The Secrets of a Kuttite Part 12

"Rather not, thanks awfully, I might get beaten."

c.o.c.kie snorted in disgust, and I had to give him a last cigarette I had just made for myself.

"The truth is, c.o.c.kie, that Square-Peg and I are hopelessly deficient in this chess business, and we have to fluke to win as they say in 'pills.' That churns you up and you can't see the pieces, and consequently move the wrong one. Don't swear. I've a proposition. 'Nellie' is coming to lunch and will give you a game. He's very hot stuff."

So it was settled. Square-Peg and I made our plans and fixed it all right with Nellie, who tries to be a very dignified and silent person of the cutting variety, and dislikes c.o.c.kie.

After our lunch of stewed horse and horse-beans and rice the game began. After a few moves c.o.c.kie had a slight advantage, and I took this opportunity to whisper to him that Nellie had a weak heart and it was dangerous to shout at him.

c.o.c.kie nodded approvingly and the game went on. Half an hour later c.o.c.kie lost a bishop which he could only retrieve by uncovering check.

His face went red and he took a breath. "Don't forget,"

I sang out, and I and S.-P. each seized a gla.s.s of water and an almost empty rum bottle for any emergency.

c.o.c.kie glared at me in a cannibalistic fashion, and eyeing Nellie carefully the while, addressed some superlatives to us, saying that the interruption had spoilt his move. Nellie sat with steady countenance while I replied that the interruption came after the move. But c.o.c.kie played brilliantly and recovered a piece, whereupon he got quite genial and addressed conciliatory remarks to me.

Twice c.o.c.kie forced exchanges, and as in both instances he got "position," which means that he was a p.a.w.n to the bad each time, we quietly stood up with the water in a first-aid att.i.tude. But c.o.c.kie was playing as he never played before, and was nodding his head in a queer way. I thought he was so blind with annoyance that he was counting the pieces, but Square-Peg a.s.sured me that his engine had got hot and was running free. c.o.c.kie went on serenely for about another half-hour when, after a pause of several minutes, he suddenly discovered himself to be mated, for Nellie had said only the word "check" and now added "mate" in the most matter-of-fact voice.

"d.a.m.ned fluke," screamed c.o.c.kie, forgetting himself, and springing up he banged the chessboard down fiercely on the table with an awful smash.

Poor Nellie gasped and said "Oh-o-o-o," and apparently stopped breathing and reeled in his chair. Not having brandy we gave him the last of c.o.c.kie's rum, which he managed to negotiate, and then, as usually happens, felt better. We three preserved a frigid silence towards c.o.c.kie, who said he was d.a.m.ned if he knew what was the use of people on service with weak hearts, and then strode off, Nellie in the meantime pulling hard at the bottle for an extra drip or so. How we laughed. For c.o.c.kie was really scared. It's not the sort of story to make you popular if it gets about--wilfully startling a fellow to death with a weak heart merely for beating you in a game of chess.

Later on Square-Peg and I joined c.o.c.kie on the observation post and a battle royal ensued.

"I tell you," said c.o.c.kie to me, "it's fearfully difficult to give the whole of one's attention to the game when one is playing an absolute novice. So things are missed. But if you will back me for five rupees against Square-Peg to win ten games out of ten I'll do it, you see. That will supply the interest."

I complied at once, offering one game in, which he proudly refused. With a vicious jab to c.o.c.kie to please remember it was "my money and not his" that was concerned, and to have no nonsense, he grew demonstrative, and I fled to pay a visit to Tudway on the _Sumana_.

"I tell you I can't lose," he had said. When I returned to the mess, there I found Square-Peg, who announced that he had left c.o.c.kie in a fury, he having lost the first three games.

I insisted on Square-Peg's taking the five dibs. It appears that during the first game Fritz pa.s.sed him and said "Good afternoon," to which interruption c.o.c.kie stormily attributed his subsequent beating....

_Later._--This very morning the other half of the sh.e.l.l that crashed outside my doorway (there isn't a door) went through the roof of c.o.c.kie's bedroom and simply smashed most things in it. A foot of _debris_ from the roof lay on the floor. It was lucky for c.o.c.kie that he was on duty. And luckier for me that I did not accept c.o.c.kie's many invitations to share his room.

Only yesterday he asked me again to do so. But c.o.c.kie generally has two or more rounds with Curra Mirali and pursues him round the yard, leaving the door open--every morning about 6 a.m. when I am doing my best to have one other dream.

To-night after dinner Fritz, c.o.c.kie, Square-Peg, and I discussed the proposition that the hole a sh.e.l.l makes is the safest place, as no two sh.e.l.ls ever fall in exactly the same spot.

One recalled that very good Tommy story from France when, on being asked why he hadn't taken cover in a Jack Johnson crater as he had been ordered, replied, "Unsafe, sir. I'd rather try another spot and chance it."

"But you know that the same gun never shoots into exactly the same spot twice?"

"Yes, sir. But another gun might."

Fritz and I upheld the theory of probabilities as being against a second sh.e.l.l getting into c.o.c.kie's room. For that meant a very precise elevation just clearing the back houses and wall, and meant also the range to a foot or it would get the yard.

c.o.c.kie and Square-Peg, on the contrary, held that because one sh.e.l.l has got there and so proved that a sh.e.l.l _can_ get there, another might get there also. I remember painfully suggesting that c.o.c.kie ought not to sleep in the room if he thought that another sh.e.l.l might come in, especially as he had no doubt offended the G.o.ds over the Nellie incident. This is altogether an extraordinary affair and I am recording it in detail.

Well, c.o.c.kie went to bed, taking the precaution from my incident of the morning to sleep with his head to the door instead of his feet. We were half undressed when the bombardment reopened. It became so hot that we all took shelter in the mess, the safest place. Indeed the back wall was stopping dozens of them. Later it slackened and we went to bed, whereon it gradually increased. After I had tossed restlessly for half an hour it exceeded the limit, and the plaster and dust were being flung through the doorway of my bedroom. On my way down I inspected the whole of the wall and found the roof all around pulverized. Five minutes later Square-Peg and I were smoking half undressed in the mess when the stunning noise of a splitting crash seemed to burst the world in halves. _Debris_ came into the mess. We thought the sh.e.l.l had entered the tiny yard, but c.o.c.kie's voice in unearthly yells quickly disillusioned us.

I shot into the room, which was stifling with fumes and dense yellow gas and smoke. The lamp went out. I told Square-Peg to fetch a doctor and tried to strike a light, but nothing would burn in the thick fumes. I felt for the ruined bed and managed to get him out of the room into the mess. There was a nasty deep gash over the tendon of Achilles, but no bones were broken, although the ligaments were gone and it was bleeding freely, so I applied a first field dressing, as I had so often done in France, and a.s.sured him it was not at all serious and that now he was sure to get downstream. Nevertheless poor c.o.c.kie's many nerves had been badly shaken.

Fritz came and said:

"Let me see. That's good--no bones. Bleeding stopped.

Move your foot. Nothing much really. Where else?"

After a fresh spasm c.o.c.kie complained that his back seemed cut in two, and this proved a nasty bruise, although the skin wasn't gone. It was a black bruise, and he must have got a pretty hefty knock from a piece of the bed. How he escaped goodness knows. The room was two feet deep in rubbish--topees, uniforms, cameras, bed, everything was wrecked.

We got him to the hospital, and on the way he invented extraordinary futures for each of the stretcher bearers.

Arrived at the hospital I am afraid the whole place was awakened, and some poor fellows whose dying was only a matter of hours or days turned from their fitful sleep on the ground floor to ask who was. .h.i.t.

He wanted me to sit up with him, but General Smith insisted that I went back to bed, a.s.suring me I was far too ill, and he kindly gave me an excellent cigarette.

c.o.c.kie is intrepid under fire even to the point of recklessness, but is also of the kind that feels pain tremendously.

It is, I suppose, a matter of temperament and nerves.

This has released me from the river-front and I succeed to the command of the ammunition column, and am now running our mess.

Tudway, Square-Peg, and I are now alone here. We have a little potato meal and rice, and I have procured a tin of jam. I could not have two more generous companions with whom to share our last food.

_March 23rd._--The servants won't sleep in that part of the building where the sh.e.l.ls came, so we have vacated a room for them, and Square-Peg and I have moved below into the bas.e.m.e.nt.

I saw c.o.c.kie this morning and heard him from afar.

Near him is an officer lying very still and white and quiet with his whole leg shattered, silent with the paralysis of extreme pain.

I a.s.sisted c.o.c.kie with letters and other things, and got away as quickly as I could, as I felt this other sufferer wanted silence.

_March 24th._--Some sh.e.l.ls fell in the town during the night, and once again the horses got it badly.

The 47-inch gun which was bombed by the plane is now under-water, as the river has risen five feet, the highest level during the siege.

It is a clear, beautiful day and appreciably warmer. Already the flies are dreadful and swarm everywhere in billions. The Kut fly is a p.r.o.nounced cannibal.

I walked through the palm woods to the 4-inch guns, where I found Parsnip alone in his glory. There he has been the whole siege with a very comfortable tent under the trees, and his only job is to repeat orders from the telephone to his two antediluvian guns. As a field gunner I am not enamoured of his monotonous and stationary job. Parsnip is a subaltern also and has two characteristics. In playing chess he seizes the pieces by the head, and after describing an artistic parabola, sets them down. He is a Radical, as you would expect of any fellow so handling a p.a.w.n, let alone a queen. His second claim to notoriety is said to be as author of a future publication ent.i.tled, "Important People I intend to meet." As a hobby he kills mosquitos with a horse flick.

For over an hour beneath those biblical palms Parsnip, or Pas Nip, and I stood by his guns and smoked and looked out over the darkening plain where shadow chased shadow under the capricious moon, and where, like will o' the wisps of an extravagant dream, tiny flashes tempted us still to hope on. For what? Well, there were the flashes. They were the flashes of our guns. And I longed for tobacco and wine.

Parsnip, on the contrary, was a married man!

_March 25th._--This morning I had a thorough inspection of the horse and wagon lines and inspected shelters previous to my visit to headquarters to report on ammunition. Orders are out for all ranks to prepare to receive heavy bombardment.

I am having the ammunition shelter even further reinforced against sh.e.l.l or bomb. The present scheme is to have two thick roofs each topped by kerosene tins packed close and filled with soil. One of these shelters will explode the sh.e.l.l or bomb, and the other receive the burst. The horse-lines have been changed and pits dug for all drivers and detachments and traversed for possible enfilade bursts. The men are working on a shelter for our bas.e.m.e.nt room with tins of earth piled up.

Tins are fearfully scarce, as hundreds have been requisitioned for the defence of H.M.S. _Sumana_ and other things. We have, we believe, sheltered the probable zones with what tins we have. Thus the doorway and window are unprotected because the upper back room would stop all except howitzer fire, and the enemy's howitzer is south of Kut. Similarly to prevent a lucky sh.e.l.l bursting through the wall of the first-floor room and roof of our present one, we have had three rows of tins--all we could get--arranged in front of the wall upstairs. I have calculated that any burst entering higher than this would get the opposite upstairs wall and pa.s.s out into the street.

Tudway and Square-Peg have accused me of being cold-blooded over the affair. But I intended to be nothing if not practical, and the next morning discovered that any sh.e.l.l of average intentions, in fact one falling ten feet shorter than the very one that had plugged into my bedroom wall up above, would have no difficulty in going through the mess roof and so through the mess cupboard--a large receptacle into the wall--into our so-called impregnable bedroom which was to be the emergency shelter for all hands. My bed was just beyond the cupboard the other side of the three-foot wall.

So this evening when Tudway went to the cupboard for the jam and meat and bread he found a solid wall of tins filled with earth. This he considered a master-stroke. The provisions, as he explained, would have been directly in the line of fire!

Moreover, I have had removed a score or two of loose bricks which were wedged in the best Damocletian style between the joists and the ceiling. For last night I dreamed one fell on my head. Why my head is always in the line of trouble I can't say.

Talking of dreams, that is the second nasty one in a few days. The previous time I dreamed I was being hung.

That was probably due to a b.u.t.ton that I had sewn on to the neck of my pyjama jacket by the uncertain light of dubbin oil!

_10 p.m._--There is heavy and continuous firing downstream.