by Walter Owen
Over these hills at dawn the sun views the moor always sullenly, for every night a night-sweat falls there, no sweet dew, but the clammy moisture of marshes, such as in great part the moor is; and like an evil thing that has settled to a work unholy this, at the first hint of day, rises in a thick vapour through which the sun, when he comes, glares redly.
The buildings stand far out on the moor. There are three main structures, a central large one, oblong, about fifty yards long by twenty wide, and on either side of this narrower sheds of almost equal length, evidently accessory to the main buildings, like covered platforms for loading and discharging. A cluster of outhouses completes the group, all hideously constructed of galvanised sheeting and raw girders, liberally daubed with whitewash.
Round all a light railway runs, with sidings to the two platforms, a gimcrack, uneven way with small pretence at ballasting, even on that bad soil, as if its maker too felt guilty, and the sun, peering over the hill some morning, might find him gone with all his traps. The buildings are completely circled by a double fence of barbed wire, eight feet high, curved inwards at the top. Inside this an inner fence, a few wires high, edges the railway line.
Along the edge of the wood to the westward runs a road, cut at a level crossing by the railroad, which disappears into the wood there.
At six every morning there is a bustle among the hutches out yonder. Men come and go between the shed and the platforms. The railway creaks and rattles under the rumble of closed trucks; an engine puffs. From a chimney in the main shed smoke pours and in the air an acrid odour spreads.At five in the afternoon the noises and the smoke cease Gradually the figures that now move again around the hutches grow fewer, a light gleams for a little hour or two like an eye watching, and then another night shuts down and the mist settles,
Only one or two men pass and return through the single gate in the fence, where constantly a sentry watches in a box. Through this gate, which is a heavy iron frame, backed by wire netting and surmounted by barbed wire, the single track of the railway passes, the gate being just wide enough to admit a truck. It is secured by a massive, old-fashioned lock, the key of which hangs in the sentry’s box.
The men who pass in and out are three; always the same three, each taking a salute from the sentry as he goes, and going silently with grim looks. No others of the workers ever go out, but live in the hutches yonder. The only others who have passage to and from the world outside the high barbed fence are the guard and driver of the train that puffs fussily through the gate in the daytime; and they are always the same men.
Over all this place a silence broods, heavy as the stillness of sodden grass through which the wind’s feet no longer stir, with something malignant and guilty mixed into its stillness, as if the grass concealed a corpse. A nameless suspicion filters to the soul through the eye that looks upon it, and a fear such as the traveller feels when on the heath at night he passes a pool, fringed with long grass, from which the moon’s floating pupil watches.
A mesmeric influence seems to draw the gaze that surveys the moor to those buildings that show white against its dark face, like a tumble of bleached bones over which a savour of decay still hangs. The soul says that this is an evil place, though the mind may scoff; and the soul, as always when she speaks, is right.
These buildings are the Utilization Factory of the Tenth Army Section and to them the bodies of the slain in battle are dragged over that ramshackle railroad, sometimes almost before the blood’s warmth is quite chilled, and while some grosser streamers from the departing guest still linger in the brain’s grey maze, hearing dully the summons from without.
The bodies arrive in covered trucks drawn by a fussy engine, with pantings and shrieks that seem deliberately devilish. The bodies come packed in bundles of four, naked, save for a rag of underclothing tied around their middles, and secured together by three ties of thick wire, tightly drawn, one in the middle and one at each end. At each end of the bale protrude two heads and two pairs of feet, the heads ghastly in their expressions of agony in all its moods, though now and then a face where peace has rested looks out and gives its blessing undismayed.
The feet are pitiful; they that have come so far and now must go this farther, even when all their walks are taken.
To every train that draws up at the right-hand siding, looking towards the hills, there is added an open truck with a dark-coloured tarpaulin drawn tight down over its top, an iron tank like a big kitchen sink on wheels. In this have been loaded the fragments that it was not possible to bundle, for bags are scarce and their cost would make an inroad on the Factory’s dividends; and the Factory, though under military organization, is run at a profit, must so run, or the shareholders will be angry.
For even to this last has Mammon come, and the intellect that weighs suns in its balance and wants but a fulcrum to lever worlds, divorced from love, ministers in the sty and, chuckling, counts the hire.
From that truck, last always of the train, a thick dark liquid oozes through invisible joints in its iron frame and leaves dribblings all along the track. Sometimes the tarpaulin bulges on the top.
When the train draws up - and there is at least one train a day - the wagon doors are unsealed by a stout, fussy official wearing a skip cap like a station master’s, who clatters along the platforms and bangs down the hasps of the wagon doors one after another, collecting as he passes the little green cards from the frames let into the lower corner of the wagon’s sides.
With these cards he fusses off to a small outhouse, where, in an office reeky with disinfectant, divided down the centre by a partition in which is cut an opening like a booking-office window, he bangs them down before a weak-chinned youth who sits at a desk on a high stool, and is off again. The same youth receives a sheaf of papers from the guard of the train and, adding them to a pile under his hand, resumes his work, entering from the lists to a heavy book before him. Behind him stands a shelf on which a row of similar books lengthens day by day.
Meantime, out upon the platform comes a string of men dressed in overalls and wearing hood-shaped helmets that completely cover their faces and show only two large round eyeholes paned with glass, and a circular nozzle like a telephone receiver stopped by a grating, through which is visible a wad of cotton wool. They carry poles about six feet in length, with an open hook of blunt iron at one end. The overalls are stained with dark patches and drops here and there.
They shuffle at the wagons without words, as if moved by some unholy common instinct rather than by mental impulse, and throw open the doors and commence to rake out the bundles, reaching upward with their long hooks and tugging, then stepping back as the bale thuds its sick impact on the platform.
As they discharge, other figures, dressed in the same ghoulish travesty of monk’s vesture, come and go through the sliding doors, now thrown wide. These put out their rakes, hook a bundle by the wire tie and, turning, drag it into the shed, leaning forward as they go, as one drags a sled. The bundles slip easily along the cement paving for it is worn and soon becomes covered with a viscous coating over which the bales slither. A horrible stench fills the air. The men cough dully inside the masks.
Inside the main shed a man steps forward and with a pair of pincers unhooks the wires, letting the bodies sprawl apart on the floor. The place is peopled by a hundred nightmares of decay and dissolution, of inconceivable phantasies of manglement and physical disruption. The stench wells, the steam of its abomination ascends, ascends; no mask can keep it out. No, nor can an iron roof hide it; and One, by whom no violet by the wayside blooms forgotten, whose face is maskless as the day - be assured, O Soul, that He is near.
In this part of the shed is a long corridor, partitioned off from the rest. And at the height of about ten feet from the ground passes an endless chain, propelled by machinery, that clanks ceaselessly onward. Suspended from this chain, at intervals of some three yards, are short lengths of chain terminated by sharp steel hooks that curve their cruel points upward.
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A man pushes the bodies forward with a pole under the chain, and another, taking the hook with his right hand and holding the short chain taut with his left, fixes the body by inserting the hook under the breastbone. The chain clanks and the body goes off, its heels dragging along the floor, the upper portion of the trunk sagging backward, the head rolling, the arms swaying horribly - a sickening travesty of a death agony.
The chain clanks and another hook hangs, then sags forward with its load. Another hook - another body. The work goes on. The men, poor wights caught in the web of bloodless reason, make an attempt at reverence, which at best can appear but a mockery.
The bodies are dragged up the corridor, and, after passing a corner far up near the end of the shed ascend into the steaming chamber, where they are detached. After undergoing a treatment there under the care of another batch of hooded familiars, they travel up a belt which, turning at the top, allows them to drop into a huge iron vat, that - heated by a furnace underneath from which comes up a dull roar - simmers like a pot of porridge. In the vat a great macerating wheel with massive iron cogs revolves slowly, grinding, grinding, half under and half above the surface of that awful stew, its pitiless rim passing six inches from the iron sides of the vat - O Thou, who knowest the end, sustain - and there the bodies, as bodies, cease.
Far underneath in the vat’s iron side is a door of iron, tight clamped, and from this, when periodically the vat is emptied, the crushed bones that have sunk to the bottom are drawn out to play their part in the infernal alchemy of Mammon.
The exports of the Factory are pig food, fats, glycerine and manure, brewed and distilled and strained from the mush that once was bodies of men, temples of the - Father, let this cup pass, for I faint ...
And to the Tenth Army Section belongs the 85th Regiment; and number 1251 in that regiment is Carl; and along that shuddering via crucis of the railway there, even now, Carl comes.
****
He awoke again to bodily being in a dark and stuffy truck, in which an intolerable odour reigned. He was bound with wires that cut him where they touched, to three other fragments whose souls had passed out in that same agony of battle that had left Carl unconscious, and, by some quirk of that strange house where marvels pass unnoticed, sunk in a marble-still mimicry of death. He was paralysed from crown to toe, rigid in the posture in which he had fallen from the throw of the mine. Nor was speech left to him. Sounds reached him, but he could not answer, nor even groan. Only a little light filters through his eyelids’ slits, open so little that they might be closed. And how shall any see the horror in that tiny gleam amid the ghastly tumult of the sheds?
Even as he woke the snorting engine braked at the right-hand platform. The trucks banged in succession upon the hind buffers of the one in front, and he had no more time than to realise his state and take the odour of the charnel to his waking brain, when the truck door went open with a rasp and a hook was dragging at his chest.
They dumped him on the greasy platform in his bale. The agony of the fall stunned him back to blackness on the threshold of a deeper hell than he had yet known.
****
When he woke again he did not know at first that black had passed, for he lay uppermost in the bale, his face turned to the sky that spread dark and heavy above him.
Five minutes after he had fallen, the knock-off bell had gone. The men that night had been sulky at the order to unload within the last five minutes of a heavy day, and as their slipshod overseer - already in his Sabbath best - passed through the gate in the engine cab, gloating over the prospect of his weekly night out in the town six miles away, they had piled their hooks against the shed wall and gone off to the hutches to take off their overalls and eat and afterwards go too, each to his separate shadow for a time.
The sky is dark. A storm has been gathering all the afternoon and presently closes in, and about eight o'clock rain begins to fall and the wind comes in gusts that grow stronger. The raindrops patter on the iron roofs of the sheds, faintly at first, then gradually increasing to a steady murmur. For the second time since Carl got his wounds his face is wet from heaven.
And now slowly his numb flesh wakes to feel and move. Silently, mysteriously, the body undoes her magic and lifts the spell laid, perhaps in mercy, on the tattered flesh. He opens his lips and from his lips come moans and whimpers that the rain’s murmur drowns. Presently he slips an arm out of the tie that binds him across the chest, for the bundle has been loosened by that fall from the truck. The ties slacken more as the arm comes out. Then with long moments of stillness during which.agony again swamps him, and struggles stretching across ages of horror, he drags his living body out from its hollow in that bundle of flesh in which decay is already rampant and rises to his feet on the littered platform.
It is a terrible Carl that stands there. He is naked except for a blood-stained rag from his own underclothes, which some relic of decency has ordered should be tied about the corpses’ hips. His breast gapes from belly to neck from that bayonet rip; his left leg hangs crooked, not broken, but shrinking from the ground, every touch of which is a long-drawn woe. His form is blackened by earth and powder fumes, splashed in a dozen places with dark brown blood. He has not eaten for three days. And he is mad.
The rain drives him to shelter and there in the shed’s wall he sees a narrow door. He drags himself along by the wall, and moaning gets to the door - moaning turns the handle. What need of guards and locks here inside that grim fence? He is inside the shed.
A lantern hangs from a hook, just inside, lighted; so, in fact, hangs every night, by the whim of some brain sicker or saner than the rest of the shed’s servants; and by its yellow glare Carl sees that further horror on the floor. It is ten o'clock.
At twelve he is in a long room, a storehouse of the Factory’s ghastly products, lower down the shed, with a door that gives upon the same platform upon which the wagon dumped him. In his hand is the lantern and his lips gabble unceasingly the words: “All, all, let me see all”; for in Carl’s insanity horror reigns - a last vestige of reason - horror at that grisly place in which man’s flesh is made to pig’s food in a pot; horror at the dangling hooks and those pale rows upon the gratings in the steam chamber; and fear raised to super-terror, shock by shock, as his reeling brain leaps to knowledge of each new horror.
“Let me see all,” he babbles, and from his breast the slow gouts well one by one, for every word a gout, and at every fresh abomination again the words. He has crept up the Corridor of Hooks, followed by his capering shadow, his bare feet slipping in the glush on the floor; he has crouched with outstretched lantern above the Pot; and down in the cellar, where the iron door opens, has seen the vast heap of splintered bones that feeds the manure grinders.
And one last horror has been his, one last drop of white-hot torture has seared his brain. He came upon it in a cask still unclosed... he had been empty for three days… and only afterwards he understood....
Now, as he stands there he begins to faint again - he has fainted three times since he took the lantern from its peg - and he staggers, leaning against a heap of a dozen casks piled on the floor against the farther wall, some ten yards from the door. His foot knocks away a block, and the casks, piled in three tiers, come down with a rumble, chasing him before them. To him they seem live things, monstrous births of horror, ghouls set there by man to watch and trap him...
A choking moan comes from his throat and his figure is off down the shed, the lantern dropping from him as he goes. The lantern overturns, the glass shatters, and the spilt oil behind him sputters and runs, blue will-o’-the-wisps flickering upon its pool. Then, as the flame spreads to a litter of stained straw and sawdust that strews one part of the shed floor, a yellow flame springs that with licking fangs reaches and leaps.
But Carl, though he sees the flame’s reflection throw his shadow ahead in a giant phantom that capers and sprawls over floor and wall, heeds not, for he hears after him the barrels rumbling, the floor here slopin
g downward. And madly he scampers to reach that door before those trundling horrors, bulging forward, all lay their touch upon his heels.
He reaches the door and fumbles at the latch, while out of its corner his frantic eye measures the space between him and the foremost cask and the pace of its roll. He finds the catch, raises it and pulls, and for an instant his heart darts a red pang and his panting brain swims as the door remains fast. Then it gives, and he is out on the platform where those pale figures lie, and the door behind him slams, to shake an instant later with the dull thud of the casks upon its farther side.
Instantly his flesh shrinks as the rain impinges on his already shuddering skin and its liquid shell spreads encasing his body. His torn ear wakes its smart at the bite of the wind; his left leg is a moan that fears the ground and hangs crooked from the knee, twitching, as he rests his weight on the other; his breast, as his blood responds to that urgency of hurry which still shakes him, opens a fresh gape, and from the gash’s lower end again a rivulet of red trickles thickly down.
By now the storm has spread its dark forces over all the sky, and the moor lies dark beneath great masses of cloud that roll their squadrons over the heavens and deploy and march and countermarch, like armies that muster and take positions for attack, and charge and withdraw, flirting with lightnings. The rain comes in sudden whirls and gusts, no steady downpour, but like batteries that open suddenly and discharge their wrath and wheel and are gone; and after a lull another in turn, choosing its time, bursts its flurry of peltings and shuts and goes dribbling.
There are signs, however, that the night may yet clear, for amid the clouds’ jostling battalions now and then a rift shows, and there the black deep of the night sleeps sphered in the moon’s light; and here and there a star swims.
As Carl comes out of the door a shower spouts to its height with a roar, shuddering the shed with an echoing downpour on the resounding roof of iron sheeting. A gust of wind whoops around the corner and like a troop of phantom vultures flings itself upon him, whirling around his pale tattered flesh that stands trembling and bewrayed there in that new trial of its discomfort.