Читать книгу: «Front Lines», страница 11

“Mans,” said the prisoner, nodding his head towards the other end of the dug-out. “Oder mans.”

The Lieutenant whipped round with a startled exclamation. “What, more of ’em. G’ Lord! I’ve had about enough of this. But we’d better make all safe. Come on, Fritz; lead us to ’em. No monkey tricks, now,” and he pushed his pistol close to the German’s flinching head. “Oder mans, kamerad, eh? Savvy?”

“Ge-wounded,” said the prisoner, making signs to help his meaning. Under his guidance and with the pistol close to his ear all the time, they pulled aside some of the coats and found a man lying in a bunk hidden behind them. His head was tied up in a soaking bandage, the rough pillow was wet with blood, and by all the signs he was pretty badly hit. The Lieutenant needed no more than a glance to see the man was past being dangerous, so, after making the prisoner give him a drink from a water-bottle, they went round the walls, and found it recessed all the way round with empty bunks.

“What a blazing ass I was not to hunt round,” said the Lieutenant, puffing another sigh of relief as they finished the jumpy business of pulling aside coat after coat, and never knowing whether the movement of any one of them was going to bring a muzzle-close shot from the blackness behind. “We must get out of this, though. It’s growing late, and the Battery will be wondering and thinking we’ve got pipped on the way back.”

“What about these things, sir?” said the Signaller, pointing to the helmets and equipment they had hauled down.

“Right,” said the Lieutenant; “I’m certainly not going without a souvenir of this entertainment. And I don’t see why Brother Fritz oughtn’t to make himself useful. Here, spread that big ground-sheet – ”

So it came about that an hour after a procession tramped back through the lines of the infantry and on to the gun lines – one German, with a huge ground-sheet, gathered at the corners and bulging with souvenirs, slung over his shoulder, the Lieutenant close behind him with an automatic at the ready, and the Signaller, wearing a huge grin, and with a few spare helmets slung to his haversack strap.

“I thought I’d fetch him right along,” the Lieutenant explained a little later to the O.C. Battery. “Seeing the Battery’s never had a prisoner to its own cheek, I thought one might please ’em. And, besides, I wanted him to lug the loot along. I’ve got full outfits for the mess this time, helmets and rifles and bayonets and all sorts.”

The Battery were pleased. The Gunners don’t often have the chance to take prisoners, and this one enjoyed all the popularity of a complete novelty. He was taken to the men’s dug-out, and fed with a full assignment of rations, from bacon and tea to jam and cheese, while the men in turn cross-questioned him by the aid of an English-French-German phrase-book unearthed by some studious gunner.

And when he departed under escort to be handed over and join the other prisoners, the Battery watched him go with complete regret.

“To tell the truth, sir,” the Sergeant-Major remarked to the Lieutenant, “the men would like to have kept him as a sort of Battery Souvenir – kind of a cross between a mascot and a maid-of-all-work. Y’see, it’s not often – in fact, I don’t know that we’re not the first Field Battery in this war to bring in a prisoner wi’ arms, kit, and equipment complete.”

“The first battery,” said the Lieutenant fervently, “and when I think of that minute down a deep hole in pitch dark, hearing someone breathe, and not knowing – well, we may be the first battery, and, as far as I’m concerned, we’ll jolly well be the last.”

XV
OUR TURN

No. II platoon had had a bad mauling in their advance, and when they reached their “final objective line” there were left out of the ninety-odd men who had started, one sergeant, one corporal, and fourteen men. But, with the rest of the line, they at once set to work to consolidate, to dig in, to fill the sandbags each man carried, and to line the lip of a shell crater with them. Every man there knew that a counter-attack on their position was practically a certainty. They had not a great many bombs or very much ammunition left; they had been struggling through a wilderness of sticky mud and shell-churned mire all day, moving for all the world like flies across a half-dry fly-paper; they had been without food since dawn, when they had consumed the bully and biscuit of their iron “ration”; they were plastered with a casing of chilly mud from head to foot; they were wet to the skin; brain, body, and bone weary.

But they went about the task of consolidating with the greatest vigour they could bring their tired muscles to yield. They worried not at all about the shortage of bombs and ammunition, or lack of food, because they were all by now veterans of the new “planned” warfare, knew that every detail of re-supplying them with all they required had been fully and carefully arranged, that these things were probably even now on the way to them, that reinforcements and working parties would be pushed up to the new line as soon as it was established. So the Sergeant was quite willing to leave all that to work out in its proper sequence, knew that his simple job was to hold the ground they had taken, and, therefore, bent all his mind to that work.

But it suddenly appeared that the ground was not as completely taken as he had supposed. A machine-gun close at hand began to bang out a string of running reports; a stream of bullets hissed and whipped and smacked the ground about him and his party. A spasmodic crackle of rifle-fire started again farther along the line at the same time. The Sergeant paid no heed to that. He and his men had flung down into cover, and dropped spades and trenching tools and sandbags, and whipped up their rifles to return the fire, at the first sound of the machine-gun.

The Sergeant peered over the edge of the hole he was in, locating a bobbing head or two and the spurting flashes of the gun, and ducked down again. “They’re in a shell-hole not more’n twenty, thirty yards away,” he said rapidly. “Looks like only a handful. We’ll rush ’em out. Here – ” and he went on into quick detailed orders for the rushing. Three minutes later he and his men swarmed out of their shelter and went forward at a scrambling run, the bombers flinging a shower of grenades ahead of them, the bayonet men floundering over the rough ground with weapons at the ready, the Sergeant well in the lead.

Their sudden and purposeful rush must have upset the group of Germans, because the machine-gun fire for a moment became erratic, the muzzle jerked this way and that, the bullets whistled wide, and during that same vital moment no bombs were thrown by the Germans; and when at last they did begin to come spinning out, most of them went too far, and the runners were well over them before they had time to explode. In another moment the Sergeant leaped down fairly on top of the machine-gun, his bayonet thrusting through the gunner as he jumped. He shot a second and bayoneted a third, had his shoulder-strap blown away by a rifle at no more than muzzle distance, his sleeve and his haversack ripped open by a bayonet thrust.

Then his men swarmed down into the wide crater, and in two minutes the fight was over. There were another few seconds of rapid fire at two or three of the Germans who had jumped out and run for their lives, and that finished the immediate performance. The Sergeant looked round, climbed from the hole, and made a hasty examination of the ground about them.

“’Tisn’t as good a crater as we left,” he said, “an’ it’s ’way out front o’ the line the others is digging, so we’d best get back. Get a hold o’ that machine-gun an’ all the spare ammunition you can lay hands on. We might find it come in useful. Good job we had the way a Fritz gun works shown us once. Come on.”

The men hastily collected all the ammunition they could find and were moving back, when one of them, standing on the edge of the hole, remarked: “We got the top o’ the ridge all right this time. Look at the open flat down there.”

The Sergeant turned and looked, and an exclamation broke from him at sight of the view over the ground beyond the ridge. Up to now that ground had been hidden by a haze of smoke from the bursting shells where our barrage was pounding steadily down. But for a minute the smoke had lifted or blown aside, and the Sergeant found himself looking down the long slope of a valley with gently swelling sides, looking right down on to the plain below the ridge. He scanned the lie of the ground rapidly, and in an instant had made up his mind. “Hold on there,” he ordered abruptly; “we’ll dig in here instead. Sling that machine-gun back in here and point her out that way. You, Lees, get ’er into action, and rip out a few rounds just to see you got the hang o’ it. Heave those dead Boches out; an’, Corporal, you nip back with half a dozen men and fetch along the tools and sandbags we left there. Slippy now.”

The Corporal picked his half-dozen men and vanished, and the Sergeant whipped out a message-book and began to scribble a note. Before he had finished the rifle-fire began to rattle down along the line again, and he thrust the book in his pocket, picked up his rifle, and peered out over the edge of the hole. “There they go, Lees,” he said suddenly. “Way along there on the left front. Pump it into ’em. Don’t waste rounds, though; we may need ’em for our own front in a minute. Come on, Corporal, get down in here. Looks like the start o’ a counter-attack, though I don’t see any of the blighters on our own front. Here, you two, spade out a cut into the next shell-hole there, so’s to link ’em up. Steady that gun, Lees; don’t waste ’em. Get on to your sandbag-fillin’, the others, an’ make a bit o’ a parapet this side.”

“We’re a long ways out in front of the rest o’ the line, ain’t we?” said the Corporal.

“Yes, I know,” said the Sergeant. “I want to send a message back presently. This is the spot to hold, an’ don’t you forget it. Just look down – hullo, here’s our barrage droppin’ again. Well, it blots out the view, but it’ll be blottin’ out any Germs that try to push us; so hit ’er up, the Gunners. But – ” He broke off suddenly, and stared out into the writhing haze of smoke in front of them. “Here they come,” he said sharply. “Now, Lees, get to it. Stand by, you bombers. Range three hundred the rest o’ you, an’ fire steady. Pick your marks. We got no rounds to waste. Now, then – ”

The rifles began to bang steadily, then at a rapidly increasing rate as the fire failed to stop the advance, and more dim figures after figures came looming up hazily and emerging from the smoke. The machine-gunner held his fire until he could bring his sights on a little group, fired in short bursts with a side-ways twitch that sprayed the bullets out fan-wise as they went. The rifle-fire out to right and left of them, and almost behind them, swelled to a long, rolling beat with the tattoo of machine-guns rapping through it in gusts, the explosions of grenades rising and falling in erratic bursts.

Farther back, the guns were hard at it again, and the shells were screaming and rushing overhead in a ceaseless torrent, the shrapnel to blink a star of flame from the heart of a smoke-cloud springing out in mid-air, the high explosive crashing down in ponderous bellowings, up-flung vivid splashes of fire and spouting torrents of smoke, flying mud and earth clods. There were German shells, too, shrieking over, and adding their share to the indescribable uproar, crashing down along the line, and spraying out in circles of fragments, the smaller bits whistling and whizzing viciously, the larger hurtling and humming like monster bees.

“Them shells of ours is comm’ down a sight too close to us, Sergeant,” yelled the Corporal, glancing up as a shrapnel shell cracked sharply almost overhead and sprayed its bullets, scattering and splashing along the wet ground out in front of them.

“All right – it’s shrap,” the Sergeant yelled back. “Bullets is pitchin’ well forrad.”

The Corporal swore and ducked hastily from the whitt-whitt of a couple of bullets past their ears. “Them was from behind us,” he shouted. “We’re too blazin’ far out in front o’ the line here. Wot’s the good – ”

“Here,” said the Sergeant to a man who staggered back from the rough parapet, right hand clutched on a blood-streaming left shoulder, “whip a field dressin’ round that, an’ try an’ crawl back to them behind us. Find an officer, if you can, an’ tell him we’re out in front of ’im. An’ tell ’im I’m going to hang on to the position we have here till my blanky teeth pull out.”

“Wot’s the good – ” began the Corporal again, ceasing fire to look round at the Sergeant.

“Never mind the good now,” said the Sergeant shortly, as he recharged his magazine. “You’ll see after – if we live long enough.” He levelled and aimed his rifle. “An’ we won’t do that if you stand there” – (he fired a shot and jerked the breech open) – “jawin’ instead” – (he slammed the breech-bolt home and laid cheek to stock again) – “o’ shootin’”; and he snapped another shot.

On their own immediate front the attack slackened, and died away, but along the line a little the Sergeant’s group could see a swarm of men charging in. The Sergeant immediately ordered the machine-gun and every rifle to take the attackers in enfilade. For the next few minutes every man shot as fast as he could load and pull trigger, and the captured machine-gun banged and spat a steady stream of fire. The Sergeant helped until he saw the attack dying out again, its remnants fading into the smoke haze. Then he pulled his book out, and wrote his message: “Am holding crater position with captured machine-gun and eight men of No. 2 Platoon. Good position, allowing enfilade fire on attack, and with command of farther slopes. Urgently require men, ammunition, and bombs, but will hold out to the finish.”

He sent the note back by a couple of wounded men, and set his party about strengthening their position as far as possible. In ten minutes another attack commenced, and the men took up their rifles and resumed their steady fire. But this time the field-grey figures pressed in, despite the pouring fire and the pounding shells, and, although they were held and checked and driven to taking cover in shell-holes on the Sergeant’s immediate front, they were within grenade-throwing distance there, and the German “potato-masher” bombs and the British Mills’ began to twirl and curve over to and fro, and burst in shattering detonations. Three more of the Sergeant’s party were wounded inside as many minutes, but every man who could stand on his feet, well or wounded, rose at the Sergeant’s warning yell to meet the rush of about a dozen men who swung aside from a large group that had pressed in past their flank. The rush was met by a few quick shots, but the ammunition for the machine-gun had run out, and of bombs even there were only a few left. So, in the main, the rush was met with the bayonet – and killed with it. The Sergeant still held his crater, but now he had only two unwounded men left to help him.

The Corporal, nursing a gashed cheek and spitting mouthfuls of blood, shouted at him again, “Y’ ain’t goin’ to try ’ hold on longer, surely. We’ve near shot the last round away.”

“I’ll hold it,” said the Sergeant grimly, “if I have to do it myself wi’ my bare fists.”

But he cast anxious looks behind, in hope of a sight of reinforcements, and knew that if they did not come before another rush he and his party were done. His tenacity had its due reward. Help did come – men and ammunition and bombs and a couple of machine-guns – and not three minutes before the launching of another attack. An officer was with the party, and took command, but he was killed inside the first minute, and the Sergeant again took hold.

Again the attack was made all along the line, and again, under the ferocious fire of the reinforced line, it was beaten back. The line had at the last minute been hinged outward behind the Sergeant, and so joined up with him that it formed a sharpish angle, with the Sergeant’s crater at its point. The enfilade fire of this forward-swung portion and the two machine-guns in the crater did a good deal to help cut down the main attack.

When it was well over, and the attack had melted away, the Captain of the Sergeant’s Company pushed up into the crater.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked. “You, Sergeant? Your note came back, and we sent you help; but you were taking a long risk out here. Didn’t you know you had pushed out beyond your proper point? And why didn’t you retire when you found yourself in the air?”

The Sergeant turned and pointed out where the thinning smoke gave a view of the wide open flats of the plain beyond the ridge.

“I got a look o’ that, sir,” he said, “and I just thought a commanding position like this was worth sticking a lot to hang to.”

“Jove! and you were right,” said the Captain, looking gloatingly on the flats, and went on to add other and warmer words of praise.

But it was to his corporal, a little later, that the Sergeant really explained his hanging on to the point.

“Look at it!” he said enthusiastically; “look at the view you get!”

The Corporal viewed dispassionately for a moment the dreary expanse below, the shell-churned morass and mud, wandering rivulets and ditches, shell-wrecked fragments of farms and buildings, the broken, bare-stripped poles of trees.

“Bloomin’ great, ain’t it?” he mumbled disgustedly, through his bandaged jaws. “Fair beautiful. Makes you think you’d like to come ’ere after the war an’ build a ’ouse, an’ sit lookin’ out on it always – I don’t think.”

“Exactly what I said the second I saw it,” said the Sergeant, and chuckled happily. “Only my house’d be a nice little trench an’ a neat little dug-out, an’ be for duration o’ war. Think o’ it, man – just think o’ this winter, with us up here along the ridge, an’ Fritz down in his trenches below there, up to the middle in mud. Him cursin’ Creation, and strugglin’ to pump his trenches out; and us sitting nicely up here in the dry, snipin’ down in enfilade along his trench, and pumpin’ the water out of our trenches down on to the flat to drown him out.”

The Sergeant chuckled again, slapped his hands together. “I’ve been havin’ that side of it back in the salient there for best part o’ two years, off and on. Fritz has been up top, keepin’ his feet dry and watchin’ us gettin’ shelled an’ shot up an’ minnie-werfered to glory – squattin’ up here, smokin’ his pipe an’ takin’ a pot-shot at us, and watchin’ us through his field-glasses, just as he felt like. And now it’s our turn. Don’t let me hear anybody talk about drivin’ the Hun back for miles from here. I don’t want him to go back; I want him to sit down there the whole darn winter, freezin’ an’ drownin’ to death ten times a day. Fritz isn’t go in’ to like that – not any. I am, an’ that’s why I hung like grim death to this look-out point. This is where we come in; this is our turn!”

XVI
ACCORDING TO PLAN

“Ratty” Travers dropped his load with a grunt of satisfaction, squatted down on the ground, and tilting his shrapnel helmet back, mopped a streaming brow. As the line in which he had moved dropped to cover, another line rose out of the ground ahead of them and commenced to push forward. Some distance beyond, a wave of kilted Highlanders pressed on at a steady walk up to within about fifty paces of the string of flickering, jumping white patches that marked the edge of the “artillery barrage.”

Ratty Travers and the others of the machine-gun company being in support had a good view of the lines attacking ahead of them.

“Them Jocks is goin’ along nicely,” said the man who had dropped beside Ratty. Ratty grunted scornfully. “Beautiful,” he said. “An’ we’re doin’ wonderful well ourselves. I never remember gettin’ over the No Man’s Land so easy, or seein’ a trench took so quick an’ simple in my life as this one we’re in; or seein’ a’tillery barrage move so nice an’ even and steady to time.”

“You’ve seed a lot, Ratty,” said his companion. “But you ain’t seed everything.”

“That’s true,” said Ratty. “I’ve never seen a lot o’ grown men playin’ let’s-pretend like a lot of school kids. Just look at that fool wi’ the big drum, Johnny.”

Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big drum was lugging it off at the double away from the kilted line, and strung out to either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed with sticks and biscuit-tins and empty cans. Ratty and his companions were clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, and bore boxes of very real ammunition. In the “trenches” ahead of them, or moving over the open, were other men similarly equipped; rolling back to them came a clash and clatter, a dull prolonged boom-boom-boom. In every detail, so far as the men were concerned, an attack was in full swing; but there was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping whistle and sharp crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking thunder of artillery (except that steady boom-boom), no shell-scorched strip of battered ground. The warm sun shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of flags and tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition and stretchers and all the other accoutrements of battle. There were no signs of death or wounds, none of the horror of war, because this was merely a “practice attack,” a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full ten miles behind the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and tapes, the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit-tins and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The kilts came to a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment later, the “barrage” sprinted off ahead one or two score yards, halted, and fell to banging and battering tins and drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly moved on after them, to halt again at their measured distance until the next “lift” of the “barrage.” It looked sheer child’s play, a silly elaborate game; and yet there was no sign of laughter or play about the men taking part in it – except on the part of Ratty Travers. Ratty was openly scornful. “Ready there,” said a sergeant rising and pocketing the notebook he had been studying. “We’ve only five minutes in this trench. And remember you move half-right when you leave here, an’ the next line o’ flags is the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements along the edge.”

Ratty chuckled sardonically. “I ’ope that in the real thing them machine-guns won’t ‘ave nothing to say to us movin’ half-right across their front,” he said.

“They’ve been strafed out wi’ the guns,” said Johnny simply, “an’ the Jocks ’as mopped up any that’s left. We was told that yesterday.”

“I dare say,” retorted Ratty. “An’ I hopes the Huns ’ave been careful instructed in the same. It ’ud be a pity if they went an’ did anything to spoil all the plans. But they wouldn’t do that. Oh, no, of course not – I don’t think!”

He had a good deal more to say in the same strain – with especially biting criticism on the “artillery barrage” and the red-faced big drummer who played lead in it – during the rest of the practice and at the end of it when they lay in their “final objective” and rested, smoking and cooling off with the top buttons of tunics undone, while the officers gathered round the C.O. and listened to criticism and made notes in their books.

“I’ll admit,” he said, “they might plan out the trenches here the same as the ones we’re to attack from. It’s this rot o’ layin’ out the Fritz trenches gets me. An’ this attack – it’s about as like a real attack as my gasper’s like a machine-gun. Huh! Wi’ one bloke clockin’ you on a stop-watch, an’ another countin’ the paces between the trenches – Boche trenches a mile behind their front line, mind you – an’ another whackin’ a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An’ all this ‘Go steady here, this is a sharp rise,’ or ’hurry this bit, ’cos most likely it’ll be open to enfiladin’ machine-gun fire,’ or ‘this here’s the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements.’ Huh! Plunky rot I calls it.”

The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing replies. Ratty was new to this planned-attack game, of course, but since he had been out and taken his whack of the early days, had been wounded, and home, and only lately had come out again, he was entitled to a certain amount of excusing.

Johnny summed it up for them. “We’ve moved a bit since the Noove Chapelle days, you know,” he said. “You didn’t have no little lot like this then, did you?” jerking his head at the bristling line of their machine-guns. “An’ you didn’t have creepin’ barrages, an’ more shells than you could fire, eh? Used to lose seventy an’ eighty per cent. o’ the battalion’s strength goin’ over the bags them days, didn’t you? Well, we’ve changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You’ll see the differ presently.”

Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable “differ” and a great improvement on old ways. He and his company moved up towards the front leisurely and certainly, without haste and without confusion, having the orders detailed overnight for the next day’s march, finding meals cooked and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously known and “detailed” for them, coming at night to camp or billet places left vacant for them immediately before, finding everything planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, although he admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that beyond the front line this carefully-planned moving must cease abruptly. “It’ll be the same plunky old scramble an’ scrap, I’ll bet,” he said. “We’ll see then if all the Fritz trenches is just where we’ve fixed ’em, an’ if we runs to a regular time-table and follows the laid-down route an’ first-turn-to-the-right-an’-mind-the-step-performance we’ve been practisin’.”

But it was as they approached the fighting zone, and finally when they found themselves installed in a support trench on the morning of the Push that Ratty came to understand the full difference between old battles and this new style. For days on end he heard such gun-fire as he had never dreamed of, heard it continue without ceasing or slackening day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred with winking and spurting gusts of flame from our high-explosives. He walked or lay on a ground that quivered and trembled under the unceasing shock of our guns’ discharges, covered his eyes at night to shut out the flashing lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the sky. On the last march that had brought them into the trenches they had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first the huge monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little in advance of the great piles of shells and long roofed sidings crammed with more shells, then farther on past other monsters only less in comparison with those they had seen before, on again past whole batteries of 60-pounders and “six-inch” tucked away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses, and finally up through the field guns packed close in every corner that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in the open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined village – a street that was no more than a cleared strip of cobblestones bordered down its length on both sides by the piled or scattered heaps of rubble and brick that had once been rows of houses – with a mad chorus of guns roaring and cracking and banging in numberless scores about them, passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns ranged battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of flame jumping and flashing along their fronts. They found and settled into their trench with this unbroken roar of fire bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud and long that it seemed impossible to increase it. When their watches told them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned was the “zero hour,” the fixed moment of the attack, the sound of the gun-fire swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of fury that eclipsed all that had gone before. The men crouched in their trench listening in awed silence, and as the zero hour approached Ratty clambered and stood where he could look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn’t he heard the order to keep under cover? Ratty dropped back beside the others. “Lumme,” he said disgustedly, “I dunno wot this bloomin’ war’s comin’ to. Orders, orders, orders! You mustn’t get plunky well killed nowadays, unless you ’as orders to.”

“There they go,” said Johnny suddenly, and all strained their ears for the sound of rattling rifle-fire that came faintly through the roll of the guns. “An’ here they come,” said Ratty quickly, and all crouched low and listened to the rising roar of a heavy shell approaching, the heavy cr-r-rump of its fall. A message passed along, “Ready there. Move in five minutes.” And at five minutes to the tick, they rose and began to pass along the trench.

“Know where we are, Ratty?” asked Johnny. Ratty looked about him. “How should I know?” he shouted back, “I was never ’ere before.”

“You oughter,” returned Johnny. “This is the line we started from back in practice attack – the one that was taped out along by the stream.”

“I’m a fat lot better for knowin’ it too,” said Ratty sarcastically, and trudged on. They passed slowly forward and along branching trenches until they came at last to the front line, from which, after a short rest, they climbed and hoisted their machine-guns out into the open. From here for the first time they could see something of the battleground; but could see nothing of the battle except a drifting haze of smoke, and, just disappearing into it, a shadowy line of figures. The thunder of the guns continued, and out in front they could hear now the crackle of rifle fire, the sharp detonations of grenades. There were far fewer shells falling about the old “neutral ground” than Ratty had expected, and even comparatively few bullets piping over and past them. They reached the tumbled wreckage of shell-holes and splintered planks that marked what had been the front German line, clambered through this, and pushed on stumbling and climbing in and out the shell-holes that riddled the ground. “Where’s the Buffs that’s supposed to be in front o’ us,” shouted Ratty, and ducked hastily into a deep shell-hole at the warning screech of an approaching shell. It crashed down somewhere near and a shower of dirt and earth rained down on him. He climbed out. “Should be ahead about a – here’s some o’ them now wi’ prisoners,” said Johnny. They had a hurried glimpse of a huddled group of men in grey with their hands well up over their heads, running, stumbling, half falling and recovering, but always keeping their hands hoisted well up. There may have been a full thirty of them, and they were being shepherded back by no more than three or four men with bayonets gleaming on their rifles. They disappeared into the haze, and the machine-gunners dropped down into a shallow twisting depression and pressed on along it. “This is the communication trench that used to be taped out along the edge o’ that cornfield in practice attack,” said Johnny, when they halted a moment. “Trench?” said Ratty, glancing along it, “Strewth!” The trench was gone, was no more than a wide shallow depression, a tumbled gutter a foot or two below the level of the ground; and even the gutter in places was lost in a patch of broken earth-heaps and craters. It was best traced by the dead that lay in it, by the litter of steel helmets, rifles, bombs, gas-masks, bayonets, water-bottles, arms and equipment of every kind strewed along it.