Men, Women and Guns Part 26

"Have some more rum, sir?" remarked Jim soothingly.

"But I could have stood all that--they were trifles." The Major was getting warmed up to it. "This is what finished me." He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. "Read that, my boy--read that and ponder."

Jim took the paper and glanced at it.

"I carry that as my talisman. In the event of my death I've given orders for it to be sent to the author."

"But what's it all about?" asked Denver.

"'At the risk of repeating myself, I wish again to a.s.severate what I drew especial attention to last week, and the week before, and the one before that; as a firm grasp of this essential fact is imperative to an undistorted view of the situation. Whatever minor facts may now or again crop up in this t.i.tanic conflict, we must not shut our eyes to the rules of war. They are unchangeable, immutable; the rules of Caesar were the rules of Napoleon, and are in fact the rules that I myself have consistently laid down in these columns. They cannot change: this war will be decided by them as surely as night follows day; and those ignorant persons who are permitted to express their opinions elsewhere would do well to remember that simple fact.'"

"What the devil is this essential fact?"

"Would you like to know? I got to it after two columns like that."

"What was it?" laughed Jim.

"'An obstacle in an army's path is that which obstructs the path of the army in question.'"

"After that--more rum." Jim solemnly decanted the liquid. "You deserve it. You...."

"Stand to." A shout from the trench outside--repeated all along until it died away in the distance. The Major gulped his rum and dived for the door--while Jim groped for his cap. Suddenly out of the still night there came a burst of firing, sudden and furious. The firing was taken up all along the line, and then the guns started and a rain of shrapnel came down behind the British lines.

Away--a bit in front on the other side of the road to Jim's trench there were woods--woods of unenviable reputation. Hence the name of "Sanctuary." In the middle of them, on the road, lay the ruined chateau and village of Hooge--also of unenviable reputation.

And towards these woods the eyes of all were turned.

"What the devil is it?" shouted the man beside Jim. "Look at them lights in the trees."

The devil it was. Dancing through the darkness of the trees were flames and flickering lights, like will-o'-the-wisps playing over an Irish bog.

And men, looking at one another, muttered sullenly. They remembered the gas; what new devilry was this?

Up in the woods things were moving. Hardly had the relieving regiments taken over their trenches, when from the ground in front there seemed to leap a wall of flame. It rushed towards them and, falling into the trenches and on to the men's clothes, burnt furiously like brandy round a plum pudding. The woods were full of hurrying figures das.h.i.+ng blindly about, cursing and raving. For a s.p.a.ce pandemonium reigned. The Germans came on, and it looked as if there might be trouble. The regiments who had just been relieved came back, and after a while things straightened out a little. But our front trenches in those woods, when morning broke, were not where they had been the previous night....

Liquid fire--yet one more invention of "Kultur"; gas; the moat at Ypres poisoned with a.r.s.enic; crucifixion; burning death squirted from the black night--suddenly, without warning: truly a great array of Kultured triumphs.... And with it all--failure. To fight as a sportsman fights and lose has many compensations; to fight as the German fights and lose must be to taste of the dregs of h.e.l.l.

But that is how they _do_ fight, whatever interesting surmises one may make of their motives and feelings. And that is how it goes on over the water--the funny mixture of the commonplace of everyday with the great crude, cruel realities of life and death.

But as I said, for the next few weeks the grey screen cloaked those crude realities as far as Jim was concerned. Rumour for once had proved true; the division was pulled out, and his battalion found itself near Poperinghe.

"Months of boredom punctuated by moments of intense fright" is a definition of war which undoubtedly Noah would have regarded as a chestnut. And I should think it doubtful if there has ever been a war in which this definition was more correct.

Jim route marched: he trained bombers: he dined in Poperinghe and went to the Follies. Also, he allowed other men to talk to him of their plans for leave: than which no more beautiful form of unselfishness is laid down anywhere in the Law or the Prophets.

On the whole the time did not drag. There is much of interest for those who have eyes to see in that country which fringes the c.o.c.k Pit of Europe. Hacking round quietly most afternoons on a horse borrowed from someone, the spirit of the land got into him, that blood-soaked, quiet, uncomplaining country, whose soul rises unconquerable from the battered ruins.

Horses exercising, lorries cras.h.i.+ng and lurching over the pave roads.

G.S. wagons at the walk, staff motors--all the necessary wherewithal to preserve the safety of the mud holes up in front--came and went in a ceaseless procession; while every now and then a local cart with mattresses and bedsteads, tables and crockery, tied on perilously with bits of string, would come creaking past--going into the unknown, leaving the home of years.

Ypres, that tragic charnel house, with the great jagged holes torn out of the pave; with the few remaining walls of the Cathedral and Cloth Hall cracked and leaning outwards; with the strange symbolical touch of the black hea.r.s.e which stood untouched in one of the arches. Rats everywhere, in the sewers and broken walls; in the crumbling belfry above birds, cawing discordantly. The statue of the old gentleman which used to stand serene and calm amidst the wreckage, now lay broken on its face. But the stench was gone--the dreadful stench of death which had clothed it during the second battle; it was just a dead town--dead and decently buried in great heaps of broken brick....

Vlamertinghe, with the little plot of wooden crosses by the cross roads; Elverdinghe, where the gas first came, and the organ pipes lay twisted in the wreckage of the unroofed church; where the long row of French graves rest against the chateau wall, graves covered with long gra.s.s--each with an empty bottle upside down at their head.

And when Thyself with s.h.i.+ning Foot shall pa.s.s Among the Guests star-scatter'd on the Gra.s.s, ... turn down an empty Gla.s.s.

And in the family archives are some excellent reproductions--not photographs of course, for the penalty for carrying a camera is death at dawn--of ruined churches and sh.e.l.l-battered chateaux. Perhaps the most interesting one, at any rate the most human, is a "reproduction" of a group of cavalry men. They had been digging in a little village a mile behind the firing-line--a village battered and dead from which the inhabitants had long since fled. Working in the garden of the local doctor, they were digging a trench which ran back to the cellar of the house, when on the scene of operations had suddenly appeared the doctor himself. By signs he possessed himself of a shovel, and, pacing five steps from the kitchen door and three from the tomato frame, he too started to dig.

"His wife's portrait, probably," confided the cavalry officer to Jim, as they watched the proceeding. "Or possibly an urn with her ashes."

It was a sergeant who first gave a choking cry and fainted; he was nearest the hole.

"Yes," remarked Jim, "he's found the urn."

With frozen stares they watched the last of twelve dozen of light beer go into the doctor's cart. With pallid lips the officer saw three dozen of good champagne s.n.a.t.c.hed from under his nose.

"Heavens! man," he croaked, "it was _dry_ too. If our trench had been a yard that way...." He leant heavily on his stick, and groaned.

The moment was undoubtedly pregnant with emotion.

"'E'ad a nasty face, that man--a nasty face. Oh, 'orrible."

Hushed voices came from the group of leaners. The "reproduction" depicts the psychological moment when the doctor with a joyous wave of the hand wished them "_Bonjour, messieurs,_" and drove off.

"Not one--not one ruddy bottle--not the smell of a peris.h.i.+ng cork.

Stung!"

But Jim had left.

Which very silly and frivolous story is topsy-turvy land up to date, or at any rate typical of a large bit of it.

CHAPTER VII

ARCHIE AND OTHERS

However, to be serious. It was as he came away from this scene of alarm and despondency that Jim met an old pal who boasted the gunner badge, and whom conversation revealed as the proud owner of an Archie, or anti-aircraft gun. And as the salient is perhaps more fruitful in aeroplanes than any other part of the line, and the time approached five o'clock (which is generally the hour of their afternoon activity), Jim went to see the fun.

In front, an observing biplane buzzed slowly to and fro, watching the effect of a mother[1] shooting at some mark behind the German lines.

With the gun concealed in the trees, a gunner subaltern altered his range and direction as each curt wireless message flashed from the 'plane. "Lengthen 200--half a degree left." And so on till they got it.

Occasionally, with a vicious crack, a German anti-aircraft sh.e.l.l would explode in the air above in a futile endeavour to reach the observer, and a great ma.s.s of acrid yellow or black fumes would disperse slowly.

Various machines, each intent on its own job, rushed to and fro, and in the distance, like a speck in the sky, a German monoplane was travelling rapidly back over its own lines, having finished its reconnaissance.