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III
IN THE WOOD

The attack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications – the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him – that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that he was lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side – a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.

He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.

Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen tortured minutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted his hand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.

It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, and the Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.

Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk, each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the struggle; and a score of times he roused himself and fought down numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.

Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up, a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there; and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware of grey coats moving along the trench towards him, had sense enough to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed. And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.

He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness, but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles of agony; and for all the splints encasing it and despite all the care he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate of the broken bones.

He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts, the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and his vision was blurred and dim, and at last he was forced to drop and lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and branches to fragments.

But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he could barely raise himself on his shaking arms – had not the strength to crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare inches, and had to drop motionless again.

And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still lay on the edge of the broken trench along which he had crept, and he could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines, its failure leave him still within the German.

Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered; a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed back. But almost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke and swept forward, and this time, although the same flank and frontal fire caught and smote it, the line straggled and swayed forward and plunged into and over the German trench.

The Corporal lying there on the trench edge was suddenly aware of a stir amongst the men below him. The edge where he lay half screened in a debris of green stuff and huddled beside a couple of dead Germans was broken down enough to let him see well into the trench, and he understood to the full the meaning of the movements of the Germans in the trench, of their hasty hauling down of the machine-guns, their scrambling retirement crouched and hurrying along the trench back in the direction from which he had come. The trench the British had taken ran out at a right angle from this one where he lay, and the Germans near him were retiring behind the line of trench that had been taken. And that meant he was as good as saved.

A minute later two khaki figures emerged from a torn thicket of tree stumps and branches a dozen yards beyond the trench where he lay, and ran on across towards the denser wood into which the Germans had retreated. One was an officer, and close on their heels came half a dozen, a dozen, a score of men, all following close and pressing on to the wood and opening out as they went. One came to the edge of the trench where the machine-guns had been, and the Corporal with an effort lifted and waved an arm and shouted hoarsely to him. But even as he did so he realised how futile his shout was, how impossible it was for it to carry even the few yards in the pandemonium of noise that raved about them. But he shouted again, and yet again, and felt bitter disappointment as the man without noticing turned and moved along the trench, peering down into it.

The Corporal had a sudden sense of someone moving behind him, and twisted round in time to see another khaki figure moving past a dozen paces away and the upper half bodies of half a score more struggling through the thickets beyond. This time he screamed at them, but they too passed, unhearing and unheeding. The Corporal dropped quivering and trying to tell himself that it was all right, that there would be others following, that some of them must come along the trench, that the stretcher-bearers would be following close.

But for the moment none followed them, and from where they had vanished came a renewed uproar of grenade-bursts and rifle fire beating out and through the uproar of the guns and the screaming, crashing shells. The Corporal saw a couple of wounded come staggering back … the tumult of near fighting died down … a line of German grey-clad shoulders and bobbing “coal-scuttle” helmets plunged through and beyond the thicket from which the khaki had emerged a few minutes before. And then back into the trench below him scuffled the Germans with their two machine-guns. With a groan the Corporal dropped his face in the dirt and dead leaves and groaned hopelessly. He was “done in,” he told himself, “clean done in.” He could see no chance of escape. The line had been driven back, and the last ounce of strength to crawl… He tried once before he would finally admit that last ounce gone, but the effort was too much for his exhausted limbs and pain-wrenched body. He dropped to the ground again.

The rapid clatter of the two machine-guns close to him lifted his head to watch. The main German trench was spouting dust and debris, flying clouds of leaves, flashing white slivers of bark and wood, under the torrent of shells that poured on it once more. The machine-guns below him ceased, and the Corporal concluded that their target had gone for the moment. But that intense bombardment of the trench almost certainly meant the launching of another British attack, and then the machine-guns would find their target struggling again across their sights and under their streaming fire. They had a good “field of fire,” too, as the Corporal could see. The British line had to advance for the most part through the waist-high tangle of wrecked wood, but by chance or design a clearer patch of ground was swept close to the German trench, and as the advance crossed this the two machine-guns on the flank near the Corporal would get in their work, would sweep it in enfilade, would be probably the worst obstacle to the advance. And at that a riot of thoughts swept the Corporal’s mind. If he could out those machine-guns … if he could out those machine-guns … but how? There were plenty of rifles near, and plenty of dead about with cartridges on them … but one shot would bring the Germans jumping from their trench on him… Bombs now … if he had some Mills’ grenades … where had he seen…

He steadied himself deliberately and thought back. The whole wood was littered with grenades, spilt and scattered broadcast singly and in heaps – German stick-grenades and Mills’. He remembered crawling past a dead bomber with a bag full of Mills’ beside him only a score of yards away. Could he crawl to them and back again? The Germans in the trench might see him; and anyhow – hadn’t he tried? And hadn’t he found the last ounce of his strength gone?

But he found another last ounce. He half crawled, half dragged himself back and found his bag of grenades, and with the full bag hooked over his shoulder and a grenade clutched ready in his hand felt himself a new man. His strength was gone, but it takes little strength to pull the pin of a grenade, and if any German rushed him now, at least they’d go together.

The machine-guns broke out again, and the Corporal, gasping and straining, struggled foot by foot back towards them. The personal side – the question of his own situation and chances of escape – had left him. He had forgotten himself. His whole mind was centered on the attack, on the effect of those machine-guns’ fire, on the taking of the German trench. He struggled past the break in the trench and on until he had shelter behind the low parapet. He wanted some cover. One grenade wasn’t enough. He wanted to make sure, and he wouldn’t chance a splinter from his own bomb.

The machine-guns were chattering and clattering at top speed, and as he pulled the pin of his first grenade the Corporal saw another gun being dragged up beside the others. He held his grenade and counted “one-and-two-and-throw– ” and lobbed the grenade over into the trench under the very feet of the machine-gunners. He hastily pulled another pin and threw the grenade … and as a spurt of smoke and dust leaped from the trench before him and the first grenades crash-crashed, he went on pulling out the pins and flinging over others as fast as he could pitch. The trench spouted fire and dust and flying dirt and debris, the ground shook beneath him, he was half stunned with the quick-following reports – but the machine-guns had stopped on the first burst.

That was all he remembered. This time the last ounce was really gone, and he was practically unconscious when the stretcher-bearers found him after the trench was taken and the attack had passed on deep into the wood.

And weeks after, lying snug in bed in a London hospital, after a Sister had scolded him for moving in bed and reaching out for a magazine that had dropped to the floor, and told him how urgent it was that he must not move, and how a fractured leg like his must be treated gently and carefully if he did not wish to be a cripple for life, and so on and so forth, he grinned up cheerfully at her. “Or-right, Sister.” he said, “I’ll remember. But it’s a good job for me I didn’t know all that, back there – in the wood.”

IV
THE DIVING TANK

His Majesty’s land-ship Hotstuff was busy rebunkering and refilling ammunition in a nicely secluded spot under the lee of a cluster of jagged stumps that had once been trees, while her Skipper walked round her and made a careful examination of her skin. She bore, on her blunt bows especially, the marks of many bullet splashes and stars and scars, and on her starboard gun turret a couple of blackened patches of blistered paint where a persistent Hun had tried his ineffectual best to bomb the good ship at close quarters, without any further result than the burnt paint and a series of bullet holes in the bomber.

As the Skipper finished his examination, finding neither crack, dent, nor damage to anything deeper than the paintwork, “All complete” was reported to him, and he and his crew proceeded to dine off bully beef, biscuits, and uncooked prunes. The meal was interrupted by a motor-cyclist, who had to leave his cycle on the roadside and plough on foot through the sticky mud to the Hotstuff’s anchorage, with a written message. The Skipper read the message, initialled the envelope as a receipt, and, meditatively chewing on a dry prune, carefully consulted a squared map criss-crossed and wriggled over by a maze of heavy red lines that marked the German trenches, and pricked off a course to where a closer-packed maze of lines was named as a Redoubt.

The Signals dispatch-rider had approached the crew with an enormous curiosity and a deep desire to improve his mind and his knowledge on the subject of “Tanks.” But although the copybook maxims have always encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first, nature to them, returned answers more baffling in their fullness than the deepest silence would have been.

“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the dispatch-rider.

“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by an in-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally, but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill at con-siderable range.”

Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.

“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’ – trenches, an’ barbed wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.

“Almost anything,” repeated the spokesman, with just a shade of indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it? You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”

“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt and incredulity.

“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our average cruise.”

“But – but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut off – surrounded – er – ”

“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was surrounded, and cut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’ shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they? So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried to butt through it an’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”

“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”

“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat, I must confess.”

“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she floats?”

“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a watertight tank – wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at the Skipper folding up his map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul, or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the cliffs on the other side.”

The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling, and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”

“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”

But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in which direction he was likely to be the bigger fool – in believing or in refusing to believe.

The Hotstuff snorted once or twice, shook herself, and rumbled internally; her wheel-bands made a slow revolution or two, churning out a barrowload or so of soft mud, and bit through the loose upper soil into the firmer ground; she jerk-jerked convulsively two or three times, crawled out of the deep wheel-ruts she had dug, turned, nosing a cautious way between the bigger shell craters, and then ploughed off on a straight course towards the road across the sticky mud – mud which the dispatch-rider had utterly failed to negotiate, and which, being impassable to him, he had, out of the knowledge born of long experience, concluded impassable to anything, light or heavy, that ran on wheels. A wide ditch lay between the field and the road, but the Hotstuff steered straight for it and crawled tranquilly across. The dispatch-rider watched the progress across the mud with great interest, whistled softly as he saw the Tank breast the ditch and reach out for the far bank, with her fore-end and nearly half her length hanging clear out over the water, gasped as the bows dipped and fell downward, her fore-feet clutching at and resting on the further bank, her bows and under-body – the descriptive terms are rather mixed, but then, so is the name and make-up of a Land Ship – hitting the water with a mighty splash. And then, in spite of himself, he broke from wide grins into open laughter as the Hotstuff got a grip of the far bank, pushed with her hind and pulled with her fore legs and dragged herself across. If ever you have seen a fat caterpillar perched on a cabbage leaf’s edge, straining and reaching out with its front feet to reach another leaf, touching it, catching hold, and letting go astern, to pull over the gap, you have a very fair idea of what the Hotstuff looked like crossing that ditch.

She wheeled on to the road, and as the dispatch-rider, with mingled awe, amazement, and admiration, watched her lumbering off down it he saw an oil-blackened hand poked out through a gun port and waggled triumphantly back at him. “Damme,” he said, “I believe she can swim, or stand on her head, or eat peas off a knife. She looks human-intelligent enough for anything.”

But the Hotstuff on that particular trip was to display little enough intelligence, but instead an almost human perversity, adding nothing to her battle honours but very much to her skipper’s and crew’s already overcrowded vocabulary of strong language. The engineer showed signs of uneasiness as she trundled down the road, cocking his head to one side and listening with a look of strained attention, stooping his ear to various parts of the engines, squinting along rods, touching his finger-tips to different bearings.

“What’s wrong?” asked the Skipper. “Isn’t she behaving herself?”

The engineer shook his head. “There’s something not exactly right wi’ her,” he said slowly. “I doubt she’s going to give trouble.”

He was right. She gave trouble for one slow mile, more trouble for another half-mile, and then most trouble of all at a spot where the road had degenerated into a sea of thin, porridgy mud. We will say nothing of the technical trouble, but it took four solid hours to get the Hotstuff under way again. The road where she halted was a main thoroughfare to the firing line, and the locality of her break-down, fortunately for the traffic, was where a horse watering trough stood a hundred yards back from the road, and there was ample room to deflect other vehicles past the Hotstuff obstacle, which lay right in the fair-way. All the four hours a procession of motor-cars and lorries, G.S. waggons, and troops of horses streamed by to right and left of the helpless Hotstuff. The cars squirted jets of liquid mud on her as they splashed past, the lorries flung it in great gouts at her, the waggons plastered her lower body liberally, and the horses going to and from water raised objections to her appearance and spattered a quite astonishing amount of mud over her as high as her roof.

When finally she got her engines running and pulled out of the quagmire, it was too late to attempt to get her up into the action she had been called to, so her bows were turned back to her anchorage and she plodded off home. And by the luck of war, and his volunteering out of turn for the trip, the same dispatch-rider brought another message to her early next morning in her berth behind the line.

The crew’s night had been spent on internal affairs, and, since there had been no time to attempt to remove any of the accumulation of mud that covered every visible inch of her, she looked like a gigantic wet clay antheap.

The dispatch-rider stared at her.

“Looks as if she wanted her face washed,” he remarked. “What has she been up to? Thought you said she was going swimming. She don’t look much as if she’d had a bath lately.”

His former glib informant slowly straightened a weary back, checked a tart reply, and instead spoke with an excellent simulation of cheeriness.

“Didn’t you come an’ watch us yesterday, then?” he said. “Well, you missed a treat – brand-new dodge our Old Man has invented hisself. When we got ’er in the canal, we closed all ports, elevated our periscope an’ new telescopic air-toob, submerged, and sank to the bottom. And she walked four measured miles under water along the bottom o’ the canal. That” – and he waved his hand towards the mud-hidden Hotstuff – “is where she got all the mud from.”

And to this day that dispatch-rider doesn’t know whether he told a gorgeous truth or a still more gorgeous lie.