Chapter XI: Part III: Seed Time (3)

With powerless hands he took the rifle for the last time, and looked along the sights. "God!" he whimpered, "I can't hold it steady--I can't. . . . Shorty, Shorty, I'm wobbling all over the target."

But Shorty did not come to him. He was lying on the ground two or three feet away, with his own rifle hugged to his shoulder. "If there be anything in religion," he muttered fiercely, "let me shoot straight this time, God."

"That's all right," he shouted; "you've got him covered fine. Fire, son, fire--an' hit the perisher. You ain't wobbling."

And so Reginald Simpkins, lance-corporal and man, fired his last shot. Heaven knows where it went; all that matters is that a running grey-green figure two hundred yards away suddenly threw his hands above his head and pitched forward on his face.

"Great shooting, son, great shooting." Shorty Bill was beside him, turning him over once again on his back. "You plugged him clean as a whistle. Good boy."

The grey had spread; the end was very near. "I thought I heard--another shot--close by." The tired eyelids closed. "I've made good, Shorty, ain't I? . . . Honourable Jimmy . . . Regiment great thing . . . responsibility . . . greater. . . ." And so he died.

IX

"AND OTHER FELL ON GOOD GROUND"

Shorty Bill thoughtfully ejected a spent cartridge case from his magazine and pulled back the safety catch. "I'm glad I hit him. It'll be something for the boy to take away with him. I suppose he'll remember it." Shorty's brow wrinkled with the strain of this abstruse theological problem. Then he shrugged his shoulders and gave it up. "So long, son; you made good--you did well. But the old Tank has cleared 'em out, an' I must be toddling on." Then he remembered something, and produced his own patent weapon. It was only as he actually started to cut another nick in the long row which adorned the stock of his rifle that he paused: paused and looked up.

"Lumme! I'd better wait a bit; it wouldn't never do for the boy to know it was me what hit that Hun. I'll just go on a little, I'll . . . Good-bye, boy; I'm sorry--dam sorry."

With his strange, loping walk the poacher and jailbird walked off in the wake of the Tank, which was now ploughing merrily forward again. Fifty yards away he stopped, and cut another nick. "Ninety-three," he muttered; "not bad. But it wouldn't never have done for the boy to have known." Undoubtedly theology was not his strong point.

Slowly, an inch or two at a time, Reginald Simpkins slithered down the sloping side of the shell hole till he reached the bottom. To the batches of prisoners coming back--just a casualty; to the reinforcements coming up--just a casualty. To the boy himself--the great price.

And so, in the shell-ploughed, gun-furrowed No Man's Land is the seed of Britain sown. And the harvest----?