Chapter X: “The Battalion is moving off in an hour’s time, sir!”

Johnson stood over our Ensign, as he lay curled up in his Wolseley valise on the floor of his tent. A canvas bucket of hot water steamed in the servant’s hand. Our young man felt as though he had slept but an hour. Still, there was nothing for it, so he staggered in his pyjamas out into the sunshine, where The Beak, in similarly airy costume, was shaving himself at a little mirror propped up against the flap of his tent.

“Is it over the top for us, Beak?” queried our Ensign of his company commander.

“Don’t think so yet,” mumbled The Beak under the lather; “it’s fatigues for to-day, anyhow, ... carrying up stuff for the fellows in the front line. Have a good time last night?”

“Ensanguined!” retorted our young man with feeling, as he soaped his face.

Once again he was doomed to travel that dusty road towards the Front, only this time he footed it at the head of his platoon, and he found walking to be a good deal easier than cycling. About the hour of 9 A.M. he led his platoon into the wood, which had been indicated to him as their destination.

Ravaged by shell fire, seamed by trenches, gashed and blood-drenched and blackened, that wood had seen some of the fiercest fighting of the War. Not a tree lived; there was not so much as a green leaf to gladden the eye; not a bird twittered in the branches. The wood and all in it were dead, as dead as the mouldering relics of the fight that were scattered plentifully about in the yawning shell-holes, coffined by the criss-cross of fallen trunks and torn branches.

The trenches in which the two companies were to live were in places foot-deep in water, so our Ensign and Bryan, by The Beak’s directions, got the men to bale them out. By the time they had got the men comfortably settled it was luncheon time. Apollo invited our Ensign to accompany him on a tour of discovery round the wood. Our Ensign shook his head decisively. He thought not, thank you! He had some idea as to what an examination of that wood might reveal. He wouldn’t mind going, but he’d have his lunch first. So they agreed to go afterwards, Roderick accompanying them.

Our Ensign felt glad that he had had his lunch when he looked upon the horrors which the deeper recesses of the wood contained. Those who have never seen a modern battlefield can have no idea of its utter and wanton _untidiness_ ... the extraordinary jumble of arms and equipment and clothing, and papers and letters and playing-cards and empty bottles and crumbling remnants of food. The trenches were literally foot-deep in equipment in some places, with here and there a shapeless, inert mass of khaki or field-grey, as lax and limp as a sack of straw, which once had been a man.

One such scene of silent tragedy gave the three an unpleasant shock. It was in a remoter corner of the wood, where the bare and blackened tree-trunks stood closer together, where a line of wrecked dug-outs and a profusion of German equipment lying about showed that the enemy had made a stand. As our Ensign and his companions plunged in and out of the fallen tree-trunks and the splintered branches lying athwart the shell-craters, Apollo, who was leading, came to a sudden halt. He stood silent with pointing finger.

At his feet, pinned securely to the ground under a massive elm which had been torn bodily from its roots by a shell, was a skeleton yet clothed in its mud-stained and mouldy field-grey. It lay on its face, prone beneath the weight of the tree, its arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

“Poor devil!” said Roderick.

“I expect it broke his back!” observed Apollo, stooping down to get a closer view of the grim figure. But our Ensign, who was fresher than they to these sights of war, said nothing. He was thinking of the shells screaming about those wrecked dug-outs, the crash of the falling trees, the reverberating explosions, the reek of sulphur, and that solitary German felled to the earth as he bolted for shelter, and pinned down among the chaos....

* * * * *

The Beak met them as they sauntered back to tea.

“Sorry, old boy,” he said to our Ensign; “there’s a fatigue to-night. It’ll be you, as Bryan did the last one!”

“Sir!” quoth the Ensign in his best manner, and proceeded to note his instructions. He was to take a party of seventy men and proceed to a certain R.E. Dump, the map reference of which was given to him, there collect various material, and thence go to a certain Brigade Headquarters, where he would receive further orders.

It was dark by the time the party started off. It was a black night, without moon or stars, and, as on the previous evening, the air trembled to the ear-splitting crash of the guns. The first thing our Ensign did was to lose his way. There was plenty of traffic on the roads, but everybody was either going up or coming down, and no one seemed to have ever heard of an R.E. Dump in those parts. At last the party met a Sapper officer.

“A Dump?” he said, in reply to a question. “I believe they are forming one down there ... about a mile along this road.” And he pointed in the direction from which the party had come.

Our Ensign groaned, then faced about and led his men in the opposite direction. After marching for about a quarter of an hour, they came to a place by the roadside where some dark figures were moving about among large indistinguishable heaps.

“Is that the R.E. Dump?” sung out our Ensign.

“Yes! Is that the Guards’ fatigue party?” came back from the darkness.

“Yes!” shouted our Ensign in return, switching on the lamp fastened to his belt.

A Staff Officer stepped out of the roadside blackness into the circle of light.

“Good evening!” he said genially. “They want you to take some of this stuff up to the Welsh Guards. If you report to them, they’ll tell you what to do with it. I’ve got a guide here. This Dump was only formed this morning, so I don’t quite know what there is here; but you just go ahead, and load up the men with anything you think useful. It’s all for you fellows when you go over the top ... you will want plenty of stuff to consolidate with! You’ll be all right then, will you? They shell a bit as a rule going up, but the guide will lead you off the road into the open if it gets really dangerous. Good-night!”

He vanished into the night. A Grenadier private loomed up large in the patch of light.

“Guide, sir!” he said, saluting.

Our Ensign called his senior sergeant, and with him inspected the Dump. He then divided his men into as many groups as there were heaps of different material, and got them loaded up with rolls of barbed wire, pickets, stakes, giant coils of French wire, and so forth. When they were ready the men fell in in single file, and with the guide and our Ensign at the head, the party moved off into the darkness.

It was a good two-hours’ march up to the Battalion Headquarters of the Welsh Guards. The guide led them out on to a narrow track which wound its solitary way across a bare immensity of plain, in and out of shell-holes lying so thick that the lip of one crater touched the lip of the other. It was a dank, raw night, with occasional gusts of rain. The cold wind blowing down the gentle slope of the plain brought the evil odour of death from the spouting lights on the horizon where the trenches lay.

The plain was a place of death. By the roadside, in every shell-hole, the dead lay thick, British and German--now a solitary corpse, its face a white patch in the gloom, now a little knoll of men stricken down by the one shell.

The going was terrible. Under the effect of the thousands of pounds of high explosive that had worked devastation over the slope the very earth had lost its binding power and crumbled like sand beneath the feet. The darkness was intense. The men kept stumbling under their burdens, and more than one toppled headlong into a shell-hole, often on to the silent form of its uncoffined occupant. Our Ensign had learned already that in night marching the tendency of the head of a column is always to go too fast, yet though he steadied the pace down to a bare two miles an hour, the tail of the party kept on straggling behind. With the sweat running down his face, the officer spent the greater part of the march in stumbling hastily from one end of the long train to the other.

There was a good deal of sporadic shelling ... principally “whizz-bangs,” that stank most vilely in the nostrils. Most of the shells seemed to be falling about the road ahead of them, and presently the guide led the party off the track into the open, where everybody had to make the best of his way in and out of the shell-holes. At last the guide pointed to a dim tangle of bare trees on the skyline to the right.

“That’s where we shall find the Welsh, sir!” he said.

He brought the party finally up to a white chalky trench, where, in the yellow light of a lantern, a group of officers were standing about the entrance to a deep and cavernous dug-out. A regimental aid-post was somewhere in the vicinity, for the sides of the trench were lined with stretchers, and the cry of “Make way for the stretcher-bearers!” kept resounding as fresh cases were brought in. Many of the forms lying on the stretchers on parapet and parados were field-grey. One of these figures, with a livid face, opened his eyes, as our Ensign stepped over him to reach the entrance of the dug-out, and murmured: “Ach! Mutter!”

Our Ensign reported himself to the Adjutant of the Welsh Guards, who was just emerging from the dug-out while the men of his fatigue party, their forms looming large against the skyline, sat about and chatted with the orderlies and stretcher-bearers.

“We’re just going out of this,” said the Welsh Guardsman; “you’d better report to the Scots Guards. The Adjutant is about somewhere.”

Our young man found the Adjutant, and reported himself again.

“R.E. material, eh?” said the latter. “Good. We shall want you to take it up to the left company in the front line. I’ve got a good guide here. He’ll take you along.”

Our Ensign felt a trifle dismayed, for he had imagined his night’s labours to be over. He glanced at his wrist. It was 11 P.M.

They started off again, past the regimental aid-post, and out on to a sunken road, where the corpses lay thick. As they plodded on, they seemed to come to a village, for crumbling bricks lay about the road. But of houses there was not a sign. Where the tide of battle has passed on the Somme you will not find stone left upon stone.

The guide, who had been leading them very confidently so far, now began to flag. He started to look about him. An awful suspicion seized upon the officer. He knew the symptoms well enough. He guessed what the guide’s hesitation portended. There are very few officers who have served in the trenches in this war who have not been led astray by a guide some time or other.

A shell whizzed noisily overhead, and exploded close by with an appalling crash. Its orange burst revealed for a brief instant the devastation in that village of the dead.

“Mind yourself, sir!” called out the guide suddenly. Two figures came dashing out of the darkness with levelled rifles.

“Hands up!” they yelled.

Our Ensign had pulled out his revolver.

“Stop that infernal noise!” he shouted, and then, heedless of consequences, he switched on his lamp.

Two figures in khaki were facing him.

“Are you British?” cried one, while the other gasped, panting--

“Oh dear! we’ve just walked into the German lines. Have you seen our officer, sir?” And they mentioned the name of their regiment.

Our Ensign could not help them, and presently they disappeared into the darkness. Then the party went plodding on until, once more, dark shapes loomed out of the night.

A Guards’ officer came towards our Ensign. He took off his cap and wiped his damp forehead.

“What a night!” he lamented. “My infernal guide walked us plumb into the Hun lines. All the Huns were yelling, ‘Come on! We’re waiting for you!’ We made a bolt for it. I can’t make out why they didn’t shoot. I suppose they weren’t sure that some of their own fellows weren’t out as well!”

_Woo-oof!_

A shell burst violently behind the group.

“Bad place to gossip in,” said our Ensign. “I suppose you don’t know where we are, do you?”

“Devil a bit!” was the reply.

“You’ll find two of your men down the path a little way,” said our Ensign; “they nearly shot us!”

“Right!” answered the other unconcernedly. “Well, cheery-oh! Where the hell’s that guide?”...

He and his train padded past in the darkness.

Suddenly our Ensign’s guide recognised a landmark.

“I know that dead horse, sir,” he exclaimed; “it’s a little piece along here! I know the way now!”

Indeed, in a little, he brought the party to the mouth of a trench. There our Ensign found a Scots Guards subaltern.

“Here we are again!” observed the latter serenely. “Cheerful spot.”

“!!!!!!!!” replied our Ensign. “Where do you want the stuff dumped?”

“What stuff?” returned the other, straining his eyes to peer into the outer blackness.

“R.E. material for the left company,” said our Ensign.

“Right company here,” answered the officer.

Our Ensign leant back against the parapet and, baring his head to the night, invoked the vengeance of the powers of darkness on the guide. Apparently the guide had likewise discovered his mistake, for from the mirky blackness outside the trench our Ensign heard a voice--the voice of one in authority--saying sternly--

“What dead horse?”

“The dead horse wot’s lying alongside of two dead Huns!” came the pathetic voice of the guide.

“The dead horse you wanted, me lad,” answered back the stern voice, “isn’t alongside of any Huns! It’s at the dead horse by the pond that you wanted to turn off!”

Our Ensign turned desperately to the officer.

“Look here!” he said firmly, “I’ve had enough of this nonsense. My men are dead-beat, and we are fed up with being led by a lot of fool guides into every barrage on this front. I’m going to dump the goods here, and you can send word along to the other company to come and fetch ’em!”

“My dear fellow,” replied the other, “you can’t do that. The other company probably wants your stuff urgently.”

“If they want it so badly, they can dam well come and fetch it. I’m going home. It’s half-past twelve and we’ve been footing it since seven!”

“Look here,” said the other soothingly, “I’ve got a sergeant of the left company here with me; he’s just brought a message across. You can go back with him!”

Our Ensign wavered.

“How far is it?” he asked sullenly.

“Sixteen hundred yards,” replied the other promptly.

Our Ensign reflected that, if this were a prevarication, the other would have said, “Just over there!” or, “A stone’s-throw!” So he decided he would have to get those additional 1600 yards out of his weary men.

The sergeant appeared--a resolute person; the two officers parted, and once more the fatigue party strung out on its way along the corpse-strewn path. The men were very tired, so our Ensign marched in the rear and kept the stragglers together.

A lot of shells were coming over now, exploding noisily in the ruins of the village. But our Ensign hardly noticed them. He was desperately concerned lest, while he prevented the tail of his party from being left behind and lost, the head might be walking straight into the German lines.

The long train sagged, and finally halted. Our Ensign scrambled, fuming, to the head.

“Where’s that guide?” he demanded.

“He’s just after going to look for the way, sir!” said a soft Irish voice, which added: “Wirra, that’s near!” as a shell crashed into the ground close by.

Our Ensign got all the men into shell craters. The sights in those deep holes were enough to make a man sick. Then he told his sergeant he would give the guide five minutes by the watch. If he had not turned up at the end of that period of grace, they would dump their stuff where they were and steer for home by the compass.

Those were the longest five minutes our Ensign had ever spent. He was tormented by the fear lest a shell might fall in the midst of his party, and he should have twenty or thirty casualties to report on returning to the Wood. The shells came over fairly thick--about two a minute,--but they all burst beyond the men in their shell-holes. The men were magnificently cool. It struck our Ensign that they were more concerned at not having reached their journey’s end, tired out as they were, than at the dangers surrounding them.

Then a voice shouted from the darkness--

“Here you are! This way!”

Ten minutes later our Ensign led his party back along the sunken road and across the brown, shell-scarred slope. Weary though the men were, they were only too glad to force the pace and leave behind them the sights and sounds of the night.

“They’re saying behind, sir,” said the senior sergeant to our Ensign, as the party trudged along, “couldn’t we go a bit faster?”

“Oh! all right!” replied our Ensign carelessly, and quickened his pace. But he did not tell the sergeant that the same idea had long since occurred to him.