No Man's Land Part 32

"Is the Tank clearing 'em out, Shorty?" The dying man interrupted his thoughts, and he looked up to see what was happening.

"It is that, son; it's doing fine. The old thing is sittin' there like a broody hen spittin' at 'em, and the swine are running like h.e.l.l."

"G.o.d! Shorty, could one hit 'em with a gun?" The glazing eyes brightened; the lolling head straightened with a jerk.

"Sure thing." Shorty looked at him, and understood. "Like to try, boy; you'd get the cocoa-nut, I'll bet."

"That's it, Shorty; that's it. Turn me over, an' prop me up. I'd like to. . . . Lord! man, I can see 'em there, hundreds of 'em running to beat the band. Give me the gun, Bill, quick; I must just get one; I. . . ."

With powerless hands he took the rifle for the last time, and looked along the sights. "G.o.d!" 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, G.o.d."

"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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l-ploughed, gun-furrowed No Man's Land is the seed of Britain sown. And the harvest----?

PART IV

HARVEST

"Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn."

MATTHEW xiii. 30.

HARVEST

"For shoulders curved with the counter stoop will be carried erect and square; And faces white from the office light will be bronzed by the open air; And we'll walk with the stride of a new-born pride, with a new-found joy in our eyes; Scornful men who have diced with death under the naked skies.

"For some of us smirk in a chiffon shop, and some of us teach in a school; Some of us help with the seat of our pants to polish an office stool; The merits of somebody's soap or jam some of us seek to explain; But all of us wonder what we'll do when we have to go back again."--R. W. SERVICE.

What of the harvest? It is coming, perhaps sooner than we expect, perhaps not for many weary months. But the reaper is even now sharpening his sickle in readiness, and--what of the crops?

Into No Man's Land have gone alike, the wheat of honest endeavour and hards.h.i.+p well borne, and the tares of cla.s.s hatred and selfishness.

Had ever reaper n.o.bler task in front of him than the burning of those tares and the gathering of that wheat into the nation's barn? . . .

In the Chateau at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the b.l.o.o.d.y Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown. What of the harvest?

If I have made of war a hideous thing--unredeemed, repulsive--the picture is not consciously exaggerated. As far as in me lies I have drawn the thing as I have seen it.

But after the lean years, the fat; after the hideous sowing, the glorious aftermath.

The more one thinks of it, the more amazing does the paradox become--the paradox of cause and effect. To fit these civilians of Britain for all the dirty details which go to make winning or losing, to fit them for the business of killing in the most efficient manner, the tuition must include the inculcation of ideals--more, the a.s.similation of ideals--which are immeasurably superior to any they learned in their civilian life. At least so it seems to one who makes their acquaintance when they first join up. In their civilian life self ruled; there, each individual p.a.w.n scrambled and snarled as he pushed the next p.a.w.n to him under--or went under himself as the case might be--in his frenzied endeavour to better himself, to win a little brief authority! The community was composed of a ma.s.s of struggling, fighting units, each one all out for himself and only himself.

But from the tuition which the manhood of Britain is now undergoing, there must surely be a very different result. Self no longer rules; self is sunk for the good of the cause--for the good of the community.

And the community, realising that fact, endeavours, by every means in its power, to develop that self to the very maximum of which it is capable, knowing that, in due course, it will reap the benefit. No longer do individual p.a.w.ns struggle one against the other, but each--developing his own particular gift to the maximum--places it at the disposal of the community who helped him in his development. And that is the result of so-called militarism--_British_ militarism.

Surely what has been accomplished in the Army can be carried into other matters in the fullness of time. I am no prophet; I am no social reformer to speak of ways and means. All I can say with certainty is that I have seen them come in by hundreds, by thousands--these men of our country now fighting in every corner of the globe--resentful, suspicious, intolerant of authority. I have seen them in training; I have seen the finished article. And the result is good: the change for the better wonderful.

It cannot be that one must presuppose such a hideous thing as this war to be necessary, in order to attain such results. I cannot believe it.

There must be some other method of teaching the lessons of playing for the side and unselfishness. The spurred culprits of Mr. Wells'

imagination have given a lead over the fence; surely all the rest of the field is not going to jib.

And when the harvest does come in, when the sickle is finally put to the crop, there will be such an opportunity for statesmans.h.i.+p as the world has never before seen.

Winnowed by the fan of suffering and death, the wheat of the harvest will shed its tares of discord and suspicion. The duke and the labourer will have stood side by side, and will have found one another--men. No longer self the only thing; no longer a ceaseless growse against everybody and everything; no longer an instinctive suspicion of the man one rung higher up the ladder. But more self-reliant and cheery; stronger in character and bigger in outlook; with a newly acquired sense of self-control and understanding; in short, grown a little nearer to its maximum development, the manhood of the nation will be ripe for the moulder's hand. It has tasted of discipline; it has realised that only by discipline for the individual can there be true freedom for the community; and that without that discipline, chaos is inevitable. Pray heavens there be a moulder--a moulder worthy of the task.

"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"

He will have grand clay--that moulder: clay such as has never been known before. Its G.o.d will be the G.o.d of Reality, its devil the Devil of Pretence. Just as it has ceased to look at Death through a haze of drawn window-blinds and frock-coats redolent of moth-b.a.l.l.s, so it will cease with scorn to look at some of the clumsy sophistries of modern life through the rose-tinted spectacles so kindly provided for the purpose by men of great vocal, and correspondingly small mental, power.