His left knee-cap was shattered, and he screamed when they raised his legs. But with shells still coming in, every five or ten seconds, it was no time for squeamishness. They had brought him nearly to the dug-out when, with a deafening roar, a shell burst within a few yards. They went flat; but when they rose again the mess-cook’s fingers were dripping blood from a wound in the arm, and Whedbee uttered no cry when they seized his injured leg and hurried him down the steps. Then as they laid him on the floor they saw that he was dead. A fragment of the last shell had broken his back.
At the end of a few minutes the shelling ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was possible to get a stretcher and send Cane back.
II
Rumbald and Rawley returned to the mess dug-out, where the mess-cook was swabbing the table with one hand.
“You get along, Reeves, and have that arm properly dressed,” Rawley told him. “And have some antitetanus juice pumped in.”
“But there is nobody else here, sir. Corporal Jones has gone to the canteen at Aidecourt.”
“It doesn’t matter; we don’t want anything,” said Rawley. “You get along.”
He took Cane’s compass from the nail on which it hung by its long strap. “This ought to have gone down with his other kit,” he muttered. “Well, Rumbald, you are O.C. for the moment.”
Rumbald glanced at his wrist-watch. “We shall just be in time to stop Piddock,” he remarked.
“But there is no need to do that,” protested Rawley. “Brigade will send us another fellow presently, and we can carry on meantime.”
Rumbald shook his head. “We are too short-handed,” he objected.
“Oh, rot!” retorted Rawley. “Look here, Rumbald, Piddock needs this leave damned badly. He’s just about done in. He has been out here longer than any of us, and he has had a pretty thin time lately. This leave may just save him. We can carry on all right till brigade sends us another man.”
Rumbald shook his head. “There’s too much to do. We want a chap at the O.Pip, and another with the guns, and there’s the wagon lines. He can take his leave as soon as a reinforcement comes. Meantime, we’ll have him up here. . . .”
“Up here!” echoed Rawley. “Why up here?”
Rumbald rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “Well, he is more used to O.Pip work than I am, and—”
“Much more used,” agreed Rawley, cuttingly. “And what are you going to do, pray?”
“There must be an officer at the wagon lines.”
Rawley thumped the table. “Damn you, Rumbald, you can’t do that. Piddock is second-in-command now, and if he stays his job is at the wagon lines and yours is up here. Cane always stayed with the guns.”
“I’m more used to the battery at the wagon lines,” persisted Rumbald.
“More use be blowed! You’re not thinking of the battery; you’re thinking of yourself. It’s just wind up—thinking of your own skin.”
Rumbald grinned exasperatingly at Rawley’s heat. “Anyway, I’m running the battery now,” he retorted. He stood up and looked at his watch. “I must get my servant to pack my kit, and we shall just be in time to stop Piddock before he leaves.”
“You can’t be such a skunk, Rumbald; you damn well can’t.”
“You can’t stop me,” said Rumbald, as he moved towards the steps.
“I can,” shouted Rawley. “By God, I can and will. I’ll ring up brigade. I’ll speak to the colonel.” He moved towards the telephone.
Rumbald turned and seized him by the arm. No you don’t,” he snapped.
Rawley shook him off and stretched again towards the telephone, but Rumbald’s big hand gripped the lapels of his coat into a bunch and stayed him. Rawley turned his head slowly and saw the big red face at the end of the arm that held him. The smouldering anger of weeks burst into flame. His fist shot out. “Take your hands off me,” he panted.
Rumbald let go his hold and staggered back. His tie and tunic were dribbled with blood. His nose was bleeding like a tap. He rushed forward with fury-contorted face, and Rawley, with no room to retreat, could only duck under the great swinging fists and throw his arms round the thick body.
By sheer weight he was forced back against the dug-out wall, but he locked his hands in the small of Rumbald’s back and hugged like a bear. The big body began to pant, and then, step by step, they tottered across the dug-out, Rawley gripping with all his strength and trying to bend his opponent backwards. Rumbald’s heel came against a box; Rawley flung all his weight forward, and the pair came down with a crash.
They scrambled to their feet, Rawley panting and furious, Rumbald dishevelled and dangerous looking. He came on again with swinging arms. Rawley, backing before the onslaught, collided with the little table, and the hand he put behind him to steady it closed over an old entrenching-tool handle lying there. He swung it up and struck hard as one of the wild, swinging blows sent him crashing on top of the table.
Rumbald staggered back, one hand to his head; his heel came again against the box, and he went over backwards with a crash.
Rawley sat up on the collapsed table and dabbed the blood from his face with a handkerchief. Rumbald lay where he had fallen like a half-filled sack of corn, his legs apart and his chin tucked deeply into his chest by reason of a pit prop against which he had cracked his head. His forehead was cut and bleeding from the blow of the entrenching-tool handle; and blood from his nose covered his tunic.
Rawley scrambled to his feet and went down on one knee beside Rumbald. The eyes were open and the whites were turned up. Knocked right out by that crack on the head, he thought. And the head was certainly in an uncomfortable position; propped up like that with the chin in the chest.
He linked his arm under Rumbald’s shoulder and dragged him a foot or two from the post; and the moment the head was free it dropped back with a thud to the floor and lolled to one side in a horrible manner like a rag doll.
Then it was that Rawley realized that the neck was broken, had been snapped when the head came into contact with the post. Rumbald was dead.
Dead—killed in a brawl! It was true then what was always said about people who took too much care of themselves: that they got themselves killed in an air raid on leave, or were run over in the street. What a great flabby hulk he looked, lying there with his legs wide apart and blood all over his chest.
Rawley rose wearily to his feet, and then plumped down again on the box. His head was whirling. It came upon him in a flash that he would be accused of killing Rumbald. Rumbald lay there with a broken neck and his forehead all cut and bloody from a heavy blow. Striking and killing his superior officer! That meant shooting or hanging.
“My God, what an end! To be hanged for murder in war time, as though killing were a crime. Hanged, when one might be killed any day—and kill, kill hundreds and be called a hero for it.”
He stared at the silent figure on the floor. If only the shell that had got poor old Whedbee had got Rumbald instead.
He stood up. What ought he to do? Pick up the telephone and say to the signaller at the other end: “Send the stretcher bearers to the mess; I’ve just killed Mr. Rumbald.” Clear out? There was time. The mess-cook would not be back for another ten minutes or so.
III
He put on his cap and went up the steps. No one was about. The gun-pits and other dug-outs were hidden by the curve of the river bank. A few yards away the weed-grown remains of an old communicating trench began and continued diagonally up the slope. Dark clods of earth from several freshly made shell holes littered the ground. A long-range “heavy” moaned lazily overhead and detonated a few seconds later with a distant crunch.
He crossed the few yards of broken ground and dropped into the disused trench. Broken duckboards and rotting sandbags impeded his steps, and here and there a landslide partly blocked the trench. But once over the crest of the slope and out of sight of the battery he clambered out and turned south-west away from the pot-holed road.
He tramped o
n like an automaton, avoiding subconsciously the heavy batteries, earth burrows, and derelict huts that dotted this forward area. Occasionally a high-velocity shell lashed through the air and sent the black earth spouting skywards, or a long-range heavy waddled lazily overhead and detonated grumpily in the distance.
Behind him he heard the mournful swish of gas shells—many of them. They sounded very close to B Battery, and he half turned at the thought. But he turned again with a shrug. That was now no concern of his.
He pulled out his pipe and filled it. There was very little tobacco in his pouch; he had left a tin three parts full in the dug-out. He must have tobacco.
He turned towards some huts, on one of which he could distinguish the red triangle of the Y.M.C.A. It was fortunate that he had some money. Whedbee had drawn him a hundred and twenty-five francs from the field-cashier only yesterday. He took a fifty-franc note from his wallet and entered the hut. It seemed very cosy with its tables and benches and shelves with tins of fruits, milk, biscuits, and tobacco. He took his tin of tobacco, stuffed the notes of his change into the ticket pocket in the waistband of his tunic, and went out.
He tramped on away from the huts and the road. A nice mess he had made of things, he thought bitterly. This was the end of everything—of B Battery, of Berney.
He had not a notion what to do. He was driven onward by the instinct of self-preservation. He thought vaguely of stealing some clothes and posing as a civilian till after the war. But of course that was absurd. He spoke French very imperfectly, and how would an English civilian without papers explain his presence in France? He would be arrested and shot as a spy.
He had been a fool to run away. It would have been simpler to have stayed and faced the music. And then he would have been hanged because, instead of blowing Germans to bits with high explosive, he had accidentally broken the neck of a useless skrimshanker like Rumbald. Because Rumbald wore khaki and not field grey, he, Rawley, would be hanged. He had a licence to kill any number of men in grey, no matter how excellent and useful members of humanity they might be, but it was a horrible crime to kill one useless and worthless fellow who wore khaki. What a farce it all was.
He tramped on. The huts, horse-lines, and dumps that lay in rear of the Line were left behind. Around him stretched the devastated area, the old Somme battlefields in which no village, house, or building stood; a belt of desolation thirty miles in breadth, shell-pocked, trench-scarred, weed-grown, and littered with rusty wire, rotting sandbags, mouldering debris of battle and the rubble heaps of flattened villages.
He seated himself on the parados of an old trench and smoked a pipe. He must devise some plan. Various schemes floated through his mind, but none of them was really practicable. In England he might enlist under another name and bury his identity in the ranks; but he was not in England. There was the Foreign Legion, of course. It was said foreigners were enlisted without too many questions being asked, and that once enlisted they were protected from the consequences of anything done before enlistment. He had better make for the zone of the French armies then. In any case, he must get away from the area in which there were units and divisions that knew him.
He rose and tramped on. Darkness fell. Behind him the invisible horizon was lit by the summer-lightning-like flicker of the guns, and their voices were a distant grumble. Overhead an invisible night bomber forged its way through the darkness, but soon the steady pulsating drone of its twin engines dwindled and died away. No cheerful light gleamed in the surrounding darkness. The silence of death and decay brooded over the devastated area.
He tramped on hopelessly, stumbling into weed-grown shell holes, and disentangling his feet from curled strands of rusty wire. He found himself at length on a narrow pot-holed road and followed it.
The sudden scrape of a boot close ahead pulled him up short. A form loomed in the darkness and a voice asked: “Got a match, mate?” He could distinguish the outline of a battered service cap against a starry rift in the clouds. As he fumbled in his pocket, something soft and heavy fell upon the back of his head. He sank drunkenly to his knees. Darkness rushed in.
CHAPTER XIII
I
Consciousness floated back to him, consciousness of dull pains and aches and particularly of a splitting headache. Rain was falling gently on his upturned face. He opened his eyes without moving. Here and there stars shone from rifts in the clouds, and low down near the invisible horizon a dull red light glowed like an eye. He moved his aching head slowly to avoid the tickling of the long, rank grass which the chill night breeze brushed against his cheek, and at the movement the distant dull red light swayed and kindled to a bright red, revealing itself with startling suddenness as a cigarette in the mouth of a shadowy face.
“So you’ve woke up, ’ave you!” commented a voice close at hand. The point of light disappeared, and the dark head and shoulders of a man rose against the sky.
Rawley scrambled painfully to his feet and discovered in the process that his belt and tunic were undone. He took a step forward, but the figure backed from him. “Keep your distance,” it growled. “If yer don’t want a hole in yer shirt.”
Rawley plumped down again on the bank. He saw that, although the speaker was short and slight, he held a revolver in his hand.
“All right,” he said. “You can put that thing away.” He put his hand to his breast pocket, and found that his wallet was gone and that the flaps of his pockets were unbuttoned. His pockets had been ransacked. He held his aching head in his hands. “Well, what’s the idea?” he asked.
“Idea! What bleedin’ idea?” asked the other.
“I mean you’ve cleaned me out very nicely. What now?”
“Nothin’. You can clear out.”
“Oh—er—thanks!” answered Rawley, with a touch of sarcasm. “But I’m still a bit dicky, and—er—if it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait a moment.”
The other grunted and sat down on the roadside a yard or two away. Rain was falling gently. The distant gun flashes still played like summer lightning along the horizon. Rawley held his aching head in his hands. He wondered why the fellow had stayed. The glow of his cigarette waxed and waned in the darkness and gave glimpses of a sharp, ferrety little face. He was a little dirty weed of a man and a cockney, judging by his voice.
Presently he spoke again. “I’ll take my bleedin’ oath you saw some stars when Kelly copped you that beauty on the napper!” he chuckled.
His tone was conversational, and without any malice, and it dawned on Rawley that for some reason the fellow was glad of his company. The cigarette glowed in the darkness, and the sharp face behind it was revealed fitfully. The voice continued in a confidential tone: “I saw you was a gunner, that’s why I stayed till you come to. You’ll be all right in a jiffy.”
“Thanks,” answered Rawley. He was in truth a little grateful to the fellow for staying. He felt very much alone in the world at that moment, and the devastated area was very desolate and depressing at that hour. An outcast himself, the company even of a guttersnipe was not to be despised. “I suppose you are a gunner, too,” he added conversationally.
“Yep,” answered the other, and spat. “I was.” He threw away the cigarette end and lighted another with a tinder lighter.
Automatically Rawley put his hand in his pocket, but though his pipe remained, his tobacco had been taken. He put the cold stem between his teeth.
“I suppose your hospitality towards a fellow gunner wouldn’t rise to giving him a cigarette,” he asked. “My tobacco seems to have gone astray.”
The fellow hesitated a moment and then fumbled in his pockets. A cigarette fell into Rawley’s lap.
“Many thanks,” said Rawley. “But my matches seem to have gone the way of my tobacco.”
The automatic lighter landed in his lap. He twisted the flint and blew the tinder to a bright glow.
The cigarette was flat and a little bent from long residence in a pocket, but it was a smoke. Rawley straightened it between h
is fingers and lighted it.
In the silence that followed, the grumble of distant gunfire quickened suddenly to a dull throbbing roll like the muffled beating of side-drums, and the flickerings on the eastern horizon became continuous.
“Kaiser Bill’s birfday or something!” commented Rawley’s companion. “Nasty ’ate going on.”
“Sounds as if somebody is a bit peeved about something,” agreed Rawley. “That’s mostly eighteen pounders.”
“I was eighteen pounders,” said the other reminiscently.
Rawley nodded. “Nice little cannon. Though I don’t suppose I shall ever fire one again,” he added bitterly.
“Why, ain’t you going up there any more?” The dark head nodded towards the distant gunflashes.
“No—I suppose not. I cleared out of the battery this afternoon, and—there’s no going back now.”
“Why . . . you ain’t deserted, ’ave you—and you an officer!” The tone was one of shocked righteousness.
Rawley’s pent feelings overflowed. “Why, blast you, you thieving little squit, you’re a deserter, too, aren’t you?”
“Orl right. Orl right. And what if I am?” protested the other.
“Then what the hell do you mean by talking like that? If you think I got cold feet and ran away from my men, you are damn well wrong, and I’ll knock your dirty little head off.” He checked his vehemence and laughed bitterly. “Well, what’s the good of all this anyway? We are both deserters and there’s an end of it.” He threw his cigarette end on the ground and trod it viciously into the mud with his heel. There was silence for some moments, and then another cigarette landed in his lap. He lifted it between his fingers, and after a moment’s hesitation put it in his mouth. “Thanks,” he said curtly.
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