Tales of War Part 3

These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Ca.n.a.l; and being an autocrat he has made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in h.e.l.l that are easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.

Two Degrees of Envy

It was night in the front line and no moon, or the moon was hidden.

There was a strafe going on. The Tok Emmas were angry. And the artillery on both sides were looking for the Tok Emmas.

Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed dwellers in whatever far happy island there be that has not heard of these things, is the crude language of Mars. He has not time to speak of a trunk mortar battery, for he is always in a hurry, and so he calls them T. M.'s. But Bellona might not hear him saying T. M., for all the din that she makes: might think that he said D. N; and so he calls it Tok Emma. Ak, Beer, C, Don: this is the alphabet of Mars.

And the huge minnies were throwing old limbs out of No Man's Land into the frontline trench, and sh.e.l.ls were rasping down through the air that seemed to resist them until it was torn to pieces: they burst and showers of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly, as it seemed, sh.e.l.ls were bursting now and then in the air, with a flash intensely red: the smell of them was drifting down the trenches.

In the middle of all this Bert b.u.t.terworth was. .h.i.t. "Only in the foot," his pals said. "Only!" said Bert. They put him on a stretcher and carried him down the trench. They pa.s.sed Bill Britterling, standing in the mud, an old friend of Bert's. Bert's face, twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some sympathy.

"Lucky devil," said Bill.

Across the way on the other side of No Man's Land there was mud the same as on Bill's side: only the mud over there stank; it didn't seem to have been kept clean somehow. And the parapet was sliding away in places, for working parties had not had much of a chance. They had three Tok Emmas working in that battalion front line, and the British batteries did not quite know where they were, and there were eight of them looking.

Fritz Groedenscha.s.ser, standing in that unseemly mud, greatly yearned for them to find soon what they were looking for. Eight batteries searching for something they can't find, along a trench in which you have to be, leaves the elephant hunter's most desperate tale a little dull and insipid. Not that Fritz Groedenscha.s.ser knew anything about elephant hunting: he hated all things sporting, and cordially approved of the execution of Nurse Cavell. And there was thermite too.

Flammenwerfer was all very well, a good German weapon: it could burn a man alive at twenty yards. But this accursed flaming English thermite could catch you at four miles. It wasn't fair.

The three German trench mortars were all still firing. When would the English batteries find what they were looking for, and this awful thing stop? The night was cold and smelly.

Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but no warmth came to him that way.

A gust of sh.e.l.ls was coming along the trench. Still they had not found the minnewerfer! Fritz moved from his place altogether to see if he could find some place where the parapet was not broken. And as he moved along the sewerlike trench he came on a wooden cross that marked the grave of a man he once had known, now buried some days in the parapet, old Ritz Handelscheiner.

"Lucky devil," said Fritz.

The Master of No Man's Land

When the last dynasty has fallen and the last empire pa.s.sed away, when man himself has gone, there will probably still remain the swede. [The rutabaga or Swedish turnip.]

There grew a swede in No Man's Land by Croisille near the Somme, and it had grown there for a long while free from man.

It grew as you never saw a swede grow before. It grew tall and strong and weedy. It lifted its green head and gazed round over No Man's Land. Yes, man was gone, and it was the day of the swede.

The storms were tremendous. Sometimes pieces of iron sang through its leaves. But man was gone and it was the day of the swede.

A man used to come there once, a great French farmer, an oppressor of swedes. Legends were told of him and his herd of cattle, dark traditions that pa.s.sed down vegetable generations. It was somehow known in those fields that the man ate swedes.

And now his house was gone and he would come no more.

The storms were terrible, but they were better than man. The swede nodded to his companions: the years of freedom had come.

They had always known among them that these years would come. Man had not been there always, but there had always been swedes. He would go some day, suddenly, as he came. That was the faith of the swedes. And when the trees went the swede believed that the day was come. When hundreds of little weeds arrived that were never allowed before, and grew unchecked, he knew it.

After that he grew without any care, in sunlight, moonlight and rain; grew abundantly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and increased in arrogance till he felt himself greater than man. And indeed in those leaden storms that sang often over his foliage all living things seemed equal.

There was little that the Germans left when they retreated from the Somme that was higher than this swede. He grew the tallest thing for miles and miles. He dominated the waste. Two cats slunk by him from a shattered farm: he towered above them contemptuously.

A partridge ran by him once, far, far below his lofty leaves. The night winds mourning in No Man's Land seemed to sing for him alone.

It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man's Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket and brought him back to our company to cook.

Weeds and Wire

Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been, there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South, a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the South.

"Where did you hear that tune?" he asked the platoon commander.

"Oh, the h.e.l.l of a long way from here," the platoon commander said.

He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods, and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for hundreds of yards through orchards. "The h.e.l.l of a way from here,"

he said.

For a long while then they sat silent.

"It mightn't have been so very far from here," said the platoon commander. "It was in France, now I come to think of it. But it was a lovely part of France, all woods and orchards. Nothing like this, thank G.o.d." And he glanced with a tired look at the unutterable desolation.

"Where was it?" said the other.

"In Picardy," he said.

"Aren't we in Picardy now?" said his friend.

"Are we?" he said.

"I don't know. The maps don't call it Picardy."

"It was a fine place, anyway," the platoon commander said. "There seemed always to be a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short gra.s.s grew on them, and it shone in the sun at evening. There were black woods above them. A man used to come out of them singing at evening."

He looked wearily round at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene back to his reminiscences.

"He came singing through the orchards into the village," he said.

"A quaint old place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois."

"Do you know where we are?" said the other.