Front Lines. Boyd Cable
his hand, and his fingers on the pin ready to pull it. Rabbie plumped a bucket down beside him, and without words the two began plucking out the pins and hurling the grenades round the corner.
“Where’s the ithers?” shouted Rabbie when the shattering roar of their exploding grenades had died down.
“Dead,” said Lauchie tersely. “Except Shirty, an’ he’s sair wounded. I left him hidin’ in a bit broken dug-out half-a-dizen turns o’ the trench back.”
“Come on,” said Rabbie, rising abruptly. “We’ll awa’ back an’ get him.”
“He said I was t’ retire slow, an’ haud them back as well’s I could,” said Lauchie.
“I’m awa’ back for him,” said Rabbie. “Ye needna come unless ye like.”
He flung a couple of grenades round the corner; Lauchie followed suit, and the instant they heard the boom of the explosions both pushed round and up the next stretch through the eddying smoke and reek, pulling the pins as they ran, and tossing the bombs ahead of them into the next section of trench. And so, in spite of the German bombers’ resistance, they bombed their way back to where Shirty had been left. Several times they trod over or past the bodies of men killed by their bombs, once they encountered a wounded officer kneeling with his shoulder against the trench wall and snapping a couple of shots from a magazine pistol at them as they plunged through the smoke. Rabbie stunned him with a straight and hard-flung bomb, leapt, dragging Lauchie with him, back into cover until the bomb exploded, and then ran forward again. He stooped in passing and picked up the pistol from beside the shattered body. “Might be useful,” he said, “an’ it’s a good sooveneer onyway. I promised a sooveneer tae yon French lassie back in Poppyring.”
They found Shirty crouched back and hidden in the mouth of a broken-down dug-out, and helped him out despite his protests. “I was all right there,” he said. “You two get back as slow as you can, and keep them back all – ”
“See here, Shirty,” Rabbie broke in, “yer no in charge o’ the pairty now. Yer a casualty an’ I’m the senior – I’ve ma paybook here t’ prove it if ye want, so just haud your wheesh an’ come on.”
He hoisted the wounded man – Shirty’s leg was broken and he had many other minor wounds – to his shoulder, and began to move back while Lauchie followed close behind, halting at each corner to cover the retreat with a short bombing encounter.
Half-way back they met a strong support party which had been dispatched immediately after the receipt by the H.Q. signallers of a scribbled note dropped by a low-flying aeroplane. The party promptly blocked the trench, and prepared to hold it strongly until the time came again to advance, and the three bombers were all passed back to make their way to the dressing station.
There Shirty was placed on a stretcher and made ready for the ambulance, and the other two, after their splinter cuts and several slight wounds had been bandaged, prepared to walk back.
“So long, Shirty,” said Rabbie. “See ye again when ye come up an’ rejine.”
“So long, chum,” said Shirty, “an’ I’m – er – I – ”. And he stammered some halting phrase of thanks to them for coming back to fetch him out.
“Havers,” said Rabbie, “I wisna goin’ t’ leave ye there tae feenish the war in a Fritz jail. An’ yer forgettin’ whit I promised ye back there when ye ordered me for they bombs – that I’d hammer yer heid aff when we came oot. I’ll just mind ye o’ that when ye jine up again.”
“Right-o,” said Shirty happily. “I won’t let you forget it.”
“I wunner,” said Rabbie reflectively, lighting a cigarette after Shirty had gone – “I wunner if he’ll ever be fit t’ jine again. I’d fair like t’ hae anither bit scrap wi’ him, for I never was richt satisfied wi’ yon decesion against me.”
“He’s like t’ be Corporal or Sairgint time he comes oot again,” said Lauchie. “Promotion’s quick in they Reserve an’ Trainin’ Brigades at hame.”
“If we’re no killed we’re like t’ be Corporals or Sairgints oorselves,” said Rabbie. “When we’re in action I’m thinkin’ promotions are quick enought oot here in the Suicide Club.”
III
IN THE WOOD
The attack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications – the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him – that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that he was lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side – a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.
He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.
Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen tortured minutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted his hand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.
It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, and the Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in