With Haig on the Somme Part 20

"It ain't 'arf parky," growled Harry Hawke.

"It'll be 'ot enough in a bit," said his pal, Tiddler. "What price Old Street, 'Arry?"

"Chuck it!" replied the marksman of No. 2 Platoon. "No good thinking of love and sentiment now." But for all that, perhaps, a fleeting vision of his Lil pa.s.sed through his untutored brain, and made him a shade paler about the gills.

Tiddler noticed it and smiled to himself, knowing what it meant, for when Hawke looked white it was time for his enemy to look out, and the moment was rapidly approaching.

The trench was packed with men, all waiting. Those of the reserves who were not yet in their places were pouring steadily up, and immediately behind the front line Staff cars and motor cycles dashed backwards and forwards; and overhead, where, oddly enough, the larks were trilling, an English aeroplane was flying just above the scream of the sh.e.l.ls.

Dennis saw it, and wondered how Claude Laval was faring; and as he looked at his wrist-watch he saw that it was nearly six o'clock.

At that moment the most terrific bombardment the war had witnessed burst with devastating fury upon the German lines. Nothing had been heard like it, and men smiled grimly, knowing that their turn would come soon.

The C.O. left the bay, and walked along the front of his beloved battalion from one end of it to the other; a quiet, keen-eyed English officer, brave as a lion they all knew, but showing no trace of the slightest excitement as his eye scanned the faces of the waiting men.

He had been appointed to the command when the Dashwoods' father was given the brigade, and he realised that the brigadier expected great things of his old battalion.

"I never saw a fitter lot," was his gratified comment as he returned to the two brothers. "Heaven help the enemy yonder if our artillery has only cleared the wire."

"It's sincerely to be hoped they have, sir," said Captain Bob dryly.

"There was a d.i.c.kens of a lot of it. But we shall get through without a doubt. Not long to wait now, for there go the trench mortars."

Mingling with the continuous roar of our guns came a still louder and very insistent sound, to which they listened in silence, every officer of the battalion with his eye on his watch.

"Well, good luck, old chap!" said Bob suddenly, gripping Dennis by the hand. And the two brothers looked at each other with the same thought behind the quiet confidence of their smile.

It might be the last time they would ever meet on earth, but they faced the possibility without fear, and already a dense cloud of smoke, released along our whole front, was shrouding the waiting line.

"Seven-thirty to the tick," said the C.O. "Reedshires--Get over!" And in an instant the battalion was swarming out of its trench, and advancing over the two hundred yards of broken ground which separated the brigade from the enemy, with sloped arms.

It was terrible going, for the whole earth was honeycombed by craters large and small; but out of the smoke-cloud rose a ringing cheer, which was still floating on the air when the vicious tac-tac of machine-guns from the German lines told that even high explosives had their limitations, and that some at least of the enemy gun-emplacements remained undestroyed.

"Double!" cried the C.O., seeing that a kilted battalion on his left was racing forward as the best means of escaping the continuous stream of bullets.

"Charge, boys, charge!" yelled Dennis, taking up the cry; and that brown avalanche of eager, helmeted men poured on clear of the smoke into the bright sunshine, which glinted on their fixed bayonets.

In spite of the carefully prepared staff maps and plans which they had all studied closely, Dennis looked in vain for any sign of a definite objective. There was no sandbagged parapet, nothing but a confused ma.s.s of holes and heaps scattered broadcast over the landscape--the result of the terrific spade-work of the guns--which had to be crossed before the village was reached. The village, too, of which he caught a glimpse, was only a pulverised ma.s.s of debris, with here and there the angle of a shattered house or the ribs of a roof to mark what had once been human habitations.

But he knew that the strength of the enemy's position lay in the wonderful subterranean works, the deep dug-outs, the covered-in communicating trenches, and for these he and his men rushed with great determination.

Suddenly, from the other side of a chalk heap, a row of heads appeared, wearing flat blue forage caps with white bands round them, and a shout of rapture rose from No. 2 Platoon as they saw at last something to go for.

Between them and the row of heads yawned a huge sh.e.l.l crater, and as the platoon divided automatically to avoid the obstacle, a heavy volley across the crater caught them, and several of the running men pitched forward and lay where they fell.

Perhaps they had orders to retire, perhaps it was our yell that scared them; but the heads disappeared; and when our men reached the spot where they had been the Germans had vanished. One stout fellow, dropping into a hole thirty yards away, was the only indication of what had become of them; but it was sufficient, and with a "Come on, boys!" Dennis sprinted for the spot.

He had armed himself with a rifle and bayonet for the advance; but, changing it to his left hand, he opened the bag of bombs he had also brought and, drawing the pin, flung one of them into the hole, a square opening, evidently the entrance to a covered communication trench.

"Wait a moment!" he shouted, shouldering back the next man up, who in his excitement was about to plunge in; and then he heard the bomb burst below, and a shower of earth and fragments of clothing bespattered the pair of them, a piece of the bomb making an ugly gash on the man's cheek.

Then Dennis sprang down, regardless of the fumes. At the bottom of the steps he was conscious of treading on something soft, but did not stay to examine it, for a ray of light filtering in from a fissure in the roof showed him dark forms scurrying away in the distance along the boarded pa.s.sage.

The hand-grenade had got a move on the enemy, and, followed by a dozen men of the platoon, he led the way, gripping his rifle, and loosing a couple of rounds from the hip as he ran.

One of the bullets evidently found its mark, for a man lay writhing on the ground where another pa.s.sage turned off at right angles. The man tried to seize his legs, but instantly let go his hold with a hoa.r.s.e cry as Tiddler's bayonet settled all disputes, and Dennis darted round the angle.

The pa.s.sage ended in a strange place; a large dug-out which had been partially unroofed by one of our sh.e.l.ls earlier in the morning, and knee deep amid the loose earth which had poured in, half filling it, twenty Germans turned at bay, under the command of a very tall officer.

There were only eight men with Dennis, for the other four were still groping their way somewhere behind in the darkness of the pa.s.sage, and the young lieutenant realised in a flash of time that he was seriously outnumbered and must act promptly.

A big sergeant jumped at him with a shout, but before the lunging bayonet had crossed his own, Dennis fired and shot the man dead.

"Put your hands up and surrender!" he said sternly in German to the rest; and the first to obey was the tall officer, who came scrambling over the loose earth with both arms outstretched.

"We are your prisoners, sir," he said, holding his revolver as though he were presenting the b.u.t.t to Dennis. And the men of the British platoon lowered their bayonets with disappointment in their faces.

It meant some of their number escorting the prisoners to the rear, they knew, and that was not the hope they had had in their hearts.

But their disappointment was short-lived, for, as the tall officer came within a stride of the young lieutenant, he suddenly shouted: "Now you have them, men! Down with these infernal English!" And, reversing his own weapon, he fired three shots at Dennis Dashwood in rapid succession.

The treachery was so unexpected that Dennis could do no more than duck his head, and even then the third bullet buckled the brim of his trench helmet; but as the barrel of the German's revolver clicked harmlessly round, showing that it was empty, Dennis lunged upward.

"Sorry, sir!" said a voice at his elbow. "He was your bird." And a man of the platoon, who had been a gamekeeper before he joined up, withdrew his own bayonet, which had buried itself simultaneously in the cowardly brute's ribs.

But there was no time for thanks, for the enemy had responded to the treacherous command, and a terrific hand-to-hand fight ensued in the half-demolished dug-out.

When the magazines had been emptied, b.u.t.t and bayonet came into play at close quarters, and men clutched each other in a death struggle, and rolled over and over, howling like wolves.

Once, indeed, Dennis found himself driven backwards into the mouth of the pa.s.sage by two beefy fellows attacking him at the same time, and it was only by dropping his rifle and using his revolver that he saved himself from certain death.

As it was, although the Reedshires had taken heavy toll and reduced the odds considerably, three of the platoon were down, and a fourth reeled, badly wounded, against the side of the dug-out.

The four who should have provided a welcome reinforcement had missed the turning, and continued straight along the covered communication, and now nine of the enemy, springing back on to the top of the fallen earth to take breath, collected for a rush that could have but one end.

"Quick, men!" cried Dennis, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the ex-gamekeeper's rifle, which the poor chap would never use again, "get into the pa.s.sage, and slip in another clip! You've just time, if I can hold them up for a moment!"

The survivors of that little band each told the story afterwards with variations, but all were agreed on two points.

One was the blinding flash as a bomb fell into the middle of the Germans through the sh.e.l.l-hole in the roof. The other was the voice of Captain Bob, sounding strangely distinct in the death-like silence that followed the explosion as he called out: "Have you had enough in there, or would you like another one?"

Then they lifted up their voices in a great shout of "Hold on, sir!" And Dennis yelled: "Bob, you juggins, do you want to do the lot of us in?"

"Oh, it's you, is it?" cried his brother, sliding through the opening with a sergeant and a couple of bombers. "I might have known you'd be mixed up in it somehow. We heard some German jabbering and chanced our arm."

"And a lucky thing for us you did," said Dennis, pointing to the hideously bespattered grey-green uniforms that littered the earth heap.

Only one of the nine men was moving, and after a convulsive opening and shutting of his hands the movement ceased altogether. "How is it going up above?"

"Top-hole, so far," said the Captain. "At least, as far as our battalion is concerned, though there seems to be a bit of a check among those chaps on our left. n.o.body else down here? Very well; this is the quickest way out, and every minute is an hour. We've got their first-line trench, or all that was left of it." And they scrambled once more up the land slide into the open-air.