CHAPTER II

Suddenly there was a loud crash in front. Lamont immediately ducked his head.

“What’s that?” he whispered.

Another crash followed, a belching sound, preceded by a fountain of fire that rose, widening into an arch, with great swiftness and vanished in an instant. There was a series of crashes. When the sound of the last explosion died away, there was silence for a little while. Then a machine gun began to cackle some distance to the right. That made a vicious sound; a snake’s hissing magnified.

“That’s one of ours,” said Gunn, looking to the right. “Something must be happening. There were orders not to fire unless...”

He ducked as a shell came whizzing over the post from the rear and, dropping short, burst ten yards in front of the post with a deafening roar. Immediately the men awakened from their sleep. They tossed about, instinctively making a movement to stand up and with the same instinct crouching for shelter when they realised that a shell had dropped near.

“Hey! What’s that?” came the Corporal’s voice from under the elephant frame.

Gunn opened his mouth to say something to the Corporal, but closed his mouth without speaking and sheltered his head quickly. An enemy machine gun raked the post from end to end. Its sound was guttural, as if hoarse with fury.

Again the explosives boomed, now farther away, seemingly heavier, their harshness dulled by distance.

Gunn crawled stooping through the post to the Corporal. The Corporal was trying to crawl out of his shelter over two men who lay in the doorway, and who cursed one another, helplessly trying to disentangle their equipment.

“I think he’s blowing up his front line, Corporal,” said Gunn. “We’ve opened fire on the right.”

“Eh?” said the Corporal. “What dropped there in front?”

“One of ours,” said Gunn. “It fell short.”

“Fred Karno’s bloody artillery,” said the Corporal. “Stand to, everybody.”

Gunn crawled back, seized his rifle and got ready to open fire.

“Stand to,” cried the Corporal, kicking at a man who was trying to put on his gas mask. “What are you doing?”

He pawed at the man.

“I’m taking no chances,” said a querulous voice.

“Who gave orders for gas masks?” said the Corporal.

“I’m taking no chances,” answered the voice.

“Get your blasted rifle and stand to,” said the Corporal. “Jump to it, everybody. Heads!”

The enemy machine gun was now rattling on the elephant frame.

“They’ve opened fire on us, Corporal,” cried a voice, dazed with sleep.

“What d’ye think I am?” cried the Corporal. “Deaf and dumb?”

Two enemy shells dropped behind the post, the sound of their explosion almost smothered by the sodden mud, which they sent in a shower of heavy lumps into the air. The men, now fully awake and on their feet, gripping their rifles and bombs, began to chatter.

“Come on. Get out of my way. He’s coming.”

“Move, blast it. Give me room. Let go my rifle.”

“Who? Fritz? Is he coming over?”

“Jesus! We’re surrounded.”

Now there was a heavy artillery and machine gun fire. The flashes of the guns, belching their shots, and of the shells, bursting, lightened the darkness in spots, making it still more awesome.

Awakened suddenly from sleep, they were dumbfounded by this sudden and dangerous activity in which they took no part. They had been lying out for two days in a hole without hearing a shot. Now, without warning, a thunderstorm had burst over their heads. They tried to crowd the parapet, but the post was so small that there was no room for them all. There was no order. Everybody was talking.

Gunn, although he had been awake when the firing began, was as excited as the others. To him this sudden alarm was merely an ordinary incident in his trench life, but he had been disturbed by Lamont’s seductive cowardice and by the demoralising desire for escape born of Lamont’s determination “to get out of it somehow.”

Further, there had recently been continual rumours that the war was nearly over, that the enemy was retiring, that peace had, in fact, been already made. These rumours had, of course, been current since the first day that Gunn arrived in France; but of late they had been more persistent. All winter they had held that sector in practical idleness, as far as fighting was concerned. More exhausted and demoralised by the mud, hunger, rain, cold and constant “fatigues,” than they would have been by dangerous activity, they were quite ready to believe anything.

Now Gunn was thinking as he heard the shells burst: “Suppose the war is over and I get killed by the last shell?”

Then he remembered Lamont and started, ashamed because he had forgotten the boy for a few minutes in his excitement. He stooped, looked and found that Lamont had buried his head into the side of the parapet and was lying as still as a rabbit which a dog has sighted. Gunn prodded him in the ribs and whispered in his ear: “Stand to. Get your rifle.”

Lamont shuddered and tried to press his body still farther into the parapet. Gunn pulled him back, shook him and made him stand up. Almost at once he dragged him down and laid his body close against the bottom of the hole.

An enemy shell had landed right on top of the parapet, a few feet to the left of Gunn. It had come with that sharp screech which denotes an almost direct hit to the horror-stricken listener; the screech lasts just the fraction of a second of actual time, but it seems an eternity.

As the roar died away, swallowed by a more distant roar, lumps of mud and pieces of torn sandbags began to fall. Then the top of the parapet gave way and flopped into the trench. Somebody groaned. Others cursed. There was a horrible stench.

Then there was silence. As if it had effected its purpose, the firing shifted to the right.

“God!” cried a voice. “What’s this lying on top of me?”

“Eh?” said the Corporal. “Come on. Rebuild this parapet. Anybody hit? I heard somebody groaning.”

Nobody answered him. Everybody began to examine his own body. Then the first voice cried out again in horror:

“See? It’s a dead man’s leg. Blimme! One of them blasted Froggies that’s buried here.”

“Whew!” cried another. “I just stuck my hand into somebody’s rotten guts. God! What a stink!”

There were guffaws of nervous laughter. Delighted that they had not been hit by the shell and that no more shells were falling near, they laughed; grateful for their spared lives and eager to prove their contempt for danger.

“Don’t mind the stink,” said the Corporal. “Build it up again. Throw all them Frenchmen out. Build it up. Anybody hurt, I say? Who’s that moaning?”

Gunn was holding Lamont in his arms, shielding him from the Corporal. The bursting of the shell had thrown Lamont into a panic.

“I don’t hear anybody moaning,” said Gunn.

He felt an extraordinary fear lest the Corporal might become aware of Lamont’s cowardice; because he associated Lamont’s cowardice with himself. He felt that it was getting a grip on him.

“Yer a liar,” said the Corporal.

Gunn punched Lamont under the chin. The youth stopped moaning.

“Well! Anybody’d groan if two sandbags fell on his head,” said Gunn. “I got an awful wallop.”

“You’re always getting in the way,” growled the Corporal. “Why didn’t you say so? Build up the parapet.”

The Corporal stood up in the hole.

“Listen,” he said in a gay voice. “Corporal Wallace is getting it now. Serve him bloody well right. We should have had his post. His dug-out’ll be no good to him, though, if one of them jam-jars fall on it. Move to it. Build it up.”

“They’ll die dry anyway,” grumbled a voice. “Those ---- Lewis gunners always get whatever is going. Us bombers are treated like a lot of criminals. We mop up all the s--t. We’re always stuck in front, a spy-escort, listening post. First in, last out.”

“Stop talking,” said the Corporal. “Build it up.”

“Aye!” said another voice. “Then when we get out, they tie us up, for fear we’d rob the canteen.”

Grumbling, they began to rebuild the parapet.

The sacks of earth, with which the parapet had been paved, had rotted. The earth in the sacks had been turned to slime by the rain. It was almost impossible to do anything with them. When a man lifted a sack it broke in two and the fragments fell, leaving foul slime on his hands. In the pitch darkness it was impossible for a man to see whether he was lifting a sack or a piece of rotten corpse. They cursed violently.

The sounds of their movements and of their voices, uttering strange oaths, were uncouth in the darkness.

Eight Frenchmen had been killed by shell fire in that hole some time previously during an engagement. Their comrades, taking over the post under heavy fire, had used the shattered corpses as fortification.

“Better leave it to two men,” said a voice, after they worked without result for ten minutes.

“All right,” said the Corporal. “Reilly, you and Gunn do the job. Get out of the way the rest of you. That bloody sniper we gave the cigarettes to yesterday had his eyes open all right. Can’t trust one of those bastards.”

They all began to curse the sniper to whom they had given cigarettes the previous day and who had said: “You no fire. All right. I no fire.” They cursed him, not because they believed that he had anything to do with the firing, but because somebody had to be blamed for the fall of the parapet, which caused work and a stink.

“It’s all very well,” said a voice. “It’s no good ---- and blinding him now. When I wanted to shoot the ---- you blokes stopped me.”

“Don’t start coming the old soldier, Reilly,” said the Corporal. “Who’s in charge of this post? You or me? I got orders not to allow any firing. You think you own this mob because you’re a peace timer. Balls to you, drummer.”

“Good job if there were more peace wallahs knocking about,” said the voice. “Bloody lot of rookies....”

“What’s your number, Reilly?” said the Corporal.

“Before you came up,” mumbled the voice.

“See you later,” said the Corporal. “Who’s that bloody-well groaning now? Somebody s--t himself?”

“It’s Lamont, Corporal,” said a voice.

Lamont had again dug his face into the parapet.

Gunn dropped a sack and went over to him.

“He’ll be all right, Corporal,” he said.

“Come on, kid.”

“What d’ye think you’re on?” bawled the Corporal. “A wet nurse? Get on with your work. Sweet Jesus! Why did You put this baby in my section? I didn’t crucify You.”

“Oh! God Almighty!” moaned a voice. “It’s a wonder the ground doesn’t open up and swallow us for that blasphemy.”

“Hear old preacher Appleby,” laughed a voice. “The Holy Roller. Bloody old hypocrite.”

The Corporal went over to Lamont and pulled him away from the parapet.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said.

Gunn, standing nearby, began to tremble and doubled his fists. At that moment he hated Lamont for his cowardice and yet intended to assault the Corporal in order to defend his mate. At the same time, a voice kept suggesting to him, very anxiously, that he should save himself from some awful catastrophe before it was too late.

Then Lamont raised his head and said in a querulous voice that amazed Gunn by its cool cunning:

“I’ve an awful pain in my stomach, Corporal.”

“I’ll give you a pain somewhere else,” said the Corporal. “Wait ’till we get out of the line. The M.O.’ll fix your guts all right. Stop moaning or I’ll stuff my entrenching tool handle down your throat.”

Gunn breathed a sigh of relief and went back to his work.

“Christ!” said the Corporal. “What a crew I’ve got!”

“That’s the ticket,” said a voice. “Blame us for the whole bloomin’ war while you’re at it.”

The Corporal, aware that he was unable to keep order in the darkness, among this group of tough and discontented men, got very excited. He moved about, gave ridiculous orders and got everybody into a dreadful muddle. The military machine is kept working by the Corporal, the purpose of whose existence is to irritate the cogs under his control, keeping them continually active, irrespective of whether there is any purpose in their activity or not. So it was ordained by the designers of armies. But the designers had not foreseen, at least at that time, that groups of cogs, almost entirely cut off from the body of the machine, might lie in holes for days at a time, unable to find room for the senseless chores of which army routine is composed. Instead of producing that thoughtless bodily movement in response to orders, which characterises the good soldier, the Corporal now caused the exact opposite; simply because there was not enough room.

So that the nine men who babbled and staggered about in that sodden, water-logged, stinking hole, looked like nine lunatics, who, guided vaguely by a remnant of their former sanity, tried to keep in touch with the reality they had lost by an affectation of furious energy. They got in one another’s way, knocked things out of one another’s hands, cursed one another, asked questions, gave orders, picked things up and then dropped them again, sat down, got up again at once, scratched themselves, spat, shuddered and chattered continuously.

Suddenly a body was heard crawling up to the post from the rear. The Corporal cried out: “Who’s that?”

“That Corporal Williams?”

The Corporal instinctively brought his fists rigidly to his thighs, as he answered:

“Sir-r-r-r!”

There was silence immediately. The droning of the rain became loud, as Lieutenant Bull, a huge figure in the gloom, panting loudly, like a primeval beast rising from the slime, slithered into the hole, bringing a little heap of mud after him with a clatter.

“Everybody all right here, Corporal?”

The officer’s voice was bored and indifferent and his whole person exuded a feeling of boredom and indifference, in marked contrast to the nervousness of the men’s voices and the furtive movements of their bodies. His breath smelt of whiskey. He carried a little, short stick, to help himself along through the mud.

Gunn gaped in the direction of the officer, just barely seeing him in the darkness. He felt terrified of him and was worried by this terror. Bull was the only officer in the company whom Gunn really liked. He felt towards him as towards a fellow human being. Bull was fearless. He was just. He did not treat his men as if they were children or pawns in a game of chess. He treated them as if they were really men and not cogs in a machine. He was ruthless and brutal in action; but behind the line he looked after his men with zeal, and protected their well-being with the same enthusiasm that a man would show towards expensive and cherished horses or hunting dogs.

He was the type of officer that a good soldier likes and respects. He had no pity for the inefficient or the cowardly. There was no sentiment in his nature. He was like a piston rod in a machine.

Until this moment, Gunn had always felt comforted by this officer’s appearance in a trench. Now he felt afraid of him; sensing in himself the growth of something that the ruthless Lieutenant Bull would smash with his stick without a thought, or with a bullet from the heavy revolver he carried on his hip.

Gunn sought Lamont in the darkness with terrified eyes.

“Yes, sir,” said the Corporal. “Everybody’s all right here.”

“Parapet blown down, I see,” said the officer, stepping along the trench past the men, whom he brushed aside with his heavy body, without paying any more heed to them than if they were pieces of rubbish or indeed precious dogs.

They leaned back out of his way in awed silence, thrilled by the nearness of his body, which was covered with a uniform different from theirs.

His voice sounded horridly melancholy and remote, like the voice of a mumbling priest, who stands bored upon an altar before his fetish, while the devotees lie prostrate, worshipping both him and the fetish he so casually addresses in droning tones.

“Yes, sir,” said the Corporal. “I’m getting it rebuilt.”

The Corporal’s voice throbbed, addressing the officer.

The officer walked back again, saying:

“Get your men ready. We’re going to advance. The enemy is retiring. Report to Company Headquarters for instructions in... eh...”

“Yes, sir.”

“Eh... half an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer’s bored and melancholy voice died away. He cleared his throat and slithered out of the hole. Casually, he stood up, rapped his thigh with his stick, stood still with bowed head for a few moments, as if thinking of something millions of miles away. Then he wandered away into the darkness. The men remained silent for a few moments and the rain made a loud sound, pattering on their steel hats and on the oil-sheets which they wore as cloaks.

Each man was saying to himself, “We’re going over the top. Will I come back?”

They had all been over the top except Lamont. They were all tough, hardened fighters; because of that, they knew and respected the dangers of an advance.

The Corporal, it being his business, called out to them cheerfully:

“Hear that, everybody? We’re going over. He’s retiring. We’ve got him on the run. That railhead rumour that the post corporal brought up must have been right. Jerry is chucking in his mitt. War over? Blimme!”

Everybody, except Lamont, got wildly excited, especially Gunn. Now that there was a prospect of action, something to do with his muscles and sinews, Gunn would not have to use his brain in combating the seductive temptation of his comrade. He became most excited in his ejaculations.

“Come on, boys,” he said. “Let’s have a last pot at them. Let’s run ’em off the face of the earth. Up, the bloody bombing section!”

“He’s retiring!” they cried, one after the other. “He’s beat. Blighty in a month!”

Shut in on a narrow sector of front, in fact, living in a lonely hole in No Man’s Land, where a dark sky, sodden, naked earth and a curtain of droning rain constituted their world, they were incapable of comprehending the vastness of the army in which they formed the smallest unit. They were quite eager to believe, on the slightest encouragement, that the enemy had been defeated somewhere in a great battle and was now retiring, practically annihilated.

“All we have to do,” said one, “is to run after him, mopping up his dug-outs.”

“Leave that parapet alone now,” said the Corporal. “We won’t need it. Next stop, Kaiser’s palace in Berlin. Get ready those bombs and rifle grenades. Jump to it! Roll up your oil-sheets.”

They became as gay as schoolboys going on holiday; all except Lamont, who stood apart, silent. His large, blue eyes had become cunning, and his face had the strange cunning expression of a woman who is plotting something in secret.

Gunn went over to him and said:

“Well, matey! you’ll get your baptism of fire to-night. Stick to me. I’ll see you right. Then.... what price London?”

Lamont answered in a calm tone: “Do you really believe the war is going to end?”

“Eh?” said Gunn, wrinkling his face in amazement at Lamont’s sudden calmness.

“I don’t believe the war is nearly over,” said Lamont, in the same curiously calm voice.

Gunn swore at him and moved away.

“I’m glad we’re getting out of here, anyway,” said a gloomy voice. “Although you blokes won’t be as merry this time to-morrow as you are now.”

Several voices said:

“Aw! Chuck it, Reilly.”

“What are you grousing about now, Reilly?” said the Corporal. “By cripes! I’ll have you crimed for trying to demoralise the section.”

The gloomy voice again rose out of the dark hole, grumbling: “This whole business is a trap. He ain’t retiring.”

“Chuck it! Cut it out!” they murmured.

“If you ask me,” cried the gloomy voice in a louder tone, “I don’t believe one of us’ll come back alive. Whenever I got into a post where men were buried it was unlucky.”

“Come on,” cried the Corporal, angrily. “Get your rifle clean, Reilly, and close your trap. I’ll take your number if you’re not careful. What d’ye think you’re on?”

Gunn went over and sat down beside Lamont. A stupid fellow, he was very superstitious and prone to be driven to the deepest despair or the wildest enthusiasm by the most trifling omen. Reilly, the gloomy old soldier, a man whom Gunn respected because he had been at the front since 1914, had said that a disaster was imminent. Then it must be imminent. He was almost as certain of it as if he had read it in a newspaper. At once, he connected Reilly’s warning with Lamont’s tempting.

Now, however, he felt tender towards Lamont. There must have been, he thought, a legitimate excuse for the boy’s cowardly panic, when an old soldier like Reilly “had the wind up.”

“Don’t be afraid, lad,” he said, putting his hand on Lamont’s shoulder. “Pay no attention to old Reilly. It’s only his old soldier’s way of talking. There’s no danger. Jerry is on the run.”

“I’m not paying any attention to him,” said Lamont, in his girlish voice. “I know myself what is going to happen. My mind is made up. I feel happy now.”

“You do?” said Gunn in amazement. “What about?”

“Shaw,” said the Corporal, “you take charge here, while I’m away.”

“Yes, corporal,” said a dignified voice.

“What d’you feel happy about?” repeated Gunn.

Lamont’s voice broke as he said, “Bill, I want you to write to mother for me when you come out of the line and tell her...”

“Shut up,” muttered Gunn.

“Tell her that I...”

“Shut up. Chuck it. Where’s your rifle?”

He took Lamont’s rifle and pretended to clean it.

“Listen,” he said. “If we come hand-to-hand, don’t forget... see... use the butt. Just raise the butt like that, upper cut. Then bash him on the head when he falls. Kill any man with a boot in the snout. Forget the bayonet. Eh?”

Lamont sighed. Gunn suddenly bit his lower lip until it bled, threw Lamont’s rifle on the fire-step and moved away to empty his bladder in the corner.

The Corporal came back. He was nervous.

“Looks a big job,” he said. “The whole brigade is going over.”

Although they could not see his face, they felt the nervousness in his voice. They also became nervous.

Now the battle front had again become silent. The melancholy droning of the rain and the flopping of mud clods into shell holes were the only sounds.

Suddenly Gunn’s voice rose loudly from the hole, crying, “By God! I’m going to make some bastard suffer for this rain. I’ll spill some bastard’s blood before long.”

Silence followed this outburst.

“What’s the matter with him?” whispered a voice.

“Hey! Hey!” said the Corporal. “You going off your chump?”

“Nothing the matter with me,” said Gunn, in a queer tone.

In spite of his words, he felt that there was something queer the matter with him. He felt a pain in his eye sockets, and he kept shutting his eyes in order to hide from little balls of fire that kept approaching him from out the darkness.

“Damn-all the matter with me,” he repeated with stupid arrogance.

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