Norman Ten Hundred Part 8

They stare wildly about in a frenzy. Crack, crack, crack! They have had enough and retreat a few hundred yards further south. Still, there lies a dozen or more who will not again pour into the quivering flesh shrapnel's h.e.l.l-hot agony.

A glance along the Norman ranks during the late afternoon showed appreciably by the many gaps separating man from man how many casualties had already obtained. Sh.e.l.ls claimed a large toll of victims even among the more or less screened rows of figures lying along the eastern edge of the ca.n.a.l. Le Poidevin and Le Page, lighting cigarettes from the same match, caught one in the right and the other the left leg, two flying pieces of shrapnel from a sh.e.l.l bursting over one hundred yards distant; fell and stared at each other in painful astonishment ... hobbled laboriously on the long journey (for a wounded man) into Marcoing.

Stumpy, secure behind a small mound, had gazed with black pessimism on life from the moment Tich had given ALL.

"Gawd," he observed generally, "ain't it orful. What with sh.e.l.ls, an'

dead, an' gas! An' I ain't 'ad any rum since last night. Wot a pore Tommy has got ter put up with."

Night. A night when men crouched over their rifle waiting to kill, when the owl had gone far from the slaughter and even not the fitful flutter of a bat sped through the dark pall. Only man: savage, primitive man, glared at where each remained hidden. The blood l.u.s.t to kill, always to kill. Animal ferocity and pa.s.sion: man's inheritance.

From No Man's Land came the sobbing call of wounded for succour. Far, far across the void sounded those despairing frenzied shrieks. Hoa.r.s.e, appealing, incessant, until they weakened and nothing reached the ear but the smothered sobs of men whose life's sands were running out for want of that aid, so near, but which they were unable to reach.

Verey lights from Fritz's lines rose and fell with monotonous certainty, throwing faint glows on the huddled heaps lying in all directions between the two fronts. A gleam would catch reflection in the gla.s.sy eyes of a stiff form, fade and leave you staring hypnotised into the night. Was it distorted fancy ... then you would see it again, and again, until in its very frequency you noticed--nothing.

Sh.e.l.ling slackened. Now and again a pause when the stillness could be "heard." From the woods in intermittent intervals the one solitary gun still intact in an entire battery belched forth a lone sh.e.l.l into the enemy lines. In the fantastic flash of each explosion three s.h.i.+rt-sleeved forms showed a ruddy silhouette of blackened hands and features. A tearing, splintering crash awoke echoes as some great bough was shattered in impact with a "heavy" and crackled its c.u.mbersome way past smaller branches to where it splashed into the ca.n.a.l.

Into an advanced dressing station about Rues Vertes one of the Duo stumbled, bleeding profusely from several wounds, dripping with slimy mud and water, features covered with the grey black dust that comes from close contact with a sh.e.l.l. Ozanne stared at him.

"Gawd," he said, "'ow'd you get that?"

"Sc.r.a.p--with a Fritz outpost--got a stretcher?" He bent down in a half-faint, was carried to a stretcher and his wounds in body and arm bound. f.a.g in mouth he dozed, was startled into wakefulness by a call from the Padre.

"Boys," he was saying, "this village will be evacuated shortly--can't possibly hold on. Those wounded who can had better walk to Marcoing."

To Marcoing! Two and a half miles. The Norman moved dizzily out of his stretcher, stood up, and tottered to the entrance.

"Here, kid," a Corporal (R.A.M.C.) advised, "You can't do it."

"I can."

"You'll peg out on the way."

"Sooner that than--be--a prisoner. But I can--do it." He did!

Dawn! And with it an intensity of sh.e.l.ling over the whole area. Earth, limbs, trees were constantly somewhere in the air. Bodies of yesterday were torn asunder again and the wounded who had lasted out the night shrank and writhed in the fiery hail of shrapnel. Fritz came over again.

He is a courageous warrior, not afraid of his own skin, but is at best when fighting in numbers. A lone fight, back to the wall, is not his metier; he, if at all threatened, retreats.

Rues Vertes fell.

It was a physical impossibility for the Ten Hundred to hold on. The casualties already exceeded three hundred, every man was utterly worn, hungry, had existed for twenty-four hours in a state of the highest nerve tension. Not one was there who had not missed death a dozen times by the merest of escapes. They had for ten or eleven days been engaged in an offensive and what meagre rest had been theirs was woefully insufficient to counteract the heavy demands made upon the stamina.

Out-numbered by twenty to one, completely out-gunned. No reserves, no supports, and only one small line of retreat. No aerial observation, no adequate cover, and an enemy who was aware that a mere shattered Battalion stood between them and the capitulation of one or more Divisions. They were half famished, tired out ... his troops were fresh.

He had no doubts as to the result.

Again the 29th Division repelled an attack on its original front line.

Fritz tried the flank, came on in waves stretching far over the hill crest. A fire stopped him--COULD there be only ONE corps before him. He rallied, swept on again, swarming over the ca.n.a.l banks and close up into the outer Masnieres' defences; but on his lines hailed a rapid fire from the Normans, the like of which he had never deemed possible. Savident ran alone into the centre of a roadway with his Lewis-gun and poured every solitary shot by him in one long sweep up and down the wavering lines. Rifles cracked with the rapid reloading action of marksmen until the barrels burned hot in the hand. The Germans fell back. The Normans went forward in that reckless rush.

Rues Vertes was retaken!

In the outskirts of this village a number of the draft were isolated, became tangled in one great b.l.o.o.d.y melee with the angrily retreating enemy. There was nothing for it but a fight to the death.

Through the gla.s.ses they could be seen to hold off the Hun for a few brief minutes, met him in a ghastly lunging of bayonets, from which beads of blood were dropping ... but they went under one by one, until one thick-set lad remained, seized two Huns one after the other by the neck, twisted them with his own hands and went over the Divide, a bayonet through his heart.

But their example put the fear of death into the enemy and for an hour the thinning line of Normans had no attack.

He reformed, sent a large number of machine-guns with his first wave, concentrated a fearful artillery fire on the villages, and swept forward. The same fire met him, again the lines wavered, but that hail of lead was more than the men could withstand. They went back--many of the gunners without their machine-guns, not back a hundred yards or so but almost out of RIFLE RANGE.

The artillery fire had created havoc among the Normans. Twenty figures writhed in agony in so many feet, a stream of blood-soaked lads were moving slowly away towards Marcoing. One Lewis-gun team was lying about in all directions, forms distorted, limbs missing and great bare stretches of red flesh showing with sickening brilliancy of colour--and the gun itself was UNTOUCHED. Irony of fate.

On the sloping gra.s.s seven inert khaki forms could be counted, on the lower levels another five: stretched across the mound to the east of the ca.n.a.l a dozen or more were visible at intervals of eight or so yards.

All from ONE spot without moving the head.

The casualties were more than the untouched.

Weary Normans, knowing that YOUR turn would not be long acoming--and you would not be sorry when it did--knowing, too, that behind was no relief force. You had to HOLD, there was no alternative. And each face lifted earnestly in the light was set of jaw. G.o.d grant them life and they would hold until the Hun himself called "Halt!"

Ammunition had come up ... therefore was there only one factor by which they might fail--no men to use the rifles. They spoke sometimes in the pauses.

"Wonder wot they'll say at 'ome about all these yere dead?"

"Dunno."

"Anyhow, we ain't done bad work."

"No; an' we'll hang on yere like 'ell, even if they brings the ole bloomin' German army."

"Sure. If Jerry thinks 'e can show us 'ow to shoot 'e has made a 'ell of a outer."

"D'you know," shyly, "we 'ave done somethin' big!"

"Yes; I s'pose we 'ave."

The very men who had fought on and made good in face of odds that no man in his senses would have bet on at a thousand to one chance, opined that they had "done something big," or at least they "s'posed so."

No Regiment in the Empire, or out of it, could have done more. They had to "hang on" at any cost. They did: simply, doggedly.

The Guards--rushed up to the southern portion of the sector and launched against the German advance--with a determination and tenacity of purpose against which the offered opposition was futile, turned the enemy flank and forced them back in the direction of their original (November 30th) line through Cambrai.

A strong detachment fell back on the Masnieres-Rumilly sector, thereby enforcing on the small Norman remnant a further infliction of b.l.o.o.d.y fighting and casualties. The Guards swept back the waves of grey upon the Guernseys, who could not retreat--for a few hundred yards behind them the rest of the Brigade were holding up a further enemy element.

Our own artillery, hara.s.sing the Fritz retreat, sent over a number of sh.e.l.ls into Masnieres. Fritz batteries, in response to the urgency of the situation, hailed down shrapnel on a scale only equalled on the morning of their onslaught. The Normans came in for the thick of it.

The men holding the far end of the little town found themselves swamped down in the overwhelming rush of an entire retreating Battalion. They were prisoners before the abrupt alteration in the direction of the German movement had dawned on them.

Above Rues Vertes the spiteful fire of the remaining scattered units of the Ten Hundred impressed upon the Hun mind a fear of those riflers that was pregnant enough to force him to rapidly verge away from the spot to a safer distance of a mile or so.

The little village near the Crucifix was withdrawn from at dusk with no molestation. Sh.e.l.ling slackened to a mere initial salvo from Rumilly.

The lull followed in which enemy reinforcement were being brought up to be thrown in large forces upon those stubborn British regiments who were clinging tenaciously, with unshaken obstinacy, to shattered trenches.