by E. F. Benson
The Major of his company was sitting in the window watching him, though Michael was unaware of it. Suddenly he got up, and came across to the fire, and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t mind it, Comber,” he said quietly. “We all get a touch of it sometimes. But you’ll find it will pass all right. It’s the waiting doing nothing that does it.”
That touched Michael absolutely in the right place.
“Thanks awfully, sir,” he said.
“Not a bit. But it’s damned beastly while it lasts. You’ll be all right when we move. Don’t forget to take your fur coat up if you’ve got one. We shall have a cold night.”
Just after sunset they set out, marching in the gathering dusk down the road eastwards, where in a mile or two they would strike the huge rabbit warren of trenches that joined the French line to the north and south. Once or twice they had to open out and go by the margin of the road to let ambulances or commissariat wagon go by, but there was but little traffic here, as the main lines of communication lay on other roads. High above them, scarcely visible in the dusk, an English aeroplane droned back from its reconnaissance, and once there was the order given to scatter over the fields as a German Taube passed across them. This caused much laughter and chaff among the men, and Michael heard one say, “Dove they call it, do they? I’d like to make a pigeon-pie of them doves.” Soon they scrambled back on to the road again, and the interminable “Tipperary” was resumed, in whistle and song. Michael remembered how Aunt Barbara had heard it at a music-hall, and had spoken of it as a new and catchy tune which you could carry away with you. Nowadays, it carried you away. It had become the audible soul of the British army.
The trench which Michael’s company were to occupy for the next forty-eight hours was in the first firing-line, and to reach it they had to pass in single file up a mile of communication trenches, from which on all sides, like a vast rabbit warren, there opened out other galleries and passages that led to different parts of this net-work of the lines. It ran not in a straight line but in short sections with angles intervening, so under no circumstances could any considerable length of it be enfiladed, and was lit here and there by little oil lamps placed in embrasures in one or other wall of it, or for some distance at a time it was dark except for the vague twilight of the cloudy sky overhead. Then again, as they approached the firing-line, it would suddenly become intensely bright, when from the English lines, or from those of the Germans which lay not more than two hundred yards in front of them, a fireball or star-shell was sent up, that caused everything it shone upon to leap into vivid illumination. Usually, when this happened, there came from one side or the other a volley of rifle shots, that sounded like the crack of stock-whips, and once or twice a bullet passed over their heads with the buzz as of some vicious stinging insect. Here and there, where the bottom lay in soft and clayey soil, they walked through mud that came half-way up to the knee, and each foot had to be lifted with an effort, and was set free with a smacking suck. Elsewhere, if the ground was gravelly, the rain which for two days previously had been incessant, had drained off, and the going was easy. But whether the path lay over dry or soft places the air was sick with some stale odour which the breeze that swept across the lines from the south-east could not carry away. There was a perpetual pervading reek that flowed along from the entrance of trenches to right and left, that reminded Michael of the smell of a football scrimmage on a wet day, laden with the odours of sweat and dripping clothes, and something deadlier and more acrid. Sometimes they passed under a section covered in with boards, over which the earth and clods of turf had been replaced, so that reconnoitring aeroplanes should not so easily spy it out, and here from dark excavations the smell hung overpoweringly. Now and then the ground over which they passed yielded uneasily to the foot, where lay, only lightly covered over, some corpse which it had been impossible to remove, and from time to time they passed a huddled bundle of khaki not yet taken away. But except for the artillery duel that day they had heard going on that morning, the last day or two had been quiet, and the wounded had all been got out, and for the most part the dead also.
After a long tramp in this communication trench they made a sharp turn to the right, and entered that which they were going to hold for the next forty-eight hours. Here they relieved the regiment that had occupied it till now, who filed out as they came in. Along it at intervals were excavations dug out in the side, some propped up with boards and posts, others, where the ground was of sufficiently holding character, just scooped out. In front, towards the German lines ran a parapet of excavated earth, with occasional peep-holes bored in it, so that the sentry going his rounds could look out and see if there was any sign of movement from opposite without showing his head above the entrenchment. But even this was a matter of some risk, since the enemy had located these peep-holes, and from time to time fired a shot from a fixed rifle that came straight through them and buried its bullet in the hinder wall of the trench. Other spy-holes were therefore being made, but these were not yet finished, and for the present till they were dug, it was necessary to use the old ones. The trench, like all the others, was excavated in short, zigzag lengths, so that no point, either to right or left, commanded more than a score of yards of it.
In front, from just outside the parapet to a depth of some twenty yards, stretched the spider-web of wire entanglements, and a little farther down on the right there had been a copse of horn-beam saplings. An attempt had been made by the enemy during the morning to capture and entrench this, thus advancing their lines, but the movement had been seen, and the artillery fire, which had been so incessant all the morning, denoted the searching of this and the rendering of it untenable. How thorough that searching had been was clear, for that which had been an acre of wood was now but a heap of timber fit only for faggots. Scarcely a tree was left standing, and Michael, looking out of one of the peep-holes by the light of a star-shell saw that the wire entanglements were thick with leaves that the wind and the firing had detached from the broken branches. In turn, the wire entanglements had come in for some shelling by the enemy, and a squad of men were out now under cover of the darkness repairing these. There was a slight dip in the ground here, and by crouching and lying they were out of sight of the trenches opposite; but there were some snipers in that which had been a wood, from whom there came occasional shots. Then, from lower down to the right, there came a fusillade from the English lines suddenly breaking out, and after a few minutes as suddenly stopping again. But the sniping from the wood had ceased.
Michael did not come on duty till six in the morning, and for the present he had nothing to do except eat his rations and sleep as well as he could in his dug-out. He had plenty of room to stretch his legs if he sat half upright, and having taken his Major’s advice in the matter of bringing his fur coat with him, he found himself warm enough, in spite of the rather bitter wind that, striking an angle in the trench wall, eddied sharply into his retreat, to sleep. But not less justified than the advice to bring his fur coat was his Major’s assurance that the attack of the horrors which had seized him after dinner that day, would pass off when the waiting was over. Throughout the evening his nerves had been perfectly steady, and, when in their progress up the communication trench they had passed a man half disembowelled by a fragment of a shell, and screaming, or when, as he trod on one of the uneasy places an arm had stirred and jerked up suddenly through the handful of earth that covered it, he had no first-hand sense of horror: he felt rather as if those things were happening not to him but to someone else, and that, at the most, they were strange and odd, but no longer horrible. But now, when reinforced by food again and comfortable beneath his fur cloak he let his mind do what it would, not checking it, but allowing it its natural internal activity, he found that a mood transcending any he had known yet was his. So far from these experiences being terrifying, so far from their being strange and unreal, they suddenly became intensely real and shone with a splendour that he had never suspect
ed. Originally he had been pitchforked by his father into the army, and had left it to seek music. Sense of duty had made it easy for him to return to it at a time of national peril; but during all the bitter anxiety of that he had never, as in the light of the perception that came to him now, as the wind whistled round him in the dim lit darkness, had a glimpse of the glory of service to his country. Here, out in this small, evil-smelling cavern, with the whole grim business of war going on round him, he for the first time fully realised the reality of it all. He had been in the trenches before, but until now that had seemed some vague, evil dream, of which he was incredulous. Now in the darkness the darkness cleared, and the knowledge that this was the very thing itself, that a couple of hundred yards away were the lines of the enemy, whose power, for the honour of England and for the freedom of Europe, had to be broken utterly, filled him with a sense of firm, indescribable joy. The minor problems which had worried him, the fact of millions of treasure that might have fed the poor and needy over all Britain for a score of years, being outpoured in fire and steel, the fact of thousands of useful and happy lives being sacrificed, of widows and orphans and childless mothers growing ever a greater company—all these things, terrible to look at, if you looked at them alone, sank quietly into their sad appointed places when you looked at the thing entire. His own case sank there, too; music and life and love for which he would so rapturously have lived, were covered up now, and at this moment he would as rapturously have died, if, by his death, he could have served in his own infinitesimal degree, the cause he fought for.
The hours went on, whether swiftly or slowly he did not consider. The wind fell, and for some minutes a heavy shower of rain plumped vertically into the trench. Once during it a sudden illumination blazed in the sky, and he saw the pebbles in the wall opposite shining with the fresh-falling drops. There were a dozen rifle-shots and he saw the sentry who had just passed brushing the edge of his coat against Michael’s hand, pause, and look out through the spy-hole close by, and say something to himself. Occasionally he dozed for a little, and woke again from dreaming of Sylvia, into complete consciousness of where he was, and of that superb joy that pervaded him. By and by these dozings grew longer, and the intervals of wakefulness less, and for a couple of hours before he was roused he slept solidly and dreamlessly.
His spell of duty began before dawn, and he got up to go his rounds, rather stiff and numb, and his sleep seemed to have wearied rather than refreshed him. In that hour of early morning, when vitality burns lowest, and the dying part their hold on life, the thrill that had possessed him during the earlier hours of the night, had died down. He knew, having once felt it, that it was there, and believed that it would come when called upon; but it had drowsed as he slept, and was overlaid by the sense of the grim, inexorable side of the whole business. A disconcerting bullet was plugged through a spy-hole the second after he had passed it; it sounded not angry, but merely business-like, and Michael found himself thinking that shots “fired in anger,” as the phrase went, were much more likely to go wide than shots fired calmly.… That, in his sleepy brain, did not sound nonsense: it seemed to contain some great truth, if he could bother to think it out.
But for that, all was quiet again, and he had returned to his dug-out, just noticing that the dawn was beginning to break, for the clouds overhead were becoming visible in outline with the light that filtered through them, and on their thinner margin turning rose-grey, when the alarm of an attack came down the line. Instantly the huddled, sleeping bodies that lay at the side of the trench started into being, and in the moment’s pause that followed, Michael found himself fumbling at the butt of his revolver, which he had drawn out of its case. For that one moment he heard his heart thumping in his throat, and felt his mouth grow dry with some sudden panic fear that came from he knew not where, and invaded him. A qualm of sickness took him, something gurgled in his throat, and he spat on the floor of the trench. All this passed in one second, for at once he was master of himself again, though not master of a savage joy that thrilled him—the joy of this chance of killing those who fought against the peace and prosperity of the world. There was an attack coming out of the dark, and thank God, he was among those who had to meet it.
He gave the order that had been passed to him, and on the word, this section of the trench was lined with men ready to pour a volley over the low parapet. He was there, too, wildly excited, close to the spy-hole that now showed as a luminous disc against the blackness of the trench. He looked out of this, and in the breaking dawn he saw nothing but the dark ground of the dip in front, and the level lines of the German trenches opposite. Then suddenly the grey emptiness was peopled; there sprang from the earth the advance line of the surprise, who began hewing a way through the entanglements, while behind the silhouette of the trenches was broken into a huddled, heaving line of men. Then came the order to fire, and he saw men dropping and falling out of sight, and others coming on, and yet again others. These, again, fell, but others (and now he could see the gleam of bayonets) came nearer, bursting and cutting their way through the wires. Then, from opposite to right and left sounded the crack of rifles, and the man next to Michael gave one grunt, and fell back into the trench, moving no more.
Just immediately opposite were the few dozen men whose part it was to cut through the entanglements. They kept falling and passing out of sight, while others took their places. And then, for some reason, Michael found himself singling out just one of these, much in advance of the others, who was now close to the parapet. He was coming straight on him, and with a leap he cleared the last line of wire and towered above him. Michael shot him with his revolver as he stood but three yards from him, and he fell right across the parapet with head and shoulders inside the trench. And, as he dropped, Michael shouted, “Got him!” and then he looked. It was Hermann.
Next moment he had scaled the side of the trench and, exerting all his strength, was dragging him over into safety. The advance of this section, who were to rush the trench, had been stopped, and again from right and left the rifle-fire poured out on the heads that appeared above the parapet. That did not seem to concern him; all he had to do that moment was to get Hermann out of fire, and just as he dragged his legs over the parapet, so that his weight fell firm and solid on to him, he felt what seemed a sharp tap on his right arm, and could not understand why it had become suddenly powerless. It dangled loosely from somewhere above the elbow, and when he tried to move his hand he found he could not.
Then came a stab of hideous pain, which was over almost as soon as he had felt it, and he heard a man close to him say, “Are you hit, sir?”
It was evident that this surprise attack had failed, for five minutes afterwards all was quiet again. Out of the grey of dawn it had come, and before dawn was rosy it was over, and Michael with his right arm numb but for an occasional twinge of violent agony that seemed to him more like a scream or a colour than pain, was leaning over Hermann, who lay on his back quite still, while on his tunic a splash of blood slowly grew larger. Dawn was already rosy when he moved slightly and opened his eyes.
“Lieber Gott, Michael!” he whispered, his breath whistling in his throat. “Good morning, old boy!”
CHAPTER XVII
Three weeks later, Michael was sitting in his rooms in Half Moon Street, where he had arrived last night, expecting Sylvia. Since that attack at dawn in the trenches, he had been in hospital in France while his arm was mending. The bone had not been broken, but the muscles had been so badly torn that it was doubtful whether he would ever recover more than a very feeble power in it again. In any case, it would take many months before he recovered even the most elementary use of it.
Those weeks had been a long-drawn continuous nightmare, not from the effect of the injury he had undergone, nor from any nervous breakdown, but from the sense of that which inevitably hung over him. For he knew, by an inward compulsion of his mind that admitted of no argument, that he had to tell Sylvia all that had happened in those
ten minutes while the grey morning grew rosy. This sense of compulsion was deaf to all reasoning, however plausible. He knew perfectly well that unless he told Sylvia who it was whom he had shot at point-blank range, as he leaped the last wire entanglement, no one else ever could. Hermann was buried now in the same grave as others who had fallen that morning: his name would be given out as missing from the Bavarian corps to which he belonged, and in time, after the war was over, she would grow to believe that she would never see him again.
But the sheer impossibility of letting this happen, though it entailed nothing on him except the mere abstention from speech, took away the slightest temptation that silence offered. He knew that again and again Sylvia would refer to Hermann, wondering where he was, praying for his safety, hoping perhaps even that, like Michael, he would be wounded and thus escape from the inferno at the front, and it was so absolutely out of the question that he should listen to this, try to offer little encouragements, wonder with her whether he was not safe, that even in his most depressed and shrinking hours he never for a moment contemplated silence. Certainly he had to tell her that Hermann was dead, and to account for the fact that he knew him to be dead. And in the long watches of the wakeful night, when his mind moved in the twilight of drowsiness and fever and pain, it was here that a certain temptation entered. For it was easy to say (and no one could ever contradict him) that some man near him, that one perhaps who had fallen back with a grunt, had killed Hermann on the edge of the trench. Humanly speaking, there was no chance at all of that innocent falsehood being disproved. In the scurry and wild confusion of the attack none but he would remember exactly what had happened, and as he thought of that tossing and turning, it seemed to one part of his mind that the innocence of that falsehood would even be laudable, be heroic. It would save Sylvia the horrible shock of knowing that her lover had killed her brother; it would save her all that piercing of the iron into her soul that must inevitably be suffered by her if she knew the truth. And who could tell what effect the knowledge of the truth would have on her? Michael felt that it was at the least possible that she could never bear to see him again, still less sleep in the arms of the one who had killed her brother. That knowledge, even if she could put it out of mind in pity and sorrow for Michael, would surely return and return again, and tear her from him sobbing and trembling. There was all to risk in telling her the truth; sorrow and bitterness for her and for him separation and a lifelong regret were piled up in the balance against the unknown weight of her love. Indeed, there was love on both sides of that balance. Who could tell how the gold weighed against the gold?