Part 27

The R.A.M.C. men had collected the casualties, and were doing what they could for them, and the officer who was "a bit of a surgeon" gave them what help he could. The casualties were mangled cruelly, and one of them, a child, died before the ambulance came.

The shells began to come fast now. One after another they poured in, the last noise of their approach before they struck sounding like the rush and roar of an express train passing through a tunnel. No more fell near the square; but the two officers, returning across it, with the terrifying rush of its projectiles in their ears, moved hastily and puffed sighs of relief as they reached the door of the café again.

"I just about want a drink," said the one who was "a bit of a surgeon." "Thank Heaven I didn't decide to go into the Medical. The more I see of that job the less I like it."

The other shuddered. "How these surgeons do it at all," he said, "beats me. I had to go outside when you started to handle that kiddie. Sorry I couldn't stay to help you."

"It didn't matter," said the first. "Those Medical fellows did all I wanted, and anyhow you were better employed giving a hand to stop that building catching light."

The two had their drink and prepared to move again.

"Time we were off, I suppose," said the first. "Our lot must be getting ready to take the road presently, and we ought to be there."

So they moved and dodged through the quiet streets, with the shells still whooping overhead and bursting noisily in different parts of the town. On their way they entered a shop to buy some slabs of chocolate. The shop was empty when they entered, but a few stout raps on the counter brought a woman, pale-faced but volubly chattering, up a ladder and through a trapdoor in the shop-floor. She served them while the shells still moaned overhead, talking rapidly, apologizing for keeping them waiting, and explaining that for the children's sake she always went down into the cellar when the shelling commenced, wishing them, as they gathered up their parcels and left, "bonne chance," and making for the trap-door and the ladder as they closed the shop-door.

About the main streets there were few signs of the shells' work, except here and there a litter of fragments tossed over the roofs and sprayed across the road. But, passing through a small side square, the two officers saw something more of the effect of "direct hits." In the square was parked a number of ambulance wagons, and over a building at the side floated a huge Red Cross flag. Eight or nine shells had been dropped in and around the square. Where they had fallen were huge round holes, each with a scattered fringe of earth and cobble-stones and broken pavement. The trees lining the square showed big white patches on their trunks where the bark had been sliced by flying fragments, branches broken, hanging and dangling, or holding out jagged white stumps. Leaves and twigs and branches were littered about the square and heaped thick under the trees. The brick walls of many of the houses round were pitted and pocked and scarred by the shell fragments. The face of one house was marked by a huge splash, with solid center and a ragged-edged outline of radiating jerky rays, reminding one immediately of a famous ink-maker's advertisement. The bricks had taken the impression of the explosion's splash exactly as paper would take the ink's. Practically every window in the square had been broken, and in the case of the splash-marked house, blown in, sash and frame complete. One ambulance wagon lay a torn and splintered wreck, and pieces of it were flung wide to the four corners of the square. Another was overturned, with broken wheels collapsed under it, and in the Red Cross canvas tilts of others gaped huge tears and rents.

At one spot a pool of blood spread wide across the pavement, and still dripping and running sluggishly and thickly into and along the stone gutter, showed where at least one shell had caught more than brick and stone and tree, although now the square was deserted and empty of life.

And even as the two hurriedly skirted the place another shell hurtled over, tripped on the top edge of a roof across the square and exploded with an appalling clatter and burst of noise. The roof vanished in a whirlwind of smoke and dust, and the officers jumped from the doorway where they had flung themselves crouching, and finished their passage of the square at a run.

"Hottish corner," said one, as they slowed to a walk some distance away.

"Silly fools," growled the other. "What do they want to hoist that huge Red Cross flag up there for, where any airman can see it? Fairly asking for it, I call it."

When they came to the outskirts of the town they found rather more signs of life. People were hanging about their doorways and the shops, fewer windows were shuttered, fewer faces peeped from the tiny grated windows of the cellars. And up the center of the road, with lordly calm, marched three Highlanders. The smooth swing of their kilts, their even, unhurried step, the shoulders well back, and the elbows a shade outturned, the bonnets cocked to a precisely same angle on the upheld heads, all bespoke either an amazing ignorance of, or a bland indifference to, the bombardment. Their march was stopped by a sentry, who shouted to them and moved out from the pavement. Some sort of argument was going on as the officers approached, and in passing they heard the finish of it.

"You were pit there tae warn folk," a Highlander was saying. "Weel, ye've dune that, so we'll awa on oor road. We're nae fonder o' shells than y'are yersel. But we'd look bonnie, wouldn't we, t' be tellin' the Cameron lads we promised to meet, that we were feared for a bit shellin'...."

And after they had passed, the officers looked back and saw the three Scots swinging their kilts and swaggering imperturbably on to the town, and their meeting with the "Cameron lads."

There were no more shells, but that afternoon a Taube paid another of its frequent visits and vigorously bombed the railway station again, driving the inhabitants back once more to the inadequate shelter of their cellars and basements. And yet, as the same two officers marched with their battalion through the town towards the firing-line that evening, they found the streets quite normally bustling and astir, and there seemed to be no lack of light in the shops and houses and about the streets. Here and there as they passed, children stood stiffly to attention and gravely saluted the battalion, young women and old turned to call a cheery "Bonne Chance" to the soldiers, to smile bravely and wave farewells to them.

"Plucky bloomin' lot, ain't they, Bill?" said one man, and blew a kiss to three girls waving from a window.

"I takes off my 'at to them," said his mate. "What wi' Jack Johnsons and airyplane bombs, you might expec' the population to have emigrated in a bunch. The Frenchmen is a plucky enough crowd, but the women--My Lord."

"Airyplanes every other day," said the first man. "But I don't notice any darkened streets and white-painted kerbs; and we don't 'ear the inhabitants shrieking about protection from air raids, or 'Where's the anti-aircraft guns?' or 'Who's responsible for air defense?' or 'A baa the Government that don't a baa the air raids!' 'say la gerr,' says they, and shrugs their shoulders, and leaves it go at that."

They were in a darker side-street now, and the glare of the burning house shone red in the sky over the roof tops. "Somebody's 'appy 'ome gone west," remarked one man, and a mouth-organ in the ranks answered, with cheerful sarcasm, "Keep the Home Fires Burning!"

THE SIGNALERS

"It is reported that ... "--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

The "it" and the "that" which were reported, and which the despatch related in another three or four lines, concerned the position of a forward line of battle, but have really nothing to do with this account, which aims only at relating something of the method by which "it was reported" and the men whose particular work was concerned only with the report as a report, a string of words, a jumble of letters, a huddle of Morse dots and dashes.

The Signaling Company in the forward lines was situated in a very damp and very cold cellar of a half-destroyed house. In it were two or three tables commandeered from upstairs or from some houses around. That one was a rough deal kitchen table, and that another was of polished wood, with beautiful inlaid work and artistic curved and carven legs, the spoils of some drawing-room apparently, was a matter without the faintest interest to the signalers who used them. To them a table was a table, no more and no less, a thing to hold a litter of papers, message forms, telephone gear, and a candle stuck in a bottle. If they had stopped to consider the matter, and had been asked, they would probably have given a dozen of the delicate inlaid tables for one of the rough strong kitchen ones. There were three or four chairs about the place, just as miscellaneous in their appearance as the tables. But beyond the tables and chairs there was no furniture whatever, unless a scanty heap of wet straw in one corner counts as furniture, which indeed it might well do since it counted as a bed.

There were fully a dozen men in the room, most of them orderlies for the carrying of messages to and from the telephonists. These men came and went continually. Outside it had been raining hard for the greater part of the day, and now, getting on towards midnight, the drizzle still held and the trenches and fields about the signalers' quarters were running wet, churned into a mass of gluey chalk-and-clay mud. The orderlies coming in with messages were daubed thick with the wet mud from boot-soles to shoulders, often with their puttees and knees and thighs dripping and running water as if they had just waded through a stream. Those who by the carrying of a message had just completed a turn of duty, reported themselves, handed over a message perhaps, slouched wearily over to the wall farthest from the door, dropped on the stone floor, bundled up a pack or a haversack, or anything else convenient for a pillow, lay down and spread a wet mackintosh over them, wriggled and composed their bodies into the most comfortable, or rather the least uncomfortable possible position, and in a few minutes were dead asleep.

It was nothing to them that every now and again the house above them shook and quivered to the shock of a heavy shell exploding somewhere on the ground round the house, that the rattle of rifle fire dwindled away at times to separate and scattered shots, brisked up again and rose to a long roll, the devil's tattoo of the machine guns rattling through it with exactly the sound a boy makes running a stick rapidly along a railing. The bursting shells and scourging rifle fire, sweeping machine guns, banging grenades and bombs were all affairs with which the Signaling Company in the cellar had no connection. For the time being the men in a row along the wall were as unconcerned in the progress of the battle as if they were safely and comfortably asleep in London. Presently any or all of them might be waked and sent out into the flying death and dangers of the battlefield, but in the meantime their immediate and only interest was in getting what sleep they could. Every once in a while the signalers' sergeant would shout for a man, go across to the line and rouse one of the sleepers; then the awakened man would sit up and blink, rise and listen to his instructions, nod and say, "Yes, Sergeant! All right, Sergeant!" when these were completed, pouch his message, hitch his damp mackintosh about him and button it close, drag heavily across the stone floor and vanish into the darkness of the stone-staired passage.

His journey might be a long or a short one, he might only have to find a company commander in the trenches one or two hundred yards away, he might on the other hand have a several hours' long trudge ahead of him, a bewildering way to pick through the darkness across a maze of fields and a net-work of trenches, over and between the rubble heaps that represented the remains of a village, along roads pitted with all sorts of blind traps in the way of shell holes, strings of barbed wire, overturned carts, broken branches of trees, flung stones and beams; and always, whether his journey was a short one or a long, he would move in an atmosphere of risk, with sudden death or searing pain passing him by at every step, and waiting for him, as he well knew, at the next step and the next and every other one to his journey's end.