War and the Weird Part 8

"Oh, my G.o.d! I ... I can't stand it! The loss of blood and the marching has done for me!"

"So! coming into the fight like a lion, you go out like a lamb. By Saint Paul! this is not in accordance with the De Gamelyn traditions. Take up thy arms! Come along!" said the stranger tapping him on the shoulder with a barbed shaft trimmed with grey goose feather.

"Oh! please ... please.... I'm so tired!" said Tim, like a child speaking to its nurse.

The bowman saw that the boy's lips and tongue were black with thirst, and his eyes were blood-shot. And when Tim staggered over to him all his body heaved and trembled like an overdriven horse. Sick and dizzy with pain, he cast himself to earth again, and waited for death. "Why don't they hit me?... I've tried,--oh, so hard!" he sobbed.

"Steady there! Steady, De Gamelyn! Take this," said the bowman, and drew something from his side and handed it to him. It was a sword, if swords be made of fire, of lightning, of dazzling lights; and the moment Tim grasped it all his pain and dizziness fell from him.

"What is this?" he asked.

"The Sword of Life and Death," said the bowman.

"Who the blazes are you?" Tim asked sceptically.

It was with a touch of the Irish brogue that a cheery voice answered. "A friend to a friend," said the bowman, "and the devil to a foe."

"Irish?" Tim questioned.

"Citizen of the world in time past ... now a citizen of heaven."

Tim gazed at the strange man in earnest scrutiny. He appeared quite at his ease with bullets whining around him and he unslung a jack of wine and drank.

"May a parched man claim a drink of your wine?" Tim cried.

"Give what you have, ask what you need. That is the De Gamelyn code of law," said the man, and handed Tim the flagon.

"You are cheerful, sir," said Tim, his blood somewhat warmed by the wine. "In the name of the devil, who are you, and of what country?"

"My name is Nigel De Gamelyn. My Mother, dear soul, was French. My father was wise enough to be an Irishman. So much for my blood, which unites happily the practical and the dreamer fluids. I am of no country but I know all places from the King's tombs at Rome to the old inns that stand about the upper Arun. I have marched with armies over this territory aforetime. There is no shadow, I believe, on my soul, has such strength in him as I, and I rest content to be nothing to myself and all things to every man. That being bliss."

As the bowman spoke, a bullet kicked up a cloud of dust at his feet.

"Hola, by my hilt! it is time that we were stirring," he said. "Leave these fellows to grovel and remove yourself. Follow: who follows Nigel de Gamelyn?" He hitched up his belt and strode forward with his great bow, and Tim saw him send a shaft with a tw.a.n.ging noise five hundred and thirty paces. One of the German officers, towering above the other men, stood out distinctly, and then he dropped.

"I'd like to take a look at that knave," the bowman remarked, drawing a fresh arrow from his sheaf. "By the tw.a.n.g of string! I'll swear I drilled him clean between his eyes."

The enemy were getting closer now, and from the men lying around them broke a violent fusillade. It was quite useless, but it relieved their nerves. Some were discharging their shots into the turf a few yards in front of them. Others were shooting at aeroplanes.

Then suddenly there came upon Tim a great anger. A bullet striking him brought him to his senses, and he saw the men sprawling belly-flat about him. This was not war, this ignominious crawling, this grovelling in the soil, this halting! The spirit of his fathers spoke to him. He remembered one of his father's favourite sayings: "The duty of a man of the line is to fight, and if needs be, die, not to avoid dying." His anger grew--"d.a.m.n them for a pack of cringing, footling cowards: he, Tim Gamelyn, descendant of the De Gamelyns who fought in a hundred battles, would teach them how men of his father's house went into battle."

A senior officer called on those nearest to Tim to advance. And men rose up.

"D. Company, fix bayonets! Close in!" came the order. Tim gripped his sword and strode over to the Bowman. Then the advancing Germans poured a blasting volley on them.

"The Old Battalion--_charge!_" came the stentorian voice of a senior.

The men scrambled to their feet, and Tim following the Bowman sprang ahead of the Battalion. The men leapt across the blood-smeared gra.s.s after them with the speed of a winged fury, but they struck the Germans a dozen yards ahead of the battalion. The bowman had hurled aside his long bow and was using a short battle mace with terrific effect. As for Tim: all he wanted to do was to slash; stab and slash again with that wonderful sword. There followed a nightmare of drawn, grinning faces, of fierce yells and groans. The mud-stained grey figures struck at him wildly, futilely. On and on Tim went, his glittering blade now at a white face, now at a throat, now at a chest, still stabbing and thrusting to pa.s.s through the wall of men which barred his way.

The man with the bow ranged up alongside him: "On, man, on, in the name of G.o.d, march forward.... By St. George and Our Lady! we are breaking up their front;" he muttered.

"Strike me crimson!" bellowed a man near to Tim, "but you're a blooming marvel! Those German beggars are going down for twenty yards around your (decorated) sword without being hit at all. Look! Look! there goes another Hun down. Let me come over near you, mate!"

But Tim knew that De Gamelyn the Bowman had summoned to their help the armies of the unconquered dead. They came, the De Gamelyns of all generations from Crecy to Waterloo: they fought by his side, and the machine gun bullets, which fell upon the dusty earth like tropical rain, hurt them not.

Again and again the Bowman's mace smashed and lashed out before him, and Tim thrust, and thrust yet again with his sword. He heard the deep-throated roar of the bowman's singing "The Song of the Bow."

What of the shaft?

The shaft was cut in England: A long shaft, a strong shaft, Barbed and trim and true; So we'll drink all together To the grey goose feather And the land where the grey goose flew.

Suddenly a yell, horrible and fierce, uprose from the soldiers, and he heard the bowman's voice no more.

"They're on the run, by Gawd, they've got it right in the neck this journey," bellowed a soldier as the German infantry broke and tailed away. Then something took Tim in the chest, something wet and red, that went through him.

The man next to Tim saw the long bayonet stand out beyond his back, saw Tim sway, laughing, and snap the steel short as he fell upon it.

A body of kilted men suddenly swept from the right of the hard-pressed battalion, swept by in silence, and in silence swept the remaining Boches up one side of the ridge and down the other into eternity.

Two days later Colonel Arbuthnot inquired after the welfare of Private Tim Gamelyn at the field hospital.

"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke, and a terrible bayonet wound.

He died early in the morning," said the doctor.

"Is it true that he saved the battalion by urging our fellows on at the critical moment?"

"Yes," said Colonel Arbuthnot, "but do you happen to know if he had an officer's sword with him by chance when he was carried in here? All my men speak of a 'sword of flame' with which he drove the Huns before him.

Even hardened soldiers who have been through many campaigns have been babbling all sorts of nonsense of ghostly regiments of bowmen who helped to turn the German attack!"

The doctor walked over to a shelf, and, taking down a rusty old sword, placed it on the table.

"Perhaps that is what you refer to, Colonel," he said. "Where the fellow picked it up is a mystery to me. It must be some hundreds of years old."

Colonel Arbuthnot took it in his hands and read this inscription on the blade:

NIGEL DE GAMELYN ... ADSUM ...

III

THE MILLS OF G.o.d

They were putting little Boudru to bed--the R.H.A. and the Corps of Royal Engineers and Stansfield, the big fat Infantry Sergeant. His little sister, already tucked up in bed, was nearly asleep. Boudru had been allowed to stay up till Sergeant Stansfield had come in from duty.

The special privilege had been accorded to the little French boy on this, the last night that the British troops were to spend in the village. Boudru's home was in a portion of our line in which the defence trenches were of the semi-detached type--they did not join up with the other part of the line, and at times the place was distinctly unhealthy.

Sometimes it was in the hands of the Huns, sometimes the British rushed it, and held on for a few weeks; there had been times when it had been occupied by both, at other times it was written on the squared official maps as no man's land. It was a spot in which there was always a feeling of something dreadful being close at hand; there was an air of expectancy about it and one felt there was a marked atmosphere of nerves about. You might be sniped from the house opposite, or blown out of the windows by a seventeen-inch sh.e.l.l. You never know. The man who sold you tobacco the day before might be lying stiff in the gutter next day, or more probably still, he might be dining with the German Staff a mile and a half away. All this uncertainty, coupled with the fact that the place was full of spies, and that valuable information had been finding its way through to the German lines, made the General decide to withdraw his troops and take up some trenches behind it.

Boudru sat on the big armchair and swung his white bare legs defiantly.