Bruce Part 8

Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet. A sh.e.l.l had burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth. Otherwise, things were drowsily dull.

In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,--formerly of Uncle Sam's regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry. The Frenchman was slow in learning poker's mysteries.

And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced to play for I.O.U's--which is stupid sport, at best.

So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a half-dozen sharpshooters' rifles, all three men looked up from their desultory game in real interest. Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.

"Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the sandbags without drawing boche fire," he hazarded, starting out to investigate. "It's a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers'."

But Mahan's strictures were quite unwarranted. The sharpshooters were not firing at the parapet. Their scattering shots were flying high, and hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.

Adown this sh.e.l.l-pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur, showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it. His white chest was like a snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles. A bullet or two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.

A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing dog.

"Why, it's Bruce!" cried Mahan in glad welcome. "I might 'a' known he or another of the collies would be along. I might 'a' known it, when the telephones went out of commission. He--"

"Regardez-donc!" interrupted the admiring Vivier. "He acts like bullets was made of flies! Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!"

"Yes," growled Dale worriedly; "and one of these days a bullet will find its way into that splendid carca.s.s of his. He's been shot at, a thousand times, to my own knowledge. And all I ask is a chance, with a rifle-b.u.t.t, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!"

"Downs Bruce?" queried Vivier in fine scorn. "The boche he is no borned who can do it. Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the 'charm life.' He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes.

I've watch heem. I know."

Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a halt at the edge of a traverse. There he stood, wagging his plume of a tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up to lift him bodily into the trench.

A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog's collar and posted off to the colonel with it.

The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes. It bade the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest.

The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly manned to resist a ma.s.s attack. Wherefore the drawing-in and consolidating of the whole outflung line.

Bruce, his work done now, had leisure to respond to the countless offers of hospitality that encompa.s.sed him. One man brought him a slice of cold broiled bacon. Another spread pork-grease over a bit of bread and proffered it. A third unearthed from some sacredly guarded hiding-place an excessively stale half-inch square of sweet chocolate.

Had the dog so chosen, he might then and there have eaten himself to death on the mult.i.tude of votive offerings. But in a few minutes he had had enough, and he merely sniffed in polite refusal at all further gifts.

"See?" lectured Mahan. "That's the beast of it! When you say a fellow eats or drinks 'like a beast,' you ought to remember that a beast won't eat or drink a mouthful more than is good for him."

"Gee!" commented the somewhat corpulent Dale. "I'm glad I'm not a beast--especially on pay-day."

Presently Bruce tired of the ovation tendered him. These ovations were getting to be an old story. They had begun as far back as his training-camp days--when the story of his joining the army was told by the man to whom The Place's guest had written commending the dog to the trainers' kindness.

At the training-camp this story had been reenforced by the chief collie-teacher--a dour little Hieland Scot named McQuibigaskie, who on the first day declared that the American dog had more sense and more promise and more soul "than a' t'other tykes south o' Kirkcudbright Brae."

Being only mortal, Bruce found it pleasanter to be admired and petted than ignored or kicked. He was impersonally friendly with the soldiers, when he was off duty; and he relished the dainties they were forever thrusting at him.

But at times his soft eyes would grow dark with homesickness for the quiet loveliness of The Place and for the Mistress and the Master who were his loyally worshiped G.o.ds. Life had been so happy and so sweetly uneventful for him, at The Place! And there had been none of the awful endless thunder and the bewilderingly horrible smells and gruesome sights which here met him at every turn.

The dog's loving heart used to grow sick with it all; and he longed unspeakably for home. But he was a gallant soldier, and he did his work not only well, but with a snap and a dash and an almost uncanny intelligence which made him an idol to the men.

Presently, now, having eaten all he wanted and having been patted and talked to until he craved solitude, Bruce strolled ever to an empty dugout, curled up on a torn blanket there, put his nose between his white paws and went to sleep.

The German artillery-fire had swelled from an occasional explosion to a ceaseless roar, that made the ground vibrate and heave, and that beat on the eardrums with nauseating iterance. But it did not bother Bruce.

For months he had been used to this sort of annoyance, and he had learned to sleep snugly through it all.

Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying rate.

The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale activity. Far to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment's trenches a haze had begun to crawl along the ground and to send snaky tendrils high in air-tendrils that blended into a single grayish-green wall as they moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas.

The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned masks.

But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the sudden wind--freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and left, leaving the central trenches clear.

Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a gas-demonstration, can mean but one thing: a general attack. Therefore telephonic word came to the detachments to left and right of the Here-We-Comes, to fall back, under cover of the gas-cloud, to safer positions. Two dogs were sent, with the same order, to the Here-We-Comes. (One of the dogs was ga.s.sed. A bit of shrapnel found the other.)

Thus it was that the Here-We-Comes were left alone (though they did not know it), to hold the position,--with no support on either side, and with a mere handful of men wherewith to stem the impending rush.

On the heels of the dispersing gas-cloud, and straight across the half-mile or less of broken ground, came a line of gray. In five successive waves, according to custom, the boches charged. Each wave hurled itself forward as fast as efficiency would let it, in face of the opposing fire, and as far as human endurance would be goaded. Then it went down, and its survivors attached themselves to the succeeding wave.

Hence, by the time the fifth and mightiest wave got into motion, it was swelled by the survivors of all four of its predecessors and was an all-but-resistless ma.s.s of shouting and running men.

The rifles and machine-guns of the Here-We-Comes played merrily into the advancing gray swarms, stopping wave after wave, and at last checking the fifth and "master" wave almost at the very brink of the Franco-American parapet.

"That's how they do!" Mahan pantingly explained to a rather shaky newcomer, as the last wave fell back. "They count on numbers and bullrushes to get them there. If they'd had ten thousand men, in that rush, instead of five thousand, they'd have got us. And if they had twice as many men in their whole army as they have, they'd win this war. But praise be, they haven't twice as many! That is one of the fifty-seven reasons why the Allies are going to lick Germany."

Mahan talked jubilantly. The same jubilation ran all along the line of victors. But the colonel and his staff were not rejoicing. They had just learned of the withdrawal of the forces to either side of them, and they knew they themselves could not hope to stand against a second and larger charge.

Such a charge the enemy were certain to make. The Germans, too, must soon learn of the defection of the supports. It was now only a question of an hour or less before a charge with a double-enveloping movement would surround and bag the Here-We-Comes, catching the whole regiment in an inescapable trap.

To fall back, now, up that long bare hillside, under full fire of the augmented German artillery, would mean a decimating of the entire command. The Here-We-Comes could not retreat. They could not hope to hold their ground. The sole chance for life lay in the arrival of strong reenforcements from the rear, to help them hold the trenches until night, or to man the supporting positions. Reserves were within easy striking distance. But, as happened so many times in the war, there was no routine way to summon them in time.

It was the chance sight of a crumpled message lying on his dugout-table that reminded the colonel of Bruce's existence and of his presence in the front trench. It was a matter of thirty seconds for the colonel to scrawl an urgent appeal and a brief statement of conditions. Almost as soon as the note was ready, an orderly appeared at the dugout entrance, convoying the newly awakened Bruce.

The all-important message was fastened in place. The colonel himself went to the edge of the traverse, and with his own arms lifted the eighty-pound collie to the top.

There was tenderness as well as strength in the lifting arms. As he set Bruce down on the brink, the colonel said, as if speaking to a fellow-human:

"I hate to do it, old chap. I HATE to! There isn't one chance in three of your getting all the way up the hill alive. But there wouldn't be one chance in a hundred, for a MAN. The boches will be on the lookout for just this move. And their best sharpshooters will be waiting for you--even if you dodge the shrapnel and the rest of the artillery. I'm sorry! And--good-by."

Then, tersely, he rasped out the command--

"Bruce! Headquarters! Headquarters! QUICK!"

At a bound, the dog was gone.

Breasting the rise of the hill, Bruce set off at a sweeping run, his tawny-and-white mane flying in the wind.

A thousand eyes, from the Here-We-Come trenches, watched his flight.

And as many eyes from the German lines saw the huge collie's dash up the coverless slope.

Scarce had Bruce gotten fairly into his stride when the boche bullets began to sing--not a desultory little flurry of shots, as before; but by the score, and with a murderous earnestness. When he had appeared, on his way to the trenches, an hour earlier, the Germans had opened fire on him, merely for their own amus.e.m.e.nt--upon the same merry principle which always led them to shoot at an Ally war-dog. But now they understood his all-important mission; and they strove with their best skill to thwart it.