. THE FIRST LESSON
  III. AN IMPERSONAL DEMONSTRATION
   IV. SOMEWHAT MORE PERSONAL
    V. A PROJECT AND SOME SIDE-ISSUES
   VI. THE SECOND LESSON AND SOME FURTHER SIDE-ISSUES
  VII. THE THIRD LESSON, AND A DIGRESSION
 VIII. THE THIRD LESSON IS LEARNED
   IX. "AND OTHER FELL ON GOOD GROUND"


PART IV

HARVEST




PART I


THE WAY TO THE LAND

I

It came suddenly when it did come, it may be remembered.  Every one
knew it was coming, and yet--it was all so impossible, so incredible.
I remember Clive Draycott looking foolishly at his recall telegram in
the club--he had just come home on leave from Egypt--and then
brandishing it in front of my nose.

"My dear old boy," he remarked peevishly, "it's out of the question.
I'm shooting on the 12th."

But he crossed the next day to Boulogne.

It was a Sunday morning, and Folkestone looked just the same as it
always did look.  Down by the Pavilion Hotel the usual crowd of Knuts
in very tight trousers and very yellow shoes, with suits most obviously
bought off the peg, wandered about with ladies of striking aspect.
Occasional snatches of conversation, stray gems of wit, scintillated
through the tranquil August air, and came familiarly to the ears of a
party of some half-dozen men who stood by a pile of baggage at the
entrance to the hotel.

"Go hon, Bill; you hare a caution, not 'arf."  A shrill girlish giggle,
a playful jerk of the "caution's" arm, a deprecating noise from his
manly lips, which may have been caused by bashfulness at the
compliment, or more probably by the unconsumed portion of the morning
Woodbine, and the couple moved out of hearing.

"I wonder," said a voice from the group, "if we are looking on the
passing of the breed."

He was a tall, thin, spare fellow, the man who spoke; and amongst other
labels on his baggage was one marked Khartoum.  His hands were sinewy
and his face was bronzed, while his eyes, brown and deep-set, held in
them the glint of the desert places of the earth: the mark of the
jungle where birds flit through the shadows like bars of glorious
colour; the mark of the swamp where the ague mists lie dank and
stagnant in the rays of the morning sun.

No one answered his remark; it seemed unnecessary, and each was busy
with his own thoughts.  What did the next few days hold in store for
the world, for England, for him?  The ghastly, haunting fear that
possibly they held nothing for England gnawed at men's hearts.  It
would be incredible, inconceivable; but impossible things had happened
before.  Many must have felt that fear, but to none can it have been
quite so personal, so hideously personal, as to the officers of the old
Army and the Navy.  To them it was as if their own honour were at
stake, and I can see now a man opposite me almost sobbing with the fury
and the shame of it when for a while we thought--the worst.  But that
was later.


"Time to go on board, gentlemen."

Almost as beings from another world, they passed through the noisy
throng, so utterly inconsequent, so absolutely ignorant and careless.
One cannot help wondering now just how that throng has answered the
great call; how many lie in nameless graves, with the remnants of Ypres
standing sentinel to their last sleep; how many have fought and cursed
and killed in the mud-holes of the Somme; how many have chosen the
other path, and even though they had no skill and aptitude to recommend
them, are earning now their three and four pounds a week making
munitions.  But they _have_ answered the call, that throng and others
like them; they _have_ learned out of the book of life and death; and
perhaps the tall man with the bronzed face might find the answer to his
question could he see England to-day.  Only he lies somewhere between
Fletre and Meteren, and beside him are twenty men of his battalion.  He
took it in the fighting before the first battle of Ypres . . .

"I call it a bit steep."  A man in the Indian Cavalry broke the silence
of the group who were leaning over the side watching the coast fade
away.  "In England two days after three years of it, and now here we
are again.  But the sun being over the yard-arm--what say you?"

With one last final look at the blue line astern, with one last
involuntary thought--"Is it _au revoir_, or is it good-bye?"--they went
below.  The sun was indeed over the yard-arm, and the steward was a
hospitable lad of cosmopolitan instincts. . . .


II

"It is impossible to _guarantee_ a ticket to Marseilles."  So the
ticket vendor at Folkestone had informed them, and his pessimism was
justified by future events.

The fun began at the Gare du Nord.  From what I have since learned, I
have often wished since that my mission in life had been to drive a
fiacre in Paris during the early days of August '14.  A taxi conjures
up visions too wonderful to contemplate; but even with the humble
horse-bus I feel that I should now be able to afford a piano, or
whatever it is the multi-millionaire munition-man buys without a
quiver.  I might even get the missus a fur coat.

Every living soul in Paris seemed obsessed with the idea of going
somewhere else; and the chances of the stranger within their gates
approached those of an icicle in Hades, as our friends across the water
would say.  Finally, in despair, Draycott rushed into the road and
seized a venerable flea-bitten grey that was ambling along with
Monsieur, Madame, and all the little olive-branches sitting solemnly
inside the cab.  He embraced Madame, he embraced the olive-branches;
finally--in despair--I believe he embraced Monsieur.  He wept, he
entreated, he implored them to take him to the Gare de Lyon.  It was
imperative.  He would continue to kiss them without cessation and in
turn, if only they would take him and his belongings to the Gare de
Lyon.  He murmured: "Anglais--officier anglais"; he wailed the mystic
word, "Mobilisation."  Several people who were watching thought he was
acting for the cinematograph, and applauded loudly; others were
convinced he was mad, and called for the police.

But Monsieur--God bless him!--and Madame--God bless her!--and all the
little olive-branches--God bless them!--decided in his favour; and
having piled two suit-cases and a portmanteau upon that creaking cab,
he plunged into the family circle.

It was very hot; he was very hot; they were very hot; and though
Draycott confesses that he has done that familiar journey between the
two stations in greater comfort, he affirms that never has he done it
with a greater sense of elation and triumph.  The boat train to
Marseilles, he reflected complacently; if possible a bath first;
anyway, a sleeper, a comfortable dinner, and----

"Parbleu, M'sieur; la Gare de Lyon c'est fermée." Madame's voice cut
into his reflections.

As in a dream he extricated himself from to-night's supper and three
sticky children, and gazed at the station.  They were standing six deep
around the steps--a gesticulating, excited mob; while at the top, by
the iron railings, a cordon of soldiers kept them back.  Inside,
between the railings and the station, there was no one save an odd
officer or two who strolled about, smoking and talking.

Mechanically he removed his baggage and dumped it in the road;
mechanically he re-kissed the entire party; he says he even kissed the
flea-bitten grey.  Then he sat down on a suit-case and thought.

It was perfectly true: the Gare de Lyon was shut to all civilians; the
first shadow of war had come.  As if drawn by a magnet the old men were
there, the men who remembered the last time when the Prussian swine had
stamped their way across the fields of France.  Their eyes were bright,
their shoulders thrown back as they glanced appraisingly at the next
generation--their sons who would wipe out Sedan for ever from the pages
of history.  There was something grimly pathetic and grimly inspiring
in the presence of those old soldiers: the men who had failed through
no fault of their own.

"Not again," they seemed to say; "for God's sake, not a second time.
This time--Victory.  Wipe it out--that stain."

They had failed, true; but there were others who would succeed; and it
was their presence that made one feel the unconquerable spirit of
France.


III

The French officer in charge was polite, but firmly non-committal.

"There is a train which will leave here about midnight, we hope.  If
you can get a seat on it--well and good.  If not----" he shrugged his
shoulders superbly, and the conversation closed.

It was a troop train apparently, and in the course of time it would
arrive at Marseilles--perhaps.  It would not be comfortable.  "Mais,
que voulez-vous, M'sieur? c'est la guerre."

At first he had not been genial; but when he had grasped the fact that
mufti invariably cloaked the British officer, _en permission_, he had
become more friendly.

He advised dinner; in these days, as he truly remarked, one never
knows.  Also, what was England going to do?

"Fight," Draycott answered promptly, with an assurance he did not feel.
"Fight, mon Colonel; ça va sans dire."

"C'est bien," he murmured, and stood up.  "Vive l'Angleterre."  Gravely
he saluted, and Draycott took off his hat.

"Mon Colonel, vive la France."  They shook hands; and having once again
solemnly saluted one another, he took the Frenchman's advice and went
in search of dinner.

In the restaurant itself everything seemed normal.  To the close
observer there was possibly an undue proportion of women who did not
eat, but who watched with hungry, loving eyes the men who were with
them.  Now and again one would look round, and in her face was the
pitiful look of the hunted animal; then _he_ would speak, and with a
smile on her lips and a jest on her tongue she would cover a heart that
seemed like to burst with the agony of it.  Inexorably the clock moved
on: the finger of fate that was to take him from her.  They had
quarrelled, _sans doute_--who has not? there had been days when they
had not spoken.  He had not been to her all that he might have been,
but . . .  But--he was her man.

And now he was going; in half an hour her Pierre was going to leave
her.  For him the bustle and glamour of the unknown; for her--the empty
chair, the lonely house, and her thoughts.  Dear God! but war is a bad
thing for the women who stop behind. . . .

And on Draycott's brain a tableau is stamped indelibly, just a little
tableau he saw that night in the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon.  They
came, the three of them, up the flight of steps from the seething
station below, into the peace and quiet of the room, and a roar of
sound swept in with them as the doors swung open.  Threading their way
between the tables, they stopped just opposite to where he sat, and
instinctively he turned his head away.  For her the half-hour was over,
her Pierre had gone; and it is not given to a man to look on a woman's
grief save with a catching in the throat and a pricking in the eyes.
It is so utterly terrible in its overwhelming agony at the moment, so
absolutely final; one feels so helpless.

The little boy clambered on to a chair and sat watching his mother
gravely; a grey-haired woman with anxious eyes held one of her hands
clasped tight.  And the girl--she was just a girl, that's all--sat
dry-eyed and rigid, staring, staring, while every now and then she
seemed to whisper something through lips that hardly moved.

"Maman," a childish voice piped out.  "Maman."  He solemnly extended a
small and grubby hand towards her.

Slowly her head came round, her eyes took him in--almost
uncomprehendingly; she saw the childish face, the little dirty hand,
and suddenly there came to her the great gift of the Healer.

"Oh! mon bébé, mon pauv' p'tit bébé!"  She picked him up off the chair
and, clutching him in her arms, put her face on his head and sobbed out
her heart.

"Come on."  Draycott got up suddenly and turned to the man he was
dining with.  "Let's go."  They passed close to the table, and the fat
waiter, wiping his eyes on a dinner napkin, and the grey-haired woman
leaning gently over her, were talking in low tones.  They seemed
satisfied as they watched the sobbing girl; and they were people of
understanding.  "Pauvre petite," muttered the waiter as they passed.
"Mon Dieu! quelle vâche de guerre."

"My God!" said Draycott, as they went down the steps.  "I didn't
realise before what war meant to a woman.  And we shall never realise
what it means to our own women.  We only see them before we go.  Never
after."


IV

Half an hour later he encountered Monsieur le Colonel once again, and
suggested that they should split a bottle of wine together if he could
spare the time.  It was then nine o'clock, and the three hours till
midnight loomed uninviting.  His only hope, as he told him, was that
the train at present standing at the platform was not going to be
typical of the one he was to embark on.  It seemed to be of endless
length, and presented a most enticing spectacle.  Four fortunates in
each compartment had got the racks, otherwise the passengers stood: on
the footboards, in the corridors, on the seats.  If any one opened a
door the pressure was such that at least six people fell on to the
platform, and in one carriage a small _poilu_ was being squeezed
through the open window.  In the end he went--suddenly like a cork out
of a bottle, and the human mass closed up behind him.

Draycott laughed, the Colonel laughed, and went on laughing.  He
laughed unrestrainedly, even as a man who enjoys a secret jest.  At
last, with some difficulty, he controlled his mirth.

"Monsieur," he remarked gravely, but with twinkling eyes, "I fear your
hopes are ill-founded.  This is the midnight train."

"Under those circumstances," Draycott murmured, with a ghastly attempt
at mirth, "the wine is off.  I must go and secure my sleeping-berth."

Have you ever seen a fly-paper which has come "to the end of a perfect
day"?  Lumps of glutinous flies drop off on one's head, and still it
seems as full as ever.  It was the same with that train.  Lumps of
Frenchmen, permanently welded together, fell out periodically, unstuck
themselves, and departed, only to return in a few moments with the long
thin loaves of France and bottles of wine.  Sometimes they got in
again, sometimes they didn't--but they were happy, those poilus.  What
matter anything, bar killing the Boche?  And that was the only thing in
the air that night. . . .

In every carriage it was the same, until suddenly there came salvation.
A horse-box, with two horses in it and some grooms singing the
Marseillaise, loomed out of the darkness, and into it the fed-up
wanderer hurled his bag.  Yet again did he embrace every one, including
the horses; and then, overcome with his labours, he sank into a corner
and laughed.  And it was only when they had been under way for two
hours that he remembered his two other bags, sitting alone and forlorn
at the Gare de Lyon. . . .

It was a great journey that.  The heat was sweltering, and they stopped
at every station between Paris and Marseilles--generally twice, because
the train was too long for the platform.  And at every station the same
programme was repeated.  Completely regardless of the infuriated
whistles and toots of the French conductors, absolutely unmindful of
the agonised shouts of "En voiture, en voiture!  Montez, messieurs, le
train part," the human freight unloaded itself and made merry.  As far
as they were concerned, let the train "part."  It never did, and the
immediate necessity was the inner man.  But it was all very
nerve-racking.

At times there were forty Frenchmen in the truck, at others none.
Whether they fell off or were pushed Draycott knew not: they simply
occurred--periodically.  One man disappeared for five hours, and then
came back again; possibly he was walking to stretch his legs; there was
plenty of time.  But to those who travel in trains de luxe, let me
recommend a journey in a cattle-truck, where, if one is lucky, one gets
a front seat, and sits on the floor with legs dangling over the side; a
bottle of wine in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other, and a song
when the spirit is in one.  No breathless rushing through space: just a
gentle amble through the ripening corn, with the poppies glinting red
and the purple mountains in the distance; with a three days' growth on
one's chin and an amalgamation of engine soots and dust on one's face
that would give a dust storm off the desert points and a beating.  That
is the way to travel, even if the journey lasts from Sunday night to
Tuesday evening, and a horse occasionally stamps on your face.  And
even so did Clive Draycott, Captain of "Feet," go to the great
war. . . .


V

Marseilles has always been a town of mystery--the gateway of the East.
Going from it one leaves European civilisation--if such a thing can be
said to exist to-day--and steps into the unknown.  Coming to it through
that appalling Gulf of Lyons, beside which the dreaded Bay of Biscay
seems like the proverbial duck-pond, Notre Dame de la Garde holds out a
welcoming hand, and breathes of fast trains and restaurant cars, and
London.  It is the town of tongues, the city of nations.  It is not
French; it is universal.

And never can Marseilles have been so universal as in the early days of
August 1914.  Usually a port of call only, then it was a terminus.  The
ships came in, but did not leave: there seemed to be a concensus of
opinion amongst skippers that the _Goeben_ was a nasty thing to meet
alone on a dark night.  And so the overcrowded docks filled up with
waiting vessels, while Lascars and Levantine Greeks, Cingalese and
Chinamen, jostled one another in the cafés.

The other jostlers were principally Americans of fabulous wealth: at
least as they thronged the shipping offices they said so.  Also they
were very angry, which is where they differed from the Cingalese and
Chinamen, who liked Marseilles and prayed to remain for ever.  But the
Americans desired to return to God's own country--they and their wives
and their sons and daughters; moreover, they expressed their desire
fluently and frequently.  There is something stupendous about an
American magnate insisting on his rights on a hot day, when he can't
get them. . . .  It cheers a man up when he is waiting and
wondering--and England is still silent.

It was just as Draycott had made the unpleasant discovery that no
longer did the weekly boat run from Marseilles to Tunis and thence to
Malta, and was debating on the rival merits of a journey through Italy,
and thence by Syracuse to the island of goats; or a journey through
Spain to Gibraltar, and thence by sea--with luck, that a railway
magnate entered and gave his celebrated rendering of a boiler
explosion.  It appeared--when every one had partially recovered--that
he was the proud possessor of ten francs and three sous.  He also
admitted to a wife suffering from something with a name that hurt, and
various young railway magnates of both sexes.  It transpired that the
ten francs and three sous had been laboriously collected from his
_ménage_ only that morning; that the youngest hopeful had wept
copiously on losing her life's savings; and further, that it was the
limit of his resources.  He had letters of credit, or something
dangerous of that sort, to the extent of a few million; he was prepared
to buy the whole one-donkey country by a stroke of the pen, but--in
hard cash--he had ten francs and three sous. . . .

It was pathetic; it was dreadful.  An American multi-millionaire, one
of those strange beings of whom one reads, who corner tin-tacks and
things, and ruin or make thousands with a word, reduced to ten francs
and three sous.

For not another cent piece did America's pride obtain; not another sou
to add to the three.  Politely, firmly, a harassed clerk shooed him
away.  No, he could not tell him when the next boat would sail--perhaps
to-morrow, perhaps in a fortnight.  He did not know, and he did not
care how he proposed to live during that period, and he had no
intention of furnishing him with any money to do it with.  He had
definite orders from his firm: no cheques cashed under any
circumstances whatever.  He was sorry the gentleman didn't like
Marseilles, or war, or France, or him personally; he regretted deeply
that the gentleman's wife liked peaches with every meal, and hoped he'd
manage all right on his ten francs; he----  And then came the
interruption.

They crowded to the door, and watched them coming.  Occasionally a
cheer rang out, but for the most part they came in silence, passing
through the ranks of people that lined the road each side.  Half way
down the column a band blared forth, and every now and then the Colonel
in front lifted his right hand gravely in a salute.  They were small
men, the poilus of that regiment; but they marched well, with a swing,
and the glint of white teeth.  Sometimes they waved a greeting to a
girl on the footpath, and she would smile back, or throw them a flower
or a kiss.  And like a ripple going down the lines of spectators, men
took off their hats suddenly.  The Colours were passing. . . .

Almost dazedly the American took off his hat as the ripple reached him;
then he put it on again and turned to Draycott.

"Hell!" he remarked tersely, "and I've been worry in' over a ten-franc
note.  I guess I feel a bit small."  He turned and followed the
regiment, with his hands deep in his pockets, and his shoulders squared.


VI

It came through the following afternoon--the news they had been waiting
for; and now for a certain period the curtain of discretion must be
drawn.  I gather that Draycott has dim recollections of a stout field
officer endeavouring to stand on a small marble-topped table, with a
glass of beer in each hand.  He was making a speech--chiefly in
Hindustani--to the frenzied mob of cheering Frenchmen around him.  Then
he came to the point when the best people say "Vive la France!"  He
remembered he had a hat on; he remembered he ought to take it off; he
did.  The only thing he forgot was the beer.  But as he said later when
they sorted him out, it was an old suit, and England didn't declare war
every day. . . .

The following night they left in an ancient old cargo boat, skippered
by the type of man who has since made our mercantile marine the glory
of the world.  His job was to get his peculiarly odoriferous cargo home
to his owners as soon as possible; beyond that he either failed or
refused to look.  The entire German Navy might have been waiting
outside for all he cared; he merely consumed a little more whisky, and
conducted morning prayers.  He would give them no assurance; they went
at their own risk, but, if the boat got there, he would land them at
Gibraltar.  And having thought the matter over, and realised that
firstly a journey through Italy might result in their being kept as
prisoners of war; secondly, that a journey through Spain would probably
take a fortnight at least; and thirdly, that any way they could do
neither as they could get no money, Draycott and his friends embarked
with the patent manure, and watched the lights of Marseilles growing
fainter and fainter till they dropped below the horizon astern.

It was an uneventful voyage, and never for one hour after the first day
were they out of sight of land.  It was the only concession the skipper
would make for the safety of his boat; and so they jogged along at a
peaceful ten knots and watched the sun set each evening in a blaze of
golden glory over the rocky coast of Spain.  For the first time since
leaving England a week before, they were able to think.  In the rush to
Paris, in the horse-box to Marseilles, in Marseilles itself, they had
been too busy.  Besides, they were outsiders. . . .

Now, England was in it; the thing which they had known in their hearts
was coming, ever since a kindly senior subaltern had first taken it
upon himself to shape their destinies, had actually come.  And
bitterest thought of all--_they_ were not there.

"It can't last more than three months."  A pessimistic garrison gunner
from Malta, who was playing patience, cheated savagely.  "I tell you no
European country could stand it."  Undoubtedly the fatuous drivel of
certain writers had influenced even the Army itself.  "Peace will be
declared before Christmas.  An' I'll have sat on that cursed island,
and whenever I see a ship I'd like to poop at, the searchlight will go
out, an' I'll be bitten by sand flies."  He glared morosely at
Draycott; until, suddenly, a dawning look of joy spread over his face.
"It's coming out.  I swear it's coming out!"

"You cheated," remarked an onlooker cruelly.  "I saw you with my own
eyes."

It was then that he burst into tears. . . .

Shut off as they were from the outside world--the old tramp had no
wireless--they could only wonder, and wait, fuming with impatience.
What had happened?  Had the fleets met?  Had the wonderful day which
the German Navy was popularly supposed to be living for--had it
arrived?  And if it had--what had been the result?  They could only
lean over the stern and try and grasp the one monumental fact--war.
And what did it hold in store? . . .

Visions of forlorn hopes, visions of glory, visions of the glamour of
war rose unbidden in their minds.  And then, when they had got as far
as that, the smell of that patent manure obtruded itself once again,
and the dreamers of honours to come passed sadly down the gangway to
the Levantine villain who presided over the vermouth and the gin.
Which might be taken as the text for a sermon on things as they are.
In this war it is the patent manure and the vermouth which dominate the
situation as far as the fighters, at any rate, are concerned.  The
talkers may think otherwise, may prate of soul-stirring motives, and
great ideals.  But for the soldiers, life is a bit too grim and
overpowering for gloss.  After a spell they come for their vermouth,
for something to help nerves a trifle jangled, something to give a
contrast to stark reality, and having had it they go back again to the
patent manure; while the onlookers see visions and dream dreams.  I
suppose it's a fair division of labour! . . .


VII

It was the distinguished-looking gentleman in blue who came alongside
just after they dropped anchor at the Rock, who brought the glorious
news.  He ascended the gangway with great dignity, and disappeared into
some secret place with the skipper.  After some delay and a slight
commotion, various flags were hoisted, and he majestically appeared
again.  It seemed that the hoisting of the flags had apparently been
successful.  Suspicion had been averted by this simple act; there was
no longer any danger of being made a target for enthusiastic gunners.
And, what was more to the point, the distinguished gentleman was now
free to impart his great tidings.

"The German fleet, gentlemen," he remarked genially, "has ceased to
exist."

"Who said so?" asked a doubting voice.

"It is in all the Spanish papers."  The Admiral, or whatever he was,
eyed the speaker compassionately.  "A great action has taken place in
the North Sea; we have lost nineteen big ships in addition to
destroyers, and the German fleet is wiped out."

"It doesn't seem good enough, does it?" murmured a graceless member of
the group.

"But if it's really authentic?"  Draycott turned to him doubtfully.
"And there must be something in it if it's in all the Spanish papers."

"On the contrary," returned the graceless one.  "It is precisely that
fact that makes me believe there is nothing in it."

The remark seemed conclusive; and yet so detailed was the information
all over Gib, so definite the lists of vessels sunk on each side, that
even intelligent Scorps--as the inhabitants of the place are
known--were impressed.  Strangely enough, exactly the same detailed
lists, with just sufficient difference to make them credible, were in
all the Italian papers at the same time--though this only transpired
later.

At the moment nothing much mattered but the time of the next boat going
East: it was their own little personal future that counted.  A naval
battle--yes, perhaps; nineteen ships down--the German fleet as well;
fifty or sixty thousand men--gone, finished, wiped out.  And yet it was
the next boat they wanted to know about.

Callous--I think not; merely a total incapability to realise a thing so
stupendous.  It has been the same all through the war: the tragedies
have been too big for human minds to grasp.  It is the little things
that tell; the isolated thumb-nail impressions that live in one's mind,
and will go with us to the grave.  The one huddled form lying
motionless in the shell-hole, with its staring, sightless eyes; the one
small, but supreme sacrifice: that is the thing which hits--hits harder
than the _Lusitania_, or any other of the gigantic panels of the war.
The pin-pricks we feel; the sledge hammer merely stuns.  And the danger
is that those who have felt the pin-pricks may confuse them with the
sledge hammer; may lose the right road in the bypaths of personal
emotion.  War means so infinitely much to the individual; the
individual means so infinitely little to war.  Only it is sometimes
hard to remember that simple fact. . . .


VIII

It was from the top of the Rock that they watched their evil-smelling
boat depart, to plug on northward up the home trail, unperturbed by
naval battles or rumours thereof.  And it was from the top of the Rock
they first saw the smoke of the P. and O., outward bound, on which they
were destined to complete the journey.  Below lay the bay, dotted with
German and Austrian ships caught on the high seas at the outbreak of
war; a destroyer was going half-speed towards the Atlantic; a cruiser
lay in dock, her funnels smoking placidly.  Out towards Algeciras an
American battleship, with her peculiar steel trellis turrets, was
weighing anchor; and in the distance, across the Straits, Africa,
rugged and inhospitable, shimmered in the heat haze of an August day.

"So long."  The gunner subaltern waved a weary hand from his point of
vantage, where he was inspecting life with a telescope.  "There's your
barge, but she won't leave till to-morrow.  If this goes on for much
longer, my nerves will give way under the strain.  The excitement is
too great."

It appears that Draycott had forebodings even before he got on board
that P. and O.  Since then she has become almost historic amongst those
of the Regular Army whose abode at the beginning of the war was
overseas.  Save for the fact that no one was playing the harmonium, or
any other musical instrument, the appearance of her decks as they came
alongside was reminiscent of one of those delightful pleasure steamers
on which one may journey, at comparatively small cost, up and down the
Thames.  A seething mob of people, almost exclusively composed of the
male sex, glared furiously at them and one another--but principally at
them--as they came up the gangway, and departed in search of the
purser.  All the stairs down to the dining saloon were occupied by
morose passengers, and an enlivening altercation was in progress
between two elderly gentlemen of ferocious aspect anent the remnants of
what had once been a cushion.  A mild-looking being, closely clutching
a tired deck-chair, was descending to the dining saloon, where
infuriated men were loudly thumping the tables.

"Good heavens, gentlemen! what do you want?"  A haggard purser peered
at them from his office.  "Berths!"  He broke into a shout of maniacal
laughter, and then pulled himself together.  "The fourteenth stair
leading to the engine-room is not taken, but there's an exhaust pipe
passes under it, and it becomes too hot to sit on.  There is room for
two in a coal bunker which should be empty by to-night; otherwise, the
hold, if you can find room."

"But what's all the trouble," they queried peevishly.  "Surely----"

"Trouble!"  The purser swallowed hard.  "We have on board eighty-four
generals, two hundred and twenty colonels, and one thousand eight
hundred and ninety-one what-nots of junior rank.  They have all been
recalled from leave; they have all come by this boat.  The eighteenth
breakfast is now being served--perhaps."  With a dreadful cry he seized
the brandy bottle, while they faded slowly and sadly away.  There are
things too terrible for contemplation. . . .

It was a wonderful trip--that final stage to the Half Way House of
Malta.  There was the dreadful incident of the short-sighted subaltern
who got into a full Colonel's bed by mistake, when that worthy officer
had just gone down on four no trumps redoubled.  In vain to point out
the similarity of engine-room gratings--in vain to plead short sight.
The subsequent scene lingered in the memory for days.

There was the case of the sleep walker, who got loose in the hold, and
ambled heavily over four hundred infuriated human sardines, till he
finally fell prostrate into what was apparently the abode of spare
china.

Last but not least there was the dreadful Case of the Major-General's
Bath.  Of this Draycott speaks first hand; he, personally, was an
awe-struck spectator.  Now the question of baths on that boat was not
one to be trifled with.  The queue for the pit of a popular play was as
nothing to the procession that advanced to the bath in the morning.
And the least penalty for sharp practice with regard to one's turn was
death.

Into the bathroom, then, prepared for him by a perspiring Lascar, the
Major-General stepped.  At the time Draycott did not know he was a
Major-General: he was just a supreme being resplendent in a green silk
dressing-gown.  The door closed, only to open again at once.

"I have forgotten my sponge," he announced.  "I shall not be a moment."
He gazed directly at Draycott, who bowed, choking slightly.  It was
inconceivable to imagine that the resplendent one thought he might--to
put it in the vulgar tongue--pinch his bath.  By nature he was a
timorous individual, and that green dressing-gown--ye gods! perish the
thought.

It was while he waited humbly that the catastrophe occurred.  Advancing
magnificently came a second being, still more resplendent, in a purple
dressing-gown; and he was complete, with towel, sponge, and soap.  His
eye would have impaled a London taxi-driver, and, scenting trouble, the
Lascar made himself scarce.

"It is preposterous to keep people waiting in this manner," he boomed;
"perfectly monstrous."  The next moment the door was shut and bolted,
and Draycott followed the Lascar's example--just in time: green
dressing-gown was returning with his sponge.  In official parlance, a
general action seemed imminent. . . .

It opened with the crash of heavy artillery in the shape of strange and
loud expletives of an Indian nature, to be followed immediately by an
attack in force on the hostile position.  This resulted in a sanguinary
repulse, and the attacking party hopped round, apparently in pain,
nursing a stubbed toe.  The temporary set-back, however, seemed only to
raise the _morale_ of the force; and after a further heavy bombardment
of a similar nature to the one before, a succession of blows were
delivered in rapid succession at all points along the front, which
suddenly gave way and the victor was precipitated in some confusion,
but triumphant, upon the floor of the captured position.

How true it is, that great utterance of our hand-books on war!  "Every
leader must bear in mind the necessity of immediately consolidating a
newly won position, in order to resist the counter-attack of the enemy,
which sooner or later is bound to be launched."

In this case it was distinctly sooner.  With a loud shout the defending
troops arose from a recumbent position--to wit, the bath--and with
deadly accuracy launched the contents of a large bucket of hot water
upon the still prostrate foe.

"What is the meaning of this monstrous intrusion?"  The battle cry of
the purples rang through the quivering air.

"You s'scoundrel! you impudent s'scoundrel!"

With a loud spluttering noise the greens got up and assumed a
belligerent attitude.  "You m'miserable villain! that is _my_ bath.
How d'dare you--how d'dare you--throw w'water over me.  D'do you know
what I am, sir?  I am a Major-General, sir, and I shall report your
infamous c'conduct to the captain."

"And I, sir," howled his opponent, "will have you put in irons; I will
have you chained to the crow's-nest, if they have one on board.
Keel-hauled, sir, amongst the barnacles and things.  I, sir, I am a
Lieutenant-General."

Draycott was still slightly dazed when he landed in Malta.


IX

Thus did he reach the Half Way House on his journey to the Land; and at
that Half Way House he was destined to remain for a short space.  It
may be that there is a harder school than forced inaction; if so, I
have no desire to become a pupil.  "Those are your orders; there is
nothing more to be said."  Only too true; there _is_ nothing more to be
said--but thinking is a different matter. . . .

And what brush can paint the indescribable longing of those who were
fitted for it, who were trained in its ways, to get to their goal--to
get to the Land of Promise.  For it was a Land of Promise; it was the
land of the regular soldier's dreams.  And in those days there was no
thought of the dream becoming a nightmare. . . .

So Clive Draycott and those with him, in that little rocky outpost of
Empire, carried on as cheerfully as a wet sirocco wind and an
ever-present heart-burning to be in France would allow, and waited for
deliverance.

Perhaps they suffered more acutely than even those who were in the
Great Retreat.  Out of it, as they thought, out of it.  Would they ever
be able to hold up their heads again?

And then the worst thing of all: that awful day when the news came
through--the news which England got one Sunday.  Fellows kept it from
the men as far as they could; they covered up places on the map with
their hand, unostentatiously; and when they had found Compiègne they
folded the map up, and told the men everything was well.  It was that
evening that Draycott and a pal watched the sun go down over Gozo from
St. Paul's Bay, where the statue stands in the sea, and the shallow
blue water ripples against the white sandstone.

"My God! it can't be true!"  His companion turned to him, and his eyes
were tired.  "It can't be true.  We're b----"  And his lips would not
frame the word.

Only, in their hearts they knew it was true; and in their hearts a
dreadful hopelessness wormed its bitter way.  But crushing it down
there was another feeling--stronger and more powerful.  England _could_
not be beaten, _would_ not be beaten; the thing was impossible,
unbelievable.  Triumphant it arose, that great certainty.  It arose
then, and has never died since, though at times the sky has been black
and the storm clouds ominous.  They knew that all would be well; and
now--after three years--all is well.  Their faith has been justified,
the faith of the men who waited their call to the work.  Only a small
proportion remain to see that justification with their own eyes; the
Land has claimed the rest.  Ypres, the Marne, Neuve Chapelle,
Festubert--names well-nigh forgotten in the greater battles of
to-day--in each and all of them the seed of "a contemptible little
Army" has been sown.  Thus it was ordained in the Book of Fate.

But at the moment there were just two men, sick of heart, watching the
sun, in a blaze of golden glory, setting over Gozo. . . .


X

Draycott's deliverance from the Half Way House came in three or four
weeks.  With the men swarming in the rigging, and the Territorials who
had come to replace them cheering from the shore, the transport moved
slowly down the Grand Harbour past the French and British warships that
lay at anchor.  It would indeed be pleasing to record the fact that the
departing warriors sang patriotic songs concerning their country's
greatness; and that the officers with a few well-chosen words improved
the shining hour, and pointed the moral of the great Entente with
special reference to the warships around them.  But being a
truthful--or, shall we say, comparatively truthful--historian, I regret
that it cannot be done.

Such songs as did rise above the medley of catcalls and gibes of a dark
nature which passed in playful badinage between the sister services
were of a nature exclusively frivolous; and the conversation of such
officers as were not consuming the midday cocktail consisted entirely
of a great thankfulness that they had seen the last of an abominable
island, and a fervent prayer that they would never see it again.

The relief of it--the blessed relief!  They would be in time for the
end of the show any way, which was something.  They were not going to
miss it all; they would be able to look their pals in the face after it
was over.  A few, it is true, shook their heads and communed together
in secret places: a paltry few, who looked serious, and spoke of a long
war and a bloody war such as had never been thought of.  Avaunt
pessimism! war was war, and a damned good show at the best of times for
those who were trained to its ways.  The Germans had asked for it for
years, and now they had got it--and serve 'em right.  A good sporting
show, and with any luck they would get the fag end of the hunting at
home after peace was declared.

Thus it was, nearly three years ago; thus it has been, with slight
modifications, ever since.  A nation of sportsmen going merrily forth,
with the ideal of sport as their guide, to fight a nation of swine,
with the ideal of fouling as theirs.  And so the world wags on in its
funny old way, while the gods laugh, and laugh, and laugh. . . .


XI

On the boat Draycott hardly realised.  For the first week of the three
he spent in England he hardly realised--he was too excited.  He was
going out; that was all that mattered; until one morning his eyes were
opened to his personal case.  It is easy to see things where others are
concerned; but in one's own case. . . .

He was at home on three days' leave, and the girl was there too.

"Good Lord!" he remarked at breakfast; "Jerry Thornton gone too."  His
eye was running down the casualty list.  "Whole battalion must have
taken it in the neck--five officers killed, fourteen wounded.  I wish
to heaven----"  He looked up, and the words died away on his lips.

"I didn't realise what war meant to women."  His remarks at the Gare de
Lyon hit him like a blow.  For he had seen the look in the girl's eyes;
he had seen the look in his mother's.  Blotted out at once, it is true;
effaced the instant they had realised he was watching them; but--too
late.  He had seen.

"Was that Major Thornton, dear?"  His mother was speaking.  "The one
who shot so well?"  Her voice was casual; her acting superb.  And God!
how they can act--these women of ours.

For a moment something stuck in his throat.  He saw just such another
breakfast room, with a woman staring with dull eyes at the laconic name
in the paper: a name which so baldly confirmed the wire she had had
three days before.  Stunned, still dazed by the shock, she sat
silently, apathetically; as yet she could hardly feel the blow which
Fate had dealt her.  In time perhaps; just now--well, it couldn't be;
there must be some mistake.  Other men had died--true; but--not hers.
He was different; there must be some mistake. . . .

For each and every name in that list Clive Draycott of a sudden
realised the same thing was occurring.  And then he saw it--personally;
he felt it--personally; he realised that it concerned him--personally.
Those other women had looked, just as had his mother and the girl, a
few weeks ago.  Those other women had laughed and joked and asked
casual questions to cover their true feelings, just the same.  Those
other women had been through it all and----  "We only see them before
we go--never after."  In the theatre, at the restaurant, playing the
fool with us, dancing with us--then we see them; afterwards--when the
train has gone and we are looking out of the window or talking with the
man opposite, then, we do not see them.  And it is just as well.  "Mon
Dieu!  Quelle vâche de guerre." . . .

Something of all this did Draycott feel at that moment; something which
caught him and shook him and mocked him.  Something which whispered,
"You ass, you wretched ass!  You think it's you who will suffer; you
think it's you who will be acclaimed a hero.  Fool!  Your sufferings,
your achievements, whether you live or die, are as nothing to those of
these two women.  You may wear the cross for a moment's heroism: they
bear it all the time.  And they get no praise; they just endure." . . .

Yes; something like that struck him for the first time as being
personally applicable to himself.  And having looked thoughtfully out
of the window for a moment, he laughed gently, and then he spoke.

"That's the fellow," he remarked quietly.  "An' if the tea ain't cold
I'll take another dish.  Three glasses of the old man's port, Dolly, is
enough.  I had four last night."


XII

A week later he sat in a mud bath at Havre, which went by the name of a
rest camp; the Way to the Land was nearly trodden.  Thousands of others
had sat in that glutinous mud before him; hundreds of thousands were
destined to do so after.  And each and all of them were thinking men;
wondering in a greater or less degree according to the size and
activity of their grey matter what it was all about.  To some the
Unknown gave the prospect of sport, and they thanked their stars they
were nearly there; to some it gave the prospect of Duty, and they
trusted they would not fail.  With some the fear of the future blotted
out their curiosity; with others curiosity left no room for fear.  But
in every case they had something to think about--even if it were only
the intense discomfort of their surroundings.  And in every case the
woman over the water had--nothing.

By cattle trucks and carriages, by so-called fast trains and unabashed
troop trains they left in batches big and small; and others came and
filled the gaps.  The Land was calling; the Seed must not be delayed.

    *    *    *    *    *    *

"You'll have to wait till it's dark."  A weary Quartermaster, wandering
through Ypres, met Draycott and stopped.  "Thank God! you've come.
We've got three officers left and a hundred and twenty men."

"Where are they?" he demanded.  "How shall I find them?"

"Very likely you won't."  The other laughed mirthlessly.  "I'll take
you up to-night--we walk the last bit to the trenches.  If a flare goes
up--stand still; there's no other rule."

"You're about done in, Seymour," said Draycott, watching him keenly.
"What's the trouble?"

"The trouble is Hell."  The Quartermaster passed his hand wearily over
his forehead.  "Utter, absolute, complete--Hell.  The boys have been in
the front line for twenty-one days; and"--he spoke with a sudden
dreadful earnestness--"the end is not far off."

"My God!" muttered Draycott, "is it as bad as that?"

    *    *    *    *    *    *

No trenches, no dug outs, no reserves.  Ceaseless German attacks, rain,
mud, death.  And then, three or four days of icy coldness, with the
bitter Arctic wind cutting the sodden, tired, breaking men like a
knife.  Fighting every hour, with rifles and bayonets and
fists--sleepless, tired out, finished.  Only a spirit which made
possible the impossible supported them: only the glory of their
traditions held the breaking line of Old Contemptibles to the end.  And
at the end--they died. . . .

But their spirit lives on, undimmed, untarnished.  It is the spirit of
the New Armies--the Civilian Armies of Britain.  They were training
back in England when Clive Draycott went to the Land: they were
learning the message of the old Regulars from New Zealand to Yukon.  It
is not learned in a day--that message: there is much watering and
weeding to do before the seed can reach perfection, but the Land would
not wait. . . .  It was greedy then--as now; the only difference was
the amount of grain available.  And when Clive Draycott went to it
there was very little.  To God Almighty the praise.  What there was,
was very good.




PART II


THE LAND

    I.  A DAY OF PEACE
   II.  OVER THE TOP
  III.  THE MAN-TRAP
   IV.  A POINT OF DETAIL
    V.  MY LADY OF THE JASMINE
   VI.  MORPHIA
  VII.  BENDIGO JONES--HIS TREE
 VIII.  THE SONG OF THE BAYONET




I

A DAY OF PEACE

"For the fourteenth morning in succession I rise to a point of order.
Why is there no marmalade?"  The Doctor glared round the breakfast table.
"I perceive a pot of unhealthy-looking damson, and a tin of golden syrup,
the greater part of which now adorns the infant's face.  Why is there no
marmalade?"

"Could I remind you that there is a war on two miles up the road, my
splay-footed bolus-booster?"  With a grand rolling of his R's, the man
who had driven a railway through the Rocky Mountains, and who now boasted
the badges of a subaltern in His Majesty's Corps of Royal Engineers, let
drive.  "Ye come to live with us much against our will, because you're a
poor homeless wanderer----"

"All dressed up and nowhere to go," broke in the Doctor mournfully.

"You come to live with us, I say," went on the Scotchman, "and then do
nothing but criticise our food and our morals."

"Heaven knows they both need it.  Pass me what's left of the syrup,
little one.  Scrape the rest of it off your chin, my cherub, and wrap it
up in a handkerchief and take it up to the trenches with you."

"You're vewy wude."  The junior subaltern adjusted the balance in the
matter of the letter R with the Scotchman.  Two months ago he had been at
home--in peace time he would still have been at school.  But of such
mixtures is the present British Army made.  "It's my face."

As a statement of fact the remark left nothing to be desired; as a
statement of expediency, when other infants were present, the same cannot
be said.  Words, in fact, were trembling on the tongue of a veteran of
six months when the C.O. came suddenly into the room.

"Bring me an egg," he shouted to the mess waiter in the kitchen next
door.  "Listen to this, my bonnie boys."  He produced a paper from his
coat pocket and sat down at the table.  "Secret.  A large object has
fallen beside the sap leading out to Vesuvius crater.  It is about the
size of a rum jar, and is thought to be filled with explosive.  It has
been covered with sandbags and its early removal would seem desirable, as
the sap is frequently bombarded--Damn it, this egg's addled.  Take it
away, it's got spots on it.  Where did I get to?  Oh! yes--bombarded with
aerial darts and rifle grenades."  He replaced the paper in his pocket
and reached for the teapot.

"Thought to be filled with explosive!"  The Scotchman looked up
sarcastically from the letter he was censoring.  "What's it likely to be
filled with?"

"Marmalade, ducky," remarked the Doctor, still harping on his grievance.

"In addition to that the Pumpkin desires my presence at the Centre
Battalion Head-quarters at 10 ak emma."  The C.O. was prodding his second
egg suspiciously.

The Pumpkin, it may be explained in parenthesis, was the not unsuitable
nickname of the Divisional General.

"Is the old man coming round the trenches?" Jackson, the subaltern in
whose tender care reposed the crater of Vesuvius and all that appertained
thereto, including rum jars, looked up with mild interest.

The C.O. glanced at the message beside him.  "'The G.O.C. wishes to meet
the Engineer Officer in charge of Left Section, at Centre Battalion
Headquarters, at 10 a.m., A.A.A.  Message ends.'  There in a nutshell you
have the glorious news."

Breakfast is never a loquacious meal, and for a while silence reigned,
broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food
produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the
exorbitant price he demanded for it--statements which had staled with
much vain repetition.

"For heaven's sake dry up," he remarked peevishly.  "You've had sardines
on toast twenty-one nights running; what more do you want?  Listen to the
words of Sapper Mackintosh--the pudding-faced marvel.  This"--he held up
a letter--"is the fifth which he hopes will find the recipient as it
leaves him at present--in the pink, and with the dreadful pains in his
stummik quite gone."

"Our Doctor has a wonderful bedside manner," remarked the Scotchman.
"Did ye no hear the story of him and the lady way back by Hazebrook?"

"That'll do," said the Doctor, rising hurriedly.  "She had very bad
rheumatism--that poor girl."

"I know she had, Doc," put in the C.O. heartily.  "And when I think of
the way you eased her sufferings I became lost in admiration over the
noble nature of your calling.  In the meantime I'd be glad if you'd see
one of the men in the Head-quarters Section.  From the strange explosive
noises he made when I spoke to him before breakfast I gathered by the aid
of an interpreter that he had somewhat foolishly placed his complete set
of uppers and lowers on a truss of compressed hay, and one of the mules
has eaten them."

He strolled to the door on his way to the kitchen in the next house that
served as his office.

"You'd better be careful with that rum jar, Jacko.  Unless you're pretty
certain there's no danger, I'd put a slab of gun-cotton against it where
it is, and pop her off.  No sense in running any risks carrying it back."

"Right-ho!  I'll have a look as soon as I go up.  Are you coming, Mac?"
He turned to the Scotchman.

"In five minutes, my boy.  I have to perform a few blasting operations on
my pipe before I start, and then I'm with you."  He pulled a battered
veteran out of his pocket, and peered into its noisome bowl.

"Not indoors, man, for heaven's sake!"  The Doctor backed hurriedly out
of the room.  "The last billet you cleaned your pipe in they complained
to the Mayor of the village."

"Go away, Doctor, go away.  Go and put chloride of lime round the
cook-house," Mac was shouting through the window at the receding medico.
"And ask yon woman if she has a hairpin.  My pipe. . . ."  But the Doctor
was out of sight.

Ten minutes later the room was empty save for a batman clearing the
breakfast table.

    *    *    *    *    *    *

Now as a general rule the Sappers do not live in the trenches, but go up
there each day and most nights, the remainder of the time being spent in
dwellings of dubious sanitation and indubitable draughtiness a mile or so
in rear.  To each company a certain front is allotted, and it is their
joy and pride to maintain this front and the network of trenches behind
it spotless and untarnished, what time they minister ceaselessly to the
lightest whim of its heroic defenders--usually known by the generic term
of P.B.I., or poor bally Infantry.  Which, of course, is not what really
happens, but one likes to think thus beautifully.

In addition to the Infantry, other people thrust themselves forward in a
manner which requires firmness and tact to deal with: gunners require
O.P.'s, or observation posts; other gunners require trench mortar
emplacements; dangerous men with machine guns sit up and take notice, and
demand concrete and other abominations; while last, but not least, the
medical profession demand secret and secure places in which to practise
their nefarious trade.  Finally, the Ordnance Department is with one
always.  It was that branch of the great Machine which caused the frown
on the face of the Sapper Captain, hitherto alluded to as the O.C., while
next door the batman cleared the breakfast table.

"We're six bicycles short, you say, Quartermaster-Sergeant?" he exclaimed
irritably, gazing at some papers in front of him, while he filled his
pipe.

"Yes, sir; and two more with wheels buckled, and three that free-wheel
both ways."

"What d'you mean--free-wheel both ways?"

"The pedals rotate, sir, with great speed, but the bicycle remains
motionless."  When a man habitually calls an armchair, A chair,
arm--Officers, for the use of, one--his conversation is apt to become
stilted.

"How were the wheels buckled?" demanded the Captain when he had digested
this great thought.

"Two of the officers, sir--playing what I believe they called bicycle
polo with a brick and two pick-helves--had--er--a slight mishap."

"When did it happen?"

"Er--after dinner, sir, one night."  The N.C.O. looked tactfully out of
the window.

The officer did not pursue the topic.  "Well, what about these six that
have been lost?"

"Completely destroyed by shell-fire," said the C.Q.M.S. firmly.  "I have
prepared a statement of what happened for your perusal and signature."
He handed the officer a written paper and respectfully withdrew a few
paces to avoid any semblance of coercion.

"'The six bicycles were placed on the morning of the 10th ult. against
the entrance to the R.E. Dump at A.21, C.2.4.  It would appear that
during the absence of the riders a hostile shell of large calibre fell on
the six said bicycles, completely demolishing them, for when the riders
returned after the day's work merely a few fragments remained scattered
round the shell crater.'"

The Captain read it over slowly, and then, in tones of awe, a murmured
"Wonderful" wafted through the office.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"  The N.C.O. was again at his side.

"I said wonderful, Quartermaster-Sergeant--quite wonderful.  Do you think
they'll swallow it?"

"It has been done before, sir."  The tone was non-committal.  "And one of
the six was undoubtedly badly punctured by a stray rifle bullet before we
lost it--er--that is, before it was finally destroyed by shell-fire."

"Right."  With the air of a man who communes with great destinies, the
Captain signed his name.  "Anything more?"

"Nothing at present, sir.  The question of the consumption of Candles,
Tallow dip, Pounds Twenty-four, stolen from our yard by the 940th
Tunnelling Company has come back again with remarks from the Chief
Ordnance Officer at the Base--but it will wait until you come back from
the trenches."

"I'm glad of that," remarked the Captain, rising.  "I'm not feeling very
strong this morning, and candles, tallow dip--especially lbs. 24 of
them--would cause a relapse.  Orderly"--he strolled to the door--"my
bicycle, please."

A few minutes later he was riding slowly down the road towards the place
where there was "a war on."  A cool mist hung over the fields on each
side of him, and in the early morning stray cobwebs glistening with
moisture brushed lightly across his face.

"_B'jour, monsieur._"  A woman standing in the door of a roadside
_estaminet_ greeted him as he passed--a woman undisturbed by the guns
that at times roared close by; a woman whose house was one concentrated
draught, which whistled through what had once been walls and now were
holes held together by odd bricks.

He returned the greeting and rode on, while once again the
comparison--never far absent from those who live "within range"--came
into his mind: the comparison between England and France--between the
country which has only learned of war through its soldiers, and the
country whose women and children have learned of it first hand, even unto
death.  All was absolutely silent--the peace and glory of a summer's
morning hung over everything, while the smell of the wet clover came
faintly to his nostrils.  A military policeman at the corner saluted
smartly, while a small boy in a little cart drawn by three straining dogs
raced him blithely up the village street.  At the end of the battered
houses still occupied by their owners, and the temporary abode of half a
battalion of infantry resting from a spell in the trenches, progression
by bicycle became a little harder.  Great branches lay across the road,
and pits torn out of the pave by bursting shells made steering a trifle
intricate; while occasionally one of the many signal wires which had
slipped during the night and was hanging low above his head, scraped the
top of his steel helmet.

Once more the familiar "_B'jour, monsieur_"--this time from an old dame
who sat day in day out in a corner under a wall selling chocolate.  Just
above her head, so that by raising her arm she could have touched it, the
nose of a "dud" German shell poked out from the brickwork.

Ruin, desolation--and shrouding it all the cool damp mist of seven
o'clock in July.


"The very man!"  A voice hailed him from behind, and a gunner subaltern
materialised.  "Are you going up the line?"

"I am--at once."  The Sapper placed his bicycle against a heap of
sandbags.  "What does my dear one desire?

"The accursed Hun placed two large obuses into the Ritz yesterday
afternoon.  What do you propose to do about it?"  They were strolling
slowly through the sopping grass.

"Nothing--if I can possibly avoid it," answered the Sapper firmly.  "You
select for an O.P. the most prominent house in the locality--put a
signaller on the top of it with a large flag--wait till midday, when the
sun is at its brightest, and then send a message back that the bully beef
is bad.  You----"

"Laddie," interrupted the gunner, "desist.  All that you say is true and
more--but we must stick to the Ritz, if we can.  It commands a
soul-inspiring view of the trenches behind that new crater in a way we
can't get from anywhere else.  What I want you to do is to cover the
cellar with boards.  Yesterday the second shell knocked two men
insensible, and they fell backwards into it.  As they nearly drowned, it
will be obvious, even to your intelligence, that it contains--amongst
other things--water.  Moreover, the water is deep, and stinketh.  If,
therefore, my brainy _confrère_, you will authorise me to draw planks
twelve, I myself will cover yon hole with my own fair hands.  The
cadaverous gentleman at your store, whose face has been passed over by
some heavy body, proved both unsympathetic and suspicious this morning
when I asked him for them.  Wherefore, if you will sign----"  He held out
a book to the Sapper.

"'Please issue bearer with twelve planks 9 inch by 2 inch; length, 6
feet.'"  The Sapper glanced at the page and signed.  "There you are,
James.  Tell him to get them cut for you."

"I was going to, dearie.  How marvellously your brain grasps the
importance of these trifling details!  Are you passing the Ritz by any
chance?  If so, tell my warriors to come down to the Store."

"Aren't you coming up?"

"No--it's too light.  I have to be careful whom I'm seen with."  He
turned back and was quickly lost in the white mist--though for some time
afterwards the faint strains of musical items selected from _The Bing
Boys_ followed the Sapper as he walked on.

Occasional voices came mysteriously from apparently nowhere, as a party
of men went up one of the deep communication trenches close by him--a
trench invisible in summer until you actually stood over it, for the long
rank grass hid everything: grass splashed with the red of great masses of
poppies, and the white of the daisies, with odd little patches of blue
cornflowers and borage, and buttercups glinting yellow.  Just rank
luxuriant vegetation, run wild--untouched for more than a year.

Suddenly out of the mist there loomed the Ritz--the name of the
broken-down, shell-battered house which served his late companion as an
O.P.  The Sapper gave the message as requested, and stepped down three
stairs into the communication trench, which passed close under one of the
crumbling walls.  There was no necessity, as far as safety was concerned,
to get into the trench for several hundred yards--the mist effectually
prevented any chance of being seen from the German lines half a mile
farther on.

But he was mindful to see the condition of the trench--whether the sides
were crumbling, and whether the floor was suitably provided with
trench-boards and bricks.  Twisting, winding with the poppies and the
weeds meeting over his head, and the water brushing off them against his
face and coat, he walked slowly on.  Seven feet deep, perhaps three feet
wide, it might have been a sunken Devonshire lane in model, and a faint
red tinge in the soil helped the illusion.

Stale as it all was, unprofitable and a weariness to the flesh as it had
all become, the strangeness of it still struck him at times.  He wondered
lazily what the people he knew at home would think if they were following
him at that moment on a tour of inspection.  Especially his Uncle John.
Uncle John was something in the City, and looked it.  He lived near
Ascot, and nightly slept with a gas-mask beside his bed.  He could
imagine Uncle John trembling audibly in that quiet model lane, and
assuring his faithful wife of his ability to protect her.  He laughed at
the picture in his mind, and then with a slight frown stopped.

The trench bent sharply to the right, and almost subconsciously he
noticed a hole framed in thick wood, half filled in, in the wall in front
of him.  The top had broken.  He bent and peered through it.  It went
right through the wall in front, and beyond, the same deep communication
trench could be seen stretching away.  Just a loophole placed in a
traverse through which a rifle could be fired along a straight thirty
yards of trench, if the Germans ever got in.  But to fire a rifle to any
purpose the loop-hole must not be broken, and so the Sapper made a note
before resuming his stroll.

Rounding a bend, a big white board at a cross-roads confronted him.  It
advertised two or three salient facts written in large black letters.  It
appeared that by turning to the right one would ultimately reach
Leicester Square and an aid post, to say nothing of the Charing Cross
Road, which was a down trench.  By turning to the left, on the contrary,
one would reach Regent Street and a pump.  It also stated that the name
of our wanderer's present route was the Haymarket, and further affirmed
that it was an up trench.  For it will be plain to all that, where a
trench is but three feet wide, it is essential not to have men going both
ways in it--and further, it will also be plain why the aid posts occur in
the down ones.

A further interesting and momentous piece of information was imparted
from another board, to the effect that the name of the trench by which
one could reach the pump on one hand and the aid post on the other was
Piccadilly, and that it constituted the reserve line of the position.

In other words, it was not merely a communication trench, but was
recessed and traversed like a fire trench.  In very fact, it was a fire
trench--the third of the system.  In front was the support line, known as
Pall Mall, and in front of that, again, the firing line, whither later
the Sapper proposed to wend his way.  He wanted to gaze on "the rum jar
reputed to be filled with explosive."  But in the meantime there was the
question of the pump--the ever-present question which is associated with
all pumps.  To work or not to work, and the answer is generally in the
negative.

He turned to the left down Piccadilly, wondering what particular ailment
had attacked this specimen of the breed, and had caused the Adjutant of
the battalion to write winged words anent it.  The aspect of the trench
had changed; no longer did the red, white, and blue of the tangled wild
flowers meet over his head, but grey and drab the sandbag walls rose on
each side of him.  Occasionally the mouth of a dug-out yawned in the
front of the trench, a dark passage cased in with timber, sloping steeply
down to the cave below.  Voices, and sometimes snores, came drowsily up
from the bottom, where odd bunches of the South Loamshires for a space
existed beautifully.


"Hullo, old man--how's life?"  He rounded a traverse to find an officer
of the battalion lathering his chin for his morning shave.  A cracked
mirror was scotched up between two sandbags, and a small indiarubber
basin leaked stealthily on the firing step.

"So-so!  That bally pump of yours won't work again, or so the cook says.
Jenkins, pass the word along for Smithson.  He is the cook, and will tell
you the whole sordid story."

"Quiet night?"  The Sapper sat down and refilled his pipe.

"Fairly.  They caught one of our fellows in the entrance to his dug-out
up in the front line with an aerial dart about seven o'clock.  Landed
just at the entrance.  Blew the top of his head off.  Good boy, too--just
been given his stripe.  Oh, Smithson!--tell the Engineer officer about
that pump.  Confound!--I've shaved a mosquito bite!"

The cook--a veteran of many years--looked at the placidly smoking Sapper
and cleared his throat.  On any subject he was an artist; on pumps and
the deficiencies of Ally Sloper's Cavalry--as the A.S.C. is vulgarly
known--he was a genius.

"Well, sir, it's like this 'ere.  That there pump is a funny kind o'
pump.  Sometimes it gives you water and sometimes it don't."

"You surprise me," murmured the Sapper.

"Now, if I might be so bold, sir, I would suggest that another well be
sunk, sir--starting fresh-like from the beginning.  Then I could keep my
heye on it, and see that no one wasn't a-monkeying with it.  As it is,
wot with the stuff we're a-getting and the shortage of tea and the
distance I 'ave to go for water, and----"

"Well, what do you expect?"  A bitter voice from round the traverse
rudely interrupted the discourse.  "We make pumps to pump water--not dead
rats.  Wasting my time, that's what it is.  Where 'ave I put it?  In that
there perisher Smithson's dug-out, and 'e can 'ave it for his dinner."
The plumber previously sent up on receipt of the Adjutant's note came
round the corner, and, seeing his officer, stopped and saluted.

"That there pump's all right, sir.  There was a dead rat in it.  They
_will_ leave the cover off the well."  He perceived the horrified
Smithson, and fixed him with the frozen eye.

"Right.  Then you can rejoin your section."  The Sapper rose, the plumber
departed, the cook faded away, and for a space there was silence.

"Damn that fellow Smithson--he's the limit."  The Infantry Officer
laughed.  "I'll rend him for this."

"Sometimes it gives you water, and sometimes it don't," remarked the
Sapper pensively.  "Last time it was a sock.  Bye-bye.  I hope he'll
enjoy his dinner."

He followed the plumber back along Piccadilly, composing in his mind a
suitable answer to the message of despair from the Adjutant.

"With ref. to your min. of yesterday I would suggest that a larger flow
of somewhat purer water would be available if the practice of inserting
deceased rodents in the delivery pipe was discontinued forthwith.  I am
fully alive to the fact that what the eye does not see the heart does not
grieve about, and I realise that, viewed from that standpoint only, the
grave of the little animal in question could not well be improved on.  I
also realise that it adds that flavour to the tea which is so sought
after by the true connoisseur.  But, desiring to view the matter from the
clearer vantage point of an unbiassed onlooker, I venture to suggest----"

His meditations were interrupted by a procession of gunners each carrying
on his shoulder an unpleasant-looking object which resembled a gigantic
dumb-bell with only one blob on the end--a huge spherical cannon-ball on
a steel stalk.  They were coming from Leicester Square, and he met them
just as they turned up the Haymarket.  Waiting until they had all gone
by, he followed on in the rear of the party, which suddenly turned sharp
to the left, and disappeared into the bowels of the earth.

"No. 7," murmured the Sapper to himself.  "I wonder if the officer is
new?"  He turned to a bombardier standing at the entrance to the passage.
"Is your officer here?"

"He's down below, sir."  The man drew to one side, and the Sapper passed
up a narrow deep trench and went "down below" to the trench-mortar
emplacement, a cave hewn out of the ground much on the principle of an
ordinary dug-out.  But there were certain great differences; for half the
roof had been removed, and through the hole thus formed streamed in the
early morning sun.  A screen of rabbit wire covered with bits of grass,
lying horizontally over the open hole when the gun was not firing, helped
to conceal it from the prying eyes of Hun aeroplanes.  Let into the
ground and mounted and clamped to a stand was the mortar itself--while
beside it sat a very young gunner officer, much in the attitude of a
mother beside her firstborn.  He was obviously new to the game, and the
Sapper surveyed him with indulgent eye.

"Good morning."  The Gunner looked up quickly.  "I'm the Sapper Officer
on this bit of line.  You've just come in, haven't you?"

"Yes, early this morning.  Everything seems very quiet here."

"From four till eight or nine it's always peaceful.  But I don't know
that you'll find this spot very quiet once you start pooping off.  This
particular emplacement was spotted some two months ago by the wily Hun,
and he got some direct hits on it with small stuff.  Since then it hasn't
been used.  There are lots of others, you know."

"I was ordered to come to this one," answered the boy doubtfully.

"Right-oh! my dear fellow--it's your funeral.  I thought I'd just let you
know.  Are you letting drive this morning?"

"Yes--as soon as I get the order to fire."

The boy was keen as mustard, and, as I have said, very young--just
another infant.  He had not long to wait, for hardly were the words out
of his mouth when a sergeant came in.

"Captain's compliments, sir, and will you fire two rounds at G. 10 C. 5
4?"

Rapidly and without confusion the men did their appointed jobs; the great
stalk slithered down the gun, the bomb--big as a football--filled with
high explosive was fixed with a detonator, the lanyard to fire the charge
was adjusted.  Then every one cleared out of the emplacement, while the
Sapper took his stand in the trench outside.

"Let her rip."  The lanyard was pulled, and with a muffled crack the huge
cannon-ball rose into the air, its steel stalk swaying behind it.
Plainly visible, it reached its highest point, and still wobbling
drunkenly went swishing down on to G. 10 C. 54--or thereabouts.  A roar
and a great column of black smoke rose from the German lines.

Almost before the report had died away, the gun was sponged out, and
another inebriated monster departed on its mission.  But the Sapper was
already some way up the Haymarket.  It was not his first view of a
trench-mortar firing.

A vicious crack from a rifle now and then broke the stillness, and
proclaimed that the sun was clearing away the morning mist, and that
rest-time was nearly over; while the sudden rattle of a machine gun close
by him, indulging in a little indirect fire at a well-known Hun gathering
place a thousand yards or so behind their lines, disturbed a covey of
partridges, which rose with an angry whirring of wings.  Then came four
of those unmistakable faint muffled bursts from high above his head,
which betokened an aeroplane's morning gallop; and even as he
automatically jerked his head skywards, with a swishing noise something
buried itself in the earth not far away.  It is well to remember that
even Archibald's offspring obey the laws of gravity, and shells from an
anti-aircraft gun, burst they never so high, descend sooner or later in
the shape of jagged fragments--somewhere.  And if the somewhere is your
face, upturned to see the fun . . . !

The Sapper, with the remembrance fresh in his mind of a pal looking up in
just such a way a week before, quickly presented the top of his tin hat
to the skies, and all that might descend from them.  There had been that
same swishing all round them as they stood watching some close shooting
at one of our own planes.  He recalled the moment when he cried
suddenly--"Jove! they've got him!"  He had turned as he spoke to see the
officer with him, slipping sideways, knees crumpling, body sagging.
"Good God! old man, what is it?"  The question was involuntary, for as he
caught the limp figure--he knew.

The plane was all right: the German shells had not got it; but a piece of
shrapnel, the size of a match-box, had passed through that officer's eye,
and entered his brain.  He had laid him on the firing-step, and covered
his head--or what was left of it. . . .


He reached Pall Mall, to be once again confronted with a large white
notice board.  To the right were Boyaux 93 and 94--to the left, 91 and
90.  Straight on to the front, 92 led to the firing line.  With his
ultimate destination Vesuvius crater and the rum jar in view, he turned
to the right, and walked along the support trench.  It was much the same
as Piccadilly: only being one degree nearer the front, it was one degree
more warlike.  Boxes of bombs everywhere; stands for rifles on the
firing-step, which held them rigidly when they fired rifle grenades; and
every now and then a row of grey-painted rockets with a red top, which in
case of emergency send up the coloured flares that give the S.O.S.
signals to those behind.  Also men: men who slept and ate and shaved and
wrote and got bored.  A poor show is trench warfare!

"Look out, sir.  They've knocked it in just round the corner last night
with trench mortars."  A sergeant of the South Loamshires was speaking.
"Having a go at Laburnum Cottage, I'm thinking."

"What, that sniper's post?  Have you been using it?"

"One of our men in there now, sir.  He saw an Allemand go to ground in
his dug-out half an hour ago through the mist, and he reckons he ought to
finish breakfast soon, and come out again."

The Sapper crawled on his stomach over the _débris_ that blocked the
trench, and stopped at the entrance to Laburnum Cottage, officially known
as Sniper's Post No. 4.  In a little recess pushed out to the front of
the trench, covered in with corrugated iron and surrounded by sandbags,
sprawled the motionless figure of a Lance-Corporal.  With his eye glued
to his telescopic sight and his finger on the trigger of his rifle, he
seemed hardly to be breathing.  Suddenly he gave a slight grunt, and the
next instant, with a sharp crack, the rifle fired.

"Get him?" asked the Sapper.

"Dunno, sir," answered the sniper, his eye still fixed to the telescope.
"Three 'undred yards, and 'e ducked like 'ell.  It wasn't far off 'is
nibs, but one can't tell for sure."  He got down and stretched himself.
"I've waited 'alf an 'our for the perisher, too, without no breakfast."
He grinned and scrambled over the broken-down trench to remedy the latter
deficiency, while once more the Sapper walked on.  No need with this
particular regiment to suggest rebuilding the broken-in trench; it would
be done automatically--which cannot be said of them all.

At last he reached Boyau 94, and turned up towards the firing-line.
Twenty yards from the turn a mass of barbed wire crossed the trench above
his head, the barbed wire which ran in front of the support line.  For it
is not only the fire-trench that is wired--each line behind is
plentifully supplied with this beautiful vegetable growth.

The mist had cleared away, and the morning sun was blazing down from a
cloudless sky, as he reached the front trench.  Just to his left a
monstrous pair of bellows, slowly heaving up and down under the
ministrations of two pessimistic miners, sent a little of God's fresh air
down to the men in the mine-shafts underneath.  The moles were there--the
moles who scratched and scraped stolidly, at the end of their gallery
thirty or forty yards in front, deep down under the earth in No Man's
Land.

A steady stream of sandbags filled with the result of their labours came
up the shaft down which the pipe from the bellows stretched into the
darkness--sandbags which must be taken somewhere and emptied, or used to
revet a bit of trench which needed repair.

To right and left there stretched the fire-trench--twisting and turning,
traversed and recessed--just one small bit of the edge of British land.
A hundred yards away, a similar line stretched right and left, where
other pessimistic miners ministered to other monstrous bellows, and
Piccadilly was known as Unter den Linden.  The strange stagnation of it
all!

Look through the periscope at the country in front.  Not a sign of life
in the torn-up crusted earth; not a movement between the two long lines
of wire.  A few poppies here and there, and at one point a motionless
grey-green lump close to the farther wire.  Impossible to tell exactly
what it is from the periscope--the range is too far.  But, in No Man's
Land, such strange grey--and khaki--lumps may often be seen.  The night,
a wiring party, perhaps a little raid or an officer's patrol,
and--discovery.  You cannot always get your dead back to the trench, and
the laws that govern No Man's Land savour of the primitive. . . .

The Sapper watched the phlegmatic bellows-heaver for a few moments
curiously.  His stoical indifference to any one or anything save the job
in hand, the wonderful accuracy with which he spat from time to time, the
appalling fumes from his short clay pipe, all tended to make of him an
interesting study.  Supremely apathetic to friend or foe, Generals or
Huns, he did his shift without comment and, as far as could be seen,
without thought.

"Where are you putting the earth?" asked the Sapper after watching for a
while.

"Round corner, in a 'ole."  The speaker pointed with his pipe, and the
subject dropped.

The officer turned away smiling slightly, and decided on the inspection
of the rum jar.  The answer was clear and succinct, even if not couched
in the language of the old army discipline.  He inspected the hole, and,
finding it was at the back of the trench, in a crater that was formed
nightly by German _minenwerfer_, and that more earth there not only would
not block the trench but, _mirabile dicta_, would be an actual advantage,
he passed on and shortly came to a passage leading out of the front of
the trench.

The passage was labelled Sap No. 130, and presented exactly the same
appearance as the boyaux which ran out of the support line to the front
trench.  Only when one got into it did the difference become apparent,
for whereas the boyaux had continued until finally opening into a new
trench, the sap was a cul-de-sac, and finished abruptly in a little
covered-in recess built into a miniature mountain of newly-thrown-up
earth.  And this great, tumbled mass of soil was the near lip of Vesuvius
crater--blown up half way between the two front lines.

Over the top of the mountain there was no passage.  A man standing or
crawling there in daytime would have been in full view of German snipers
at a range of forty yards; while had he accomplished it in safety, he
would have slithered down the farther side into a great cavity shaped
like an egg-cup, at the bottom of which a pool of dirty, stagnant water
was slowly forming.  Moreover, if we imagine the man continuing his
journey and climbing up the other side, he would run the gauntlet of the
English snipers as he topped the farther lip, before reaching the German
sap which ran out in just such a similar cul-de-sac to the one already
described.

Thus are craters consolidated; each side holds the lip nearest to them,
and hurls curses and bombs at his opponents on the other.  The distance
between the sapheads is perhaps twenty or twenty-five yards, instead of
the hundred odd of the parent fire-trenches; and any closer
acquaintanceship is barred by the egg-cup crater, which stretches between
them.

"Keep down, sir--well down.  Lot of sniping to-day."  A sergeant of the
South Loamshires whispered hoarsely to the Sapper as he reached the end
of the sap--it is etiquette to whisper in a sap.  Three men inside the
recess were drinking tea with the calmness born of long custom, while
lying on his side, with a periscope to his eye, was Jackson, the
subaltern.

"Anything fresh, Jacko?" muttered the Sapper, crouching down beside him.

"Yes--I think they're coming closer with their left sap round the crater.
Their periscope seems to be nearer than it was yesterday."

"Let's have a look."  The two changed position, and the Captain turned
the periscope gently round until he got the exact direction.  Absolute
stillness brooded over the ground he could see; a few rough strands of
wire straggled about, and disappeared into the great mound of earth that
formed the _débris_ of the crater.

There were the enemies' trenches--a railway embankment behind them with a
derelict row of trucks--a great chimney, gaunt and desolate, with the
buildings at its foot in ruins.  But it was not on these old friends that
he was concentrating; his target was the bit of ground just in front of
him that lay close to the thrown-up earth of Vesuvius, along which the
German sap was reputed to be creeping nearer.

At last he got what he wanted.  Close at hand, perhaps twenty yards away,
there stuck up out of the ground a motionless stick with something on the
end--the German's periscope.  Now it is reputed to be a fact by several
people of apparent truthfulness that it is possible, in circumstances
such as these, for each watcher to see the other man's eyes reflected
from the mirrors of the periscopes; and it is an undoubted fact that the
laws which govern the refraction of light would allow of this phenomenon.
Personally, I am glad to say I have never seen a German's eye through a
periscope; but then personally I am inclined to doubt if any one has.  It
must be quite dreadful to see a thing like a poached egg regarding you
balefully from the top of a stick a few yards away.

At last the Sapper got up.  "He's no nearer, Jacko.  What do you think,
sergeant?"

"I don't think they were working last night, sir," one of the
tea-drinkers answered.

"There was a party of 'em out, and we bunged some bombs.  We 'eard 'em
padding the 'oof back."

"Been pretty quiet, then?"

"Except for that there rum jar, sir," answered the sergeant.  "We thought
we was napoo[1] when we 'eard that little bundle of fun a-coming."

"Have you seen it, Jacko?"

"Yes, it rolled into the sap, and I've had it put into the fire-trench.
I'm taking it back to blow it up.  I think it's a percussion fuse, but it
seems fairly safe.  I've sent for a stretcher to carry it on."

"Let's go and have a look at it."

The two officers walked down the sap and back into the trench, and
started to investigate with a professional eye the object lying on the
fire-step.  Apparently of steel, and painted a dull grey, it looked
harmless enough--but all those little love offerings of the Hun are
treated with respect.  About the size of an ordinary rum jar, with a fuse
of sorts in place of a neck, it was at the time an unknown brand of
abomination, to them at any rate.

"It differs only in appearance, I fear," remarked the Captain, after
inspecting it gingerly, "from other presents they give us.  Its object is
undoubtedly nefarious.  Where do you propose to blow it up?"

"In that little quarry near the Ritz.  Will that do all right?"

"Most excellently."  With a smile he looked at his watch.  "Just set your
watch by mine, Jacko--and poop it off at 10.5 ak emma.  Do you take me?"

The other looked puzzled for a moment; then his face cleared.

"I'd forgotten for the moment that Centre Battalion Head-quarters was not
far from the quarry," he grinned.  "Sir--I take you."

"My dear boy, the day is hot, and the Pumpkin is fat, and the flies are
glutinous.  He doesn't want to see the trenches any more than I do--and
one's mission in life is to anticipate the wishes of the great."

It was just as he finished speaking that from up the line in the
direction of the Haymarket there came four dull, vicious cracks in
succession, and some clouds of black smoke drifted slowly over his head.

"Just about No. 7 T.M. emplacement," he muttered to himself.  "I hope to
heavens . . ."

"Put it on the stretcher carefully, boys."  His subaltern was speaking to
the two men who had arrived with a stretcher.  "Have you got the slab of
gun-cotton?"

"Corporal 'Amick 'as gone to get it at the store, sir.  He's a-going to
meet us at the quarry."

"Right-ho!  Walk march."

The cavalcade departed, and the Captain resumed his morning walk, while
his thoughts wandered to the beer which is cold and light yellow.  For
many weary months had he taken a similar constitutional daily; not always
in the same place, true; but variety is hard to find in the actual
trenches themselves.  It is the country behind that makes the difference.

Time was when communication trenches existed only in the fertile brain of
those who were never called upon to use them; but that time has passed
long since.  Time was when the thin, tired breaking line of men who
fought the Prussian Guard at Ypres in 1914--and beat them--had hard work
to find the fire-trenches, let alone the communication ones; when a daily
supervision was a nerve-shattering nightly crawl, and dug-outs were
shell-holes covered with a leaking mackintosh.  It was then that men
stood for three weeks on end in an icy composition of water and slime,
and if by chance they did get a relief for a night, merely clambered out
over the back, and squelched wearily over the open ground with bullets
pinging past them from the Germans a few score yards away.

But now there are trenches in canal banks where dead things drift slowly
by, and trenches in railway embankments where the rails are red with rust
and the sleepers green with rot; there are trenches in the chalk, good
and deep, which stand well, and trenches in the slush and slime which
never stand at all; there are trenches where the smell of the long grass
comes sweetly on the west wind, and trenches where the stench of death
comes nauseous on the east.  And one and all are they damnable, for ever
accursed . . .

But the country behind--ah! there's where the difference comes.  You may
have the dead flat of pastoral Flanders, the little woods, the plough,
the dykes of Ypres and Boesinghe; you may have the slag-heaps and smoking
chimneys of La Bassée and Loos; you may have the gently undulating
country of Albert and the Somme.  Each bears the marks of the German
beast--and, like their inhabitants, they show those marks differently.
Ypres and the North, apathetic, seemingly lifeless; the mining districts,
grim and dour; the rolling plains still, in spite of all, cheerful and
smiling.  But underlying them all--deep implacable determination, a grand
national hatred of the Power who has done this thing. . . .


He turned out of the Old Kent Road into a siding which harboured the
dug-outs of the Centre Battalion.

"Is the General here yet, Murdock?"  A tall sergeant of the regiment--an
old friend of his--flattened himself against the side of the trench to
let him pass.

"Yes, sir."  The sergeant's face was expressionless, though his eyes
twinkled.  "I think, sir, as 'ow the General is feeling the 'eat.  'E
seems worried.  'E's been trying to telephone."

The Sapper, with a suppressed chuckle, went down some steps into a
spacious dug-out.  The darkness made him temporarily blind, so he saluted
and stood still just inside the doorway.

"Damn you, don't blow at me!  What's that fool blowin' down the thing
for?  I _have_ pressed a button--confound you!--and rung the bell twice.
No--I didn't ring off; somebody blew at me, and the machine fell on the
floor."

"The General is trying to get through to his château."  A voice full of
unholy joy whispered in the Sapper's ear, and that worthy, whose eyes had
got accustomed to the gloom, recognised the Adjutant.

"I gathered that something of the sort was occurring," he whispered back.

But the General was at it again.  "Who are you--the R.T.O.?  Well, ring
off.  Exchange.  Exchange.  It is the Divisional General speaking.  I
want my head-quarters.  I say, I want my--oh, don't twitter, and the
bally thing's singin' now!  First it blows and then it sings.  Good God!
what's that?"

A deafening explosion shook the dug-out, and a shower of earth and stones
rained down in the trench outside.

"They're very active this morning, sir," said the Sapper, stepping
forward.  "Lot of rum jars and things coming over."

"Are you the Sapper officer?  Good morning.  I wish you'd get this
accursed instrument to work."

"There may be a line broken," he remarked tactfully.

"Well--I shall have to go back; I can't hear a word.  The thing does
nothin' but squeak.  Now it's purring like a cat.  I hate cats.  Most
annoyin'.  I wanted to come round the front line this morning."

"In very good condition, sir; I've just been all round it.  Mighty hot up
there, General--and swarms of flies."

"And they're puttin' over some stuff, you say?"

"Yes, sir--quite a lot."

"Hum!  Well, of course, I fully intended to come round--but, dash it all,
I must get back.  Can't hear a word the fellow says.  Does nothing but
play tunes."  The Pumpkin rose and stalked to the door.  "Well, I'll come
round another morning, my boy.  I wonder, by Jove! if that last one was
meant for this head-quarters?  Devilish near, you know."  He walked up
the stairs, followed by his staff officer.  "Good mornin'--mind you see
about that telephone.  Cursed thing blows."

"Dear old Pumpkin," murmured the Adjutant as his steps died away.  "He's
a topper.  His figure's against him, but he's got the heart of a lion."

"He has," answered the Sapper, preparing to follow his footsteps.  "And
the men would do anything for him."

"What price that rum jar I sent in a bird about?"

"That was the last explosion you heard," laughed the Sapper.  "I wasn't
leaving anything to chance.  I am going to go and drink beer--iced beer,
in long glasses.  _Toujours à toi_."

He was gone, leaving the Adjutant staring.  A few moments later he
clambered out of the trench, and struck out for the crumbling church that
betokened a road and the near presence of his bicycle.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

A day of peace--yes, as things go, a day of perfect peace.  Away down
South things were moving; this was stagnation.  And yet--well, it was at
dinner that night . . .

"For the fourteenth night in succession I rise to a point of order."  The
Doctor was speaking.  "Why is the lady with the butterfly on her back
pushed away into one corner, and that horrible woman with the green wig
accorded the place of honour?"

I would hurriedly state that the Doctor's remarks were anent two pictures
which are, I believe, occasionally to be found in officers' messes in the
B.E.F.--pictures of a Parisian flavour as befits the Entente--pictures
which--at any rate they are well known to many, and I will not specify
further.

"Yes, the lady with the gween wig is dweadful."  The boy sipped his port.

"Infant, I'm shocked at you.  The depravity of these children
nowadays . . ."

An orderly came into the room with an envelope, which he handed to the
Captain.

The C.O. spread out the flimsy paper and frowned slightly as he read the
message.

"T.M. Emp. No. 7, completely wrecked by a direct hit 9.30 a.m. this
morning, A.A.A.  Please inspect and report, A.A.A., C.R.E., 140th
Division."

"Delayed as usual," grunted the Scotchman.  "I was there just after it
happened, and reported it to the O.C. Trench Mortars.  Did you not hear,
sir, for it's useless repairing it?  That position is too well known."

"Were there any casualties?"  The Sapper Captain's voice was quiet.

"Aye.  The poor lad that was crooning over his gun when I saw him this
morning, like a cat over her undrowned kitten, just disappeared."

"What d'you mean, Mac?"

"It was one of the big ones, and it came right through the wire on top of
him."  The gruff voice was soft.  "Poor bairn!"



[1] _Special Note to Lovers of Etymology_.

_Il n'y en a plus_.  There is no more.  French phrase signifying complete
absence of.  Largely heard in estaminets near closing time.

_Naploo_.--Original pure English phrase signifying the perisher has run
out of beer.

_Napoo_.--Vulgar and bastardised shortening of original pure English
phrase.  Has now been added to B.E.F. dictionary, and is used to imply
that a man, thing, person, animal, or what not, is "finished."




II

OVER THE TOP

"On the afternoon of the 21st we gained a small local success.  Our
line was advanced on a front of six hundred yards, over an average
depth of a quarter of a mile.  All the ground gained was successfully
consolidated.  Up to date eighty-six unwounded prisoners have passed
through the corps cage, of whom three are officers."

Thus ran the brief official notice so tersely given in the
"Intelligence Summary," known to the ribald as "Comic Cuts"; later it
will appear even more tersely in the daily communiqué which delights
the matutinal kipper and twin eggs of England.  It's all so simple; it
all sounds such a ridiculously easy matter to those who read.  Map
maniacs stab inaccurate maps with pins; a few amateur strategists
discourse at length, and with incredible ignorance, on the bearing
it--and countless other similar operations--will have on the main
issue.  And the vast majority remark gloomily to the other members of
the breakfast table that there is nothing in the paper as usual.
Nothing, my friend!  I wonder. . . .

This is not a story; there is no plot; it is just what happens every
day somewhere or other in the land of glutinous, stinking mud, where
the soles are pulled off a man's boots when he walks and horses go in
up to their bellies; where one steers a precarious and slippery course
on the narrow necks of earth that separate shell holes, and huddled
things stare up at the sky with unseeing eyes.  They went "over the
top" themselves--ten days ago--in just such another local success.
Nothing, my friend!  Perhaps you're right; it's mainly a sense of
proportion that is needed in war, as in other things. . . .


"Good morning, dear old soul."  The machine-gun officer emerged from a
watery hole of doubtful aspect, covered with a dented sheet of
corrugated iron and a flattened-out biscuit tin--the hole that is, not
the officer.  "We have slept well, thank you; and the wife and family
are flourishing.  Moreover--you're late."

The Sapper regarded him pessimistically through the chilly mist of an
October dawn.  "Entirely owing to my new and expensive waders being
plucked from my feet with a sucking noise.  A section of haggard men
are now engaged in salvage operations.  Shall we process?"

"We shall--in one sweet moment, not before.  Sweet, brave heart,
because----"  He put his head round the corner.  "Jones--the raspberry
wine--_toute suite_.  Just a hollow tooth full, and we will gambol like
young lambs the whole long weary way."

"It is well," remarked the Sapper, returning the empty mug to the
soldier servant.  "Personally I like it burnt at night, with a noggin
of port.  You put it in a mug, add three spoonfuls of sugar, set light
to it, and let it burn for seven minutes.  Then add some port, and
drink hot.  Man, you can lead an army corps . . ."  His voice died away
as the two officers departed on their three-mile squelch to the front
line, and the unshaven Jones gazed after them admiringly.

"A hartist!" he murmured admiringly, "a plurry hartist.  Personally,
the rasberry juice, any old 'ow for me."  He disappeared from view, and
further disclosures would be tactless. . . .

And so we lift the curtain on the dawn of the 21st.  Doubtless the
setting is frivolous, but it has served to introduce two of the supers
who go to make up the final scene.  In the portion of the front line
for which they were bound there lay the battalion which was cast for
the principal part, and it is the prerogative of stars to have their
entrance led up to. . . .

The mist hung thick over the shell-torn ground as the two officers
walked on.  In places stretches of half-demolished wire and blown-in
trenches showed where the Germans had put up a fight.  Stray graves,
ours and theirs, were dotted about promiscuously, and little heaps of
dirty and caked equipment showed that salvage work was in progress.
Away to the left a few crumbling walls and shattered trees marked a
one-time prosperous agricultural village, from which with great
regularity there came the sighing drone of a German crump followed by a
column of black smoke and a shower of bricks and _débris_.  But the
place was dead; its inhabitants gone--God knows where.  And soldiers:
well, soldiers have a rooted dislike to dead villages near the trenches.

A strange squat object loomed suddenly into sight--a well-known
landmark to those who wandered daily behind the lines.  Derelict,
motionless, it lay on a sunken road, completely blocking it; and the
sunken road was heavy with the stench of death.  It is not good for the
Hun to take liberties with a tank, even if it is temporarily
_hors-de-combat_.

A man limping wearily, his head bandaged, his face unshaved, his khaki
coated with half-dry mud, plodded heavily towards them.

"Can you tell me the way to the dressing-station, sir?"  He had stopped
and, swaying slightly, stood in front of the two officers.

"Straight on, lad.  You'll find it somewhere back there."  The
machine-gun officer pointed vaguely into the mist.  "About half a mile."

"You ain't got a drop of water, 'ave you, sir?  The water party got
lost last night, and we've only had about a teacupful this last
twenty-four hours."

But when going up to visit the trenches water-bottles are a useless
encumbrance, and, with a tired sigh, the wounded Tommy resumed his
thirsty way in the direction of the dressing-station.

"Cooked, poor devil," remarked the Sapper, as he disappeared.  "Pretty
nearly finished."

"But he'll be his mother's own bright boy again when he gets his nose
inside that aid post.  We go left here, I think."

They paused for a moment to get their bearings--a matter of some
importance and no little difficulty.

It may seem an easy thing to walk up to the trenches.  One goes on, and
ultimately one arrives, the casual reader will surmise.  And with luck
the casual reader will be right.  But there are certain small points
which may have escaped his ken and which render the task of reaching
the front line a trifle harder than walking to the club for lunch.

In the first place the aspect of the ground is not of that cheerful and
varied type which has inspired so many gifted landscape painters.  No
trees and little rivers, no cottages and flowering paths delight one's
eye.  It is impossible to say: "Take the turn to the left after passing
the cactus bush, and keep straight on till you come to the asparagus
bed; and then you'll see the front trench on your right."

The local cactus bush or its equivalent is hurled into space twice
daily, thereby largely interfering with its use as a landmark.  The
local asparagus bed or its equivalent differs only from the remainder
of the ground in the fact that a mule passed peacefully away on it some
weeks previously.  And one day even that difference vanished.  The mule
passed away again--in small fragments.

Even the front trenches where they exist have a variegated career.  At
certain periods quite a large proportion of them are in the air at the
same time, in company with the village just behind; and when they come
down again it is more than likely their position will change to the
next row of damp and unpleasant holes.

That is the trouble: the whole ground is one huge hole.  Holes are the
only features of the landscape: big holes, little holes, damp ones,
smelly ones; holes occupied and holes to let; holes you fall into and
holes you don't--but, holes.  Everywhere holes.  The cactus bush is a
hole; the asparagus bed is a hole; the trenches are holes.  The whole
country looks like a disease.  A large amount of the wandering must
perforce be done at night; and should the casual reader still doubt the
difficulty of finding one's way, let him imagine three voluntary
descents, and as many compulsory ones, into the wet brand of hole; let
him further imagine a steady downpour of rain, no sign of a star, and a
shrewd suspicion that if he's walked as far as he thinks he has in the
right direction he ought to be in the front line; and then let him
imagine--holes.  Whenever he moves he either negotiates or fails to
negotiate--holes.  Having, in scrambling out of holes turned round
twice he doesn't know which way he's facing; he only knows there
are--holes.  Toc--toc--toc; the slow tapping of a German machine-gun
sounds from the direction he had fondly imagined Battalion
Head-quarters to be; the swish of bullets come nearer as the Hun sweeps
the ground; a flare goes up, showing--holes.  Another compulsory
descent; a phut! as a bullet passes over his head, and the swishing
passes on.  Shortly that swishing will come back, and in the meantime
are there not--holes?  But as for the front trench, whither he is
bound, the contest is unequal.  No man can fight--holes.

A further point which is worthy of remark _en passant_ may possibly
escape the notice of the uninitiated.  It is a well-known fact, and
will be vouched for by all who have experienced the Somme, that that
part of the ground which is not hole is carried, like the unexpended
portion of the day's rations, on the person.  Acres of soil have been
removed from their original abode and have been carried laboriously to
other acres.  They have then been brought back again; not by boot only,
but by hand, and face, by hair and teeth.  It is reported--though I
will not vouch for the accuracy of the statement--that on one occasion
a relieving battalion completely defeated a small German counter-attack
by standing on the parapet and kicking viciously towards the advancing
Huns.  The enormous mass of soil thus propelled not only crushed the
hated foe but effectually buried him.  However, that is by the way.  We
are digressing far from the Sapper and the machine-gun officer who
stood by a derelict tank in the damp mist of an October dawn and
cogitated on the direction of their particular piece of front line.

"It is amazing," said a voice behind them, "that man can have descended
to such a state of congenital idiocy as to do all this to an
inoffensive carrot field."

The Brigade-Major, followed by the Brigadier, joined the two officers.
Behind them the signal officer plucked France from his face.  And then
of a sudden five officers disappeared.  A droning roar rose with
extreme rapidity to that pitch of loudness that denotes undesirable
closeness; a mass of black fumes and flying mud shot up twenty odd
yards away; a flight of cockchafers seemed to pass into the distance as
the jagged fragments whizzed overhead--and five faces appeared as
suddenly from the ground.  Holes have their uses at times.

"This sunken road is always hairy," remarked the signal officer--known
to his intimates as Sigs--giving the General a hand-up from his
particular lair.  "It were unwise to linger, sir."

"Another quarter-mile and we hit Essex Trench," remarked the
Brigade-Major.  "Sally's head-quarters are there."  The five officers
passed on, squelching loudly, and once again peace and silence reigned
in the sunken road. . . .

And now we come to the principal actors in the drama.  Crowded in Essex
Trench, damp with mist, were the men of the South Loamshires.  A few
were scribbling notes, and an all-pervading smell of frying bacon
permeated the air.  One or two, wrapped in great-coats, with a
mackintosh sheet over them, still slept peacefully--but the whole
regiment was stirring into life.  The morning of the day had come.  To
many it was a new experience; to others it was stale--going over the
top.  But, new or old, not a man but realised that by evening the roll
of the regiment would have many gaps; new or old, not a man but
realised that his name might be one of those gaps.  Just the luck of
the game; perhaps nothing, perhaps a Blighty, perhaps . . .

It is well without doubt that the lower the intelligence the less the
imagination.  To ninety per cent. of these men the situation lost much
of its edge; to the remaining ten the edge was sharpened.  What is to
be is to be, in war as elsewhere.  Fatalism as regards one's own
prospects is inevitable; essential.  But fatalism is an unsatisfying
creed; the word "Why?" is apt to creep into the back of a man's mind,
and the word "Why?" when the intelligence is low, is a dangerous one.
For the word "Why?" can only be satisfactorily answered by the
realisation of the bigness of the issue; by the knowledge that
individual effort is imperative if collective success is to be
obtained; by the absolute conviction that no man can be a law unto
himself.  To the ten per cent. these facts were clear; but then, to the
ten per cent. the "Why?" was louder.  The factor of their composition
which said to them "Why?"--clearly and insistently--even as they lay
motionless under their coats or outwardly wrangled for bacon and
tea--that very factor supplied the answer.

To the thinkers and dreamers there comes at such times the greater
knowledge: the knowledge which lifts them above self and the
trivialities of their own lives; the knowledge that is almost Divine.
They appreciate the futility--but they realise the necessity.  And in
their hearts they laugh sardonically as the shadow of Dream's End
clouds the sky.  The utter futility of it all--the utter necessity now
that futility has caught the world.  Then they realise the bacon is
cold--and curse.

To the ninety per cent. it is not so.  Not theirs to reason so acutely,
not theirs to care so much; to them the two dominant features of this
war--death and boredom--appeal with far less force.  For both depend so
utterly on imagination in their effect on the individual.  Death is
only awful in anticipation; boredom only an affliction to the
keen-witted.  So to the ninety, perhaps, the "Why?" does not sound
insistently.  It is as well, for if the answer is not forthcoming there
is danger, as I have said.  And one wonders sometimes which class
produces the best results for the business in hand--the business of
slaughtering Huns. . . .  The small one that rises to great heights and
sinks to great depths, or the big one, the plodders.

But I have digressed again.  It is easy to wander into by-paths when
the main road is prosaic, and the study of a body of men before an
attack--the men who fear and don't show it, the men who fear and try
not to show it, the men who don't care a hang what happens--cannot but
grip the observer who has eyes to see.  Almost does he forget his own
allotted part in the drama; the psychology of the thing is too
absorbing.  And it can only be realised when seen first hand.

Let us leave them there for the time--that battalion of the South
Loamshires.  Sally--as the C.O. is generally known--has talked with the
Brigadier and the Brigade-Major.  He knows that zero hour is 11.30
a.m.; he knows his objective--Suffolk Trench; he knows the strong point
at its northern end which the sappers are going to consolidate.  The
Sapper has found his section subaltern and his section nursing coils of
barbed wire and shovels, and has been informed with much blasphemy that
the guide had lost his way, and the party had been wandering all night.
The machine-gun officer has delivered words of wisdom to various guns'
crews--both Lewis and otherwise--who came under his eagle eye at
intervals along the trench.  Just the prosaic main road; the details
are tedious; the actual orders uninteresting.  The attack would either
succeed or it would fail; the strong point would either be consolidated
or it would not.  The orders--the details--are necessary adjuncts to
the operation; of no more interest than the arrangements for pulling up
the fire curtain.  Only if the fire curtain sticks, the play is robbed
of much of its natural charm to the onlooker.


"Bring me some more breakfast.  That walk gives one the devil of a
hunger."  The Brigadier was back once more in his dug-out, while,
outside, the mist had lifted and the autumn sun shone down on a world
of mud.

The Brigade-Major was shaving; the Staff Captain--a non-starter in the
morning's walk--was demanding corrugated iron from the unmoved Sapper.

"I tell you this roof is a disgrace.  Cascades of water pour through
into the soup at dinner.  Why don't you do something?"

"What do you propose I should do, brave heart?  Sit on the roof and
catch it?"

The subject was a complicated one, touching deep problems of supply and
demand, to say nothing of carrying parties; so let us leave them to
their warfare.

The signal officer was looking wise over something that boomed and
buzzed alternately; the machine-gun officer may, or may not, have been
enjoying another toothful.

In short, the supers, the stage-managers had departed.  The last
directions had been given, and the play was due to start in an hour and
a quarter.  All that could be done for its success had been done by
those who were behind; now it was up to the men who sat and sprawled in
the mud-holes in front, with the blue smoke of their cigarettes curling
upwards and their equipment and rifles stacked beside them.

A desultory bombardment on each side droned stolidly on, while away to
the front three British aeroplanes, seemingly come from nowhere,
tumbled and looped round two Germans like mosquitoes over a pool.  A
row of sausage balloons like a barber's rash adorned the sky as far as
the eye could see.  Just an everyday scene on the Somme, and meanwhile
the actors waited.

"Come up to the top.  There's ten minutes to go."  The Staff Captain
and the Sapper--their dispute settled--strolled amicably to the top of
the hill behind the dug-out and produced their field-glasses.  Away in
front Essex Trench could be seen, and the men inside it, standing to.
For them the period of suspense was nearly over--the curtain was just
going up.

"One minute."  The Sapper snapped his watch to and focussed his
glasses.  "They're on."

Suddenly from all around, as if touched by a spring, an ear-splitting
din leaped into life.  In the valley behind them it seemed as if
hundreds of tongues of flame were darting and quivering, sprouting from
what a moment before was barren ground.  The acrid smell of cordite
drifted over them, while without cessation there came the solemn
boom--boom--boom of the heavier guns way back.  Like the _motif_ of an
opera, the field-guns and light howitzers cracked and snorted,
permeating everything with one continuous blast of sound; while the
sonorous roar and rumble of the giant pieces behind--slower, as
befitted them--completed the mighty orchestra.  Neither man could hear
the other speak; but then, they were both watching too intently for
that.

Hardly had hell been let loose when a line of men arose from Essex
Trench and walked steadily to their front.  Just ahead of them great
clouds of smoke rose belching from the ground: clouds into which they
vanished at times, only to reappear a moment later.  They were
advancing behind a creeping barrage, and advancing with the steadiness
of automatic machines.

"Good lads!  Good lads!"  The Staff Captain's lips framed the words;
his voice was inaudible.

Every now and then a man pitched forward and lay still; or muttered a
curse as he felt the sting of something in his arm.  A section on the
left dropped suddenly, only to worm on again by ones and twos, trying
to avoid the dreaded toc-toc--slow and menacing--of a German
machine-gun.  Then the bombers were there.  Crouching back, a man would
pull the pin out of his bomb, run forward, and hurl it into the trench
where the Germans were huddled in groups.  And away behind the South
Loamshires, on the shell-pocked ground that now boiled and heaved like
some monstrous sulphur spring, with thick black and yellow fumes
drifting slowly across it, there lay the first fruits of the harvest: a
few of the gaps in the evening's roll-call.

On the flank a machine-gun was going, taking them in enfilade.  In
front, Germans--numbers of Germans--glared snarling at them out of the
trench, or whimpered in a corner with arms upraised, as was the nature
of the beasts.  A non-commissioned officer picked up a bomb and hurled
it at the advancing platoon sergeant; only to cry "_Kamerad_" when it
failed to explode. . . .

And so the South Loamshires, or such as were left of them, came to
their objective; the first part of the play was over.  The
machine-gunner who had enfiladed them passed in his checks, fighting to
the end, brained with the butt of a rifle.

Occasionally a wounded man crawled into the trench; a German officer
sat sullenly in a corner stanching a gaping hole in his leg.  Behind
them, towards the Essex Trench, the air was now clearer; the
bombardment had moved over the line they had won, and thundered down on
the German communications.

"Runner!"  A Company Commander stood shakily trying to patch up a wound
in his arm.  As far as he could tell from a hasty reconnaissance, he
was the senior officer present.  "Give this to the C.O.: 'Objectives
won.  Situation on right doubtful.  Estimated casualties two hundred.'"
He handed the man a slip of paper.

At a steady lope the runner went over the back of the trench, into the
barrage of German shrapnel and high explosive.  They saw him reach it,
stop suddenly, twist round, and slither slowly forward.

"Runner down, sir."  A sergeant standing by spoke almost casually.

"Runner!"  Once again the officer called; once again a man went off at
a jog-trot.  They saw him reach his predecessor; stop a moment and bend
down.  He looked round and shook his head and went steadily on.  The
luck of the game--that's all.  And it's only when one's sitting
still--waiting, that one asks "Why?"  Ten minutes later he was with the
C.O., waiting for the answer to take back.

And so the drama is over; the play has been a success.  From the wings
the Staff Captain and the Sapper have returned to Brigade Head-quarters.

"Saw 'em getting over the top, sir.  Then they got into the smoke and
we lost 'em.  Like a witches' cauldron."

"We shan't hear anything for two hours."  The General thoughtfully
knocked the ashes out of his pipe.  They were his men who had gone into
that witches' cauldron; with them daily he lived and daily died.  Their
Dream's End was his too.  But--a sense of proportion, always.  "We
might as well have lunch," he remarked casually.


Gradually the bombardment died away, though from time to time the guns
burst into sullen mutterings, as though hungry at being baulked of
their food.

The same old aeroplanes--or different ones--buzzed busily about; the
same old stoical balloons looked more rash-like than ever.

And then suddenly outside the brigade office there was a stir.

A runner had hove in sight, and the signal officer emerged to get his
tidings.

"Good," he muttered to himself; "the old man will be pleased."  He went
into the General's dug-out.

"Message just through, sir, from C.O. South Loamshires: 'Objectives
obtained.  A.A.A.  Situation on right somewhere obscure.  A.A.A.
Estimated casualties 200 all ranks.  A.A.A.  Will be consolidated
to-night.  A.A.A.'"

The "old man" _was_ pleased.

And so, on the afternoon of the 21st, we gained a small local success.
We advanced our line on a front of six hundred yards over an average
depth of a quarter of a mile, etc., etc.

It wasn't much, my friends at home; but--that runner will run no more,
and some eighty odd of that odd two hundred have cooked their last
ration of bacon.  Their "Why?" is answered.

No, it wasn't much; but it wasn't--nothing.




III

THE MAN-TRAP

Should you, in the course of your wanderings, ever run across
Brigadier-General Herbert Firebrace, do not ask him if he knows Percy
FitzPercy.  The warning is probably quite unnecessary: not knowing
FitzP. yourself, the question is hardly likely to occur to you.  But I
mention it in case.  One never knows, and Herbert will not be
prejudiced in your favour if you do.

As far as I know, the story of their first--and last--meeting has never
yet been told to the world at large.  It is a harrowing tale, and it
found no place in official _communiqués_.  Just one of those
regrettable incidents that fade into the limbo of forgotten things, it
served as a topic of conversation to certain ribald subalterns, and
then it gradually disappeared into obscurity along with Percy
FitzPercy.  Only it took several months for the topic to fade; Percy
beat it in about ten seconds.

Before the war Percy had been, amongst other things, an actor of
indifferent calibre; he had helped a barman in Canada, carried a chain
for a railroad survey, done a bit of rubber-planting, and written
poetry.  He was, in fact, a man of many parts, and cultivated a
frivolous demeanour and an eyeglass.  Unkind acquaintances described
him as the most monumental ass that has yet been produced by a
painstaking world; personally, I think the picture a trifle harsh.
Percy meant well; and it wasn't really his fault that the events I am
about to chronicle ended so disastrously.  Unfortunately, however, he
was unable to get the General to see eye to eye with him in this
trifling matter; and so, as I have already said, Percy beat it in about
ten seconds.

The whole trouble started over the question of man-traps.  "If,"
remarked a Sapper subaltern one night after the port had been round
more than once--"If one could construct a large conical hole like an
inverted funnel in the front-line trench, so that the small opening was
in the trench itself, and the bottom of the funnel fifteen or twenty
feet below in the ground, and if the Huns came over and raided us one
night, one might catch one or two."  He dreamily emptied and refilled
his glass.

"By Jove, dear old boy"--Percy fixed his eye-glass and gazed admiringly
at the speaker--"that's a splendid idea!  Sort of glorified
man-trap--what!--dear old thing."

"That's it, Percy, old lad.  Why don't you make one next time you're in
the trenches?"  The speaker winked at the remainder of the party.

"'Pon my soul, dear old man, I think I will."  Percy was clearly struck
with the idea.  "Cover the hole, don't you know, with trench-boards by
day, and have it open at night.  Great idea, old sport, great idea!"

"You could go and fish for them in the morning with a sausage on the
end of a string," murmured some one.  "Get 'em to sing the 'Hymn of
Hate' before they got any breakfast."

"Or even place large spikes at the bottom on which they would fall and
become impaled."  The first speaker was becoming bloodthirsty.

"Oh, no, dear old chap!  I don't think an impaled Hun would look very
nice.  It would be quite horrible in the morning, when one started to
count up the bag, to find them all impaled.  Besides, there might be
two on one stake."  Exactly the objection to the last contingency was
not clear; but after dinner attention to such trifles is of secondary
importance.

"Percy inaugurates new form of frightfulness," laughed the Major.  "May
I be there when you catch your first!"

The conversation dropped; other and more intimate topics anent the fair
ones at home took its place; but in the mind of Percy FitzPercy the
germ of invention was sown.  When he went back to his battalion that
night, in their so-called rest-billets, he was thinking.  Which was
always a perilous proceeding for Percy.

Now it so happened that his part of the line at the moment had
originally belonged to the Hun.  It was a confused bit of trench, in
which miners carried on extensively their reprehensible trade.  And
where there are miners there is also spoil.  Spoil, for the benefit of
the uninitiated, is the technical name given to the material they
remove from the centre of the earth during the process of driving their
galleries.  It is brought up to the surface in sandbags, and is then
carried away and dumped somewhere out of harm's way.  In reality it is
generally stacked carefully in the trenches themselves, thereby
completely blocking all traffic; which is by the way.

But after mining has been in progress for some time, and various
craters have been blown and sapped out to, and after trench mortars
have "strafed" consistently for many months and torn the original
surface of the ground to pieces, the actual position of the trenches
themselves becomes haphazard.  They cease in many cases to bear the
slightest likeness to the ordinary trenches of commerce; they become
deep gorges in mountains of sandbags.  I have sometimes wished that
those officers who apparently write home to devoted bands of female
workers asking for more sandbags would get in touch with me instead.  I
shall be delighted to let them have anything up to five million, all
filled, by return; which is again by the way.

To return to Percy.  In his part of the front sandbags grew like
pebbles on a shingly beach; and from time to time fresh cuts off the
trenches were opened to allow for further expansion in the sandbag
family.  The existing front line in one place had started life as a cut
off the old trench, and had gradually been taken into use as a
permanency, and it was at this point that he stumbled on the great
discovery which was destined to cause all the trouble.  How he first
stumbled is not recorded; but early one morning Percy FitzPercy could
have been seen like a terrier with his nose down a rabbit-hole, lying
flat at the bottom of the trench, peering into a noisome and
foul-smelling cavity underneath him.

"My dear old boy," he remarked, enthusiastically, to a brother
subaltern, who was watching the proceeding coldly, "it's an old German
dug-out; I'm certain it's an old German dug-out."

"I don't care a damn if it is," answered the other, without enthusiasm.
"It stinks like a polecat, and is undoubtedly full of all creeping
things.  For heaven's sake, let's go and get something to eat."

Slowly and reluctantly Percy allowed himself to be led away, thinking
deeply.  Only the week before had the Hun attempted a raid and actually
entered the trench close to the spot in question, and here was
apparently a ready-made man-trap should he do so again.  After
breakfast he would explore his find; after breakfast he would himself
set to work and labour unceasingly.  As I have said, Percy FitzPercy
meant well.

It is possible that lesser men might have been deterred by the
unpromising results of that exploration.  Descending gingerly through
the hole, which had been widened sufficiently to allow of the passage,
Percy switched his torch around the cavity he found himself in.  Above
his head long rounded timbers, side by side and touching one another,
formed the roof, which was in good condition, save in the centre, where
the blue sky shone through the hole he had entered by.  In one corner
stood a bedstead covered by a moth-eaten blanket, while all over the
floor crumbling sandbags and old clothes and equipment gave it the
appearance of a rag-and-bone shop.  In one place the wall had fallen
in, a mound of chalk filled the corner, and from a score of vantage
points elderly rodents watched with increasing disfavour this
unexpected human invasion.

Up above in the trench the disfavour was repeated in that picturesque
phraseology for which Thomas is famous.

"Wot are you a-doing 'ere?"  An incensed sergeant rounded a corner, and
gazed wrathfully at three privates, each armed with a spade and wearing
gas helmets.  "Wot 'ave you got them 'elmets on for?"  He approached
the fatal hole, and recoiled slightly.  "Gaw-lumme!  Wot's that smell?"

"Percy," answered a sepulchral voice.  "Our little Perce."

"Wot yer mean--Percy?  Wot's that 'ole?"  A cloud of dust at that
moment rose through it, and he recoiled still farther.  "Oo's down
there?"

"Percy," answered the same sepulchral voice.  "Percy FitzP. carrying
hout a reconaysance in force.  'E's found a 'Un smell factory, and 'e's
fair wallowing in it."

At that moment a voice came gently through the opening.  "I say, you
fellahs, just come down here a moment, and bring your shovels--what?"

A face, covered with a fine coating of blackish-grey dust, popped up
out of the bottom of the trench.  "We're fairly going to catch the old
Hun before we've finished."

With a choking gasp the sergeant lost all self-control and faded
rapidly away, while the three privates slowly and reluctantly followed
the face through the hole.

It was fortunate--or possibly, in view of future events,
unfortunate--that during the next two hours no responsible individual
came along that particular piece of front line.  Incidentally there was
nothing surprising in the fact.  In most places, especially during the
day, the front line is held but lightly by isolated posts, which are
visited from time to time by the company or platoon commander, and more
rarely by the Colonel.  On this particular occasion the C.O. had
already paid his visit to the scene of activity.  The company commander
was wrestling with returns, and Percy himself led the long-suffering
platoon.  And so without hindrance from any outsiders the fell business
proceeded.

Volumes of evil-smelling dust poured out into the trench, punctuated
from time to time with boots, a few rats who had met with an untimely
end, some unrecognisable garments, and large numbers of empty bottles.
An early investigation had shown the indomitable leader that the old
shaft which had led down to the dug-out in the days when it was used
was completely blocked up, and so the hole through the roof was the
only means of entrance or exit.  Moreover, the hole being in the centre
of the roof, and the dug-out being a high one, there was no method of
reaching it other than by standing on the bed or the decomposing chair.
Once the bird was in there, granted the bed had been removed, there was
therefore no way by which he could get out without being helped from
above.  And so with joy in his heart the indefatigable Percy laboured
on, what time three sweating privates consigned him to the uttermost
depths of the pit.

Now one may say at once that Percy had all the makings in him of the
true artist.  Having decided to stage his performance, he had no
intention of letting it fail through lack of attention to detail.  Life
in the front trenches is not at any time an enlivening proceeding; the
days drag wearily by, the nights are full of noises and Verey
lights--and this particular part of the line was no exception to the
general rule.  So our hero was not distracted by mundane influences or
stress of work from elaborating his scheme.  In addition, once the
miasma had subsided, and the idea had been explained to them, the three
supers became quite keen themselves.  It was one of them, in fact, who
suggested the first detail.

"'Ow are we to know, sir," he remarked, as they sat resting on an
adjacent fire-step after three hours' strenuous exhuming, "that
supposing two of the perishers fall through the 'ole they won't escape?
Two men could get out of that there place without no bed to 'elp 'em."

"By Jove, yes!"  Percy scratched his forehead and left furrows of white
in the general darkness.  "By Jove, yes; you're quite right--what?
Break one's heart to lose the blighters, don't you know.  You're a
doocid clever fellow to think of that, Jenkins."

"Tomkins, sir," murmured the originator of the brain-wave, slightly
abashed by the unexpected praise.

"We might," remarked another of the world's workers, thoughtfully
sucking his teeth--"we might 'ave a trap-door, a 'eavy one, to let down
over the 'ole once they was in."

"Yus--and 'ow are we to know when they is in?"  The third member of the
party proceeded to justify his existence.  "They won't come over 'ere
and fall into the 'ole and then shout to us to let down the trap."  He
thoughtfully lit a Woodbine.  "The 'Un will be strafing if there's a
raid on, and there'll be the 'ell of a beano going on, and no one won't
never 'ear nothing."

With which sage aphorism he relapsed into silence, and a gloom settled
on the meeting.

"By Jove, you fellows, we must think of something!  We must pull up our
socks and think--what?  After we've spent all this time clearing the
bally place out we must really think of something--by Jove!"  Percy
gazed hopefully at his three supers, but it seemed that their
contributions to the conversation were at an end, and for a space
silence reigned, broken only by the gentle lullaby of the tooth-sucker.

"We might," remarked Tomkins at length, after a period of profound
thought, "'ave a trip-wire, wot would ring a gong."

"That's it--that's it!  'Pon my word, you're a doocid clever fellow,
Thomson, doocid clever fellow--what?"  Percy became enthusiastic.
"Ring the gong where the fellah is who lets down the door.  He lets
down the door, and we bag the Hun.  Dam good idea!"

"I don't believe in no gongs," remarked the musical one scornfully.
"No--nor trip-wires neither."  He eyed his audience pugnaciously.

"But, my good fellah--er--what do you believe in?"  Percy's spirits
were sinking.

"Tins, china, cups and saucers, plates, old saucepans--anything and
everything wot will make a noise when the 'Un falls on it.  That's the
ticket, sir," he continued, with gathering emphasis as he noted the
impression he was causing.  "Lumme--a trip-wire: it might break, or the
gong mightn't ring, or the blighter mightn't 'ear it.  Wiv china--every
step he took 'e'd smash anuvver pot.  Drahn a rum jar 'e would.  But--a
trip-wire!"  He spat impartially and resumed his tune.

"By Jove, that's a splendid idea!"  The mercurial Percy's face shone
again.  "Splendid idea!  Fill it full of old tins and china--what?  And
when we hear the second fellah hit the floor and start breakin' up the
home we can pull the string and let down the trap-door.  Splendid idea!
Doocid clever of you, 'pon my soul it is!"

"And where do you think of getting the china from?"  Tomkins, fearing
that his mantle of doocid cleverness was descending upon the
tooth-sucker, eyed him unconvinced.  "I wasn't aware as 'ow there was a
penny bazaar in the neighbourhood, nor yet a William Whiteley's."

"Yes, by Jove," chirped Percy, "where do we get it all from?  We shall
want lots of it, too, don't you know--what?"

"Get it?"  The suggester of the idea looked scornful and addressed
himself to Tomkins.  "There ain't no bully tins in the perishing
trenches, are there?  Ho no!  An' there hain't no china an' bits of
glass and old cups and things in that there village about 'alf a mile
down the road?  Ho no!  I reckon there's enough to fill twenty 'oles
like that there."  Once again the oracle resumed his hobby.

"Splendid!"  Percy jumped to his feet.  "The very thing!  We'll do it
this next company relief, by Jove!  Now, boys, two more hours.  We just
want to get the bedstead out and straighten things up, and we'll be all
ready for the dinner-service--what?"

Now there was another thing in which Percy FitzPercy showed that he had
the makings of a true artist.  He fully appreciated the value of
secrecy in presenting his performances to the public at large.  True,
all his platoon were bound to find out, and the remainder of the
company had a shrewd idea that something was afoot.  But one does not
walk along trenches--especially in the front line--for pleasure; and
beyond a casual inquiry as to what new form of insanity he was up to
now, the company commander was not interested in Percy's doings.  Now
that the place had been cleared out, the opening was covered during the
day by a trench-board carefully stolen from the nearest R.E. dump;
while the members of the platoon assiduously collected old tin and
china utensils, both great and small, which were thrown into the cavity
and arranged tastefully by the stage-manager.

At night the trench-board was removed, and after careful weighting with
two dud shells, a piece of rail, and the stalk of a sixty-pound
trench-mortar bomb, it was placed on edge beside the hole.  It was so
arranged that it leaned slightly inwards, and was only kept from
falling by a cord which passed in front of it and which was attached to
two screw pickets--one on each side.  The hole itself was covered with
a sack.  So much for the scenery.

The stage directions were equally simple.  The curtain rises on a
German raid.  Noises off, etc.; the flashes of guns, the bursting of
rum jars, the dazzling brilliance of flares lighting up the lowering
night.  On the entrance of the Hun into the trench (if he did), a watch
would be kept on the hole (if any one was there to watch).  On the
sound of the first crash of breaking china, no action.  On the sound of
the second crash of breaking china, Percy himself (if alive) or a
substitute (if not), would dash forward and cut the string.  The
trap-door would fall; and then, having repelled the Hun, they could
return and examine the bag at their leisure.  So much for the plot.
Now for the action.

It has always been my contention that Brigadier-General Herbert
Firebrace rather brought it on himself.  There are things which
generals may do, and there are things which they may not; or shall we
say, lest I be deemed guilty of _lèse majesté_, things it were better
they did not?  All things to them are lawful, but all things most
undoubtedly are not expedient.  And no one--not even his most fervent
admirer--could say that the General's action was a wise one.  Let it be
understood that when the more exalted ones of the earth desire to make
a tour of trenches, there is a recognised procedure for doing it.
First comes the sergeant of the platoon occupying the portion of the
line under inspection--experience has shown the wisdom of having the
only trustworthy guide in front.  Then comes the company commander,
followed by the Colonel, the Staff officer and the Great One.
Immediately behind, the Adjutant (taking notes), the platoon commander
(partially dazed), the machine-gun officer (not essential), and the
Sapper (if he's been caught by the human avalanche) advance in echelon.
At intervals the procession halts, and the same religious rite takes
place.

SERGEANT (_peering round the next traverse, in voice of fury_): "Don't
drink tea out of yer tin 'at, yer perisher!  'Ere's the General
a-coming."

COLONEL (_prompted by company commander_): "Now from here, sir, we get
a most magnificent field of fire behind--ah--those craters there.  I
thought that--where was it we decided?--oh, yes, by--ah--putting a
Lewis gun here . . . er, well, perhaps you'd like to look yourself,
sir."

GREAT ONE: "Yes, very much.  Have you got my periscope?"  (_Staff
officer produces, and Great One peers through it._)  "I quite agree
with you."  (_After long inspection_)  "You might make a note of it."

STAFF OFFICER: "Just make a note of that, will you?"

ADJUTANT (_makes note_): "Make a note of it, Bill, will you?"

PLATOON COMMANDER (_recovering slightly from stupor_): "Make a note of
what?"

MACHINE-GUN OFFICER: "All right, old boy.  It's my pidgeon."  (_Sotto
voce to SAPPER_) "I've had a gun there for the last two nights."
(_Aloud to OMNES_) "An excellent place, sir.  I'll see to it."

SAPPER (_to M.G.O., with seeming irrelevance_): "Well, when he got to
the house he was told she was having a bath, and----"  Procession moves
on, while infuriated sentry on sap duty misses the point of the story.
And that is the right way of touring the trenches.

Unfortunately General Firebrace was a new broom.  It was quite
permissible for him to do what he did, but, as I said before, I am
doubtful if it was altogether wise.  In a moment of rashness he decided
to go round the trenches alone.  As a matter of fact, at the moment of
this resolve the Brigade-Major was out, the evening was fine, and the
General was energetic.  Perfect peace reigned over that portion of the
battle area which concerned him, and he was anxious to see that the
arrangement of sentry groups in the various sap-heads met with his
approval.  His predecessor, he recalled, had had words with the still
greater ones of the earth anent a couple of small, but nevertheless
regrettable, incidents when men had been removed somewhat forcibly by
the wily Hun from out those same sap-heads.  So he settled his steel
helmet firmly on his head, and stepped out of his dug-out into the
communication trench.

Now in that particular part of the line the communication trenches were
long ones, and by the time he reached the front line it was getting
dark.  A man of small stature, but withal fiery appearance, General
Herbert Firebrace strode along through the deepening gloom, humming
gently to himself.  At first the trenches were fairly populous--he was
in a part of the front line between two groups of craters--and he found
it necessary to bark "Gangway!" continuously.  Then he reached his
goal, the saps behind one of the groups--short trenches which stretch
out from the fire trench into No Man's Land and finish on the near lips
of the craters.  He grunted with satisfaction as he found the first of
the saps held to his satisfaction.  The sentry group were quietly
smoking; the sentry up at the head of the sap was watching fixedly
through his periscope.  The rifles and bayonets of the men rested close
at hand, the Mills bombs were conveniently placed on a narrow ledge
under cover.

"Ha, good!  All quiet here, my lads?"

"All quiet, sir," answered the corporal, scrambling up.

"That's all right.  Good night, corporal."  And the martial little
figure disappeared round the corner.

Now the corporal was new in that bit of the line; to be exact, he had
just returned from leave.  That was one cause.

"Look out--oil-can!"  The sentry gave a hail, and every one ducked.
That was the other cause.

For at the precise moment that an oil-can exploded with a thunderous
crump twenty yards or so beyond the trench, there was a sudden noise of
ripping canvas, an agonised shout, and the heavy crash of a body
encountering china.  Then--silence.  The sap parties heard only the
oil-can; Percy FitzPercy for a wonder was not brooding over his
invention, and there was no one who knew that close beside them in an
odoriferous underground abode the Brigadier-General lay completely
stunned, with his head in a metal soup tureen and his rather extensive
set of uppers in a disused tin hitherto devoted to that painstaking
gentleman, Mr. Maconochie.

Up to this point it will be willingly conceded, I think, by any one
acquainted with trench etiquette that the unfortunate predicament of
Herbert Firebrace, General and Great One, was only what he deserved.
To depart so flagrantly from the spirit of the rules as to wander round
front-line trenches alone and in the falling shades of night is asking
for trouble; and if the matter had ended there I have no doubt--knowing
the strict sense of justice which is one of the praiseworthy features
of the house of Firebrace--I have no doubt that he would have sent for
Percy FitzPercy and apologised handsomely for the inconvenience he had
so unwittingly caused.  But the matter did not end there; it only
began.  And the finale, reviewed dispassionately, undoubtedly gives one
to think--one might even say think furiously.

A quarter of an hour after the regrettable occurrence just described
Percy stood chatting lightly and inconsequently with his company
commander in the support line.  At the moment he was expatiating on the
merits of a new pipe of his own invention designed for use in No Man's
Land on a dark night.  Its exact beauties escape my memory; as far as I
can remember one put the bowl in one's mouth and the tobacco in the
stem and blew.  It was an invention typical of Percy--utterly futile.
He had just called the company commander "dear old soul" for the tenth
time, and was explaining how no sparks or glowing ash could be seen if
you made use of this patent atrocity, when a Lewis gun started rattling
away in front.  Half a dozen Verey lights shot up, there was a sudden
brisk burst of firing, with the explosion of a number of bombs.

"By Jove!" cried Percy, pipe and all else forgotten.  "By Jove, dear
old man--a raid--what?  A Hun raid--now for the man-trap!"  He departed
at speed up the nearest boyau, leaving a trail of sparks behind him
like a catherine-wheel that has been out in the rain; to be followed by
his Captain, who had first taken the precaution of loading his
automatic.

The first man Percy met was the tooth-sucker, who was shaking with
uncontrollable excitement.

"There's a perisher fell in the 'ole, sir!  Three of 'em come in, and
we killed two an' the other fell in the 'ole."

I am given to understand that on receipt of the news what little
intellect our pipe-inventor ever possessed completely deserted him.
Uttering hoarse cries, he dashed down the trench, and, unmindful of his
own orders to wait on the chance of catching a second, he feverishly
slashed at the string, and with an ominous clang and a squelch of mud
the trap-door descended into its appointed position.  Certain it is,
when the company commander came in sight, he was standing upon it, in
an attitude strongly reminiscent of the heavy tragedian--out of a
"shop"--holding forth in his favourite Bodega.

"What the blazes are you doing there?" howled his infuriated Captain.
"Why aren't you in number eight sap, instead of doing a dumb-crambo
show?"

"The raid is over, sir," answered Percy, majestically.  "The raider
is--ah--below."

"What the----" began the frenzied senior.  And then he paused.  "Great
Scott!  What's that infernal shindy?"

From below their feet there rose a perfect orgy of breaking china and
rattling tins, with ever and anon a loud musical note as of a bucket
being belaboured with a stick.  Grunts and guttural curses, followed by
strange hollow noises indicative of pain, for a while drowned all
attempts at conversation.  Finally there was a grand finale of crashing
cups and tinkling tins, the sound of a heavy blow, a grunt of muffled
agony and--silence.  The lights still hissed up into the night, stray
rifles still cracked at intervals, but otherwise--silence.

At last Percy spoke.  "Do you know, dear old boy, I believe there are
two of them down there; 'pon my soul, I do--what?"  He spoke with
deliberation, as befits an inventor.  "It seemed to me that the one who
swore and the one who grunted were different people."

The tooth-sucker opined likewise; also Tomkins, who had arrived on the
scene.

"What is this dam foolishness?" said the Captain irritably.  "Am I to
understand there are two Germans inside there, under the trench?"

"One for certain; two possibly--or even three, dear old boy."  At the
thought of three, he of the teeth played a tune in his excitement.

"Then for heaven's sake get the top off and let's get them out!"

It was then that the last cruel blow of Fate was dealt to the hapless
Herbert.  For after a brief period of feverish pulling, during which
the company commander broke his nails and Percy fell over backwards,
the trap-door remained _in statu quo_.

"What the devil's the matter with the beastly thing?" muttered the
Captain, savagely.  "It's your fool-trick, FitzPercy!  Can't you open
it?"

"My dear old boy," remarked the proud inventor vaguely, "it generally
opens--'pon my soul, it does."  He turned his torch on to the reluctant
trench-board and examined it through his eyeglass.  "By Jove! that's
it, dear old son, there's the trouble.  The dud shell has slipped
forward and got wedged in the rafters.  How doocid funny--what?"

"What is doocid funny, you blithering ass?"

"Why, if we'd gone on, dear old sport, the shell might have gone off.
By Jove, that's good, that is!" Percy chuckled immoderately.  "If we go
on, the shell goes off!"

"You're the type of man who ought to be in a home," remarked his senior
officer dispassionately.  "Get a saw as soon as you can, and cut
through the board.  And if the bally shell goes off and kills you,
it'll serve you right.  You're a disease, FitzPercy, that's what you
are.  A walking microbe; an example of atavism; a throw-back to the
tail period."  Still muttering, his company commander passed out of
sight, leaving the triumphant Percy completely unabashed and glowing
with righteous success.

Now, in the trenches saws do not grow freely.  You cannot wander round
a corner and pick one up; in fact, a saw that will saw is an exceeding
precious thing.  Moreover, they are closely guarded by their rightful
owners, who show great reluctance in parting with them.  It therefore
was not surprising that over an hour elapsed before a perspiring
messenger returned with one and operations commenced.  And during that
hour Percy lived.

It is given to few to see their hopes and aspirations realised so
beautifully and quickly; as in a dream he listened to the hideous
cachinnations that floated up through the slabs of the trench-board.  A
continuous booming noise as of a bittern calling to its young was
varied with heavy grunts and occasional blows of a heavy bludgeon on
metal.  And throughout it all there ran a delicate motif of crashing
cups and tinkling tins.

"We have them, dear old soul," murmured Percy ecstatically to himself;
"we have them simply wallowing in the mulligatawny!"

But there is an end of everything--even of getting a saw out of an R.E.
store.  A glorious full moon shone down upon the scene as, an hour
afterwards, the trench-board was removed and the entrance opened.  An
"up-and-over"--or trench-ladder--was lowered into the dug-out, and the
excited onlookers waited to vet the catch.  At last the ladder shook,
as the first of the prisoners prepared to ascend.

"Entrance, dear old man," cried the stage-manager, majestically, "of
what we have hitherto described as 'male voices off.'"

"Get up, you swine, and get a move on!" rasped a voice in perfect
English from the depths of the hole; while a palsied silence settled on
the audience.

The ladder shook again, and at last there emerged from the bottom of
the trench a large round tin which completely encased the head of its
wearer, who slowly followed, maintaining a continuous booming roar.
Immediately behind him came the owner of the voice, severely chipped
about the face, but with the light of battle in his eyes.

"Now, you----"  The words died away in his mouth.  "Great heavens!  The
General!"  And as the frozen eye of the speaker, who had been the other
occupant of the hole, wandered round the stricken onlookers, even
Percy's nerve broke.  It was the Colonel.


I will draw the veil of reticence over the remainder of this harrowing
narrative.  The procession back to Brigade Head-quarters has become
historic.  The attempt to remove the soup tureen on the spot caused its
unhappy possessor such agony, and gave rise to so much unseemly and
ill-repressed mirth on the part of the audience, that it was hastily
abandoned, and the wretched man was led gently back to his dug-out.

The Brigade-Major, who had been notified over the telephone, met him at
the entrance with a handkerchief suspiciously near his mouth.

"How dreadful, sir!" he murmured, in a voice that shook a little.  "I
have--er--sent for a tin-opener."

The General was led to a chair, into which he sank wearily, while in
hushed tones the Colonel explained what had happened to the shaking
Staff.

"I was told that the General had been seen going down to the front line
alone," he remarked in a low tone, "and so I at once followed him.
Just as I got to the craters there was a small Hun raid.  I let drive
at one of them with my revolver, and the next instant I fell through a
hole, full on top of some one's back.  He let out a roar of pain and
scrambled up.  Of course I thought it was a Hun, and proceeded to beat
him over the head with my stick.  Great Scott, what a show!"

The Colonel mopped his brow, and the Staff shook still more.

"I'd dropped my revolver, or I'd probably have shot him.  Then suddenly
there was a clang, and the hole was closed up, while at the same moment
something charged past me, head down, and hit the wall.  There was a
roar of pain, and the tin became a fixture.  The poor old boy had
rammed the wall with the soup tureen."

A gurgling noise from the chair interrupted him.

"What is it, sir?" cried the Staff Captain, solicitously.

The General hooted mournfully.

"Yes, sir.  He'll be here very soon, sir.  Not much longer now.  We've
sent for a tinsmith from one of the Engineer companies."

But the booming cantata continued.

"What does he want?" whispered the Staff Captain.  "A drink?"

The Brigade-Major looked hopeful.

"Yes; get a whisky and soda and a straw, if there's one left."

The booming died away.

A few minutes later the Staff, ably assisted by the General's batman,
got one end of the straw into the worthy Brigadier's mouth.  The
Colonel closed those holes he could see with his fingers, and the
signalling officer held the drink.

"Now, are we ready?" cried the Brigade-Major anxiously.  "All right,
sir--suck."

The experiment was not a success.  Jets of liquid spurted in all
directions, an explosion like a geyser shook the tin, and the Staff
recoiled a pace.  In fact, I am given to understand that the chief
clerk, an intensely interested spectator, so far forgot himself as to
counsel the Staff Captain to "sit on 'is 'ead."

"Do you think we could do anything with one of those instruments for
opening tongues?" hazarded the Staff Captain, when the silence had
become oppressive and the outbursts of fire extinguished.

"We might try."  The signalling officer was doubtful, but sallied
forth, and after some delay returned with one.  "Where shall we start?"

"Any old place."  The Staff Captain gripped the implement and stepped
manfully forward.  "We're going to try something else, sir--a
tongue-opener."

The General hooted apathetically; the onlookers looked anxious, and the
Staff Captain got his first grip on the tin.

"Hold the General's head, Bill," he cried to the Brigade-Major, "so
that I can get a purchase.  Now, then--one--two----"

A howl of agony rent the air, and even the chief clerk looked pensive.

"It's his ear, you fool!"  The Colonel dodged rapidly out of the door
to evade the human tornado within, and the situation became crucial.
Even the tinsmith, who arrived at that moment, a man of phlegmatic
disposition, was moved out of his habitual calm and applauded loudly.

"Thank heavens you've come!" gasped the Brigade-Major, keeping a wary
eye fixed on his frenzied senior, who, surrounded with _débris_ and red
ink, was now endeavouring to pull the tin off with his hands.  "The
General has had a slight mishap.  Can you remove that tin from his
head?"

The expert contemplated his victim in silence for a few moments.

"Yus," he remarked at length, "I can, sir, if 'e keeps quite still.
But I won't be answerable for the consequences if 'e don't."

"No more will I."  The Brigade-Major mopped his brow.  "For heaven's
sake get on with it."


Thus ended the episode of Percy FitzPercy--his man-trap.

It might have happened to any one, but only FitzPercy would have
searched carefully amongst the crockery, and having found what he was
looking for made a point of bringing it to head-quarters just as the
tin was finally removed.

To emerge into the light of two candles and an electric torch with a
bit of one ear and half a face deficient, and realise that the man
responsible for it is offering you your uppers in three parts and some
fragments, is a situation too dreadful to contemplate.

As I said before, Percy gave up trying after about ten seconds.




IV

A POINT OF DETAIL

"Hist!"  The officer gripped the sergeant's arm just above the elbow,
bringing his mouth close up to his ear.  "Don't move."  The words were
hardly breathed, so low was the tense, sudden whisper, and the two men
crouched motionless, peering into the darkness which enveloped them.

"Where, sir?"  The sergeant slowly twisted his head till it was almost
touching that of the man beside him; and he too, whose normal voice
resembled a human fog horn, scarcely did more than frame the words with
his lips.

"Behind that mound of chalk.  Several of them."  The sergeant's eyes
followed the line of the outstretched hand until they picked up the
dark menacing lump in the ground twenty feet away.  Sombre, grim,
apparently lifeless, outlined against the night sky--it appeared almost
monstrous in size to the men who lay on the edge of a shell hole, with
every nerve alert.  A bullet spat over them viciously, but they did not
alter their position--they knew they were not the target; and from
their own lines came the sudden clang of a shovel.  All around them the
night was full of vague, indefinable noises; instinctively a man,
brought suddenly into such a place and ignorant of his whereabouts,
would have known that there were men all around him: men whom he could
not see, men who flitted through the shadows bent on mysterious tasks,
men who moved silently, with eyes strained to pierce the darkness.
Behind the German lines a trench tramway was in use; the metallic
rumble of the trolleys on the iron rails came continuously from the
distance.  And suddenly from close at hand a man laughed. . . .

"Do you see them?"  Once again the officer was whispering, while he
still grasped, almost unconsciously, the sergeant's arm.
"There--there!  Look!"

Two or three shadowy blobs seemed to move uncertainly above the edge of
the chalk mound and then disappear again; and a moment afterwards, from
almost on top of them, came a hoarse guttural whisper.  The officer's
grip tightened convulsively; the night of a sudden seemed alive with
men close to them--pressing around them.  Almost involuntarily he got
up and moved back a few steps, still peering, straining to see in the
inky blackness.  Something loomed up and bumped into him, only to
recoil with a muttered oath; and even as he realised it was a German he
heard his sergeant's low voice from a few feet away.  "Where are you,
sir?  Where are you?"  The next moment he was back at his side.

"Get back your own way," he whispered; "we've bumped a big patrol.
Don't fire."  And as he spoke, with a slight hiss a flare shot up into
the night.

Now had it not been for that one untimely flare this story would never
have been written.  Indecent curiosity in other wanderers' doings in No
Man's Land is an unprofitable amusement; while the sound of strafing,
to say nothing of revolver shots, is calculated to produce a tornado of
fire from all directions, administered impartially by friend and foe
alike.  Wherefore it is more than likely that but for the sudden
ghostly light both the Englishmen would have got away.  As it was, John
Brinton, M.C., Lieutenant in His Majesty's Regiment of the Royal
Loamshires, found himself crouching in a slight dip in the ground and
contemplating from a range of four feet no less than six Huns similarly
engaged.  There was the sharp crack of a revolver, a struggle, a
muffled cry; then silence.  Half a dozen more flares went up from each
line; everywhere sentries peered earnestly towards the sound of the
shot; a few desultory rifles cracked, and then the night resumed its
whispering mystery.  But at the bottom of the dip five Huns lay on the
top of a stunned English officer; while the sixth lay still and
twisted, with a revolver bullet in his brain.

Twenty minutes afterwards the sergeant, crawling warily on his belly,
approached a saphead and after a brief word or two dropped in.

"'Ave you seen Mr. Brinton, sir," he asked anxiously of an officer whom
he found in the sap, pessimistically smoking a cigarette--saps are
pessimistic places.

"No."  The officer looked up quickly.  "He was out with you, wasn't he,
Sergeant Dawson?"

"Yes, sir--on patrol.  We'd just a-got to that there chalk 'ummock,
when we ran into some of 'em.  'E said to me--'Get back,' 'e said,
'your own way,' and then they put up a flare.  I couldn't see 'im as I
was lying doggo in a 'ole, but I 'eard a revolver shot about ten yards
away.  I looked round when the flare was out, but couldn't see him, nor
'ear him.  So I thought 'e might 'ave got back."

"Pass the word along for Mr. Brinton."  The officer went out of the sap
into the fire trench.  "And get a move on with it."  He stood for a few
moments, looking thoughtful.  "I hope," he muttered to himself, "I hope
the old boy hasn't been scuppered."

But--the old boy _had_ been scuppered.  A runner failed to discover him
in the trench; two strong patrols scoured the ground around the chalk
'ummock and drew blank.  And so, in the fullness of time there appeared
in the Roll of Honour the name of Lieut. John Brinton, of the Royal
Loamshires, under the laconic heading of Missing, believed Prisoner of
War, which is the prologue of this tale of the coalfields of France.


The part of the line in which the Royal Loamshires found themselves at
the time of the unfortunate matter of John Brinton, M.C., was somewhere
south of La Bassée and somewhere north of Loos--closer identification
is undesirable.  It is not a pleasant part of the line, though there
are many worse.  The principal bugbears of one's existence are the
tunnelling companies, who without cessation practise their nefarious
trade, thereby causing alarm and despondency to all concerned.
Doubtless they mean well, but their habit of exploding large quantities
of ammonal at uncertain hours and places does not endear them to the
frenzied onlookers, who spend the next hour plucking boulders from
their eyes.  In addition, there is the matter of sandbags.  The
proximity of a mine shaft is invariably indicated by a young mountain
of these useful and hygienic articles, which tower and spread and
expand in every direction where they are most inconvenient.  I admit
that, having placed half the interior of France in bags, the disposal
of the same on arriving in the light of day presents difficulties.  I
admit that the fault lies entirely with the harassed and long-suffering
gentleman who boasts the proud title of "spoil's officer."  I admit----
But I grow warm, in addition to digressing unpardonably.  The trouble
is that I always do grow warm, and digress at the mention of sandbags.

In part of the Loamshires' front line, mining activity was great.  A
continuous group of craters stretched along No Man's Land, separating
them from the wily Hun, for half the battalion front--a group which we
will call Outpost.  The name is wrong, but it will serve.  To the near
lips of each crater a sap ran out from the front line, so that merely
the great yawning hole lay between the saphead and the corresponding
abode of the Germans on the other lip.  Each night these sapheads were
held by a small group of men armed with Verey lights, bombs,
bowie-knives, and other impedimenta of destruction; while between the
saps the trench was held but lightly--in some cases, not at all.  The
idea of concentrating men in the front line has long been given up by
both sides.

If therefore one strolls along the firing line--a tedious amusement at
all times--it is more than likely that one will find long stretches
completely deserted.  The scene is desolate; the walk is strangely
eerie.  Walls of sandbags tower on each side, in some cases two or
three feet above one's head; the clouds go scudding by, while the
shadows of a traverse dance fantastically as a flare comes hissing
down.  The Hun is thirty yards away; the silence is absolute; the place
is ghostly with the phantoms of forgotten men.  And sometimes, as one
walks, strange fancies creep into one's brain.  Relics of childish
fears, memories of the bogey man who waited round the end of the dark
passage at home, come faintly from the past.  And foolish though it be,
one wonders sometimes with a sharp, clutching pang of nervous
fear--What is round the next corner?

Nothing--of course not.  What should there be?  The night is quiet; the
trench is English.  The next party is forty yards farther on; the
voices of the last still come softly through the air.  And yet--and
yet----!  But I digress again.

Now not one of the least of all the crimes of those responsible for the
disposal of the underworld of France, when it comes to the surface in
sandbags, is the following.  (Lest any one may think that I am writing
a text-book, I would crave patience.)  Be it known, then, that to keep
out a bullet some four feet of earth are necessary.  Less than that and
the bullet will come through and impinge with great violence on the
warrior behind.  This fact is well known to all whose path in life
leads them to the trenches; but for all that Tommy is a feckless lad.
In some ways he bears a marked resemblance to that sagacious bird, the
ostrich; and because of that resemblance, I have remarked on this
question of disposing sandbags in terms of pain and grief.  The easiest
thing to do with a sandbag in a trench, if you don't want it, is to
chuck it out.  Human nature being what it is, the distance chucked is
reduced to a minimum--in other words, it is placed on the edge of the
parapet.  More follow--and they are placed beside it on the edge of the
parapet; which causes the inside edge of the parapet to increase in
height, but not in thickness.  In other words, after a while the top
two or three layers of bags, though looking perfectly safe from the
inside, are not bullet proof.  Which Tommy knows--but . . . well, I
have mentioned the ostrich.

Now this state of affairs existed in one or two places behind Outpost
craters.  There were spots where the top of the parapet was not of
sufficient thickness to keep out a rifle bullet.  And it was just by
one of these spots that the Company Commander, going round one night,
suddenly stumbled on something that lay sprawling at the bottom of the
trench--an unmistakable something.  It lay half on the fire step and
half off, midway between two saps, and the head sagged back helplessly.
He switched on his torch, and having looked at the huddled form, cursed
softly under his breath.  For it was his senior subaltern, and a bullet
had entered his head from behind just above the neck.  It had come out
at his forehead, and we will not specify further.

"Stretcher bearers at once."  He went back to the group he had just
left.  "Mr. Dixon has been shot through the parapet, farther up."

"Killed, sir?"  The N.C.O. in charge was in Dixon's platoon.

"Yes."  The Company Officer was laconic.  "Brains blown out.  It's that
damned parapet--one sandbag thick.  What the hell's the use of my
speaking?"

He had had a trying day, and his tone may be excused.  "You sit here
and you do nothing.  The whole company are a set of cursed lazy
loafers."

Seeing that the men were getting an average of six hours' sleep the
remark was hardly fair, but, as I said, the day had been a trying one
and this had been the last straw.  He strode back again to the dead
subaltern, muttering angrily.

"Poor old man," he whispered gently, lifting the legs on to the fire
step and bending over the still form.  "Poor old man; you've solved the
Big Mystery by now, anyway."  The light of his torch fell on the dead
man's face, and he shuddered slightly: a bullet can do a lot of damage.
Then he climbed on the fire step and looked over the parapet.  It was a
place where the spoils party had been particularly busy; and though the
Company Officer was full six foot, he could only just see over the top;
as a fire step it was useless to any one but a giant from a freak show.

"Hullo! what's happened?"  A voice behind him made him turn round.

"That you, Dick?  Poor little Jerry Dixon been shot through the
parapet--that's what's happened."  He got down and stood at the bottom
of the trench beside the second-in-command.  "The three top layers
there are only one bag thick."  Once again his language became heated.

"Steady, old man," Dick Staunton puffed steadily at his pipe, and
looked at the body lying beside them.  "Were you with him when he was
hit?"

"No.  Came round visiting the sentries and found him lying there dead."

"Oh!"  He switched on his torch and continued smoking in silence.
Suddenly he bent forward and peered closely at the shattered head.
"Give me a hand for a minute.  I want to turn the boy over."

Faintly surprised, he did as he was bid.

In silence they turned the body over, and again there was silence while
Staunton carefully examined the spot where the bullet had entered.

"Strange," he muttered to himself after a few moments, "very strange.
Tell me, Joe"--his voice was normal again--"exactly how did you find
him?  What position was he in?"

"He was half sitting on the fire step; with his head in the corner and
his legs sprawling in the bottom of the trench."

"Sitting?  Then his face was towards you."

"Why, yes.  Is there anything peculiar in the fact?  He'd probably just
been having a look over the top, and as he turned away to get down he
was hit through the sandbags in the back of the neck.  His head was a
bit forward as he was getting down, so the bullet passed through his
head and out of his forehead."

In silence they turned the boy over again and covered his face with a
pocket-handkerchief.

"You're too much of a blooming detective, you know, old man.  Much
police work has made thee mad," laughed the Company Commander.  "What
else can have happened?"

"I'm no detective, Joe."  The other man smiled slightly.  "But there
are one or two small points of detail which strike me, though I can
make nothing out of them, I admit.  First--his height.  He's six inches
shorter than you, and yet you could barely see over the top.
Therefore, what was he doing trying to look over the parapet here of
all places?  Secondly, the way he fell.  A man killed instantaneously,
and shot through the back of his head, would in all probability pitch
forward on his face.  You say his face was towards you, and that he was
sitting in the corner of the traverse."  He paused to fill his pipe.

"Go on," said the Company Commander curiously.  "You interest me."

"The third point is one on which I admit that I am doubtful.  The
bullet wound is clean.  Now I am inclined to think--though I don't
know--that a bullet passing through a chalk bag would become jagged,
and would not be travelling straight when it continued its flight.
However, I don't attach much importance to that.  And the fourth and
last point is almost too trifling to mention.  Do you notice anything
peculiar about his uniform?"

The listener flashed his torch over the dead officer, "No," he said at
length.  "I can't say that I do.  Except that one of his regimental
badges is missing.  I suppose you don't mean that, do you?"  The
Company Officer laughed irritably.

"I do," returned the other quietly.  "It's a point of detail, even if a
little one."  He looked thoughtfully at the man in front of him.  "Do I
strike you as a callous sort of devil, old man?"

"You seem to be treating the boy rather on the line of a specimen for
improving your deductive powers."

"Perhaps you're right."  Staunton turned away.  "But I didn't mean it
that way--quite.  Sorry, Joe; the boy was a pal of yours?"

"He was."

"God rest his soul!"  The second-in-command spoke low.  Then, with a
final salute to the youngster whose soul had gone to the haven of
fighting men, he turned away and vanished into the night.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

The next day the Company Commander came round to Battalion
Head-quarters.

"My two best subalterns," grunted the Colonel in disgust, "within two
days.  Very annoying.  Good boys--toppers both of them.  You'd go quite
a way, Dick, before you bettered Brinton and Dixon."

"You would," affirmed the second-in-command.  "Quite a way."

"And with all your theorising last night, old man," remarked the
Captain slyly, "we both forgot the obvious solution.  He got on the
fire step, found he couldn't see over--so he clambered up on top.
Then, when he was getting down, he was hit, and slithered into the
position I found him in."

Staunton regarded the speaker through a haze of tobacco smoke.  "I
wonder," he murmured at length.  "I wonder."

He did not state that during the morning he had made a point of
interrogating Jerry Dixon's servant.  And that worthy--an old and
trusted soldier--had very positively denied that either of the Pelicans
Rampant, which formed the regimental badge, had been missing from his
master's coat the previous evening.

"Now Mr. Brinton's coat, sir," he remarked thoughtfully, "that did 'ave
a badge off, that did.  But 'is servant!"  He snorted, and dismissed
the subject scornfully.

As I say, the Major did not mention this fact.  After all, it was such
a very small point of detail.


To the frivolous-minded, Dick Staunton was at times the cause of a
certain amount of amusement.  Originally in the Army, he had left it
when a junior captain, and had settled down to the normal life of a
country gentleman.  By nature of a silent disposition, he abominated
social functions of all sorts.  He hunted, he fished, and he shot, and
spent the rest of his time studying the habits of the wild.  And as
always happens to a man who lives much with nature, his mind gradually
got skilled in the noticing of little things.  Small signs, invisible
to the casual observer, he noticed automatically; and without being in
any sense a Sherlock Holmes, he had acquired the habit of putting two
and two together in a manner that was, at times, disconcertingly
correct.

"Points of detail," he remarked one evening in the dug-out after
dinner, "are very easy to see if you have eyes to see them with.  One
is nothing; two are a coincidence; three are a moral certainty.  A
really trained man can see a molehill; I can see a mountain; most of
you fellows couldn't see the Himalayas."  With which sage remark he
thoughtfully lit his pipe and relapsed into silence.  And silence being
his usual characteristic he came into the Battalion Head-quarters
dug-out one evening and dropped quietly into a seat, almost unnoticed
by the somewhat noisy group around the table.

"Afternoon, Dickie."  The Sapper officer looked up and saw him.  "D'you
hear we're pinching your last recruit?  Jesson--this is Major
Staunton."  He turned to a second lieutenant in the Royal Loamshires
beside him as he made the introduction.

"How d'you do, sir."  Jesson got up and saluted.  "I've only just got
over from England; and now apparently they're attaching me to the R.E.,
as I'm a miner."

He sat down again, and once more turned his attention to that excellent
French illustrated weekly without which no officers' mess in France is
complete.  Lest I be run in for libel, I will refrain from further
information as to its title and general effect on officers concerned.

For a few moments Staunton sat watching the group and listening with
some amusement to the criticisms on those lovely members of the fair
sex so ably portrayed in its pages, and then his attention centred on
the revolver he was cleaning.  Jesson, a good-looking, clean-cut man of
about twenty-nine or thirty was holding forth on an experience he had
had in Alaska, which concerned a woman, a team of dogs, and a gentleman
known as One-eyed Pete, and as he spoke Staunton watched him idly.  It
struck him that he seemed a promising type, and that it was a pity the
Tunnellers were getting him.

"Haven't you got enough disturbers of the peace already," he remarked
to the Tunnelling officer, "without snatching our ewe lamb?"

"We are at full strength as a matter of fact, Major," answered an
officer covered with chalk; "but they do some funny things in the
palaces of the great.  We often get odd birds blowing in.  I've been
initiating him all this morning into the joys of Outpost."

"And how is jolly old Blighty?" remarked the Adjutant.  "Thank Heaven!
leave approaches."

"About the same."  Jesson helped himself to a whisky-and-soda.  "Darker
than ever, and taxis an impossibility.  Still I dare say I shall be
glad enough to go back when my first leave comes due," he added with a
laugh.

"Is this your first time out?" asked Staunton.

"Yes."  Jesson unbuttoned his burberry and took out his cigarette case.
Outside the dusk was falling, and he bent forward to get a light from
the candle flickering on the table in front of him.  "The very first
time.  I've been on Government work up to now."

It was at that moment that a very close observer might have noticed
that Dick Staunton's pipe ceased to draw with monotonous regularity: he
might even have heard a quick intake of breath.  But he would have had
to be a very close one--very close indeed; for the next instant he was
again speaking and his voice was normal.

"I suppose you've been at the depot," he hazarded.  "Who are there now?"

"Oh, the usual old crowd," answered Jesson "I don't expect you know
many of them though, do you, Major?  Ginger Stretton in the 14th
Battalion--do you know him by any chance?"

"No, I don't think I do."  His face was in the shadow, but had it been
visible a slightly puzzled frown might have been seen on his forehead.
"I suppose they still make all you fellows on joining go to the
regimental tailor, don't they?"

Jesson looked a trifle surprised at the question.  "I don't think they
are as particular as they were," he returned after a moment.
"Personally I went to Jones & Jones."  He casually buttoned up his
mackintosh and turned to the Tunneller.  "If you're ready I think we
might be going.  I want to see about my kit."  He got up as he spoke
and turned towards the entrance, while at the same moment the Sapper
rose too.  "I'd like to drop in again, sir, sometimes if I may."  He
spoke to the shadow where Staunton had been sitting.

"Do."  Jesson gave a violent start, for the voice came from just behind
his shoulder.  Like the hunter he was, Dick Staunton had moved without
a sound, and now stood directly between Jesson and the door.  "But
don't go yet.  I want to tell you a story that may amuse you.  Have
some tea."

"Er--won't it keep till some other time, Major?  I'm rather anxious to
see about my kit."

"Let the kit keep.  Sit down and have some tea."

"What the devil has come over you, Dickie?"  The Adjutant was looking
frankly amazed.  "You aren't generally so loquacious."

"That's why to-night my little whim must be humoured," answered
Staunton with a slight smile.  "Sit down, please, Jesson.  It's quite
an amusing little yarn, and I would like your opinion on it."

"No hope for you, old boy.  Dickie has turned into a social success."
The Adjutant laughed and lit a cigarette, and once again became
immersed in his paper.

To the casual observer the scene was a very normal one.  Four men in a
dug-out, yarning and reading; while outside the occasional whine of a
shell, the dirty deeds of a Stokes gun, the noises of the trenches
filled the air.  Nothing unusual, nothing out of the way
except--something, an indefinable something.  As the Sapper said
afterwards there must have been something tangible in the
atmosphere--else why did his pulses quicken.  He glanced at the
Adjutant sitting opposite him engrossed in his book; he looked at
Staunton across the table--Staunton, with a slight smile on his
lips--and his eyes fixed on Jesson.  He looked at Jesson beside
him--Jesson, whom he had met that morning for the first time.  And all
he noticed about Jesson was that his left knee twitched
ceaselessly. . . .

He ran over in his mind the day's work.  He had met him at about eleven
that morning, wandering along the support line with an officer in the
Loamshires whom he knew well, who had hailed him and introduced Jesson.

"A recruit--a new recruit," he had said, "for your atrocious trade.
He's just left old pimple-faced Charlie, who was writing returns in
triplicate as usual."

Now pimple-faced Charlie was his own Major, who habitually did write
returns in triplicate; wherefore, after a few remarks of a casual
nature in which he elicited the fact that Jesson was a mining engineer
and had suddenly been ordered while waiting at the base to join the
940th Tunnelling Company, he took him in tow and showed him round the
mine galleries.

Mining work was very active in the sector.  Four or five small mines
and one big one were going up in the near future, so the tour of
inspection had been a long one.  That his companion was not new to the
game was obvious from the outset; and his pertinent inquiries anent
cross-cuts, listening galleries, and the whole of the work in hand had
shown that he was keen as well.  Altogether a promising recruit, he had
mused: quite a find--keen and able, two qualities which unfortunately
do not go hand in hand quite as often as one would like.  And now
Staunton and this find of his were facing one another in silence across
the plank table of the dug-out; Jesson, with an expression of polite
indifference as befitted a subaltern compelled to listen to a senior
officer's story which he didn't want to hear; Staunton, with an
enigmatic smile.  Then of a sudden Staunton spoke.

"Have you ever studied the question of the importance of matters of
detail, Jesson?" he remarked quietly to the impassive figure facing him
across the table.

"I can't say that I have, sir," answered the other, politely stifling a
yawn.

"You should.  A most interesting study.  My story concerns points of
detail.  The imperative thing is to be able to sort out the vital
points from all the others; then piece them together, and arrive at the
right answer."

"It must be very easy to be led astray, I should imagine; and arrive at
the--er--wrong one."  Jesson concealed a smile, and waited for the
Major to continue.

"Yes and no.  It's all a matter of practice."  Staunton's imperturbable
voice was as quiet as ever.  "And anyway, it's only in peace time that
it matters very much whether one is right or wrong.  Nowadays!
Well--_à la guerre comme à la guerre_."  He smiled gently.  "But my
story.  I want you, as an impartial observer, just arrived, with an
unbiassed mind, to tell me if you think my joining up of two or three
points of detail is a sound one.  Both these officers know the points
of detail, so your opinion will be more valuable than theirs.

"A few nights ago our battalion had one of those unfortunate little
contretemps that so often happen in war.  A subaltern of ours, John
Brinton by name, went out on patrol, and never returned.  An exhaustive
search in No Man's Land failed to discover his body; so we were
reluctantly compelled to conclude that he was in German hands; whether
alive or dead we don't know.  There we have the first fact in my case.
Now for the second.

"Two nights after that another of our subalterns was killed in a way
which struck me as peculiar.  I will not weary you with all the various
little points that led me to believe that the bullet which killed him
did not come from the trenches opposite; I will merely say that his
position, his height, and the depth of the trench were the most
obvious.  And granted that my conclusions were correct, strange as it
might appear at first sight, his death must have been caused at close
quarters, possibly in the trench itself."

"Good Lord!" muttered the Adjutant, who was now listening with
interest.  "What do you mean?"

"Two facts, you see," went on Staunton quietly.  "And they would have
remained unconnected in my mind--Brinton's capture and Dixon's
death--but for a small point of detail.  Dixon's jacket was without the
left regimental badge when his body was found.  His servant knows he
had them both earlier in the day.  On the contrary, Brinton had lost
his left regimental badge for some time.  Am I interesting you?"

"Profoundly, thank you, sir."  The man opposite smiled amiably.

"I'm glad of that; it's an interesting problem.  You see the
significance of that small point about the badge, the way in which it
connects very intimately Brinton's capture and Dixon's death.  So
intimately, in fact, does it connect them, that one is almost tempted
to assume that the man who killed Dixon was the man in possession of
Brinton's uniform.  Are you with me so far?"

"The evidence seems a trifle slight," remarked Jesson.

"Quite true; the evidence is very slight.  But then, it often is.
Everything up to date turns on the question of the badge.  Let me
reconstruct a possible--only possible, mark you--story, based on the
supposition that my badge theory is correct.  A German who speaks
English perfectly is given a nice warm uniform taken from a captured
British officer.  Then he is told to go over to the British lines and
see what he can find out.  He comes one night; perfectly easy; no
trouble; until walking along the front line he meets another
officer--alone: an officer of the same regiment as that whose uniform
he is wearing.  Unavoidable; in fact, less likely to raise suspicion
with the frequent changes that occur if he goes to the same regiment
than if he went to another.  But something happens: either the other
officer's suspicions are aroused, or the German does not wish to be
recognised again by him.  The trench is quiet; an occasional rifle is
going off, so he does the bold thing.  He shoots him from point-blank
range--probably with a Colt.  As he stands there with the dead officer
in front of him, waiting, listening hard, wondering if he has been
heard, he sees the two badges on the officer's coat.  So, being a cool
hand, he takes off the left one, puts it on his own coat, and
disappears for a time.  Quite easy; especially when the trenches are
old German ones."

"Really, Major, you seem to have made a speciality of detective
fiction.  As you said, I suppose your theory is possible."

Jesson spoke casually, but his eyes for the first time left the face of
the man opposite him and roved towards the door.  For the first time a
sudden ghastly suspicion of the truth entered the Sapper's brain; and
even as it did so he noticed that Staunton's revolver--the cleansing
finished--pointed steadily at Jesson's chest.

"I am glad you think it possible.  To render it probable we must go a
bit farther.  The essence of all detective stories is the final clue
that catches the criminal, isn't it?"  The revolver moved an inch or
two farther into prominence.

"Good Lord, Dickie?  Is that gun of yours loaded?" cried the Adjutant
in alarm.  For the first time he also seemed to become aware that
something unusual was happening, and he suddenly stood up.  "What the
devil is it, Major?  What have you got that gun on him for?"

"For fun, dear boy, for fun.  It's part of the atmosphere.  We've got
to the point haven't we, where--in my story, of course--the German
dressed in Brinton's uniform comes into the English lines.  Now what
sort of a man would they send in this part of the line, where mining
activity is great?  I continue the theory, you see; that's all."

He looked at Jesson, who made no reply; though without cessation he
moistened his lips with his tongue.

"A miner."  The Adjutant's voice cut in.  "Go on, for God's sake."

"Precisely--a miner.  The second point of detail; and two points of
detail are a strange coincidence--nothing more.  Only--there is a
third."

"And three are a moral certainty, as you've often said."  The Adjutant
once again bent across the table and spoke softly.  "Are you fooling,
Dickie--are you fooling?  If so, the joke has gone far enough."

But the Sapper's eyes were fixed on a leg that twitched, and they
wandered now and then to a neck where--even in the dim light of a
candle--he could see a pulse throbbing--throbbing.

"It's not a joke," he said, and his mouth was dry.  "What is the third
point of detail, Dickie?"

"Yes, what is the third point of detail, sir?"  Jesson's voice was
steady as a rock.  "I am very interested in your problem."  He raised
his hands from the table and stretched them in front of him.  Not a
finger quivered, and with a sublime insolence he examined his nails.

To the Sapper there occurred suddenly those lines of Kipling,

  "For there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth,
  When two strong men come face to face though they come from
      the ends of the earth."

He _knew_ now; he realised the man beside him was a German; he knew
that the sentence of death was very near.  What the clue was that had
given the man away he hardly thought about--in fact, he hardly cared.
All he knew was that death was waiting for the man beside him, and that
his hands were steady as a rock.

Quietly Staunton leant forward and undid Jesson's mackintosh.  Then he
sat back and with his finger he pointed at a spot above his left
breast-pocket.  "You have never been out to the front, you say; your
coat is a new one by Jones & Jones; and yet--until recently--you have
been wearing the ribbon of a medal.  What medal, Jesson, what medal?
It shows up, that clean patch in the light.  John Brinton went to Jones
& Jones; and John Brinton had a Military Cross."

For a full minute the two men looked into one another's eyes--deep
down, and read the things that are written underneath, be a man English
or German.  Then suddenly Jesson smiled slightly and spoke.

"You are a clever man, Major Staunton.  When will the rifle practice
take place?"

      *      *      *      *      *      *

Thus it ended, the play of which John Brinton's disappearance formed
the prologue.  But before the curtain rang down on the epilogue the
German told them one or two little things: that John Brinton was alive
and well; that the existence of Ginger Stretton, to whom he had alluded
so glibly, had only become known to him from a letter in Brinton's
coat; that the peculiarities of pimple-faced Charlie had been forced on
him by his guide before they met the Sapper.

"In fact," as the Adjutant remarked, "the fellow was almost too good a
sportsman to----"  But that's the epilogue.


A file of men; a watery sun just starting its day's work; a raw, chilly
morning.  In front--a man: a man with a white disc of paper pinned over
the heart.

A word of command; a pushing forward of safety catches; a volley; a
finish.




V

MY LADY OF THE JASMINE

The Kid staggered wearily along the road through the blinding rain.
Dodging between the endless streams of traffic, which moved slowly in
both directions, now stopping for ten minutes, now jolting forward
again for a couple of hundred yards, he walked on towards where he
thought his battalion was.  The last Staff officer he had seen had told
him that, as far as he knew, they had pulled out to rest in some
dug-outs about four miles farther on--dug-outs which had only recently
been taken from the Germans.  To start with he had got on to a lorry,
but when darkness fell, and the total progression had been one mile, he
decided to walk and save time.  Occasionally the lights of a car shone
in his face, as its infuriated occupant broke every rule of the Somme
roads by double banking; that is, trying to pass the vehicles in front.
But at last the traffic wore thinner as the road approached the front
line, and an hour and a half after he had left the lorry, it stopped
altogether, save for pack-mules and squelching men.  The rain still
sogged down, and--ye gods! the Kid was tired.  Away into the night
there stretched a path of slippery duck-boards, threading its way
between shell holes half filled with water.  Men loomed up out of the
darkness and went past him, slipping and sliding, cursing below their
breath.  A shower of sparks shot up into the air from a dug-out on his
right, and a great lobbing flare away in the distance lit up the scene
for a second or two with a ghostly radiance.  It showed the Kid the
only other near occupant of the reclaimed territory at the moment: a
mule, whose four hoofs stuck stiffly out of a shell hole--pointing at
him, motionless.  With a shudder he moved on along the duck-walk.
After all he was but a kid, and he was almighty tired.

For three days he seemed to have been on the run without closing his
eyes.  First the battalion had gone over the top; then they had worked
like slaves consolidating what they'd won; afterwards he had been sent
for because of his knowledge of French and German to go back to
Divisional Head-quarters; and then he had come back to find the
battalion had moved.  And any who may have tried walking five or six
miles by night in heavy rain to an unknown destination along some of
the roads east of Albert, will bear out that it is a wearisome
performance.  When to these facts is added the further information that
the age of the boy was only eighteen, it will be conceded that the
breaking-point was not far off.

Now I have emphasised the physical condition of the Kid, as he was
known to all and sundry, because I think it may have a bearing on the
story I am going to relate.  I am no expert in "ologies" and other
things dealing with so-called spiritualistic revelations.  I might even
say, in fact, that I am profoundly sceptical of them all, though to say
so may reveal my abysmal ignorance.  So be it; my thumbs are crossed.
This is not a controversial treatise on spiritualism, and all that
appertains thereto.  One thing, however, I will say--in my ignorance,
of course.  Until some of the great thinkers of the world have beaten
down the jungle of facts beyond our ken, and made a track--be it never
so narrow--free from knaves and charlatans, it is ill-advised for Mrs.
Smith or Lady de Smythe to believe that Signer Macaroni--_né_
Jones--will reveal to them the secrets of the infinite for two pounds.
He may; on the other hand, he may not.  That the secrets are there, who
but a fool can doubt; it is only Signer Macaroni's power of
disinterested revelation that causes my unworthy scepticism.

And so let us come back to the Kid, and the strange thing that happened
in a recently captured German dug-out on the night of which I have been
writing.  It was just as he had decided--rain or no rain--to lie down
and sleep in the mud and filth--anywhere, anything, as long as he could
sleep--that suddenly out of the darkness ahead he heard the Adjutant's
voice, and knew that he had found the battalion.  With almost a sob of
thankfulness at the unexpected finish to his worries, he hailed him.

"Hullo! is that you, Kid?" The Adjutant loomed out of the darkness.
"We thought you were lost for good.  Are you cooked?"

"I'm just about done in," answered the boy.  "Where is B Company?"

"I'll show you.  It's the hell of a place to find even by day; but
you've got 'some' dug-out.  Beer, and tables, and beds; in fact, it's
the first dug-out I've seen that in any way resembles the descriptions
one reads in the papers."

"Well, as long as I can get to sleep, old man, I don't care a damn if
it's the Ritz or a pigsty."  The Kid plucked his foot from a mud-hole,
and squelched on behind the Adjutant.

Now much has been written about German dug-outs--their size, their
comfort, the revolving book-cases, the four-poster beds.  Special
mention has frequently been made of cellars full of rare old vintages,
and of concreted buttery hatches; of lifts to take stout officers to
the ground, and of portable derricks to sling even stouter ones into
their scented valises.  In fact, such stress has been laid upon these
things by people of great knowledge, that I understand an opinion is
prevalent amongst some earnest thinkers at home that when a high German
officer wishes to surrender he first sends up two dozen of light beer
on the lift to placate his capturers, rapidly following himself with a
corkscrew.  This may or may not be so; personally, I have had no such
gratifying experience.  But then, personally, I have generally been
hard put to it to recognise the dug-outs of reality from the dug-outs
of the daily papers.  Most of them are much the same as any ordinary,
vulgar English dug-out; many are worse; but one or two undoubtedly are
very good.  In places where the nature of the ground has lent itself to
deep work, and the lines have been stagnant for many moons, the Huns
have carried out excellent work for the suitable housing of their
officers.  And it was down the entrance of one of these few and far
between abodes that the Kid ultimately staggered, with the blessed
feeling in his mind of rest at last.  Round a table in the centre sat
the other officers of B Company, discussing the remains of a very
excellent German repast.  As he came in they all looked up.

"The lost sheep," sang out the Captain cheerfully.  "Come on, my
kidlet, draw up, and put your nose inside some beer."

"Not a bad place, is it?" chimed in the Doctor, puffing at a large and
fat cigar of Hun extraction.  "Excellent cellar of rare old ale, cigars
of great potency--real genuine Flor de Boche--a picture gallery
of--er--a pleasing description, and a bed.  What more can man desire?"

"Private MacPherson does not approve, I fear me, of the pictures,"
chuckled the senior subaltern.  "I heard him muttering dark things
about 'painted Jezebels,' and 'yon scarlet women of Babylon.'"

"It must be very dreadful for all concerned to go through life with a
mind like MacPherson's."  The Doctor was examining his cigar
doubtfully.  "There is an obstruction in this.  It's either going to
explode with great force in a minute, or else I'm coming to the motto.
Hi! you blighter----" he jumped up hurriedly to avoid the stream of
beer that shot across the table from the Kid's overturned glass.

"Idiot child."  The Company Commander roused himself from his gentle
doze to contemplate the delinquent.  Then he smiled.  "Man, he's
asleep; the boy's beat to a frazzle."

"Aye, you're right.  Tim, come off that bed; the Kid is fair cooked.
Wake up, infant."  The Doctor shook him by the shoulder.  "Wake up.
Take off your boots, and then get down to it on the bed."

The Kid sat up blinking.  "I'm very sorry," he said after a moment.
"Did 

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